"So there's nothing to do but wait and see," said Borden.
He tried to work on the space-drive. All its parts were spread out
on the drive room floor. When they'd repaired it before, it had been
so thoroughly fused that a part looked good even if repaired to the
accuracy of a bent wax candle straightened out by hand.
Now the repairs looked very bad. It seemed incredible that anything so
clumsily made should have worked. But Borden couldn't keep his mind on
it.
"Just on the off chance, Ellen," he said abruptly, "you will not leave
the ship by yourself. We'd better replace the lock-door fastening, too.
If we do have visitors from the city on the white spot, that won't stop
them. But it might keep them from taking us off-guard."
* * * * *
He opened the thief-proof locker where an essential part of the
lock-catch had been stored, to protect it from Sattell. It had a
combination fastening, intended merely to prevent pilfering when the
ship was in a space-port.
Borden reached in. Then he went completely and terribly white.
"He's got the star charts and the log! He got in here somehow!"
This was the ultimate in disaster. Because space is trackless. At fifty
light years from Earth the Milky Way is still plain, of course, but
the constellations have ceased to be. At a hundred light years one is
lost. At a thousand light years--and the _Danaë_ had passed that point
months ago--a ship in space is in much the position of a canary whose
universe has consisted of a cage in a single room, and has escaped out
a window into the wide, wide world.
A space-ship has to keep an infinitely precise log of bearings run and
distances traveled in all three dimensions. It must make photographic
star charts. And the accuracy of all its records must be perfect if
it is to find the place it left nearly enough for the stars to become
familiar again so it can locate the Solar System--barely four light
hours in span.
"I think I made a serious mistake," Borden said quietly, "when I didn't
kill Sattell!"
To find a spot four light years across in a galaxy a hundred thousand
light years wide would be difficult enough with good maps. With no
maps, they could spend the rest of their lives wandering hopelessly
among the stars, of which not one in ten thousand had yet been named
by men, landing on planets not one in a hundred thousand of which had
known human footsteps. And they might search for months or years upon a
planet where there was a human colony, and never discover its location.
Borden clenched and unclenched his hands. Sattell had been foisted upon
him as a crew-member while the _Danaë_ was being fitted out for space.
Borden was filled with a deadly cold fury in which regret for his own
past forbearance was his principal emotion.
"Since he's taken the log and charts," he told Ellen icily, "he means
either to bargain with us or to destroy us. And if I know Sattell, it's
six of one and half a dozen of the other!"
It would be. Sattell now had the power of life and death over Borden
and Ellen and Jerry. He would not trade that power for anything
less. In fact, he would not dare yield it at all, because he was so
sure he would be killed himself if he did. The only bargain he could
conceivably make would be one in which they surrendered themselves
to him absolutely, armed him and disarmed themselves, and threw
themselves on Sattell's mercy. And Sattell had little mercy.
"You might try calling Jerry again," said Borden. "Once we've warned
him, we can try to track Sattell by his footprints. His shoes have
heels, and the ground is soft."
Ellen picked up the walkie-talkie microphone again.
"Jerry, Sattell's disappeared. Come in, please.... Jerry, Sattell's
disappeared. Come in, please...."
Her voice went on and on. Borden went grimly over the ship, looking
for signs of what else Sattell might have busied himself with in the
past twenty-four hours. He had believed that Sattell, being in the
same boat with the rest of them--in the same space-ship, anyhow--would
automatically have thought of the group. No sane man did think of
anything but cooperation with his companions in disaster.
But there exists a kind of human being, he knew, which may be a mutant,
which makes a career of the gratification of all emotions, impulses,
momentary desires. Which knows no purpose save personal satisfaction,
and simply does not think like nonmutant human beings.
There were all too many specimens of this type among humans. Some
ordinarily masked themselves, but if Sattell ever had, he now had been
unmasked.