"I know that well enough. What ship?"
"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that
that's the liner _Alborak_, out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission
for Mars."
Mury shook his head regretfully. "That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you
suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that
drive."
"I don't know what you're talking about," said Arliess. But his voice
was raw and unsteady.
"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for
us--will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!"
* * * * *
Arliess turned his head at last, slowly, as if the movement were
painful. His dispassionate goggles regarded the telltale needles that
had come quiveringly alive on the radiodetector box between them,
bluntly giving the lie to the automatic chart. "You know more than I
supposed," he said, and laughed unpleasantly. "But it won't do you
any good now. We're to be inspected in space--a surprise of which we
weren't informed until a few minutes before you came sneaking into the
ship."
"That's too bad," said Mury. He sounded as if he thought it was too
bad. As he spoke, he leaned sidewise, to the left this time, and closed
a switch, lighting a darkened panel on the board; his long forefinger
selected and pressed two studs. "_Too bad_," he repeated, and picked
up the flame pistol. Young Arliess exploded in another furious surge
against the binding clamps, clawing with clumsy gloved hands for the
release; then he quieted, and stared at the small black bore trained on
him.
He was trembling a little with fury. "You damned louse. Why don't you
make it a clean job by giving it to me, now?"
"I'll need you, now if not before," said the Panclast softly. "Your
friends would have stayed alive if that warship hadn't showed its nose.
You must understand that. I was forced into counter-measures."
Then Ryd, squirming sidewise in his seat, understood. Those studs
had controlled the outer airlocks. And now the men who had been in
those locks, the young guardsman and the _Shahrazad's_ pilot and
engineer--were no longer there.
"You--need _me_?" Arliess was briefly incredulous. "Oh--I get it. There
have to be three in the crew." Then he sprang like a tiger.
But the moment in which he had thumbed the release and wrenched free of
the padded clamps had been too long. Ryd flinched away--but there was
no roar, no flame stabbed blue. They grappled an instant, swaying on
the tilted floor--and then the pistol, reversed in Mury's hand, chopped
down on Arliess' temple, a glancing blow, but fiercely struck.
The astrogator let go, staggering; and the gun swung up again and
felled him.
Mury let the pistol drop into his own crew-seat, and, lugging Arliess
under the arms, got him into his seat with a grunting heave. He said
breathlessly, regretfully, "It was the only way...." The mask came off
at once; the shock-pale face that emerged was even more youthful than
Ryd had thought. The red trickle across the forehead was startling
against its pallor.
Ryd sat staring--unshaken by the thought of yet another murder, but
with a knot of fear tightening in his stomach as he thought of the
warship somewhere out of their vision, questing nearer with every
racing second--while the motors throbbed, the airvalves sang softly,
and the gyroscopes whined somewhere.
And Mury's long, brown fingers explored rapidly through the stunned
man's blond thatch; he nodded with satisfaction, and then with sure
motions secured Arliess in his place. Ryd, on peremptory gesture, did
for himself the same, with fingers that were oddly numb and jointless.
Then Mury was back in the pilot's chair. For a moment he sat as if
poised, staring into starry space with knitted brows; then he reached
far over, in front of the sagging astrogator, and with a decisive flick
of the wrist switched on the ship's magnets to their full power.
"What's that for?" stammered Ryd, bewildered and more than a little
scared. "Why--"
Mury made no answer. Instead, he had fixed once more on the detector
box, watching it intently as the minutes crawled. The movements by
which he secured his own anticlamps were automatonlike.
* * * * *
Twice the needles jumped briefly. Mury did not stir. But when they
began to swing slowly over the scale, his hands leaped at the control
studs; in the next instant _Shahrazad_ leaped and shivered, and a
powerful acceleration fought to lever them out of their seats. The
noise was deafening; one thin layer of sound proofing was between the
cabin and the one-inch tubes of the overdrive.
Ryd's eyes rolled up in his head and grew filmed; the control room
for him a blur of dizzy flame. He almost blacked out again; he seemed
to see the face of the white Moon, leprously diseased, float like a
runaway balloon past the curved nose window and disappear below his
topsy-turvy field of vision; but he couldn't be sure it wasn't his own
head spiraling away from its moorings. And then it was over and the
ship bored steadily along her new tangent through space.
But now she vibrated yet more deeply to the great thrust of the
afterdrive, and the light blurred more and grew dim. _Shahrazad_ raced
into darkness, and the needles that told of a magnetic mass somewhere
not far ahead, cutting swiftly through her far-flung field, swung
steadily over.
Then _bang!_ in one unreverberating explosion, and the ship bucked
hard and the blurred lights came down in a rain of fiery pinwheels.
The motor died with a snap. Silence rang and Ryd's stomach boiled with
weightlessness; slowly his eyes could see again. _Shahrazad_ held
straight on her course toward some unknown target star; the gyroscopes
still whined.
"Seven thousand feet a second," came Mury's voice from nowhere. "That's
the speed at which we overran the meteoroid. It wouldn't have been nice
if it had come through here; the armor before the control panel would
have stopped it if it didn't strike higher...."
Ryd fell to shuddering. He mouthed with difficulty, "My God, you don't
hit meteors on purpose!"
"You damned well do," said Mury crisply, "if you have to." His manner
brought a sort of frightened admiration into Ryd's dark, unsteady eyes.
Mury added, with apparent lack of connectedness, "Astrogators' heads
don't just crack themselves on switch handles." The underdrive, roaring
alive as he pressed the bottom stud on the control circle, caught Ryd's
breath against his diaphragm and left him none to answer with if he had
wished to.
She leveled out on course with short jerky bursts from the various
banks of tubes. Mury was doing all his own course-plotting now, and his
teeth were sunk in his lower lip as he frowned at the charts and at the
rows of figures that spun into view on the calculator. He was still
correcting feverishly when the stars dimmed and space throbbed like a
tympanum.
A voice clanged through the strobophones. "_Shahrazad! Algol_ calling
_Shahrazad_! Cut your drive to one vertical gravity. We will parallel
and send a boat across. That is all."
Mury's right hand moved slightly on the sloping ledge and closed the
throttle. The forward thrust again collapsed into weightlessness, and
the _Shahrazad_ seemed to hang motionless for a moment before the
underdrive took up the load. And meanwhile the meters told their tale
of the swift onrush of the great battle cruiser in whose forward sphere
of exhaust gases they already flew. Across the starry sky ahead crept a
vast belt of hazy light like a zodiacal glow.
"The _Algol_," said Mury musingly. "A stellar dreadnaught. They aren't
sparing precautions...." Abruptly he dropped his right hand from
the dashboard, grasped a sheathed wire that curved away beneath the
radiodetector box, and detached it with a brisk jerk. The needles
dropped instantly to a uniform zero. The chain of causation was
complete.
* * * * *
So there was no warning of the approach of the spaceboat. It bumped
alongside and grappled to the towship's starboard airlock a couple of
minutes later; Ryd stiffened, drew a long breath, and held it as if
he would hold it forever. Mury, hand steady, depressed the studs that
opened the lock ... for the second time since the ship had lifted.
The man who came aboard, from the warship hanging somewhere out there
among the stars, was the very avatar of the Fleet in that second decade
of the ninth century. Incarnate in space-blue and silver stars, with
smoothly smiling face, shaven with a more than military meticulousness,
that radiated power and the confidence of power. Power flanked and
overshadowed his medium-tall figure, in the shape of two armed robot
marines. The eyes of the Panclast masked their smoldering lights as
they met those beneath the winged officer's cap; but the latter,
aristocratically bored, noticed little or nothing.
"You appear to have had an accident, Captain Yaher," said the
lieutenant with unblinking calm. "We noticed from a distance that your
undershell was badly scored as if by collision with some solid body.
Unfortunately ... and remarkably. Is any of your equipment out of
order?"
Mury shrugged without effort, jerked a gloved thumb at the dangling
wire. The lieutenant raised narrow eyebrows.
"Damaged before you lifted?"
"We were inspected thoroughly on the runway. It must have happened
during initial acceleration."
The other frowned, fine vertical lines creasing his smooth forehead.
"Odd."
Mury smiled a thin, crooked smile. "You military men don't know what
can happen aboard a run-down towship. Anything, literally. The merchant
fleet isn't at its best since the embargo."
"I know," said the officer curtly. "Even in the Fleet--" He stopped
short, and his eyes, shifting, found a new subject ready-made in the
slumped figure of Arliess. "Was this man seriously injured, Captain?"
"Just stunned, I think. He's an astrogator, and astrogators are tough."
* * * * *
The officer laughed perfunctorily. He moved forward and made a brief,
distasteful examination of Arliess' tousled head, then stepped back,
rubbing his fingers together.
"There's no fracture. But if he's concussed, he's in no shape to stand
heavy acceleration."
Mury said smoothly, "We're not going to be using any. We're up to speed
and our orders are to handle that power cylinder like a soap bubble."
The young lieutenant stroked his smooth chin, standing with feet
braced against the tilt of the floor beneath which the rockets rumbled
steadily, holding him erect as if under Earth gravity. The two men at
the control board watched him with stares equally unblinkingly but far
different in sentiment. Mury's was inscrutable; it might have veiled
anything. Ryd's was all sick fear and certainty that something would
betray them before the nerve-racking scene was played out.
"I think," said the blue-clad officer, "that if it won't incommode you
too much to hold this acceleration a bit longer--"
"Not at all," said Mury, and Ryd silently but no less hysterically
cursed his facile confidence.
"... I'll cross over again and send a ship's doctor to attend to your
astrogator. A shot in the arm should bring him around."
Mury nodded placidly. The officer turned casually, spoke to the two
blue-chromiumed robots, who faced about smartly; then, snapping his
fingers, their master wheeled once more. "Just a moment. I almost
forgot this.... Strangely enough, one of my men stumbled over it in
your starboard lock." He fumbled inside his tunic a moment, displayed
in his hand a heavy .20 service flame gun.
A flat and terrible silence lay in the control room. Then Mury broke
it, as it had to be broken quickly:
"We weren't supposed to have any arms aboard. I can't say where that
came from."
"Can't say, eh?" said the other musingly. Ryd, cold sweat on his
forehead, stared in horrid fascination, first at the man and then at
the fighter robots. He tensed himself to fight back, now, at the last,
like a cornered rat--he hardly knew how or why.
With a shrug, the officer dropped the weapon into his pocket. "Ah,
well--so many of these little mysteries remain just that. We mustn't
hold up Terra's power supply." He turned once more to go. "I'll have
the medico here in a flicker."
The trio passed out through the whispering locks, out to the waiting
spaceboat. Ryd found that his mouth was parchment-dry; he stared at the
apparently unshaken Mury, and drew a shuddering breath.
"I guess," he said jerkily, "we fooled them."