by James White
Using direct control and never taking his eyes off the viewer, Grayson took the nurse immediately into a corridor leading toward the damaged number six—Nurse 53 had the fault common to all mechanisms designed to do more than a few simple, specialized jobs—it was incredibly delicate. There might be obstacles in its path which the robot's built-in responses would not recognize as such, and there were too few nurses left for him to risk this one unnecessarily. He took a little of his attention from the control panel when Cross bent over him, but only briefly.
"Grayson," the captain said quietly, "if that man is alive, I want him brought directly to the control room."
Cross always spoke quietly, and even at the height of the present battle he hadn't uttered a single unnecessary word. If there was a weak point in that tall, spare frame, it was microscopic, and a man would almost die rather than show weakness before him. During the engagement, when shouting and a certain degree of confusion would have been considered normal, he hadn't raised his voice once. And he was most economical with words. Grayson didn't expect an explanation for the completely unprecedented order.
"The man is Stuart," Cross said. "A drive engineer." He turned and began trying to coordinate the ship's four remaining fire points against the nearest, but incredibly agile, Raghman ship.
Why, Grayson asked himself, should a casualty be brought here instead of to sick bay? The fact that he was an overdrive engineer didn't explain anything, at first. But the answer came to him suddenly, and for the first time since joining the ship, Grayson felt a little ashamed of Captain Cross.
The Starcloud carried lifeships, simple, reaction-driven shells that had neither the speed nor fuel-food storage capacity for instellar flight—but for one exception. Nearby, under a section of the hull as yet untouched by the Raghman force eddies, was a six-man lifeship equipped with the overdrive generators which made speeds greater than light possible. Nobody in the control room, Grayson knew, had the necessary specialized knowledge to tune and operate those generators, hence the captain's order to bring Engineer-Gunnery Officer Stuart here.
Cross was going to abandon ship.
Sometimes, Grayson told himself angrily, he thought like some dewy-eyed twelve-year-old. Captain Cross was the most valuable and highly skilled scientist on the ship, otherwise he wouldn't have been its captain. The romantic tradition that masters should perish with their commands had always been a stupid one, and in this present era it was downright criminal. Cross was duty-bound to save himself first, not last. Grayson knew this, but somehow, he still felt disappointed in the other. . . .
The control room seemed to jump as a shock wave passed through it: another force-eddy had successfully penetrated the ship's defensive screen. Grayson bent forward anxiously. The picture being transmitted from Nurse 53 spun wildly as the nearby explosion sent the robot tumbling end over end. He sighed thankfully when the image steadied again and his panel told him that 53 was undamaged. But his relief was short-lived, because the clear, steady picture on his view-screen showed a section of the corridor along which the robot was passing. The farther end of the corridor—terminating in the control chamber of number six launching tube—had turned brown and was slowly caving in. The force-eddy had been very close indeed.
"Get it through! Quickly!" Cross was behind him again, his voice shockingly loud and harsh. "Maybe you can bring it back by a different route...."
"I'm trying," Grayson interrupted, "but it's going to be a tight squeeze. . . ." He didn't have to tell the Captain that the squeeze would need to be a very loose one if the robot was to be of any use when it did get through. Nurse 53 was no bulldozer.
It was like living through one of those nightmares where everything is slowed to quarter speed. Slowly, as the robot's vision pickup relayed it back, the image of the damaged end of the corridor expanded in Grayson's view-screen. Almost imperceptibly, yet far too quickly for the robot's safety, the ceiling and walls slumped and buckled under their own weight. As if the metal plating and bulkheads had been turned into so much soft, brown toffee, the ceiling rippled and bellied downwards and the walls tried to emulate a concertina. The secondary—softening —effect of the force-eddies produced no heat, but they were deadly enough without it.
The robot's vision pickup was set low: Grayson found it hard to judge how much clearance he had. Four feet, he guessed desperately, which should be just enough to clear 53's antenna. He sent it into the melted section of corridor at its snail-like top speed, praying under Ms breath as the walls—a sugary powdering of metallic crystals making them even more closely resemble candy—slid slowly past. The corridor floor was still solid and intact.
A sigh from Cross gently stirred the fine hair on top of Grayson's scalp as the damaged control pod containing Stuart came into sight, but it ended with a sharply indrawn breath as the transmitted image jerked suddenly and slewed around, showing nothing but a buckled expanse of wall. It stayed that way for perhaps two seconds while Grayson's fingers tapped madly at his panel's control keys, then it went black.
"What. . . ?" Cross began harshly, but Grayon was already answering him.
"Both the power and vision antennae were broken off against the ceiling." Grayson nodded at his panel where the trouble was illustrated by lights which glowed and others which did not. "It can't use the power beamed to it, and it's blind as well."
"Batteries?"
"I used up the emergency batteries trying to get more speed out of the thing. Besides, there may have been other damage. I couldn't allow it to treat anyone now without direct supervision—its diagnostic circuits suffer first if anything goes wrong."
As Grayson stopped talking he deliberately kept his eyes away from the captain's face. There had been a strained, almost strident quality in the other's tone that made him wonder if the rocklike calm of the captain was at last beginning to crack around the edges. There would be no escape in the lifeship without Stuart. Grayson didn't want to see the other's expression in case he would feel even more ashamed of Captain Cross.
All at once the utter hopelessness of the situation fell around his mind in a heavy, suffocating blanket of despair. It wasn't just the desperate plight of the ship, or his own imminent destruction alone that was smashing at what remained of his ego; it was the nagging sense of failure in his job, of things he might have done but hadn't, which could have diverted this latest disaster. If he'd been half the robotics man he was cracked up to be, he would have found some way of getting Stuart to the control room. He hadn't, and now nobody would get out of this.
If the Starcloud's crew only knew what a fake he was. As he had done time and again before, Grayson told himself that as medical officer of the ship he was nothing but a second-rate G.P. with eighty assistants to do all his work —and ninety percent of his thinking—for him. True, it required a certain aptitude to control and work through his robot nurses, and not many doctors had that ability. But he wasn't really a doctor. Why, he hadn't touched a patient—directly—in over two years.
Without his robots, he probably wouldn't know how to start treating a case of measles.
The crazy humor of the whole business made Grayson smile bitterly to himself. Here he was, likely to pass out at any minute, and he was afraid to look at the captain's face because of the embarrassment a scared expression on it would cause him! Wryly he wondered if the look on his own face was one likely to inspire confidence in a subordinate. He didn't think so.
"We're ready now, sir," said Harper, at the ordnance panel. Cross, who had his mouth open to speak to Grayson, looked indecisive for perhaps a second, then moved quickly beside the gunnery officer.
"Be careful," he said, his eyes flicking across the pitifully meager number of 'In Operation' lights on the panel, and coming to rest on the main viewer. "They mustn't suspect what we're doing." He didn't look or sound particularly scared, just anxious.
Grayson looked at the big screen, too. He had an idea something important was about to happen.
The nearest R
aghman ship circled the Starcloud at a distance of roughly two miles; its two companions were five miles out. In the enlarger beside the big screen, it showed as an opaque, milky globe whose outlines shimmered faintly, giving the ship its characteristic appearance of fluidity; a defensive screen, no doubt. As Grayson watched, a hazy bubble swelled rapidly on the enemy ship's hull, broke free, and came undulating toward them like some ghostly electric eel. A force-eddy. But it should be a few minutes before it would hit them—as a rule the eddies moved slowly.
The thought that this might be one of the exceptions to that rule was making Harper's forehead wet and shiny.
Cross said, "Now!"
In a ship that was nine-tenths servo-mechanism, one became accustomed to seeing reality through a row of dials and a set of indicator lights. Harper's panel told him that launching tubes three, four, seven, and nine—the only four still linked to central control—had each expelled a missile simultaneously. It also told them that twenty "sunlight" flares had been ferried up from the forward magazine and were now awaiting detonation on the outer hull. For a diversion of some sort, Grayson guessed. He watched the main screen closely as three of the missiles curved toward the two farthest Raghman, and the fourth shot at the ship which had so recently closed in.
Harper's finger tensed, and Grayson instinctively shut his eyes. The flares ignited.
If the beings in the ships had eyes, it must have looked as if the Starcloud's magazines had gone up. But whether they had or not, it was hoped that the pyrotechnics would rivet the Raghman attention solely on the Starcloud, and not on what that ship was trying to do.
Instantaneously with the ignition of the flares, the three missiles heading toward the farthest Raghman ships split up, blasting around in a tight semicircle. Together with the one originally aimed at it, they went streaking toward the nearest Raghman ship. Their course and velocities had been precalculated and timed—they hit it from four different directions at once. Grayson shut his eyes again.
"And then," Harper said savagely, "there were two."
The Raghman ship had—gone.
A yell of sheer exultation from the communications officer—and Smith was usually the quiet, retiring type—was abruptly cut off as the temporarily forgotten force-eddy struck. The shock spun the standing Captain Cross to the floor and flung Grayson half out of his chair. He was wriggling back into his seat when the captain, fingering a raw patch where his forehead had met the floor, struggled to his feet.
"They can be destroyed, then," he said, awed at the implications of his own words, and still half afraid to believe them. His disbelief passed and he went on excitedly, "The solution is to englobe them. That way they can't slide away from everything shot at them the way they always do. But for that we've got to lure them into short range, make them careless, get them looking the other way, then . . ." Cross looked at the fading bright spot on the big screen, and for the first time that day, smiled. "... Bingo!"
"However," he went on, thought lines creasing his brow, "the design of the ship is wrong for those tactics. What we need is a formation—or a flotilla of armed life-ships protected by the screens and firepower of a larger mother ship might be better. We were successful this time because of a trick, a trick which might not work a second time."
Harper cleared his throat. "It won't," he said simply, nodding at his panel where two more sets of lights had gone out. The disruption of the last force-eddy had left them with just two launching tubes in operable condition. Another englobing attempt was out of the question.
The captain's shoulders drooped. His long, bony frame seemed to sink in on itself. He turned his face away from the control room's occupants. "If I'd known," he said thickly. "If I'd known this sooner..."
Another concussion shook the ship, but Grayson barely noticed it. He thought he knew the hell that was in Cross's mind; he felt very sorry for the captain.
During the opening minutes of the engagement, while the ship was still a powerful fighting unit, Captain Cross might have destroyed the whole Raghman fleet—and without resorting to trickery, either. But when confronted by the unknown in the shape of three Raghman globes hurling force-eddies, the natural reaction was to keep the unknown at arm's length by firing fast and furiously in return, and definitely not to allow it to approach closely. It wasn't until the Starcloud was a wreck, and no longer capable of keeping the Raghman ships at a distance, that the trick had been thought of. Grayson wasn't blaming the captain for his fatal error in tactics. Nobody was blaming the captain, except the captain.
Cross straightened abruptly. His face and voice when he spoke were utterly devoid of emotion. He said:
"The position is this. We have information which may lead to us winning the Human-Raghman war, or at least holding out until something better is developed. But this data must reach the proper authorities. If it doesn't then this type of ship—the first of the star class super-battleships—will be written off as a failure instead of the potential success that it is.
"We have, for the first time, some analysis data of the Raghman force-eddy, details of the Starcloud's operating efficiency under fire up until it became nine-tenths a wreck, and we have an offensive tactic that has proved effective at least once." Cross's eyes moved quickly from face to face. "Suggestions, gentlemen."
Harper stirred restively. "What's the use?" he said. "No matter what we decide to do, we'll need an overdrive engineer. We haven't got one." He looked angrily toward Grayson's control panel, which was now completely dead, and then directly at the doctor. Grayson felt acutely uncomfortable.
Suddenly the Captain looked across at Grayson, too. "I wonder..." he said thoughtfully, then broke off.
Grayson knew what was coming.
He was afraid of dying. He was, Grayson admitted freely to himself, desperately anxious to prolong his life. And he was far from being among the first five in order of importance on the Starcloud. But the ship's officers had been so drastically thinned out during the battle that, if the overdrive-powered lifeship could be launched, he would be on it. But even more than of dying, Grayson was afraid of dying while making a complete and utter fool of himself.
On the Starcloud an officer's leisure time was his own. But while Harper, Smith, and the rest of the commissioned men used theirs to climb all over the ship, or to play hectic ballgames in gravity-free sections, Grayson had stayed in his cabin, listening to his music tapes or studying up on the latest techniques in handling medical robots. He had never been a good mixer, and he was, he more than suspected, bone lazy. The end result of this was that he knew practically nothing about the geography of the ship, he was as weak as a woman, and he had only a rudimentary knowledge of how to handle himself in a spacesuit. And add to all that the fact that he hadn't had direct contact with a patient in two years. Grayson knew what was coming, all right, and he knew that he wouldn't do what would be asked.
"Dr. Grayson," Cross said evenly, "any hope of escape we have hinges on Second Engineer Stuart. Would you go personally to him, treat him, and bring him back here."
Grayson couldn't speak. His neck muscles seemed to be paralyzed, too, because he couldn't even shake his head. Cross's eyes bored straight through to his soul, stripping away the flimsy layers of camouflage with which he faced the world, and revealing him as the coward and faker that he was. The silence seemed to last hours while he struggled vainly with his vocal cords, but it could only have been a few seconds.
"It's a very unusual job for you," Cross went on. His voice remained emotionless, but there was a brief gleam of sympathy in his usually cold gray eyes—and of understanding and reassurance. "However, I know your ability, Doctor. You'll be able to do it."
Grayson got his voice working enough to croak, "I'll try, sir." He felt surprised, and strangely pleased, that he'd been able to say those words instead of a panicky "No!" As well as his other accomplishments, Cross was quite a psychologist, too.
"Very well," the captain said, still in an almost offhand tone. "Harp
er will help you into the suit. Connect your phones to a reel of cable and pay it out as you go. That is the safest way to keep contact with us now that the ship's intercom system has fallen apart. When you reach Stuart—"
"Captain!" Smith's warning shout cut him off in mid-sentence. "Force-eddies—six, seven . . . no, nine of them! That ship we blasted must have flung them off just before we got her." His eyes swiveled wildly between Cross and the ghostly, undulating images on the screen. He was sweating.
It must have taken a superhuman effort for Cross to avoid looking at the screen, and to keep his voice at a conversational level as he added, "We haven't a lot of time, Doctor. Be as quick as you can."
Grayson was outside the control room, plugging his suit phones into the socket in its airlock, when the force-eddies struck. From his position flat on the heaving and shuddering floor he saw the section of the corridor leading sternwards twist crazily and bend upwards, so that only about twenty yards of its length was visible. A brief gale whistled through the corridor, subsided, and the fabric of his suit creaked and stretched outwards; the air had gone. He rechecked the control room airlock seals, then began moving quickly toward the ship's prow, and Stuart.
He ran into trouble almost at once.
One moment he was half running along the corridor, the next he was threshing about above the floor, weightless. Eventually he made contact with the wall, and continued on his way by pulling himself along a section of the ship's plumbing. He got about ten yards when a great, invisible hand flattened him viciously against what should have been the ceiling, and held him there. Sheer panic made him shout for help, but then he calmed quickly as he realized what must have happened. Luckily the suit transmitter had been switched off, so nobody knew about Ms bright blue funk. Switching it on, he said: "Grayson to Control..." and rapidly described his predicament.
The radioman's voice sounded, relaying a more technical version of it to Cross, then Smith said: "We're going to cut artificial gravity in this whole section. The captain says it will be safer for you that way. Luck, Doc. Off."
