Gefty said, "Shut the control unit off. From what you were saying, that
throws us automatically back into normspace, while we're still close
enough to the Hub. You'll find plenty of people there who'll stake you
to a trip to the future if they can go along and are convinced they'll
return. Miss Ruse and I don't happen to be that adventurous."
There was silence from the passage. Gefty added, "Take your time to make
up your mind about it, if you want to. I don't like the idea of those
lights hitting us, but neither do you. And I think I can wait this out
as well as you can...."
The silence stretched out. Presently Gefty said, "If you do accept,
slide that fire-shooting device of yours into the room before you show
up. We don't want accidents."
He paused again. Kerim was chewing her lips, hands clenched into small
fists in her lap. Then Maulbow answered, voice flat and expressionless
now.
"The worst thing we can do at present," he said, "is to prolong a
dispute about possible courses of action. If I disarm, will you lay
aside your gun?"
"Yes."
"Then I accept your conditions, disappointing as they are."
He was silent. After a moment, Gefty heard the white rod clatter lightly
along the floor of the passage. It struck the passage wall, spun off it,
and rolled into the instrument room, coming to rest a few feet away from
him. Gefty hesitated, picked it up and laid it on the wall table. He
placed his own gun beside it, moved a dozen steps away. Kerim's eyes
followed him anxiously.
"Gefty," she whispered, "he might ..."
Gefty looked at her, formed the words "It's all right" with his mouth
and called, "Guns have been put aside, Maulbow. Come on in, and let's
keep it peaceable."
He waited, arms hanging loosely at his side, heart beating heavily, as
quick footsteps came up the passage. Maulbow appeared in the entrance,
glanced at Gefty and Kerim, then about the room. His gaze rested for a
moment on the wall table, shifted back to Gefty. Maulbow came on into
the room, turning towards Gefty, mouth twisting.
He said softly, "It is not our practice, Rammer, to share the secrets of
the Great Current with other races. I hadn't foreseen that you might
become a dangerous nuisance. But now--"
His right hand began to lift, half closed about some small golden
instrument. Gefty's left arm moved back and quickly forwards.
The service knife slid out of its sheath and up from his palm as an
arrow of smoky blackness burst from the thing in Maulbow's hand. The
blackness came racing with a thin, snarling noise across the floor
towards Gefty's feet. The knife flashed above it, turning, and stood
hilt-deep in Maulbow's chest.
* * * * *
Gefty returned a few minutes later from the forward cabin which served
as the _Queen's_ sick bay, and said to Kerim, "He's still alive, though
I don't know why. He may even recover. He's full of anesthetic, and that
should keep him quiet till we're back in normspace. Then I'll see what
we can do for him."
Kerim had lost some of her white, shocked look while he was gone. "You
knew he would try to kill you?" she asked shakily.
"Suspected he had it in mind--he gave in too quick. But I thought I'd
have a chance to take any gadget he was hiding away from him first. I
was wrong about that. Now we'd better move fast ..."
He switched the emergency check panel back on, glanced over the familiar
patterns of lights and numbers. A few minor damage spots were indicated,
but the ship was still fully operational. One minor damage spot which
did not appear on the panel was now to be found in the instrument room
itself, in the corner on which the door of the map room opened. The
door, the adjoining bulkheads and section of flooring were scarred,
blackened, and as assortedly malodorous as burned things tend to become.
That was where Gefty had stood when Maulbow entered the room, and if he
had remained there an instant after letting go of the knife, he would
have been in very much worse condition than the essentially fireproof
furnishings.
Both Maulbow's weapons--the white rod lying innocently on the wall table
and the round, golden device which had dropped from his hand spitting
darts of smoking blackness--had blasted unnervingly away into that area
for almost thirty seconds after Maulbow was down and twisting about on
the floor. Then he went limp and the firing instantly stopped.
Apparently, Maulbow's control of them had ended as he lost
consciousness.
It seemed fortunate that the sick bay cabin's emergency treatment
accessories, gentle as their action was, might have been designed for
the specific purpose of keeping the most violent of prisoners
immobilized--let alone one with a terrible knife wound in him. At the
angle along which the knife had driven in and up below the ribs, an
ordinary man would have been dead in seconds. But it was very evident
now that Maulbow was no ordinary man, and even after the eerie weapons
had been pitched out of the ship through the instrument room's disposal
tube, Gefty couldn't rid himself of an uncomfortable suspicion that he
wasn't done with Maulbow yet--wouldn't be done with him, in fact, until
one or the other of them was dead.
He said to Kerim, "I thought the machine Maulbow set up in the storage
vault would turn out to be some drive engine, but apparently it has an
entirely different function. He connected it with the instruments he had
made in the Hub, and together they form what he calls a control unit.
The emergency panel would show if the unit were drawing juice from the
ship. It isn't, and I don't know what powers it. But we do know now that
the control unit is holding us in the time current, and it will go on
holding us there as long as it's in operation.
"If we could shut it off, the _Queen_ would be 'rejected' by the
current, like Maulbow's sailer was. In other words, we'd get knocked
back into normspace--which is what we want. And we want it to happen as
soon as possible because, if Maulbow was telling the truth on that
point, every minute that passes here is taking us farther away from the
Hub, and farther from our own time towards his."
Kerim nodded, eyes intent on his face.
"Now I can't just go down there and start slapping switches around on
the thing," Gefty went on. "He said it wasn't working right, and even if
it were, I couldn't tell what would happen. But it doesn't seem to
connect up with any ship systems--it just seems to be holding us in a
field of its own. So I should be able to move the whole unit into the
cargo lock and eject it from there. If we shift the _Queen_ outside its
field, that should have the same effect as shutting the control unit
off. It should throw us back into normspace."