by Chad Oliver
“How’s the prisoner?” Collins asked.
“Quite well,” Malcolm replied. “He seems to be much stronger now than when you brought him in. Beastly business—what are you going to do with him?”
“Couldn’t say,” Collins shrugged. “You go and get some sleep and I’ll have a talk with our friend, O.K.?”
“Righto,” Malcolm said brightly and shoved off down the corridor.
Collins smiled again. Malcolm always made him feel better somehow. He often wondered what the man was like, deep in the innermost corners of his being—what thoughts did he have that he never shared with anyone? There weren’t many like Malcolm around anymore, and when they were all gone—
Collins unlocked the corridor door and floated in to where the other man waited in the darkness.
The man watched him steadily, without fear. Collins could feel his presence in the room, vibrant, unafraid.
“You have come to kill me,” the man stated calmly.
“No,” said Collins. “I only want to talk to you—you will not be harmed.”
The man laughed in his face.
Collins ignored him and fired a torch. The flame sputtered and caught as the torch built up air pressure, pushing the shadows back and filling the room with warm orange light. Collins narrowed his eyes to slits against the glare and looked at the man. He returned the gaze frankly. He had a strong face, Collins decided. His hair was long and wild and his teeth were sharp and white. His clothing was old and wrinkled, but not unclean. There seemed to be intelligence in his eyes—or was it only the uncertain light from the torch that made it seem so?
“Start talking,” the man said shortly. “Or do you always speak without words?”
“My name is Collins,” he said, forcing a smile. “I’m the one who—”
“I remember,” the man said.
“Do you have a name, or must I make up one? I’m quite willing to call you Thing or Ug, but maybe you prefer your own name.”
“My name is Owens.”
“O.K., Owens. Now, look—I’d like to help you if I can. I know you’re in a difficult position here—”
“I’ll do my worrying,” Owens said. “You do yours.”
Collins felt himself oddly drawn toward this man before him. A savage? Perhaps. But courage was courage, and even in an enemy it commanded respect.
“You know you could be killed,” he told him quietly. “I may not be able to save you for long. Our food supplies are short. I know what would happen to me if I were your captive.”
“You might make a good meal at that,” Owens stated.
“You,” Collins informed him, “are not exactly a born diplomat. Doesn’t the prospect of death mean anything to you? Your situation is not ideal, you know.”
“Neither is yours,” the man said surprisingly. “I have known death all my life. I know that it comes whether you are afraid of it or not, so why be afraid? Your own life will soon be over; perhaps you would do well to reserve your charity.”
Collins floated toward the man through the shadows, his own eyes cold and hard. He gripped Owens’ arm tightly and applied pressure until his fingers ached. Owens did not flinch and continued to meet his gaze squarely.
“What did you mean by that?” whispered Collins tensely. “What do you know about my life?”
“Your world will be dead within twenty sleep periods, and you will die with it,” the man said, his voice edged with hate. “The world will be ours.”
“Those are big words,” Collins said, fingering his knife with his free hand. “But they are only words.”
Owens smiled coldly. “You think that we are fools because we do not believe as you do,” he said evenly. “You think that we are fools because we know the stars are gods. But we know other things as well, my stupid friend.”
“Such as?” suggested Collins, drawing his knife.
“You threaten me?” the savage asked, and laughed.
Collins pressed closer, his heart pulsing in his throat. What did this man know?
“The tanks, the air tanks,” Owns hissed, his eyes wild and bright. “You think we don’t know where the air comes from? We do know, and the tanks are in our part of the world—we’re going to seal you off from you air, and the work has already begun.”
Collins floated back, stunned. The air—
Before he had a chance to recover himself, the door to the room burst open. Young Lanson hurtled through, his body quivering with excitement.
“There he is, there he is!” Lanson screamed, pointing at Owens. “Kill him!”
“Calm down,” Collins snapped. “What’s the matter?”
“Matter?” whispered Lanson hoarsely. “You fool, it’s the captain, the captain!”
Collins just stared at him, unable to speak.
“Your father is dead,” Lanson said, his voice breaking with hysteria. “He’s been murdered.”
Slowly, inexorably, Collins felt the fury creep through his veins. Not rage, not hot, blinding madness, but fury—cold, chill fury that seeped like ice through his body, into his heart, his mind—
The captain—
Shielded now by a wall of ice, his mind took command. He gestured towards Owens. “Bring him,” he said shortly, and launched himself into the dark corridor. He left his torch with Lanson and hurtled through the darkness that was his home, his mind refusing even to think of what the captain’s death meant to them now. He must think ahead, keep moving—
He swam into the control room, and there was the captain. His chest was red where they had pulled the knife out, and he was very still. His people were clustered around him in the control room and the torch cast broken shadows on the walls, but the captain could not see them. His dead eyes looked outward, out to the silver stars, and now he was alone.
“Dad,” said Collins, and his voice was very small. He could not speak further. The captain had been a symbol to him all his life, a force, a principle, that held the ship together. But now in death, he was only an old man again, an old man with snow-white hair, and Collins was his son.
Collins felt a hand touch his. He looked up to see Helen, his wife, who knew that she could not comfort him but was brave enough to try. Collins squeezed her hand to show that he understood and then turned to his people.
“We will elect a new captain soon,” he said quietly. “I will not try to assume the position unless I am asked. We have other problems before us now.”
There were murmurs from the crowd, but Collins ignored them. He moved slowly over to where Owens was floating, guarded by Lanson. He looked at Owens coldly for a full minute, staring into his eyes. He waited, smiling very slightly. Then he hit him in the face.
Owens reeled back, shaking his head. Collins hit him again.
“We’re going to get through to the engine room,” Collins hissed, his face very close to his prisoner’s. “This time we’re going to get through, and you’re going to take us.” He hit him again and watched the blood trickle from a split lip. “Understand?”
Lanson pressed in, knife blade gleaming. “Kill him,” he screamed. “Kill the—”
“Shut up.” Collins looked at the man once, and that was enough. “We need our friend here. The other men are blocking off our air supply. This is our last chance. If we fail this time, we die.”
The crowd shifted and moved with the shadows and tension filled the air.
“If he won’t take us through—” one voice began.
“He’ll take us,” Collins replied.
“If we can’t fix the drive after we get there—”
“We’ve got to try,” Collins said coldly. “I tell you, those engines couldn’t have failed! They were tampered with, shut off! If one man can turn them off, another can turn them on.” He paused. “I’ll kill any man who stands in my way.”
“I’m on your side, old boy,” Malcolm said, and didn’t smile.
Collins shot him a glance and then relaxed a little. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to str
ike any heroic poses.”
Malcolm shrugged. “You lead,” he said. “I’ll follow.”
“No, that won’t do,” Collins pointed. “You pick a detail and stay back here—we may not come back, you know. Set the controls, and make certain that the gravity is adjusted to not more than one-fifth Earth-normal. Understand?”
“Righto,” said Malcolm, and moved off about his task.
“Webb, Renaldo, Echols—you older men who learned your science from the captain—are you with me?”
The men smiled their assent. One muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “At last” and went to get his equipment. Spirit and enthusiasm, as though kindled out of the very air, needing only an initial spark, filled the chamber.
And the old captain floated alone, his dead eyes on the stars—
Collins spun Owens around and twisted the man’s arm up behind his back. “O.K.,” he whispered. “Let’s go.”
Lanson hesitated. “Now?”
“Now,” said Collins flatly. “We can pick up weapons and synthetics on the way.”
Quite suddenly, Owens twisted himself loose. He floated there before them, his keen eyes flashing.
“Fools!” he said clearly. “He would lead you all into death—we would be butchered before we even drew near my people’s world. Do you think that my people are imbeciles, that you can simply move in and succeed where all others have failed? Your leader is a fool!”
Collins icily hit the man again in the face. Owens just laughed at him, wiping the blood away with his hand
“You prove nothing,” Owens said calmly. “You cannot answer my arguments with your fists.”
Collins moved in close again and there was death in his eyes. “It’s up to you to get us through,” he told the man, beginning to feel the doubt slink back into the chamber and take its ugly hold on the people. “If you do not, we’ll tear you apart—inch by inch.”
Owens hesitated, cold sweat standing out on his forehead.
“There is a way,” he said finally. “There is one way—”
Collins gripped his arm, digging his nails into the man’s flesh.
“If you cannot go through,” Owens pointed out, “you have to go around.”
Collins felt his body go dead within him. Around? That meant—
“There’s only one way,” Owens said. “We’ll have to go—Outside.”
Stars. It was one thing to view them from the shelter of the control room but a different proposition entirely when seen from Outside. Cold they were, and close—it seemed to Collins that he had only to reach out a spacesuited hand to pluck an ice-diamond from its field of velvet black. If he should lose his footing, float off into nothingness, forever alone—
He tried not to think about it. If the dark and brooding Viking had seemed quiet in her strange Odyssey through the star-seas, how much more was he conscious of the silence now—not merely silence, but an absence of all sound, utter and complete. The old radios of the suits no longer functioned; the air supply was uncertain. Almost Collins fancied that his breathing was already flat and stale.
Inch by inch, foot by slow, agonizing foot the men pulled themselves like ants along the silent side of the Viking. Collins could see the monstrous, incredible figure of Owens ahead of him, like a robot-suit without a human being in it. Behind him he sensed his people—Webb, Echols, Renaldo, their equipment strapped to their backs, feeling their way along the emergency guy rod even as he was doing. Were they good enough? The thought crept, unbidden, into his mind. They had worked hard, they were good, but they had learned under terrible handicaps. Their tools were inadequate. Could they fix the drive? If not—
Getting out of the Viking in their old spacesuits had been something of a feat in itself, although the problem was not in getting through the small air lock but in not getting blown through it into infinity. Getting back into the ship again through the engine room was, to say the least, going to be something else again. Owens had said that there was an operable air lock there that he had seen, one that could be opened from Outside, but—
Was the man leading them all to their deaths? Was this all simply a last, ironic gesture of defiance?
Collins inched his way along. He had no choice, he realized. It was act now or not at all. A chance, however desperate, was still a chance. Owens. There was something strange about the man—
Collins stared at the cold metal side of the Viking as he crept along it. In there, separated from him by scant feet, were the other men, the children of the revolutionaries. He was in their territory now, their part of the ship, where they gathered around their great synthetic fires and lived their proud but futile lives, sliding back, back, back into a cold death in an empty ship—
Could they be saved, turned to use, if the ship were recovered? Collins had always said that they could, and he believed it. For all their differences, for all their strangeness, these were yet people—people who had chosen to follow a different path from his, but people none the less. A common goal, a common hope, might yet unite the two—and all hands would be needed if the Viking were to come through at last.
Collins smiled bitterly. What was that expression he had read in his youth? Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. Collins laughed, and the sound was eerily deafening in the closeness of his suit. He had never seen a chicken, and he was unworried about the hatching of an egg. He didn’t have any eggs.
His stomach was a hollow knot within him and the palms of his hands, although beginning to freeze, were clammy with sweat. It seemed to him that he had been crawling for an eternity, crawling forever, crawling through the night and under the merciless stars.
The engine room—Where was the engine room?
They made it. Somehow, they made it. One minute he was crawling inch by inch along the endless guy rod and the next he had stopped, behind Owens. He breathed a cold breath of relief. There, bulging oddly out from the side of the dark Viking, was an air lock. Owens had maneuvered himself into position in front of it and was attempting to turn a valve handle. It did not move. Owens waved a gloved hand urgently.
Collins managed to get himself into position next to the other man, and together they twisted at the valve. It didn’t budge. Collins felt the cold seeping into his suit and his lungs were choked and constricted. He looked at Owens. Owens looked at him, and for a moment they hung there, motionless, on the brink of eternity.
Then Collins waved to Echols, who slowly made his way over to join them. Wordlessly, Collins fumbled with the pack on Echols’ back. It was slow work and his hands were very cold in their thick, insulated gloves, but he finally managed to extract a large hammer. Clumsily, he signaled to Owens and Echols to hold onto him. They braced themselves and got a firm grip on his legs.
Desperately, Collins swung the hammer at the valve. He knew that he might jam it hopelessly, but he had no time now for niceties. The valve had to be jarred loose somehow, and that very quickly. The cold was growing worse—
Collins swung the hammer with as much force as he could muster in his awkward position and then the three men hit the valve together, pulling and tugging and clawing at it with the frenzy and the strength of men who see death staring them icily in the face.
The valve moved. With numbing fingers, they spun it until it would move no more. Then Collins and Owens grasped the handle. Together, they heaved with all their strength.
Nothing happened. The stars seemed to creep nearer—
They pulled again, despair lending strength to their numb muscles. Collins gasped, his heart pounding in his throat. Had it moved? Was it frozen? There—
With a sudden, silent explosion the air lock door puffed outward. The men held on and then moved into the small air lock one by one, almost completely filling it. Coughing for breath and numb with cold, they sealed the outer door again and went to work on the inner one. Collins tasted blood in his throat and a dead whiteness was washing over his brain.
This time, it was easier. The inner
door burst open as the ship’s air rushed into the air lock and then Collins led his men into the ship. Instantly, without waiting, even to look around them, the men ripped off each other’s helmet and gulped in great drafts of heady air. Never before in the lives of any of them had air tasted so sweet; never before had they fully realized the ecstasy of breathing.
When he had partially recovered, Collins secured a synthetic torch from Renaldo’s pack and coaxed it into flame. Light leaped out, blinding his eyes, and the room jumped into sharp relief. Owens had not lied. Collins felt something that might have been tears start to his eyes as he looked around him.
They were alone in the engine room.
Collins rallied his mind, still somewhat stunned from its brush with an unfamiliar Outside, and set to work. The first requirement was safety and he floated across the chamber and checked the after door. It was closed, but unlocked. He threw the switch on it and then turned back to his companions.
The next necessity was light. Together, the men kindled torches and planted them strategically around the room. The light was flickering and uneven, but it would have to do. Even at that, it hurt their eyes; Collins doubted that they could have stood much more.
He looked around the engine room, and his doubts returned. The main plutonium pile, together with its water reactant, was of course invisible behind its graphalloy shielding. If the trouble proved to be not at the surface, but deep within the pile itself, Collins knew that the situation was probably hopeless. But he felt a strange exhilaration none the less. Here, at last, was a straight problem in technology—a problem too difficult for his limited means, perhaps, but still a problem he could sink his teeth into.
Collins eyed the shielding and the dials and switches with a feeling akin to awe—not superstitious awe, nor unreasoning wonder, but simply a healthy respect for a supreme accomplishment of his people. This was the power that had lifted the Viking long ago from the bonds of Earth, carried her beyond Pluto and into interstellar space—and this was the power that had been silent for more than a century. Had the power failed the men, or had the men failed the power? It was no mere rhetorical problem—upon its solution hinged the fate of Earth’s first emissary to the stars.
