Dr. Little maintained his position for several minutes, looking and listening; but no sound reached his ears, and he could perceive nothing through the gratings which covered the other hatchways. He also gave a few moments’ attention to the lock on his own grating, which evidently was operated from either side; but it was designed to be opened by a complicated key, and the doctor had no instruments for examining its interior. With a sigh he hooked one arm about a bar of the grating and relaxed, trying to reason out the chain of events which had led up to these peculiar circumstances.
The Gomeisa had been a heavy cruiser, quite capable of putting up a stiff defense to any conceivable attack. Certainly no assault could have been so sudden and complete that the enemy would be in a position to use hand weapons on the crew before an alarm was raised—the idea was absurd; and fixed mount projectors of any type would have left more of a mark on the doctor than he could find at this moment. Furthermore, the ship had been, at the last time of which Little had clear recollection, crossing the relatively empty gulf between the Galaxy proper and the Greater Magellanic Cloud—a most unpropitious place for a surprise attack. The star density in that region is of the order of one per eight thousand cubic parsecs, leaving a practically clear field for detector operations. No, an attack did not seem possible; and yet Little had been deprived of consciousness without warning, had been removed from the Gomeisa in that state; and had awakened within a sleeping bag which showed too plainly the fact that part, at least, of the cruiser had been open to space for some time.
Was he in a base on some planet of one of those few stars of the “desert,” or in some ship of unheard-of design? His weightlessness disposed of the first idea before it was formulated; and the doctor glanced at his belt. Through the glass window in its case, he could see the filament of his personal equalizer glowing faintly; he was in a ship, in second-order flight, and the little device had automatically taken on the task of balancing the drive forces which would, without it, act unequally on each element in his body. As a further check, he felt in his pocket and drew out two coins, one of copper and one of silver. He held them nearly together some distance from his body, released them carefully so as not to give them velocities of their own, and withdrew his hand. Deprived of the equalizer field, they began to drift slowly in a direction parallel to the corridor, the copper bit moving at a barely perceptible crawl, the silver rapidly gaining. The corridor, then, was parallel to the ship’s line of flight; and the coins had fallen forward, since the silver was more susceptible to the driving field action.
~ * ~
Little pushed off from the ceiling and retrieved the coins, restoring them to his otherwise empty pocket. He had not been carrying instruments or weapons, and had no means of telling whether or not he had been searched while unconscious. Nothing was missing, but he had possessed nothing worth taking. The fact that he was locked in might be taken to indicate that he was a prisoner, and prisoners are customarily relieved of any possessions which might prove helpful in an escape. Only beings who had had contact with humanity would logically be expected to identify which of the numerous gadgets carried by the average man are weapons; but the design of this craft bore no resemblance to that of any race with which Little was acquainted. He still possessed his wrist watch and mechanical pencil, so the doctor found himself unable to decide even the nature of his captors, far less their intentions.
Possibly he would find out something when—and if—he was fed. He realized suddenly that he was both hungry and thirsty. He had been unconscious long enough for his watch to run down.
Little’s pulse had dropped to somewhere near normal, he noticed, as he drifted beside the hatch. He wondered again what had knocked him out without leaving any mark or causing some sensation; then gave up this line of speculation in favor of the more immediate one advocated by his empty stomach. He fell asleep again before he reached any solution. He dreamed that someone had moved Rigel to the other side of the Galaxy, and the navigator couldn’t find his way home. Very silly, he thought, and went on dreaming it.
A gonglike note, as penetrating as though his own skull had been used as the bell, woke him the second time. He was alert at once, and instantly perceived the green, translucent sphere suspended a few feet away. For a moment he thought it might be one of his captors; then his nose told him differently. It was ordinary lime juice, as carried by practically every Earth cruiser. A moment’s search served to locate, beside the hatchway, the fine nozzle through which the liquid had been impelled. The doctor had no drinking tube, but he had long since mastered the trick of using his tongue in such circumstances without allowing any other part of his face to touch the liquid. It was a standard joke to confront recruits, on their first free flight, with the same problem. If nose or cheek touched the sphere, surface tension did the rest.
~ * ~
Little returned to the door and took up what he intended to be a permanent station there. He was waiting partly for some sign of human beings, partly for evidence of his captors, and, more and more as time wore on, for some trace of solid food, He waited in vain for all three. At intervals, a pint or so of lime juice came through the jet and formed a globe in the air beside it; nothing else. Little had always liked the stuff, but his opinion was slowly changing as more and more of it was forced on him. It was all there was to drink, and the air seemed to be rather dry; at any rate, he got frightfully thirsty at what seemed unusually short intervals.
He wound his watch and discovered that the “feedings” came at intervals of a little over four hours. He had plenty of chance to make observations, and nothing else to observe; it was not long before he was able to predict within a few seconds the arrival of another drink, Later, he wished he hadn’t figured it out; the last five or ten minutes of each wait were characterized by an almost agonizing thirst, none the less painful for being purely mental. Sometimes he slept, but he was always awake at the zero minute.
With nothing to occupy his mind but fruitless speculation, it is not surprising that he lost all track of the number of feedings. He knew only that he had slept a large number of times, had become deathly sick of lime juice, and was beginning to suffer severely from the lack of other food, when a faint suggestion of weight manifested itself. He looked at his equalizer the instant he noticed the situation and found it dark. The ship had cut its second-order converters, and was applying a very slight first-order acceleration in its original line of flight—the barely perceptible weight was directed toward what Little had found to be the stern. Its direction changed by a few degrees on several occasions, but was restored each time in a few seconds. The intensity remained constant, as nearly as Little could tell, for several hours.
Then it increased, smoothly but swiftly, to a value only slightly below that of Earthly gravity. The alterations in direction became more frequent, but never sudden or violent enough to throw Little off his feet— he was now standing on the rear wall, which had become the floor. Evidently the ship’s pilot, organic or mechanical, well deserved the name. For nearly half an hour by the watch, conditions remained thus; then the drive was eased through an arc of ninety degrees, the wall containing the hatchway once more became the ceiling, and within a few minutes the faintest of tremors was perceptible through the immense hull and the direction of gravity became constant. If this indicated a landing, Little mentally took off his hat to the entity at the controls,
The doctor found himself badly placed for observation. The hatch was about four feet above the highest point he could reach, and even jumping was not quite sufficient to give him a hold on the bars. He estimated that he had nearly all of his normal hundred and ninety pounds Earth weight, and lack of proper food for the last several days had markedly impaired his physical powers. It was worse than tantalizing; for suddenly, for the first time since he had regained consciousness in this strange spot, he heard sounds from outside. They were distorted by echoes, sounding and reverberating along the corridor outside
, and evidently originated at a considerable distance, but they were definitely and unmistakably the voices of human beings.
For minutes the doctor waited. The voices came no nearer, but on the other hand they did not go any farther away. He called out, but apparently the group was too large and making too much noise of its own to hear him. The chatter went on. No words were distinguishable, but there was a prevailing overtone of excitement that not even the metallic echoes of the great hull could cover. Little listened, and kept his eyes fixed on the hatchway.
He heard nothing approach, but suddenly there was a faint click as the lock opened. The grille swung sharply inward until it was perpendicular to the wall in which it was set; then the side bars of its frame telescoped outward until they clicked against the floor. The crossbars separated simultaneously, still maintaining equal distances from each other, and a moment after the hatch had opened a metal ladder extended from it to the floor of the room. It took close examination to see the telescopic joints just below each rung. The metal tubing must be paper-thin, Little thought, to permit such construction.
~ * ~
The doctor set foot on the ladder without hesitation. Presumably, his captors were above, and wanted him to leave the room in which he was imprisoned. In this wish he concurred heartily; he was too hungry to object effectively, anyway. He made his way up the ladder to the corridor, forcing his shoulders through the narrow opening. The human voices were still audible, but they faded into the background of his attention as he examined the beings grouped around the hatch.
There were five of them. They bore some resemblance to the nonhumans of Tau Ceti’s first planet, having evidently evolved from a radially symmetric, starfishlike form to a somewhat more specialized type with differentiated locomotive and prehensile appendages. They were five-limbed and headless, with a spread of about eight feet. The bodies were nearly spherical; and if the arms had been only a little thicker at the base it would have been impossible to tell where body left off and arm began. The tube feet of the Terrestrial starfish were represented by a cluster of pencil-thick tendrils near the tip of each arm and leg—the distinction between these evidently lying in the fact that three of the appendages were slightly thicker and much blunter at the tips than the two which served as arms. The tendrils on the “legs” were shorter and stubbier, as well. The bodies, and the appendages nearly to their tips, were covered with a mat of spines, each several inches in length, lying for the most part nearly flat against the skin. These either grew naturally, or had been combed away from the central mouth and the five double-pupiled eyes situated between the limb junctions.
The beings wore metal mesh belts twined into the spines on their legs, and these supported cases for what were probably tools and weapons. Their “hands” were empty; evidently they did not fear an attempted escape or attack on the doctor’s part. They made no sound except for the dry rustle of their spiny armor as they moved. In silence they closed in around Little, while one waved his flexible arms toward one end of the passageway. A gentle shove from behind, as the doctor faced in the indicated direction, transmitted the necessary command, and the group marched toward the bow. Two of the silent things stalked in front, two brought up the rear; and at the first opportunity, the other swarmed up one of the radial ladders and continued his journey directly over Little’s head, swinging along by the handholds on the central beam.
As they advanced, the voices from ahead grew slowly louder. Occasional words were now distinguishable. The speakers, however, were much farther away than the sound of their voices suggested, since the metal-walled corridor carried the sounds well if not faithfully. Nearly three hundred yards from Little’s cell, a vertical shaft of the same dimensions as the corridor interrupted the latter. The voices were coming from below. Without hesitation, the escort swung over the lip of the shaft and started down the ladder which took up its full width; Little followed. On the way, he got some idea of the size of the ship he was in. Looking up, he saw the mouths of two other corridors entering the shaft above the one he had traversed; at the level of the second, another hallway joined it from the side. Evidently he was not near the center line of the craft; there were at least two, and possibly three, tiers of longitudinal corridors. He had already seen along one of those corridors; the ship must be over fifteen hundred feet in length. Four vessels the size of the Gomeisa could have used the immense hull for a hangar, and left plenty of elbow room for the servicing crews.
Below him, the shaft debouched into a chamber whose walls were not visible from Little’s position. His eyes, however, which had become exceedingly tired of the endless orange radiance which formed the ship’s only illumination, were gladdened at the sight of what was unquestionably daylight leaking up from the room. As he descended, two of the walls became visible—the shaft opened near one corner—and in one of them he finally saw an air lock, with both valves open. He went hastily down the remaining few feet and stopped as he touched the floor. His gaze took in on the instant the twenty-yard-square chamber, which seemed to occupy a slight outcrop of the hull, and stopped at the corner farthest from the air lock. Penned in that corner by a line of the starfish were thirty-eight beings; and Little needed no second glance to identify the crew of the Gomeisa. They recognized him simultaneously; the chatter stopped, to be replaced by a moment’s silence and then a shout of “Doc!” from nearly two score throats. Little stared, then strode forward and through the line of guards, which opened for him, A moment later he was undergoing a process of handshaking and backslapping that made him wonder. He didn’t think he had been that popular.
~ * ~
Young Captain Albee was the first to speak coherently.
“It’s good to see you again, sir. Everyone but you was accounted for, and we’d begun to think they must have filed you away in formaldehyde for future reference. Where were you?”
“You mean I was the only one favored with solitary confinement?” asked Little. “I woke up in a cell upstairs, about two thirds of the way back, with less company than Jonah. I could see several other sets of bars from my stateroom door, but there was nothing behind any of them. I haven’t seen or heard any living creature but myself since then. I can’t even remember leaving, or being removed from, the Gomeisa. Does anyone know what happened?”
“How is it that you don’t?” asked Albee. “We were attacked; we had a fight, of a sort. Did you sleep through it? That doesn’t seem possible.”
“I did, apparently. Give me the story.”
“There’s not much to give. I was about to go off watch when the detectors picked up a lump that seemed highly magnetic, and something over eighty million tons mass. We hove to, and came alongside it while Tine took a couple of pictures of the Galaxy and the Cloud so that we could find it again. I sent out four men to take samples, and the instant the outer door was opened these things”—he jerked his head toward the silent guards—”froze it that way with a jet of water on the hinge and jamb. They were too close to use the heavy projectors, and we still had no idea there was a ship inside the meteoric stuff. They were in space-suits, and got into the lock before we could do anything. By the time we had our armor on they had burned down the inner lock door and were all through the ship. The hand-to-hand fighting was shameful; I thought I knew all the football tricks going, and I’d taught most of them to the boys, but they had every last one of us pinned down before things could get under way. I never saw anything like it.
“I still can’t understand what knocked you out. They used no weapons—that annoyed me—and if you didn’t put a suit on yourself I don’t see how you lived when they opened up your room. The air was gone before they started going over the ship.”
“I think I get it,” said Little slowly. “Geletane. Four cylinders of it. Did you broadcast a general landing warning when you cut the second-order to examine that phony Bonanza? You didn’t, of course, since we weren’t in a gravity field of any strength. And the ‘meteor’ was magnet
ic, which made no difference to our beryllium hull, but made plenty to the steel geletane cylinders, one of which I had undamped for a pressure test and had left in the tester. I went on about my business, and the field yanked the cylinder out of the tester and against the wall. It didn’t make enough noise to attract my attention, because I was in the next room. With the door open. And the valve cracked just a trifle—just enough. I didn’t need a suit when these starfish opened my room; I must have been as stiff as a frame member. I had all the symptoms of recovery from suspended animation when I woke up, too, but I never thought of interpreting them that way. The next ship I’m in, see if I don’t get them to rig up an automatic alarm to tell what the second-order fields are doing—”
“You might also put your geletane cylinders back in the clamps when, and if, this happy state of affairs eventuates,” remarked Goldthwaite, the gloomy technical sergeant. “May I ask what happens now, captain?”
Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03] Page 18
