Brent wanted to think. Unconsciously, he was beginning to think like a member of the Profession, though he was no longer under any obligation to do so. He was, if the Delilah’s overdrive was blown, as free of all obligations and duties and all need to think of the consequences of his acts as a man in a coffin six feet underground. If the drive was blown, he was effectively in a coffin midway between suns.
He went to the Delilah’s bar. There were a dozen passengers already in it. Brent saw one of them furtively filling his pockets with snack-packets. A bad sign—a man preparing to hoard food against his fellows.
Brent ordered a drink of sarfane, and the bartender served him. He sipped his drink—and froze. Sarfane was a light drink, and ordinarily delicious. It could not be mixed with anything else, though, or its flavor was spoiled. Something had obviously been mixed with this.
He sat very still. This is quick! he thought. If the Delilah’s officers knew the ship’s situation was hopeless, it would be reasonable to have served drinks doctored with sedative. The more unstable passengers, who would crack up first, would be the first to drink. If drugged, they would grow sleepy instead of desperate. That would make sense. But it had not been twenty minutes since the overdrive went off. Quick action, Brent thought. Too quick! Much too quick!
It was.
CHAPTER III
Every six months, a liner from the Caldarian planets landed on Luxor V. Only twenty light-years apart, the light-metal planets found a perfect complementary economic system in Luxor V. A brisk exchange of agricultural products was only matched by the swapping of lithium and magnesium for bismuth, thorium, and uranium, and there was equally friendly interchange of inhabitants.
The liner Caldaria had full holds of commercial goods and passengers. The liner came down gently, signalling its arrival, and with its communicator sending out a list of passengers and its invoice even before touching ground.
An explosive shell hit its nose just as the descent was checked because of the suddenly-realized absence of any response. The shell shattered the control-room and all possibility of navigating the huge ship. Other shells smashed into it. It went reeling to the ground with huge gashes in its sides.
Only when there was no possibility of its rising again did any movement show around the edges of the landing-field. Then ground vehicles came briskly toward it to examine it for salvageable loot. Men from the ground vehicles began to cut their way into the wrecked ship to see if any personable women had survived its fall…
The men in the ground vehicles were not Luxorians. They were looters, from somewhere else. All the Luxorians were dead.
* * * *
A woman began to scream hysterically out in the passenger-lounge of the Delilah. Brent turned his head. The pimply-faced Rudl was being thrust angrily from her side by another passenger.
The men in the bar talked loudly. Brent sat with the drink of sarfane with something else in it in his hand.
Kit Harlow had said that madness and frenzy would come upon the Delilah’s passengers. The overdrive would stay off until that frenzy developed. It would continue until she and her father had been killed. Then, she had said composedly, the overdrive would be repaired and the Delilah would probably return to the port from which she had started, taking back its shaken half-crazed passengers and the bodies of those who had died. None of it made sense, anyhow.
One thing was sure. The drinks of the Delilah’s bar had been doctored within twenty minutes of the cutting of the overdrive. It should have taken nearly that long to be sure that a failure was irreparable. It seemed almost like a measure planned in advance. It was too quick.
Brent tasted his sarfane again. He considered the taste carefully, trying to discern what had been added to ruin the delicate flavor. The addition was aromatic, bitter. It was just enough to spoil the pleasure of drinking sarfane.
It’s iposap, thought Brent. He tasted again. Taurine iposap. It was a flavoring ingredient for mixed drinks, like the ancient bitters. It came in blue bottles with gold labels, and it was very, very expensive, and on some planets it was forbidden by law. Its flavor was fascinating and blended perfectly with most bar-dispensed beverages. It made them taste better, but most people avoided it. One drink, with one drop of iposap in it, was very good, but two were murder. Most drunks became fighting drunks when their drinks had been laced with iposap, and most drinkers were drunk with two such servings under their belts.
If all the Delilah’s drinks had been dashed like Brent’s, they were not dosed to make drinkers sleepy, but to make them lunatics. In that case, the officers of the Delilah were not planning to check the horrors to be expected in any ship hopelessly lost in space, but were planning to hurry them and increase them. It was designed that madness should follow instantly upon despair. Decent people were to be overwhelmed by madmen before they could organize to die with dignity.
A child began to scream, “Mummy! Mummy! Don’t let them eat me! He says—”
The pimply Rudl scuttled away from a terror-stricken child. The child’s mother comforted it, her own face ashen.
A man shouted hysterically in the bar: “If we gotta die, we oughta kill those officers that didn’t take care—” The bartender moved suavely about his duties—duties which consisted of mixing and serving drinks.
Rudl sidled to the bar. There was weeping in the passengers’ lounge. A little girl screwed up her face and began to whimper through the mere contagion of despair. Her father picked her up and began to pat her back, his face vacant of all thought. He looked blankly at the wall, mechanically trying to soothe the child.
There was a thwack of fist against flesh. Someone at the bar, reeling, had struck someone else. Thick-tongued, he defied the world and fate and chance.
The bartender set out more drinks. There was no flicker of light to indicate that the drink-charges were being punched on the bar-accounting system. Brent suddenly realized that the charge register had not flashed once since he had entered the bar.
Quietly Brent spilled his drink and approached the bar. The bartender placed another drink before him. He tasted it. Iposap again—and no charge for the drink. Free drinks, and every one laced with the Taurine bitters that made one drink enough for most men, and two too many, and three an incitement to frenzy.
Brent spilled this drink, too, and went casually out of the bar. The atmosphere in it was growing tense and highly-charged. As he went out, a man headed in bumped into him. Another passenger needed a drink to help him face the fact that the ship—on the face of things—would drift forever helplessly in emptiness.
Forever was a harsh word. There was food and water and air. There was power. The ship could travel between any two planets of a solar system on its interplanetary drive. Such a journey might take months, but it could be done. It could travel perhaps one light-hour; or even two, but not for light-years. Therefore it would drift forever.
Brent went to his own cabin. Had he not been in the Profession, he would have been raging. Instead, he was wholly, icily calm. It’s the idea, he thought, that she and her father will be killed by those beasts—made into beasts on purpose. Then maybe they’ll even execute the survivors just to make everything—tidy. In a day or so we’ll all be classifiable as criminals.
Getting at some of his luggage and checking on what he extracted from it, he estimated there should be at least one murder on the Delilah within the next six hours. By that time, everybody on the ship would have become acutely aware that there was life, in terms of food and water and air, to be gained every time someone else died.
But he underestimated. He was in his cabin less than thirty minutes. When he came out there was already a man dead on the floor of the passengers’ lounge, with blood glistening in a dark pool beside him.
CHAPTER IV
It was a very small cruiser, a private ship, built for trips no longer than between Darien III and its oversized moon, which was almost half the size of the planet itself. There were two young men and two girls in it,
bound for the family estate of one of the girls on the moon. They came up out of atmosphere, and the young man who was piloting the cruiser increased the drive. One of the girls sat beside him, laughing at things he said, which were neither more nor less witty than the things all young men say to make girls admire them. The other couple settled down to a card game.
They were twenty thousand miles out when the detectors rang furiously. The pilot bent intently toward his controls. The girl said indignantly:
“It’s a ship coming out of overdrive! That’s too close for anybody to come out of overdrive!”
The young man stared blankly. It was not one ship. It was twenty. Forty. Sixty. It was a space-fleet! And there was no imaginable reason for a space-fleet to exist or to maneuver as a unit. The couple in the cruiser’s control-room called to the others.
“Come up here and look!”
A huge ship turned and sped toward them. It came on at a furious acceleration. The young man piloting the tiny cruiser flicked his communicator-switch.
“Hello,” he said curiously. “Who are you and what’s all this fleet about?”
There was no answer. But there was a sudden blue-white glow at the bow of the nearing big ship.
The little cruiser’s nose glowed. It went incandescent. There was a sudden puffing as its ports malted and let out the air within it. Which, of course, was the easiest way for the young people in it to die. They were quite dead before their cruiser had been melted down to an iregular ball of bright metal. And of course they did not see the great fleet divide into two portions, of which one went on to Darien III, while the other approached its inhabited moon…
* * * *
None of the Delilah’s officers was anywhere about. Brent asked questions angrily. No ship’s officer had appeared. The dead man lay where he had fallen. Somebody had come out of the bar, reeling. He shouted crazily, “Everybody’s gonna die! Everybody! Who’s gonna be first?”
A sober man—now dead—had gone up to him and tried to quiet him, urging that the women were already despairing enough and there was surely no need to frighten the children.
The drunk bellowed, “You be first!” And stabbed. Then he advanced upon other passengers, waving a bloodstained knife and shouting his senseless refrain: “Everybody’s gonna die! Who’ll be next?” It was motiveless murder, attributable exclusively to iposap in too many drinks.
Some passengers fled from him. But a young man—one of the honeymooners Brent had noticed—charged with a chair held clubwise. Other men leaped in when he brought it down. The drunk was subdued and disarmed and bound with a volunteer guard placed over him. But no ship’s officer had answered the signal—often repeated—that an emergency existed in the passengers’ lounge.
It was the young honeymooner who told Brent about it. He regarded Brent with a calculating eye and said grimly, “My name’s Shannon. This is my wife. You’ve stayed sober, anyhow. If a few of us stick together, we can keep things under control.”
Brent approved of him, but said shortly, “That doesn’t seem to be the crew’s intention. The drinks being served free are loaded with iposap. That’s hardly encouraging.”
Shannon said coldly, “Would they be planning to leave us passengers locked up while they stay in the rest of the ship and have all the food—and air?”
“Hardly anything so simple,” said Brent drily. “It’s seemed to me that the trouble is being deliberately stirred up, besides the iposap contribution. There’s a man named Rudl—”
Shannon’s jaw tightened.
“I’m a construction man,” said Brent, which was not untrue in one sense, but was far from the whole truth. “I just got out some keys. You may not know it, but the doors of a spaceship cabin can be locked. You might put the children in a cabin where your wife could take care of them in—relative safety.”
Shannon stirred hungrily. Brent slipped two keys into his fingers.
“Give one of these to that girl in the corner, Kit Harlow,” Brent commanded. “It’s a personal matter.”
“I’ll do it,” said Shannon grimly. “Thanks. If my wife can lock herself in—”
Brent glanced at the white-faced girl clinging to the other man’s arm.
“Maybe she won’t,” he said. “But anyhow—if it’s intended to hurry a breakdown of decency, better not call any meeting to organize anything else. If iposap is being served out free to encourage riot, there’ll be moves made against a leader of sanity. Watch it.”
Brent went back to the bar. The bartender was gone; but he had not locked up. There were open bottles all about, to be used or taken by a gesture. There were more men drinking now. Some looked dazed and numb, eyes glassy. They stared into space. There were two women at a table. One gulped down a drink and cried shrilly, “I don’t want to think! Get me another drink, somebody!” She was already fretful and querulous.
* * * *
Brent reached for a bottle and poured out a few drops. Iposap. He tried another. Iposap. There couldn’t be any doubt. He felt certain objects in his pockets and was grimly glad he’d packed some special tools of a construction-man’s using—they had been essential a little while back—in his bags.
A brawny man lurched up to Brent and said thickly, “I don’t like yer face!”
His fist lashed out. Brent blocked the blow without returning it. Someone else said belligerently, “That’s a dastardly trick, with all of us dyin’…”
Brent’s assailant demanded ferociously, “Who’s dyin’? I’m not!”
He struck. It was senseless. It was sickening. It was not normal drunkenness. There was neither rhyme nor reason in any of it. A man lurched aggressively against Brent. Crazy fool, thought Brent bitterly.
He defended himself—ruthlessly, with the inconspicuous but deadly means of defense he had been taught in the Profession.
Fists flew. A bottle crashed. One of the two women screamed with rage. Her chair had been overturned. She scrambled up from the floor and flew at the nearest man in sight, screeching and scratching.
The tumult grew horrible. It was like what passed for festivity in the lowest of dives. Men laughed drunkenly at the woman, who was now clawing her chosen victim, shrieking abuse at him for having knocked her to the floor—as if that were important with the Delilah’s overdrive off. The man fought back. The woman’s clothing tore.
They’re all watching her, thought Brent disgustedly. I can try it now.
He vaulted the counter, and no one noticed. He crouched down. The front of the bar itself was solid; the bartender had entered through a small, concealed door. Brent found the handle. He went through. He found himself in the smallest of airlocks. He opened the farther door and was in the crew’s part of the ship.
He was on a metal cat-walk amid a maze of fabricated girders, with feeble light showing the rounded compartments of the ship’s essential machinery. The ship was actually an assemblage of metal balloons enclosed in an outer skin, with stiffening braces running in all directions.
Brent recognized the pattern instantly. The Delilah was a Stimson-design freighter modified for passengers. Her hull would be strictly standard in contour to fit inside an overdrive field.
He heard a dynamo hum. It was making current for the ship’s interior lighting. There was also the deep purring of the air plant. He placed the two sounds in his mind, and from that knowledge could have drawn blueprints for the entire ship. The crew’s quarters would be up high, just under the control-room. The interplanetary drive would be just above the ship’s normal center of gravity. The overdrive must be in one particular spot because the overdrive field has to enclose the ship centrally. Brent knew where he was and where everything he wanted to find was, too. He headed for the overdrive room.
There were only dim service-lamps out here. They threw faint glows on the narrow steel plates of the catwalk on which he had emerged. It would lead to the crew-lift—the shaft up to the crew’s quarters on which crewmen would rise and descend by the use of stirrups racked on ev
ery level. The fuel tanks were globular, to resist internal pressure. The separate motor-rooms were also globular, so they could serve as airtight compartments in case of need.
Brent went ten paces down the narrow walk. He rounded the ship’s main water-tank. Then he simply reached out, grasped a curving truss-braced girder, and swung off into the obscurity between the giant metal balls. The girders, in pairs and with stiffening-members between them, were wholly practical ways to move from one place to another. Service crews in spaceports used them.
He climbed into blackness, making no noise. Presently he was under the air-plant room. He heard the rushing sound of turbines pulling air through hoses from the several compartments through the ship.
Brent listened critically to the noise of the air-plant, as an indication of the age and design of the ship.
He was about to move on when he heard the rattle of a stirrup on the crew-lift. From shadows, he watched.
A figure descended slowly. He passed by a light in his descent. It was not a crew-member, but the passenger Rudl. He got off the lift-shaft, clipped the stirrup in its rack without fumbling, and moved along the catwalk Brent had used only minutes before.
He’s been reporting, thought Brent coldly. They’ve probably figured out their timetable. So many riots, so many dead, so much of the unspeakable, and then they’ll decide it’s time to declare the overdrive repaired. And they’ll go back to Khem IV because that’s the ship’s home port and murder has been done, and the passengers who survive will be tried and executed for having reacted to despair and the iposap that was given them…
He waited until the pimply man had vanished. Brent heard the click that told of the tiny airlock closed. He swung away, then, across the dim space of the ship’s interior.
As he wormed his way toward the overdrive compartment, things fell into place with a click that was almost audible in his own thoughts. He realized what the message Kit had given him meant. It was suddenly the clearest and most obvious thing in the world that the planetary ruler of Khem IV would have his cooks executed if they served an Earth Commerce Commissioner a fruit called vistek on a planet called Khem IV. Vistek came from the other side of the galaxy. It came from nine thousand light-years away!
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 68
