The _Ganymede's_ engines rose to full power and the pilot controls spun
over without a hand on them.
"Engine room! Engine room! Stop that nonsense down there!"
"We can't--they're frozen--the converter has gone into full without
us--"
"Sir, I can't budge this stick. It's locked somehow."
The lights went out. Men screamed.
"Get me a flashlight!" snapped Takahashi in the dark. "I'll take this
damned panel apart myself."
The beam etched his features against night. "Who goes?" he cried.
"It's I." Jansky appeared in the dim reflected glow. "Never mind,
Takahashi. Let the ship have her way."
"But ma'm, we could crash--"
"I've finally gotten Donovan to talk. He says we're in the grip of some
kind of powerbeam. They'll pull us to one of their space stations and
then maybe we can negotiate--or fight. Come on, we've got to quiet the
men."
The flashlight went out. Takahashi's laugh was shrill. "Better quiet me
first, Captain."
Her hand was on his arm, steadying, strengthening. "Don't fail me,
Tetsuo. You're the last one I've got. I just had to paralyze Scoresby."
"Thanks--thanks, chief. I'm all right now. Let's go."
They fumbled through blindness. The engines roared, full speed ahead
with a ghost on the bridge. Men were stumbling and cursing and
screaming in the dark. Someone switched on the battle-stations siren,
and its howl was the last voice of insanity.
Struggle in the dark, wrestling, paralyzing the berserk, calling on all
the iron will which had lifted humankind to the stars--slow restoration
of order, men creeping to general quarters, breathing heavily in the
guttering light of paper torches.
The engines cut off and the ship snapped into normal matter state.
Helena Jansky saw blood-red sunlight through the viewport. There was no
time to sound the alarm before the ship crashed.
* * * * *
"A hundred men. No more than a hundred men alive."
She wrapped her cloak tight about her against the wind and stood
looking across the camp. The streaming firelight touched her face
with red, limning it against the utter dark of the night heavens,
sheening faintly in the hair that blew wildly around her strong bitter
countenance. Beyond, other fires danced and flickered in the gloom, men
huddled around them while the cold seeped slowly to their bones. Here
and there an injured human moaned.
Across the ragged spine of bare black hills they could still see the
molten glow of the wreck. When it hit, the atomic converters had run
wild and begun devouring the hull. There had barely been time for the
survivors to drag themselves and some of the cripples free, and to put
the rocky barrier between them and the mounting radioactivity. During
the slow red sunset, they had gathered wood, hewing with knives at the
distorted scrub trees reaching above the shale and snow of the valley.
Now they sat waiting out the night.