Adventures in the Far Future

by Donald A. Wollheim

  “There is no immediate cause for alarm. Stay calm. The overdrive field has been cut. That is all. There is no need to be alarmed. This is a well-found ship with a thoroughly trained crew, and we are in communication with cur base. There is no occasion for uneasiness.”

  Brent heard every word, and a cold chill began at the base of his spine and went up, vertebra by vertebra, to chill the back of his skull, and then went deliberately down the ladder of his backbone again. The words from the speaker were soothing, but the message was one to chill the blood. For one thing, the voice lied. It spoke of communication with the Delilah’s base. That was lie number one. It said there was no reason to be disturbed. That was lie number two and on up to infinity. Liners did not cut their overdrives in mid-voyage. If and when an overdrive went off—and was lied about—everybody on board the ship was dead. Automatically. But unfortunately they didn’t act dead.

  Brent waited, feeling sick inside. Then he got up stiffly from his bunk. He put on his clothes. There was no port in his cabin, of course. In overdrive there is nothing to be seen anyhow except out the bow, control-room ports. Overdrive is travel at the speed of light multiplied many times—the multiplier depending on the type of drive.

  For almost two centuries humanity had nothing faster than interplanetary drive, and was confined to its home solar system in consequence, because from Sol to its nearest neighbor was four and a half light-years, which would have taken centuries to travel. On overdrive, nowadays, a freighter makes it in a week and a crack liner in a fraction of that time. But they do it in overdrive. Overdrive! If the overdrive goes, the trip is finished. Period.

  Brent parted his hair carefully before he went out of his cabin. It was quite absurd. He was thinking. The overdrive’s blown. I’ve got to look after that girl. It was a curious thing to drink, because he was of the Profession; and besides, she had never spoken to him.

  He knew that her name was Kit Harlow and that she was wonderfully pleasing to look at. But there had been a reason for not trying to make her acquaintance. Some very strange things had happened. A planet named Derik had been discovered, most unexpectedly, to have all its cities filled with skeletons and all its treasures looted. Another planet named Tren III was found to have all its citizens rotting in the streets of its looted cities.

  Four widely separated planets, in all, had been discovered with their entire populations killed. Two had been painstakingly looted of every valuable which men with unlimited transportation could wish to carry away. And it had been Brent’s errand—being of the Profession—to try to find out how all this had come about. Naturally, he had not thought of getting acquainted with girls, however pretty.

  Now, though, all bets were off. If the Delilah‘s overdrive was blown, nobody had any profession or business or obligations of any sort that reached outside the ship. Nothing anybody did would have any effect, or any meaning, to anybody not on the ship at the same time with him. The Delilah was, at the moment, very stodgy and respectable. But presently it would be a first-class imitation of hell. Brent’s Professional status was gone and all his obligations with it. It occurred to him that the most useful thing he could do would be to explain the situation to Kit Harlow and offer, politely, to kill her before things got too bad.

  He didn’t have to think the situation out. In overdrive, an antique ship like this—modern ships did vastly better—would cover a light-year of distance in a week of time. Light travels a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. In eight minutes it travels ninety-two millions of miles. In a day it travels so far that the distance has no meaning. In a year … it travels the distance the Delilah should cover in a week. If a ship’s overdrive went off—any ship’s overdrive—and where it went off was known, still it would take ten thousand other spaceships ten thousand years to hunt for it with one chance in ten thousand of finding it.

  Nobody ever hunted for a ship that vanished in overdrive. It was useless. If the crew couldn’t fix whatever was wrong, it wouldn’t get fixed. So far, in two thousand years of interstellar navigation, just two ships had been found after their overdrives blew. Each had drifted into a planetary system by pure chance. One had been lost a century and a half when it was discovered. The other had been missing for eight hundred years. Both were blessedly empty of life when they were found—of course—but both showed plain signs of what had happened inside them before life went. Madness was only part of it—the smallest, least, and cleanest part of it.

  I wonder if there are arms on board, thought Brent. The crew could wipe out the rest of us. Best thing, too.

  His mind went back to the girl. Such a pretty girl! She was traveling with her father, who was an Earth Commerce Commissioner and a Very Important Person indeed. They’d been on Khem IV while Brent was there. He’d seen them with a pattering escort of secret-service men. But Brent had been busy finding out nothing at all. Khem IV was a thinly settled planet with a savagely totalitarian government, but he’d found no indications of Professional interest. He’d merely been trailed everywhere by unskilled detectives. It was pure coincidence that Kit and Brent traveled on the same ship to Loren II.

  I wish she’d missed this ship, thought Brent numbly. It didn’t occur to him to wish that he’d missed it. The speaker in the ceiling repeated:

  “There is no cause for alarm. Be calm. The overdrive field has been cut. That is all. We are in communication with our base. There is no need for uneasiness.”

  It occurred to Brent that it was very foolish to keep repeating that message. It would not reassure anybody. Anyone who knew anything would know it was a lie. The more it was insisted upon, the more frightened the passengers would become.

  II

  HE OPENED the door of his cabin and went out. His door opened on the main lounge. It was full of the Delilah’s passengers. He’d never seen so many of them at once before. There were some children. They were playing. There was a woman with a painted, empty face. She smiled fixedly, but her eyes were filled with horror.

  Brent looked at the girl he’d thought of first. He moved toward her. A man clutched his arm and babbled:

  “Look here! They say—they say the ship’s in touch with home. Do you think that’s so?”

  Brent nodded.

  “Oh, surely!” he said untruthfully. “They have a new faster-than-light communication system. All ships have it now. We’ll be all right.”

  The man gasped in relief.

  “You’re sure? Positive?” Then he began to laugh foolishly. “Then it’s all right! It’s all right!”

  Brent moved on. It would be wonderful if it were true, he thought sourly to himself. Now was no time to refuse a comforting lie to someone who needed it.

  Jim frowned to himself. There was something in the back of his mind that was trying to come out. But his head wasn’t working just right.

  Nobody’s mind is clear when filled with the numbing knowledge that he is absolutely helpless against absolutely certain doom. Of course the Delilah wasn’t in communication with anybody or anything. Radiation is propagated at the speed of light, only. If a message beam could be held tight enough, and if enough power could be put into it, and if it were aimed straight enough—why—a liner like the Delilah could send a message back to Khem IV, from which it had departed two weeks before. But the message would take two years to get back. More, it wasn’t likely to hit. The sun Khem had a proper motion, which might be anything from fifteen to three hundred miles a second in any direction. The light from it showed it where it had been two years before. A beam would have to be aimed where it would be two years hence. And even then the beam would hardly hit Khem IV in its orbit. No. The Delilah could never get a message back to its base. That was out of the question.

  We’re dead, thought Brent morbidly, all of us. Only we haven’t started to act like it yet. Before they did act dead, things would happen it was not pleasant to anticipate.

  He stopped beside the girl, Kit Harlow. She and her father were standing by themselves, look
ing at the other passengers. Their expressions were peculiar. It wasn’t that they didn’t know what the blown overdrive meant, but that they were taking it in their own way.

  “Pardon,” said Brent. “I’m Jim Brent. I think you know what’s happened. I… saw you back in port and I’m traveling by myself. Things will be bad presently. I thought I’d offer—”

  The girl looked at him detachedly. Her father said harshly:

  “You thought you’d offer what?”

  He saw a bitter anger in the older man’s eyes. And then Brent realized what the other man was thinking. He flushed angrily.

  “We are dead,” he said coldly. “You know it. You know what’s likely to happen as these people go mad. I intended to offer to help keep things decent for your daughter for so long as it can be managed. I happen to be a fool, and I meant to offer to act like one.”

  With that he turned away, frustrated, bitter. They’d thought he meant something very different. Reasonable enough, at that. Some men, knowing that nothing can make what is coming any worse—

  “Just a moment,” said the girl.

  He turned back. Her voice was just what he’d thought it would be: clear, and level, and good to listen to. She smiled faintly at him.

  “Thank you very much. If you can organize some other passengers, you may be able to prevent some horrors—for a while.”

  Her father said bitterly:

  “I doubt it. That might make things worse. After all, the loudspeakers may have spoken the truth. The overdrive may only be turned off. It may not be blown.”

  Brent shook his head as if to clear it. He wasn’t* thinking very straight, and he knew it. Nobody does, immediately after discovering that he cannot have any possible hope. Kit said sharply:

  “You really think that?”

  “I’ve been thinking it out,” said her father bitterly. “You know what happened where we were! It would be most indiscreet to murder me in any ordinary way. Or you.” Then he said harshly, “This young man had better not talk to us.”

  The girl caught her breath. She went paler.

  “I hadn’t thought of that!” Then she turned to Brent and said quietly, “My father is right. We do not think this … accident is just what it seems. There will be confusion and horror, of course. People will go mad, and people will be killed. We … will be among those killed. But we think that ultimately the overdrive will be repaired. Probably, when it is repaired, the ship will go back to Khem IV.”

  Brent still could not think very straight. His mind was possessed by the horrors which could be anticipated.

  “But you can do us a very great favor,” said the girl. She moistened her lips and looked at her father. He nodded. “It is … very important. Much more important than my father’s life or mine. Will you try?”

  Brent had been carefully trained to think clearly in emergencies, but this was not an emergency. It still seemed to him pure disaster. There was nothing for his mind to take hold of, to think about.

  “First,” said Kit, very pale, “you mustn’t talk to us again.

  Don’t avoid us conspicuously, but—especially don’t try to keep us from being killed. That’s necessary.”

  Brent tried to listen, with the back of his mind trying to tell him something that fitted in.

  ‘Then,” said Kit composedly, “when you get back to Earth, go to the Commerce Commission and find someone who knows my father. Tell him exactly what happened to my father and me, and say that we think it happened because the planet ruler of Khem IV had vistek served at a state banquet by mistake. It was served to us. Vistek. V-I-S-T-E-K. It was a mistake. He had his cooks executed for the mistake. And—we couldn’t be murdered in any ordinary fashion. That’s the message.”

  She looked again at her father. Again he nodded.

  “That’s all,” she said. “You can’t do any more for us. And you can’t do that if you are known to be friendly to us. Now please don’t talk to either of us again.”

  She turned away and her father turned with her. As they moved off, a voice panted in Brent’s ear:

  “He’s an important man! What’d he say? He’s Earth Commissioner of Commerce! He’d know all the inside! What’d he say?”

  It was a pimply-faced man named Rudi, who, during the first two weeks of the voyage, had thrust himself into every gathering, talked to every individual passenger, and had succeeded in making a general nuisance of himself. Brent said briefly:

  “He said just what the loudspeaker said. That we’re in touch with the base and if there’s any trouble a rescue ship will come to take us off this ship.”

  Again it was untrue, but panic would come soon enough. The pimply Rudi whimpered:

  “They can’t! They couldn’t get word back, and they couldn’t find us if they knew we were lost! They couldn’t—”

  Brent said savagely:

  “You fool! Do you want to start a panic by babbling like that? Go talk to a ship’s officer! Ask him!”

  Rudi stumbled away. Brent clenched his hands. Kit‘s father was an important man. He was too important a man to be murdered in any ordinary way without great repercussions. But why should anybody want to murder him? Why should a ship pretend that its overdrive was blown, and then repaired, simply to arrange for the death of a man and a girl at the hands of fear-crazed passengers? And the message they wanted him to give— What was that about?

  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.

  III

  A WOMAN began to scream hysterically, out in the passenger-lounge of the Delilah. Brent turned his head. The pimply-faced Rudi 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 savored the spoiled flavor 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, deliberately. 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 people
became fighting drunks when their drinks had been laced with iposap, and most drinkers were drunk with two such drinks 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 Rudi scuttled away from the terror-stricken child. The child’s mother comforted it absorbedly, 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. Rudi 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 since he had been in 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.