Hanging by a Thread

by Randall Garrett

end-over-end,and the center of rotation was in the lounge itself. The heavy cargo inthe hold was balancing the lighter, but longer, part of the ship above thelounge. He began climbing down the stairwell toward the navigation andcontrol sections.

  Somewhere down there, somebody was cursing fluently in Arabic.

  "Illegitimate offspring of a mangy she-camel! Eater of dogs! Wallowerin carrion!" And then, with hardly a break: "Allah, All-Merciful,All-Compassionate! Have mercy on Thy servant! I swear by the beard ofThy holy Prophet that I will attend more closely to my duties to Theeif Thou wilt get me loose from this ill-begotten monstrosity! Help meor I perish!" The last words were a wail.

  "I'm coming!" boomed Jayjay in the same tongue. "Save thy strength!"

  * * * * *

  There was silence from the control room as Jayjay clambered on downthe stairwell. Fortunately, the steps had been built so that it waspossible to use them from either side, no matter which way the gravitypull happened to be. By the time he reached the control room, heweighed a good fifteen pounds.

  Captain Atef al-Amin was staring up at the stairs as Jayjay came down.He was jammed tightly into a space between two of the big controlcabinets, hanging head downward and looking more disheveled thanJayjay had ever seen the usually immaculately-uniformed captain.

  "Oh," said Captain Al-Amin, in English, "it's you. For a moment Ithought--" Then he waved his free hand. "Never mind. Can you get meout of here?"

  What had been the floor of the control room was now the ceiling. Thetwo steel cabinets which housed parts of the computer unit nowappeared to be bolted to the ceiling. They were only about five feethigh, and the space between them was far too narrow for a man to havegot in there by himself--especially a man of the captain's build. Nonethe less, he was in there--jammed in up to his waist. Only his uppertorso and one arm was free. The other arm was jammed in against thewall.

  Jayjay took the leap from the stairs and grabbed on to the chair thathung from the ceiling nearby. When you only weigh fifteen pounds, youcan make Tarzan look like an amateur.

  "You hurt?" he asked.

  "It isn't comfortable, sure as hell," said Al-Amin. "I think my arm'sbroken. Think you can get me loose?"

  "I can try. Give me your hand." Jayjay took the captain's free handand gave it a tug. Then he released the chair he was holding, bracedboth feet against the panels of the computer housings, and gave a goodpull. The captain didn't budge, but he winced a little.

  "That hurt?"

  "Just my arm. The pressure has cut off my blood circulation; my legsare numb, and I can't tell if they hurt or not."

  Jayjay grabbed the chair again and surveyed the situation. "Where'syour First Officer?"

  "Breckner? Down in the engine room."

  Jayjay didn't comment on that. If the hold was airless, it was likelythat the engine room was, too, and there was no need to worry Al-Aminany more than necessary just now.

  "Can you use a cutting torch?" the captain asked.

  "Yes, but I don't think it'll be necessary," Jayjay said. "Hold on aminute." He went back up the stairs to the officers' washroom and,after a little search, got a container of liquid soap from thesupplies. Then he went back down to the control room. He made the jumpto the chair, holding on with one hand while he held the container ofsoap with the other.

  "Can you hold me up with one hand? I'll need both hands to work with."

  "In this gravity? Easy. Give me your belt."

  Captain Atef Al-Amin grabbed Jayjay's belt and hung on, while Jayjayused both hands to squirt the liquid soap all over the captain fromthe waist down.

  It would have made a great newspaper photo. Captain Al-Amin, wedgedbetween two steel cabinets, hanging upside-down under a pull ofone-fifteenth standard gee, holding up his rescuer by the belt. Therescuer, right-side-up, was squeezing a plastic container of liquidsoap and directing the stream against the captain.

  When Al-Amin was thoroughly wetted with the solution, Jayjay againbraced his feet against the steel panels and pulled.

  With a slick, slurping sound, the captain slid loose, and the two ofthem toppled head-over-heels across the room. Jayjay was prepared forthat; he stopped them both by grasping an overhead desk-top as theywent by. Then he let go, and the two men dropped slowly to what hadbeen the ceiling.

  "_Hoo!_" said the captain. "That's a relief! Allah!"

  Jayjay took a look at the man's arm. "Radius might be broken; ulnaseems O.K. We'll splint it later. Your legs are going to tingle likecrazy when the feeling comes back."

  "I know. But we have other things to worry about, Mr. Kelvin.Evidently you and I are the only ones awake so far, and I'm in nocondition to go moving all over this spinning bucket just yet. Wouldyou do some reconnoitering for me?"

  "Sure," said Jayjay. "Just tell me what you want."

  * * * * *

  Within half an hour, the news was in.

  There were five men alive in the ship: Jayjay, Captain Al-Amin, JeffryHull, Second Officer Vandenbosch, and Maintenance Officer Smith.Vandenbosch had broken both legs and had to be strapped into a bunkand given a shot of narcolene.

  Jayjay had put on a spacesuit and taken a look outside. The whole rearend of the ship was gone, and with it had gone the First Officer, theRadio Officer, and the Engineering Officer. And, of course, the mainpower plant of the ship.

  Most of the cargo hold was intact, but the walls had been breached,and the air was gone.

  "Well, that's that," said Captain Al-Amin. Jayjay, Smith, Hull, andthe captain were in the control room, trying not to look glum. "I wishI knew what happened."

  "Meteor," Jayjay said flatly. "The bumper hull is fused at the edgesof the break, and the direction of motion was inward."

  "I don't see how it could have got by the meteor detectors," saidSmith, a lean, sad-looking man with a badly bruised face.

  "I don't either," the captain said, "but it must have. If the engineshad blown, the damage would have been quite different."

  Jeffry Hull nervously took a cigarette from his pocket pack. His nosehad quit bleeding, but his eye was purpling rapidly and was almostswollen shut.

  Captain Al-Amin leaned over and gently took the cigarette from Hull'sfingers. "No smoking, I'm afraid. We'll have to conserve oxygen."

  "You guys are so damn _calm_!" Hull said. His voice betrayed a surfaceof anger covering a substratum of fear. "Here we are, heading awayfrom the Solar System at eighteen million miles an hour, and you allact as if we were going on a picnic or something."

  The observation was hardly accurate. Any group of men who went on apicnic in the frame of mind that Jayjay and the others were in wouldhave produced the gloomiest outing since the Noah family took a tripin an excursion boat.

  "There's nothing to worry about," Captain Al-Amin said gently. "All wehave to do is set the screamers going, and the Interplanetary Policewill pick us up."

  "Screamers?" Hull looked puzzled.

  Instead of answering the implied question, the captain looked atSmith. "Have you checked them?" He knew that Smith had, but he wastrying to quiet Hull's fears.

  Smith nodded. "They're O.K." He looked at Hull. "A screamer is anemergency radio. There's one in every compartment. You've seen them."He pointed across the room, toward a red panel in the wall. "Inthere."

  "But I thought it was impossible for a spaceship in flight to contacta planet by radio," Hull objected.

  "Normally, it is," Smith admitted. "It takes too much power and tootight a beam to get much intelligence over a distance that great froma moving ship. But the screamers are set up for emergency purposes.They're like flares, except that they operate on microwave frequenciesinstead of visible light.

  "The big radio telescopes on Luna and on the Jovian satellites canpick them up if we beam them sunward, and the Plutonian station canpick us up if we beam in that direction."

  Hull looked much calmer. "But where do you get the power if theengines are gone? Surely the emergency batterie
s won't supply thatkind of power."

  "Of course not. Each screamer has its own power supply. It's ahydrogen-oxygen fuel cell that generates a hell of a burst of powerfor about thirty minutes before it burns out from the overload. It'smeant to be used only once, but it does the job."

  "How do they know where to find us from a burst like that?" Hullasked.

  "Well, suppose we only had one screamer. We'd beam it toward Pluto,since it would be easier for an IP ship to get to us from there. Sinceall screamers have the same frequency--don't ask me what it is; I'mnot a radio