Farradyne awoke to the pressure of about one-gravity and began to
wonder how far the Lancaster had carried him under its jury-rigged
drive. His watch said that fourteen hours had passed since
weightlessness had come, but this was no good for an estimate of
distance.
The whole thing was incomprehensible to him. Interstellar travel in
a matter of hours made his mind reel, and the idea of installing a
gadget that made it possible with the ease of installing a radio in
an automobile only added to the inconsistencies. All he could grasp
of it was that the gadget the alien race had must be some sort of
force-field generator that worked independently of the basic reaction
motor and therefore could be turned off or on at will. He gave up
trying to theorize and began to consider the more personal problem of
his location and what he could do.
He cracked the scuttlebutt and found that the ship was a-planet. He
listened and heard nothing, not even the familiar sounds of a ship in
warm-up. He cracked the hatch of his cubby and looked out. The small
corridor was as dark as the grave, and as silent. Boldly he stepped out
and looked around under the light of his spacesuit torch.
Bolted to the floor were four rectangular boxes of metal connected
together by a heavy cable, and from one a second cable ran to a
standard connector set in the wall of the Lancaster.
Like all other Solarian spacecraft, the Lancaster was well-supplied
with a network of cables running up and down the length of the ship
to serve as test connections and spares for this or that equipment
when needed. So the enemy had re-connected their multi-line cable to
one of the standard Terran connectors and plugged the cable into the
Lancaster's cable-plate.
Farradyne could see nothing about the metal boxes that would tell him
anything, so he left them and went aloft, cautiously. He doffed the
spacesuit at the next level and hung it neatly in a suit locker, before
he continued up the stairways.
Out of one porthole he could see the spaceport. It was broad and dark
except for a bouquet of searchlights that drilled into the sky around
the rim, a wash of floodlamps that surrounded one of the vast starships
a mile or so distant, and the far-off blurs of bright red light that
probably read "Spaceman's Bar" in whatever the enemy used for a printed
language.
He left the viewport and went higher until he came to the salon. He
peered into it from floor level, but it was dark and untenanted. The
spacelock was open and Farradyne looked out of the big round opening
across the field to another huge starship standing a few hundred yards
from the Lancaster. The other ship was as dark as the Lancaster, except
for one small porthole that gleamed like a headlight in the darkness.
The problem of where he was sent him to the control room. He looked
into the sky, hunting for familiar constellations. The Pleiades were
there, but warped, and Farradyne found that while he knew they were
distorted as an aggregation of stellar positions, he could not remember
their proper relationship. Orion was visible, but the hero had hiked
his belt up. The Great Bear was sitting on his haunches, and the
Smaller Bear had lost his front feet. Sirius no longer blazed in Canis
Major. Procyon had taken off for parts unknown, while several other
bright stars dotted the skies in places where no stars had been on
Terra.
He tried to recall visits to the big stellatarium in New York where the
lecturer displayed the skies as seen from various well-known stars that
were within a half-hundred light years of Sol; but he found that he
evidently had not been as attentive as he might have been.
* * * * *
Finally he gave up hoping to establish his whereabouts by visual
inspection, and took his first look at the control room. He could
see nothing changed at first; then he found a small auxiliary panel
beside the pilot's seat, which contained a bar-topped toggle switch and
three pilot lamps quite different in appearance from the rest of the
Lancaster's standard equipment. He felt an urge to try the toggle, but
fought it down; it was too much like playing with toy building blocks
made of subcritical masses of plutonium, and Farradyne wanted to stay
alive long enough to _watch_ the ruin of the enemy, not become a part
of it.
He got his 20-power binoculars from the locker and went down to the
spacelock. The near-by starship was as abandoned as the Lancaster,
except for that one bright porthole. Through it he could see nothing
but one corner of wall and ceiling.
A sudden flash of light made Farradyne drop to the floor of the salon
and wriggle forward cautiously to the edge of the door.
A vehicle of some sort had turned in at the spaceport from the rim, and
its headlights had flashed against his face. He looked at it through
the glasses but could not see beyond the glare of the headlights; the
car was coming swiftly toward the Lancaster.
Farradyne gathered himself to make a grand rush for his cubby, but
stayed to watch because he could make safety after he was certain that
the car would stop at the Lancaster. Instead, the vehicle swung around
the interstellar ship and stopped by the landing ramp. Three men and a
woman got out--
"Norma!" breathed Farradyne.
High in the enemy ship, one porthole winked off and the one beside it
winked on, and a few minutes later Farradyne saw the same trio of men
escort Clevis from the landing ramp and hand him into the spaceport
jeep. The engine roared and they took off for the rim of the port.
Farradyne looked around the spaceport and wondered. It seemed such
a cozy place, completely unguarded so far as he could tell. This
undoubtedly meant that the port was a restricted zone and anybody
permitted inside the boundaries was known and recognized before he got
in.
The jeep disappeared, and Farradyne came down his landing ramp and
scooted across the flat spaceport to the starship.
Inside the spacelock was a small ante-room with an elevator and some
stairs. Farradyne did not trust the elevator; he turned and raced up
the stairs, ignoring the warnings of his own mind that this was a
completely foolhardy stunt.
Up and up he went, around circular corridors, past dark doorways
and sealed hatches, until he was both winded and muscle-weary from
climbing. He paused from time to time to orient himself by a quick look
out of the nearest porthole that faced the Lancaster, until he found
that he was at the right level above the control room of his own ship.
The next level above brought him to a door that had a thin line of
light along the bottom.
Across the door was a metal bar, but the slide-aside keeper, with a
hole in it for a lock, hung open; the enemy had not considered it
necessary to lock the door against outside tampering.
Farradyne slipped the keeper aside and lifted the bar.
* * * * *
Norma stood there just inside the door, waiting. Her hands were on her
hips and there was a cold glitter in her eye. It flickered and failed
as she recognized Farradyne.
"Well!" she snapped. "If it isn't our Boy Scout and Man-about-space who
claims he doesn't know where hellflowers come from!"
"I didn't--but I'm learning fast," he told her. "Maybe you can help. Do
you know where we are?"
"Your friends asked questions. They didn't tell me anything."
He looked at her sourly. "I wish I'd known the other light in the
window was Clevis," he said.
"So you didn't know?" she cried angrily.
Farradyne waved a hand sidewise and it shut her up. "Stop making like a
fishwife and think! You have a good mind--for God's sake, use it!"