by Chad Oliver
The men set to work with a will. Collins, Echols, Renaldo, and Webb, the cream of the ship’s scientists now that the captain was gone, went at their job with the cool precision of men who have studied and planned for many lonely years for just such an eventuality. Owens stood alone, watching, making no sound, with his face beginning to swell painfully from the blows he had received. The chamber was quiet, but filled with a tense, electric anticipation that was a tangible thing.
Invisible behind its shield, the great pile waited. Outside, hovering beyond the air lock, the stars floated in austere splendor—
The crew of four worked on, absorbed in their problem, oblivious to time. The silence was broken only by the harsh breathing and the short, staccato sentences as the men exchanged information and asked questions. They had pitifully little to go on, with their limited instruments, but they had knowledge and understanding. And they had something else—a burning, unquenchable ferocity of purpose that would not be denied. Man’s problems have often been insoluble, from those of the nameless Pleistocene hunters who challenged the mighty mammoth, to Fermi who had engineered the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction beneath the stands of faraway Chicago, to Wilson Langford who had given his life that man might reach the moon of Earth, to a host of others on the black star trails to forever—but they had always been solved.
Man was writing another chapter now—and Collins and his tiny band would not give up.
Time passed as the minutes slipped into hours and the hours crept forward into a day and on—
Finally, they had done all they could.
“It all checks, as far as I can see,” said Webb, rubbing his bloodshot eyes, his great beard floating free in the air.
Renaldo nodded. “Someone threw the rods,” he agreed. “That’s all—there could have been no other failure, or why are the rods in place?”
Echols, thin and pale, said nothing. There was only one thing to try, his expression seemed to say. They must simply try it, and if it failed then that was that
Collins was the first to look up. Startled, he surveyed the engine room with quick eyes. “Owens,” he said quietly. “He’s gone.”
The others followed his gaze to the airlock door, almost without interest. They had greater problems than Owens to worry about; the man’s usefulness was at an end.
“He didn’t get out the door into the ship,” Renaldo offered. “I would have noticed that. He’s gone Outside.”
“Why?” speculated Collins, and then let it drop. It could not concern them now.
“I guess we’re as ready as we’ll ever be,” Webb said shortly, a tight little smile on his lips.
“Sequence pull,” Collins said.
No man spoke what was in his heart, for there were no words. Even their thoughts were under control; they thought of the problem before them and nothing else.
One by one, the damping control rods were pulled. There were eight of them; Renaldo pulled the last.
Nothing happened. There was a deathly silence.
Collins held his breath. It might be that Malcolm, in the control room, had not followed instructions. Or they themselves had miscalculated. Or—
A tiny, feeble clicking sounded in the room. In the silence, it was almost deafening as each fragile click was magnified in the listeners’ imagination until it became a thundering roar.
“The counters,” whispered Collins. “The counters—”
With a mounting intensity, the clicks increased in both numbers and strength. They beat a tattoo in the chamber, a tattoo that modulated into a smooth whir of power.
Suddenly, there was light—white, blinding light that slashed at the mind and burned into eyeballs.
Someone screamed, then choked it off.
A crushing, terrible force leaped from the floor and smashed the men down. They fell sprawling, gasping for breath, flecks of blood touching the corners of their mouths with crimson. They were pressed into the hard floor—it seemed that they must press through it entirely and out into space to perish.
A humming roar filled the engine room and the great ship, still for numberless years, vibrated with a surge of power and energy.
“Wrong,” gasped Echols hoarsely, his mouth pulled out of shape by the terrible pressure. “What went wrong?”
”Nothing,” coughed Collins, pulling himself along the floor like a snake. “That’s it—don’t you see? Nothing.”
The four men stared at each other then, wincing from the pressure pull and the glare of the white lights. And there, prostrate, in fearful pain, they smiled.
The dead Viking had come back from a nameless grave; now, at last, she lived again.
Captain Kleberg, his iron-gray hair neatly combed, leaned back in his chair and with an expression almost of contentment on his face puffed on a pipe which had seen better days: Mark Langston, Jim McConnell, and Stan Owens challenged their chairs in their usual ways and perhaps drank more of Captain Kleberg’s Scotch than the rule book strictly allowed.
Mark Langston’s leg was throbbing unpleasantly but he ignored it. The murmur of the vibrations, the distant hum of buzzers, the clicking of instruments, the far-off song of the jets—all these were once more blended together into the music he had known. What he had done, and what he had seen, on the dark Viking had washed his bitterness away as though it had never existed. He could look his fellow man in the eye again, with pride. That was one of those things you never discussed with anyone, that stayed bottled up within you always—but that was also one of the things that counted in the long run.
“They never would have had a prayer alone,” Stan Owens said. “Not a prayer.”
“Hardly,” agreed McConnell. “It was almost more than we could manage, even with the power unit from the launch, to clear that drive and rig the rods so they could handle them. They wouldn’t have had as good a chance as a man trying to build a spaceship with a screw driver.”
“From one point of view they were ridiculously overconfident in even trying to get that ship going again,” Owens said thoughtfully, sipping his drink. “That was one reason the captain had to go—he knew too much to try. As long as he lived, the situation was static; if he had remained in command we couldn’t have done a thing.”
The captain. Mark Langston chewed on the stem of his pipe but didn’t light it. He could see the captain now, alone in that great control room, his old eyes alert as he listened to them explaining to him why he had to relinquish his command for the good of his ship. He could hear Owens’ quiet voice showing him how his men put their trust in him as a symbol, and waited for him to save them—waited too long. He could hear the captain’s slow, careful questions. And he could see—the knife, the sudden knife, the knife they had not been able to stop. The captain, sizing up the situation, had taken his own life to give his people the best possible chance. No man had ever given more—
McConnell hung a cigarette at an impossible angle out of his mouth. “You feeling any better?” he asked Owens. “You took quite a beating in there.”
Stan Owens fingered his battered face ruefully. “I didn’t see any other way to handle it,” he said. “Next time I’ll just walk through a meat grinder.”
Stan Owens. Mark Langston looked at his friend. It had all been his plan, his responsibility—and he, more than any other man, had brought life again to the lost Viking. The old captain, his son Collins, Webb, Renaldo, Echols, the strange and wonderful Englishman Malcolm—these would one day be household names, known to every schoolboy from the saga of the first of the interstellar ships. But who would ever hear the name of Stan Owens, save perhaps as a dimly-remembered legend, a ghost-name? Would historians of the future ever figure out what really had happened on that dark ship—and would they correctly identify Owens as the “savage” who had led Collins to the engine room? Would they puzzle unduly over the extra air lock that had not been present when the ship left Earth? Would they ever understand that a switch had been made with Collins’ original prisoner, with Owens tak
ing over with his story of a vanishing air supply to goad the desperate Collins into action?
It had been a masterly plan, considering the time handicaps under which it was devised and executed. The prisoner they had removed from under old Malcolm’s eyes had been closeted and given a strong psychological conditioning—he himself had helped in that—so that he would exert a favorable influence among his people when the ship came to life again.
It would take the Viking thirty years or more to finish her incredible voyage to Capella—but she would get there and find a subtly-directed welcome that would surpass her wildest dreams. Civilization would thrill to her story, and Collins and Webb and Renaldo and Echols would be immortalized in story, picture, and legend.
And Stan Owens? Jim McConnell? Captain Kleberg? Members of the complement of the Wilson Langford, inexcusably late on a standard run from Earth. Except in a few forever-secret records, they would be unknown.
And it did not matter—that was the best part of it.
Mark Langston came back to the present with a start. He glanced at his watch. Almost time to go back on duty again—
“I want you to know,” Jim McConnell was saying, “that I now qualify as an expert on primitive plutonium drives. Me and the boys, we can go roost in a museum in our old age.”
“My only regret,” said Stan Owens, “is that I have not one report I can give for my profession. Those two halves of the Viking, the one oriented around the captain as a symbol of security, the other slipping back into a never-never culture that would delight the boys at the Academy, form just about the most magnificent examples of belief systems under stress that have ever gone unrecorded in the annals of—”
“O.K., O.K.,” interrupted Captain Kleberg. “We surrender.”
Mark Langston dismounted from his chair. “Time for me to be thrown to the wolves,” he announced sadly.
McConnell laughed, waving one of his eternal cigarettes in the air. “A reward for a hero,” he said cheerfully. “For unprecedented valor, we award to you Mrs. Simmons.”
“Thank you,” said Mark Langston. “I am overwhelmed.”
“Good enough for you, boy,” Stan Owens said with a smile. “I’ll always believe it was you who fixed that jam on the air lock—you were trying to turn me into an ice cube, and you deserve a fate worse than death.”
“Coming right up,” Mark Langston assured him. “Dear Mrs. Simmons, the scourge of the spaceways, and that devil’s brood of hers, are hot on the trail now that they’ve found out how late we’re running. Poor Raleigh has been fighting her for hours.”
“Time to rush in another cavalry troop,” Captain Kleberg ordered gravely. “Carry on, Langston—chin up.”
Kleberg, Owens, and McConnell applauded wildly as Mark Langston left the room to return to his post. He grinned and limped down the corridor to the lift. One thing was sure—if he was still alive when she came in, he was going to be there to watch the Viking land. With that to look forward to, he could stand a lot.
Whistling a thoroughly bawdy and completely off-key tune, Mark Langston marched in to face Mrs. Simmons and extricate young Raleigh from his peril.
Four weeks passed. A ship lived again, and a son spoke to his father—
Collins stood alone in the midst of the noise and activity of the control room. The white lights beat down on him and even behind his standard dark glasses his eyes hurt. To every man, woman, and child on the ship, he was the captain now—with one exception. To Collins himself, there would always be only one captain.
He walked carefully over to the viewport, forcing his untrained muscles to carry him through the light gravity. It would be years, he knew, before they could stand one-half normal gravity—but they would make it.
Collins stood alone, looking out at the stars his father had loved. Very softly then, so that only he could hear, he whispered a promise:
“We’re coming.”
LET ME LIVE IN A HOUSE
It was all exactly perfect, down to the last scratch on the white picket fence and the frigidaire that wheezed asthmatically at predictable intervals throughout the night.
The two white cottages rested lightly on their fresh green lawns, like contented dreams. They were smug in their completeness. They had green shutters and substantial brass door knockers. They had clean, crisp curtains on the windows, and knickknacks on the mantelpieces over the fireplaces. They had a fragment of poetry, caught in dime-store frames in the halls: Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.
One of the cottages had a picture of crusty old Grandfather Walters, and that was important.
Soft and subtle sounds hummed through the warm air. One of the sounds was that of a copter, high overhead, but you couldn’t see it, of course. A breeze sighed across the grass, but the grass was motionless. Somewhere, children laughed and shouted as they clambered and splashed in the old swimming hole.
There were no children, naturally—nor any swimming hole, for that matter.
It was all exactly perfect, though. Exactly. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear it was real.
Gordon Collier breathed in the smell of flowers that didn’t exist and stared without enthusiasm at the white clouds that drifted along through a robin’s-egg-blue sky.
“Damn it all,” he said.
He kicked at the green grass under his feet and failed to dent it. Then he walked into his snug white cottage and slammed the door behind him, hard.
Helen called from the kitchen: “Don’t slam the door, dear.”
“I’m sorry,” Gordon said. “It slipped.”
Helen came bustling in. She was an attractive, if hardly spectacular, woman of thirty. She had brown hair and eyes and a domestic manner. She kissed her husband lightly. “Been over at the WaIters’?” she asked.
“How did you guess?” Gordon said. Where did she think he had been—outside?
“Now, Gordey,” Helen admonished him. “You needn’t snap my head off for asking a civil question.”
“Please don’t call me ‘Gordey’,” Gordon said irritably. Then he relented—it wasn’t her fault, after all. He gave her the news about the Walters. “Bart’s playing football,” he related for the millionth time, “and Mary is watching tri-di.”
“Will they be dropping over for cards tonight?” Helen asked.
She’s playing the game to the hilt, Gordon thought. She’s learned her part like a machine. I wish I could do that.
“They’ll be over,” he said.
Helen’s eyes lighted up happily. She had always loved company, Gordon remembered. “My!” she exclaimed. “I’d better see about supper.” She smiled eagerly, like a dog at a rabbit, and hustled away back to the kitchen.
Gordon Collier watched his wife go, not without admiration of a sort. They had certainly picked well when they picked Bart, who could sit for hours with his electric football game, reliving the past, or who could with equal absorption paint charmingly naive pictures about the stars. Mary, too, was fine—as long as she had her tri-di set, her life was complete. But when they had picked his wife, they had hit the nail on the head. She was perfect in her part—she gave the impression of actually believing in it.
Gordon frowned sourly at himself. “The trouble with you, Gordon,” he said softly, “is that you just haven’t learned your lines very well.”
There was a reason for that, too—but he preferred not to think about it.
After supper—steak and fried potatoes and salad and coffee—the doorbell rang. It was, of course, the Walters.
“Well!” exclaimed Helen. “If it isn’t Bart and Mary!”
In they came—Mary, gray at forty, looking to see if the tri-di was on, and Barton, big and wholesome as a vitamin ad, bounding through the door as though it were the enemy goal line.
Four people, Gordon thought. Four people, utterly alone. Four human beings, pretending to be a society.
Four people.
They exchanged such small talk as there was.
Since they had all been doing precisely the same things for seven months, there wasn’t much in the way of startling information to be passed back and forth. The bulk of the conversation was taken up with Mary’s opinion of the latest tri-di shows, and it developed that she liked them all.
She turned on Gordon’s set, which didn’t please him unduly, and for half an hour they watched a variety show—canned and built into the set, of course—that was mainly distinguished by its singular lack of variety of any sort. Finally, in desperation, Gordon got out the cards.
“We’ll make it poker tonight,” he decided as they all sat down at the collapsible green card table. He dealt out four hands of three-card draw, shoved a quarter into the center of the table, and settled back to enjoy the game as best he could.
It wasn’t easy. Mary turned up the tri-di in order to hear better, and Barton engaged with furious energy in his favorite pastime—replaying the 1973 Stanford-Notre Dame game, with himself in the starring role.
At eleven o’clock sharp Helen served the cheese and crackers.
At midnight, they heard the new sound.
It was a faint whistle, and it hissed over their heads like an ice-coated snake. It sizzled in from far away, and then there was a long, still pause. Finally, there was a shadowy suggestion of a thump.
Gordon instantly cut off the tri-di set. They all listened. He opened a window and looked out. He couldn’t see anything—the blue sky had switched to the deep purple of night and the only glimmer of light came from the porch lamp on the cottage next door. There was nothing to see, and all that he heard were the normal sounds that weren’t really there—the chirp of crickets, the soft sigh of the breeze.
