Adventures in the Far Future

by Donald A. Wollheim

  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 bumped into him, headed in. 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.

  IV

  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 for the children—

  The drunk bellowed, “You be first!” And stabbed. Then he advanced upon other passengers, waving a blood-stained 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 club-wise. 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.

  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 matching her, thought Brent disgustedly. I can try it.

  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 catwalk 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, arid 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 every 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 vanished. He simply reached out, grasped a curving truss-braced girder, and swung 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 space ports 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. He watched. A figure descended slowly. He passed by a light in his descent. It was not a crew member, but the passenger Rudi. 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 TV 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.

  It was as he wormed his way toward the overdrive compartment that 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!

  Brent could see precisely why that accident had made it necessary for the Delilah’s overdrive to be cut off until Kit Harlow and her father were dead. It was a matter he was especially trained to see, because it was a matter concerning his Profession.

  V

  THE overdrive compartment, like all the others on the Delilah was a great round ball of metal with welded gores. Brent reached it and put his ear cautiously to the rounded wall. He listened for minutes. There were minute ringing noises in the metal, some of which were actually remote echoes of the air plant’s noises. But any large structure of metal, unless especially muffled, always has such noises. Sometimes they are easily heard, and then spacemen say that it is a singing ship and the superstition is that it is lucky. The Delilah, though, was not musical enough for that.

  There was someone in the overdrive room. Brent made sure. So before he swung around and into the entrance, he got something out of his pocket, and he stepped through the door with a small pocket-blaster out and ready.

  The engineer was sitting in a folding foam-chair, staring at nothing as if fascinated by his own thoughts. As Brent loomed over him, he licked his lips. Then he jerked his head up, startled. He saw that Brent was not a crew member, but a stranger. He made a convulsive movement.

  “Still!” said Brent warningly. The tiny blaster bore very steadily. “What’s up? Why is the overdrive off?”

  The man choked, staring with horrified eyes at the blaster’s muzzle. Brent glanced aside for the fraction of a second. The master switch was open—the engine-room switch. He only needed to look directly at that. Without moving his eyes he could see that the telltale dials that would locate trouble-almost invariably hopeless trouble if it happened in space-were still hooded over. They were never used except in port to check the circuits, and of course, hopelessly, if something did go wrong in space. Between uses they were covered with plastic hoods to protect them from dust. They hadn’t been unhooded. So there had been no attempt to find trouble. So there wasn’t any trouble. The main switch had been opened on orders.

  Brent moved the blaster suggestively.

  “I said,” he repeated softly, “what’s the trouble? Why is the drive off? And don’t talk loudly—why are the passengers invited to go mad with fear?”

  The Delilah’s engineer tried to speak.

  “I—I—” Then his throat closed with a click. With a visible effort he tore his eyes from the blaster muzzle and looked up at Brent’s face. His expression was one of sheer terror.

  “How about throwing the switch on?” asked Brent. The engineer moved trembling hands to obey. But Brent saw a gleam of hope in his eyes, or was it a gleam of cunning? Brent snapped, “Don’t touch it!” Then he said as softly as before. “That was just a check-up. If you threw the switch, it wouldn’t start the engines. It would just light up a ‘ready for operation’ light in the control room, wouldn’t it? And they’d know there was something wrong here. And they’d come—and maybe you’d live.”

  The engineer gasped:

  “Don’t—don’t kill me!”

  “Suppose you tell me how much you know,” said Brent, eyes burning.

  The engineer moaned softly.

  “So you don’t know,” said Brent, “that the overdrive was to be turned off, the passengers driven mad; and when the right people had been killed, the ship was to turn around and head for port. The surviving passengers would be tried for murder, eh? How about the crew?” he asked with sardonic softness. “Did you stop to think that the crew might be executed for not preventing the passengers from murdering each other?”

  The engineer babbled. He was a pitiable sight, but Brent was merciless. There were hundreds of thousands of colonized planets, now, with local histories up to two thousand years in length. Earth could not govern them—which was why the Profession was a necessity—and there were nearly as many forms of social organization as there were planets. Khem IV was a totalitarian government quite ruthless enough to do exactly what Brent had just named—and the engineer knew it. He whimpered.

  Brent looked at him with scornful pity.

  “But what can I do with you?” he demanded. “Apparently • I know more than you do about this mess.”

  The engineer whimpered again. Then, with the frantic speed of desperation, he sprang from his chair at an alarm button on the wall. Brent pulled trigger. There was no sound. The engineer’s body thumped into the rounded hollow wall of the overdrive room, and then slumped down on the floorplates in the boneless limpness of a man killed by a blaster.

  Brent put the blaster back in his pocket.

  He now regarded the overdrive with a grim and knowledgeable attention. But he couldn’t afford to meddle with it just yet. He noted, though, the details of its installation. It was a good fifty years old. It had been installed by someone only half-qualified, by really modem standards. They haven’t read an engineering journal since this ship was built he thought grimly. They’d never heard of the Doom-Welt equation, for one thing, which shows with such beautiful clarity how and why turning part of the second-stage exciter into a closed circuit gives multiplied space-modification effect. Brent —it was incidental to qualification -for the Profession—could work on this drive for a bare few minutes and—

  He nodded to himself. But the crew would be armed and desperate, and the passengers were already half-crazed with fear. Alarm the crew further and they might commit a massacre … and to reassure the passengers would alarm the crew. Technically, it would be easy, but humanly it was impossible, he thought. Yet the impossible would have to be done.

  He moved about the absurdly simple apparatus that was the overdrive itself. It was merely a long bar of brightly polished metal with a peculiar greenish cast. At its ends it branched into slenderer rods—almost wires—that went through the skin of the overdrive room and spread out and branched again and again until they ended in pointed projections a few inches only beyond the plating of the hull. There were four separate coils of seemingly bare copper wire, placed in particular relationship to the bar. And that was all. Even the copper seemed uninsulated. But Brent knew better than that.

  He climbed away from the engine room with the body dangling and jerking as he climbed among the girders in the semidarkness.

  It was almost an hour later when he reached the passengers’ lounge again. He’d brushed himself carefully before re-entering. But nobody would have noticed, anyway.

  A small group of passengers had gathered together, quietly and grimly waiting for something. The men—there were not too many of them—wore varying expressions of pure desperation. Behind them there were the women. Behind the women were children. There had been fighting. One man had a crude bandage covering half his face, as if someone had clawed at his eye all too successfully. There were some bent and broken chairs.

  Kit Harlow and her father were near the group. Kit’s face was shockingly pale. Her dress was torn. Her father’s features were battered. Blood ran down one temple. A slow, deep rage, deeper than even his fury over what he had discovered, filled Brent to the very brim. He heard a snarling from the bar. “They think they’re too good for us! They think—’’ It was the voice of Rudi—the pimply-faced man whom Brent had seen on his journey to the ship’s control room. Brent ground his teeth.

  Brent came to Kit, and whispered shortly: “I saw the overdrive. It’s in perfect working order. We’ve got a chance. Don’t let yourself get killed yet!”

  But he raged at the signs that she had been forced to struggle in the riot he had missed. He went to the bar and with brisk, angry motions threw water pitchers over the heads and onto the heads of the men inside it.

  It would have been suicidal with normal men. But the crowd in the bar was half-crazed by
iposap—made frantic by a deliberately excessive dosage. Every man clutched some drinkable while Rudi exhorted them. They were drugged and drunken and he worked them up… .

  The noise was that of wild beasts turned loose. A man came staggering out of the melee, made suddenly cold sober by blood which jetted from his throat. He looked down at it stupidly, and leaned against the wall mutely imploring help from those he had joined in attacking only a little while ago.

  It was too late. His knees sagged and gave way under him.

  But Brent did not see that. He’d made a diversion. He had the pack fighting blindly. He dived into the fray.

  There are tricks of fighting among rioters and drunken men. They are not pretty tricks, but they are effective. Brent used them—sparingly.

  Brent got through; crouched below visibility and fighting his way savagely, he reached Rudi. And the pimply man did not know he was endangered until a fist sank deep into his belly, and he collapsed—and a fist connected scientifically with his jaw. Then Brent crouched over him, searching him swiftly. He found a flat case. He reached up and put it in the pocket of one of the surging mob about and above him. Then he dragged the pimply man to the wall and, crouched low, with his head protected by his hunched shoulders, he worked his way out again.

  He was not unscathed. His clothes were ripped and he was bleeding when he dragged Rudi out of the door. He was staggering and panting, alike from the beating and the exertion, when he blindly essayed to open a cabin door and drag Rudi inside. Two figures followed—Kit and her father.

  “Close the door!” Brent panted.

  Instantly he began to tear strips from the bed clothing to bind his victim: his hands … his feet. He disarmed and gagged the pimply Rudi.

  “I should—kill him,” he said, breathing hard when it was done. “He was an agent provocateur assigned to stir those drugged fools to murder one another … and you. He had a communicator on him. It carried every sound he heard and every word he spoke to the control room. One of those drunks in the bar has it on him now. It’s still keeping the listeners in the control room entertained. But I haven’t got much time—”