She kissed him, amused. "It's always like that, silly. You're on
Mercury, remember?"
Farradyne held her close and kissed her again. A minute passed before
he came up for air. He looked at her, leaning his head back so that he
could see her face without looking crosseyed. "I'll bet you are a real
hellion in the dark."
Carolyn laughed, and shook her head. "Like all the rest of the women
on Mercury, I'm scared to pieces of the dark. But it is late, Charles,
and you've just got to go." She hugged his head down so that he could
look at her wrist watch on the arm about his neck. "It's five o'clock
and you are to take off at nine. Charles, please don't crack up just
because of lack of sleep."
"Okay," he said regretfully, "okay."
She held him close. "It's been a nice evening, Charles. So kiss me
good-bye, and remember that it won't be long until I see you on Terra."
"It gets dark on Terra," he told her. He tightened his arms and she
pressed against him.
Against his lips she murmured, "I might not be afraid of the dark,
Charles."
The promise of her last embrace stayed with him. There were only three
hours of sleep between the time he left her and the time of awakening
for the take-off, but dreams of Carolyn filled them all. They were
pleasant dreams and they were unpleasant dreams; he saw Carolyn coming
to him with her past renounced, he saw her coming to him as a secret
agent who was in the hellish business for the same reason he was. And
he dreamed of her waving him a good-bye with her dark eyes filled
with tears as she was taken off to the Titan Penal Colony. He even
entertained notion of joining her, justifying himself by thinking that
people who fall in love with love lotus addiction are the weaklings of
the human race and could be eradicated to the advantage of the general
level. This he recognized as sophistry.
But, be it as it may, Carolyn was a pleasant, attractive companion,
and if her presence could only be known for a very short time, it was
none the less pleasant. It was a rough game they were playing and many
people were bound to get hurt. More people--innocent people--would
get hurt if he called it off. So by the time Farradyne and his dreams
came to the conclusion that he could afford to take what pleasure out
of life this situation offered for the moment and let Tomorrow exact
its tribute, it was time to get out of bed and start the pre-flight
check-off.
He had work to do. Schoolmarms to haul to Pluto and some refined
thorium ore to bring to Terra. He would make no signal this trip, he
was still far from being on the inside. Maybe the next. Or the one
after that, depending upon his progress. But in the meantime he would
be seeing Carolyn Niles on Terra.
Farradyne began his check-up, already anticipating the reunion which
was at least ten days away.
9
They came aboard a half hour later and Farradyne saw at once that
this trip would be free of trouble and danger. They were all mild and
wide-eyed curious. They obviously knew their place and how to go about
in life with a minimum of friction.
Their leader was a Professor Martin, an agile gentleman of about sixty
years who led them up the ramp and then stood there introducing each
and every one of them to Farradyne as they came in. They became a sea
of faces and a sound of disconnected names except for a few of the more
vivid ones. Miss Otis, who giggled like a schoolgirl but hadn't been of
schoolgirl age for at least thirty years; a Mr. Hughes, dark of skin
and smiling, who tried to convey the impression that he knew his way
around in space; a very prim dame named Miss Higginbotham who probably
had every kid in her class scared of her; a Mrs. Logan who was far too
beautiful to be part of Farradyne's narrow pattern for schoolteachers.
Miss Tilden seemed to know something about spacing, and her friend,
who was old enough to be Miss Tilden's mother, Miss Carewe, knew more
about spacing than Miss Tilden. And a Mr. Forbes who seemed completely
impressed by everything he laid eyes on.
And so they came, a prim and strait-laced lot, the like of which
Farradyne had not seen in a long, long time.
Certainly nothing of the hellflower flavor among this group. It made
Farradyne feel easier, and after a bit he began to smile at their
innocence and their wholehearted interest. He came to understand
that this trip was to be a bit different for them, or it could be if
he cared to make it so. It was obvious that their previous hops had
been made under pilots who treated them with the usual aloofness that
spacemen hold for their passengers. Farradyne felt more sympathetic
about them; he wanted to help, wanted to show them what could be seen.
Part of this desire to help them have a good time was born in the idea
that someday Farradyne would probably be looking for some character
witnesses and if he treated these schoolteachers with cordial interest
and a willingness to explain and demonstrate his spacecraft, they
would be inclined to accept him as a man of understanding, honesty and
ability.
They took off after Farradyne delivered a very short talk on the rigors
of take-off maneuvering and the necessity of staying strapped down
whenever the spacer was about to cut didoes.
It was even less of a strain than Farradyne anticipated. They helped.
Miss Carewe was a home economics teacher and she took care of the
galley in a highly efficient manner. Mr. Forbes taught manual training
or something of the sort; he requisitioned an oilcan and removed the
squeaks from a couple of doors and took care of some of the minor
details that Farradyne was inclined to ignore because he had other
things on his mind. Someone, Farradyne never found out who, made beds
and policed the ship, cleaning the salon and passengers' quarters
until the rooms and hallways shone. Whoever it was did not recognize
the faint stains of blood apparently, because there were no questions
asked about the evidence of Mike Cahill's death.
Miss Tilden spent quite a bit of time making a small oil painting for
the space above the bar which she said looked vacant. The degree of
their tolerance was high, too. None of them cared for drinking, but
they approved of Farradyne and his White Star Trail.
In return, Farradyne took them into the control room and showed them
how the ship was run. Professor Hughes toyed with the computer by the
hour because he was a mathematics teacher, and Miss Tilden listened to
Farradyne by the hour as he recounted some of his adventures in space
because she was a teacher of modern history.
The beautiful Mrs. Logan taught science, so Farradyne took her below to
explain the atomic pile and how it worked.
With a pre-recorded tape from the course computer running through the
autopilot, Farradyne pointed out the motion on the control rods that
regulated the activity of the pile. Above the pile, he explained, was
a huge tank of water that was used as a reaction-mass. Water was fed
through the pile and its energy was raised to some tremendous degree,
then hurled out through the throat of the reaction motor.
Mrs. Logan then pointed to the series of little ports in the hull.
Farradyne explained, "Now and then it is necessary to replace the
control rods because they become transmuted into metals that have too
little absorption factor. To get rid of them on a spaceport would mean
the trouble of disposing of quite a bit of metal that is dangerously
radioactive. So we take the convenient method of tossing them out in
space where they can't harm anything."
"But where do they land?" she asked. "Isn't that dangerous?"
"Not at all. We use discretion. Look. In a few hours we will be
halfway to Pluto. Our velocity will be tremendous because we have been
accelerating all the way from Mercury. To land on Pluto we'll have to
make a turn-over at halfway and start decelerating. If I wanted to
replace control rods, I'd do it just before turn-over. The velocity of
the ship and the rods would be a good many times the escape velocity
of the entire solar system, so the rods would continue on and on, and
actually they'd pass out of the solar system beyond Pluto in a matter
of hours. Long before we got there."
"But supposing one did land on Terra, for instance?"
"It would make an interesting looking meteorite; it would melt in
mid-air. Then the total radioactivity would spread thin and do no
damage."
She was satisfied, and Farradyne led her back to the salon.
For the first time in years Farradyne began to feel at ease with the
universe. His mind, previously busy with his main problem, found time
to consider other things. And, like the rest of the spaceman breed,
Farradyne was something of a gadgeteer.
Spacing, in a sense, was very much like the manning of a sailing ship
of the nineteenth century. When something needed attention, in space
it was during maneuver for landing, take-off, or turn-over; on sea
it was coming about on a tack or setting sail, a full-time attention
was necessary. Between periods of activity, the spaceman sat on his
duff and waited for one of the silent twinkles to detach itself from
the stellar curtain above his observation dome and become a planet or
destination.
Some spacemen reverted to the point where they built spacecraft in old
bottles, others spent their time in tinkering.
Farradyne had always been one of the latter. And so as his mind felt at
ease, he began to tinker with the gear down in the repair shop. It was
a small room below the passenger section hardly large enough to hold
the machinery it contained. But Farradyne, like many of his fellows,
enjoyed making things, repairing things and generally experimenting.
Every spaceman hoped to come up with something that would make him rich
and famous, and some of them had done it. They had plenty of time, a
good grasp of things scientific as well as manual dexterity.
So Farradyne tinkered happily.
The shop was silent; the usual milling around of his passengers stopped
as they went to bed. Now there was only the occasional groan of
metal-upon-metal or the faint whine as a motor somewhere wound up to
do some automatic job. The click and clack of relays were just barely
audible; they would have been unheard by someone whose training had
been other than that of a spaceman. In the background was the muted
sibilant of the reaction motor, a sound like the shush of a distant
seashore. Farradyne heard these sounds unconsciously. They were as
pleasant to the ears of the spaceman as the sounds of a sailing ship
were to the old-time seaman.
But another faint sound came to disturb him, rising up into the level
of audibility very slowly.
It was a ringing in Farradyne's ears.
Ringing in the ears can come from too much alcohol, or a shot of dope,
or a slap on the side of the head. Or a change in air-pressure.
Farradyne had not been drinking nor taking the needle, but he had spent
many years in an environment where the supply of air was important.
He had become oversensitive to it. He sniffed automatically, the
gesture of a man who has reason to suspect the quality of the air he is
breathing. He shook his head. He did feel a bit light-headed. There was
the bare trifle of a dull pain above his eyes and a sting in his nose.
He sneezed and brought forth a dribble of blood.
Farradyne raced aloft; he could settle nothing standing in the
workshop. The bulkhead door between the hold of the Lancaster and the
passengers' section was closed. He pushed it and it opened with slight
difficulty to let a blow of air hit his face. He grunted in puzzlement.
Any change in air-pressure in any part of the ship should have started
a clangor of the puncture alarm, a racket loud enough to waken the dead.
He went through the stateroom corridor and listened carefully as he
went. Some rooms were silent and others sounded like the song of the
cross-cut saw working its way through a burl of maple. There were
gradations of snores between these extremes. Nothing that a suspicious
man could put his finger on. He did not pause in the salon, which was
silent and darkened, but not completely black. There was nothing out of
the way here.
In fact the only thing that was out of line was the queer fact that the
ship was silent when the alarm should have been sounding. He went up to
the control room.
Lamps told him the story in a series of quick appraisals, because of
some long-forgotten genius that had insisted that whenever possible,
warning devices should not be fused, should not be turn-offable and
should not be destructible. The Lancaster was a fine ship, designed
well, but a frontal attack on a panel with metal cutting tools made
the exception to the "whenever possible" part of the design of warning
signals.
The ship's bell-system had been opened like a tin can.
But the pilot lamp system was strung here and there behind the panels
and it would have taken a major overhaul to ruin it; the saboteur would
have spent all night opening cans instead of doing his dirty work.
Farradyne should have been asleep, then he would not have noticed the
blaze of lamps.
They told him the tale in a glance. The low-pressure portion of the
ship was down in the pile-bay, and the reason was that one of the
scuttle-doors was open. The pressure in the reaction-mass bay was low,
and now that Farradyne had come aloft, the pressure in the upper
levels was as low as the reaction-mass bay. As he watched, another one
of the scuttle ports swung open and its warning lamp flared into life.
Farradyne went into action. He ripped open the cabinet that held his
space-suit and clawed the thing from its hook. He started down the
stairway on a stumbling run, getting into the suit by leaps, jumps and
pauses. He realized that he could have moved faster if he stopped to do
one thing at a time, but his frantic mind would not permit him to make
haste slowly. So he stumbled and he fell against the walls, and the
tanks of his back rapped against his shoulder-blades, and the helmet
cut a divot out of the bridge of his nose. Luckily it did not make him
bleed, but it hurt like the very devil.
He zipped up the airtight clotures by the time he reached the little
workshop and he ducked in there to get a weapon of some sort. He
reached past the hammer, ignored the obvious chisel because it was not
heavy enough, even though it was sharp, and picked up a fourteen-inch
half-round wood-working rasp. He hefted it in his gloved hand and it
felt about right.
The air-break on the topside was open, and Farradyne closed it. He
fretted at the seconds necessary to equalize the pressure, and to
check the workings of the space-suit. He also located the cause of the
air-leakage; normally the air-break doors were airtight. A sliver of
wool or cotton string lay in the rubber gasket and produced a channel
for the escape of some of the air into the pile-bay. Farradyne stopped,
his attention attracted by this trifle of evidence. It was neither wool
nor cotton, but a match torn from a giveaway book and used to light a
cigarette for Mrs. Logan a good many hours before.
He threw it aside and went in, his attention once more on the important
business before him. He ran along the curved corridor. And there, a
figure in a space-suit was quietly levering one of the control rods out
of its slot and preparing to hurl it into the void.
Farradyne understood the whole act in that one glance; it was the sort
of thing that he would do if sabotage were his intention. The single
scuttle-port had been opened first by hand. Then the saboteur had
scuttled the stock of spare control rods, and since the Lancaster was
reasonably new, there had been quite a batch of them. Furthermore they
were long, unwieldy, heavy things that took time to handle. Naturally
this was the first act, because the next act would cause the ship's
acceleration to rise. The rise in acceleration would make the rods too
heavy to carry and would also cause investigation as soon as people
became aware of the increasing pressure.
Then the working rods would be hurled out, leaving the ship heading
toward some anonymous star at about eight gravities of acceleration.
The passengers and crew would be helpless--and dead long before they
got within any appreciable fraction of a distance to any planet.
Maybe two or three of the rods had been scuttled already. The rest,
functioning on the automatic, would have been shoved in farther
to compensate; Farradyne could feel no change in the acceleration
pressure. But once the working rods were all the way home, the removal
of the next would cause the ship to take off, literally with the
throttle tied down. Farradyne was willing to bet the rest of his life
that the safety-valve that furnished the water-mass to the pile was
either welded open or damaged in such a way that the supply could not
be stopped.
Then--and Farradyne had to admire the vandal's precautions--he would
make his way to the escape hatch and let the helpless passengers go
on ... and on....