"I'll be a lot more fun."
"No doubt. And nothing but fun. What do you expect to do when the fun
becomes hollow?"
"It hasn't yet."
"It will some day. You can't go on being a slightly irresponsible
loafer all your life."
"Who is?"
"You are."
"Look," said Jock Norton angrily, "I'm still running this lifeship the
way it's supposed to be run."
"At a hundred an hour."
"Maybe so. But let me ask you, which one of us would you rather have
around right now? The trained spaceman or the captain of industry?"
"That's a fool question," said Alice. "Loaded to the gills. You know
the answer to that. But once we get back home, then?"
"You're not hoping to marry that dried-up little--"
Alice laughed, almost hysterically.
"This will kill you, but until you assumed that I was sleeping with
him as well as taking his dictation, I hadn't really looked upon
Charles Andrews as anything but an employer. Sure, he's male. So is
my Uncle Ned, my brother, and my nephew. Not to mention my father and
grandfather. But Mr. Andrews is not my idea of a lover."
Jock Norton nodded soberly. He took a deep breath of satisfaction.
Alice underwent a swift revision in his mental classification of her.
She changed from a luxury-bought mistress to be seduced by the offer of
real fun and passion into a woman with no emotional connections, to be
seduced for the fun of it. Both, in Norton's mind, were fair game.
"What's wrong with me?" he asked.
"Nothing much, Jock Norton, except that you're essentially lazy."
"Lazy?"
"Lazy," she repeated. "Want it both barrels, or will you take it with
sugar?"
"Hard. What's wrong with me?"
"You're educated. You know a lot. You've explained things that neither
Mr. Andrews nor I had ever dreamed of, let alone understood. You know
your way around spacecraft, know a lot of the basic sciences. Not that
you'd ever be a scientist, but you're bright enough to grasp the idea
and make it work. But what do you do about it? You jockey a spacer,
instead of digging in and making it pay off. You look for the easy way
out instead of working for it." Alice looked up at him sharply to see
how he was taking it, and then she added, "You have the only brain
present that has the mental right to stand up and direct operations.
Instead, you argue and backstep."
Harshly he said, "What would you have me do--take a swing at Napoleon
when he sits on those short hind legs of his and objects or demands?"
"I don't know. I'm not a spaceman, responsible for the lives of three
people--at a hundred clams an hour."
"Some day I'm going to shove those hundred fish down your throat."
"Do. And I'll spit 'em back at you!"
Norton roughly took her shoulders in his hands. He twisted her to face
him, clamped down on her soft shoulders until she turned her face up
to complain with welling eyes. He put his lips on hers and tried to
force some warmth into them. She submitted calmly, and when he found no
response and opened his eyes, she was staring at him vacantly.
Abruptly he let her go. She relaxed in the seat.
"I'm not afraid to work," he said in a hollow voice.
"Prove it," she replied flatly.
He got up, left her there, and went below.
V
Wilson sat in the Information Center and eyed the search grid glumly.
It stretched stereoscopically out in the room, a lot of its vacant
network of gleaming white lines frosted over with white shading, to
mark where the search had covered.
There were a lot of untouched spaces--a horde, a myriad. On the side
wall was a chart, showing that nine squadrons of twenty-five spacecraft
each were patrolling back and forth through the uncharted wastes,
seeking the space-wrecked lifeships.
The maddening part was the hourly report from both lifeships. It was
like someone hiding in the dark and calling for aid, invisible and
alone. And not really calling for aid, but only making whimpering
noises. For the signaling equipment on the lifeships was not equipped
with the complicated infrawave phone, but only with the simple
signal-emitter, coded to transmit the identification call of the unit.
On the hour they came in, calling three times, "Lifeship Seventy-nine,
Seventy-nine, Number Three." Number Two had not been heard from.
Presumably it was not in use, or hadn't made the grade.
Wilson chewed his fingernails and fretted. Was Alice on Number One or
Number Three, or was she on Number Two and it had foundered?
If she were still alive, what kind of fellow survivors were with her?
He hoped she was with a group. If she had blown out in a lifeship with
only one other--well, Ted Wilson did not like the idea. Of course, it
was more customary than not for a young woman to love lightly before
she mated permanently. There was a lot less chance of wading into
matrimony wide-eyed and ignorant of what it was all about.
But Wilson, if willing to face such transient loving at all, would
have preferred that Alice have her chance to pick and choose, rather
than have the matter thrust upon her in the middle of a threatening
situation. The passion that comes with the shadow of death is only the
instinct of racial preservation, and it mates men and women unsuited to
one another during subsequent peace and quiet.
Above all, he did not want Alice to emerge from this moment of personal
danger morally bound to some unsuitable mate because of a child
conceived under the shadow of the sword!
Hourly, after the coded signals came in, Ted Wilson took the microphone
himself and called out into space in the infrawave. He called messages
of hope, and explained how many spacecraft were scouring the deep black
void. He could only pray that he would be heard, that his voice would
give Alice some firm foundation for hope.
He could not be sure the passengers from the wrecked spaceship even had
their receivers turned on, because infrawave receivers drink up a lot
of power and lifeships are not equipped with any vast reserve. There
just was not the room in a lifeship for anything more than the bare
necessities of living.
The search grid was a truncated cone, and the whitened areas of
finished search had finally filled the smaller end of the cone. There
was the flared skirt of the cone yet to be combed, and this provided
more volume than the cylinder taken out of the middle. It also provided
a shorter search path as the searching spacecraft built out the volume,
ring after ring around the first pass along the line of flight.
Far, far to one side a detector registered, and brought every man
in the fleet to the alert. Then they relaxed unhappily again as the
scooter returned with another report of a small gas cloud. Wilson
thought glumly that they had discovered enough space meteors, gas
clouds, and unawakened comets to make up a small sun.
Then his attention was taken from his own personal troubles by the
arrival of another squadron from Centauri. He found himself busy
readjusting the search pattern to accommodate this new contingent.
He eyed the pattern in the stereo and hoped it was good enough.
* * * * *
There was the basic aggregate of nine full squadrons spread out flat in
a space lattice that ran back and forth from narrow end to wide end of
the cone of probability. There was one full squadron of roving ships
that went aimlessly back and forth across the pattern, just to cope
with the happenstance factor.
One squadron was parked at either end of the search grid as space
markers, with a computer ship at either end to maintain a constant
check on their space coordinates. The big search pattern shuttled from
one end to the other, and if they came back to miss the marker ships,
they retraced their path so that no space went uncombed.
The infrawave chattered and Space Admiral Stone was calling for
Commodore Theodore Wilson.
"How're you coming?"
Wilson replied, "We're still at it, Admiral. So far we haven't seen
her."
"Don't forget, Wilson, there's more lost out there than the woman you
want."
Ted wanted to snap back angrily, but all he said was, "You don't mind
if I take this search personally, do you, Admiral Stone? I'm not
overlooking any bets, but I do admit that Miss Hemingway is a bit more
important to me than any of the rest."
"No, I suppose no one could blame you for that. Just keep it up,
Wilson."
"Sure," Ted said wearily. "After all, this is a black and white job I'm
on. Either we'll be successful--or we won't."
"Luck."
"Spaceman's luck, Admiral."
Wilson went back to his brooding....
Charles Andrews came back into the salon with a brisk air. He
flexed his arms, took a deep breath, and mopped his forehead with a
handkerchief. He sat down beside Alice and smiled at her warmly.
"That thing is a wonder worker," he said, breathing deeply. "Nothing
like exercise to make a man feel fine and fit."
Alice looked up at him with some amusement. "Mr. Andrews, tell me. Are
you the kind of man who opens the window on a winter morning about six
o'clock, and takes deep lungsful of icy air?"
"Not quite that bad, my dear. Not quite. But brisk living does keep a
man sharp and hard. I daresay I acquitted myself well on that pedal
generator despite my fifty years."
"No doubt."
Andrews chuckled. "I'll do better than our young pilot friend. The man
is big, and should be muscular, but he is soft from lack of exercise.
Yet he'll attempt to stay there longer than I did, I guess."
"No doubt."
He eyed her sharply, not missing her repetitious dry reply.
"Which, incidentally," he said, "gives me my first chance to speak with
you alone since we took off from Earth."
"That's so. But--"
"Miss Hemingway, you are an exceedingly brisk young woman, attractive
and intelligent. May I ask if you have ever taken a lover?"
"Why, no."
"Never considered it?"
She smiled thinly. "Naturally. All women think about it. Most do.
I--er--"
Alice let her voice trail away uncertainly. The direct, frontal attack
had put her off-balance, but she realized that this was Andrews' direct
way.
He had smiled at her uncertainty, and said swiftly, "Then may I be the
first--" when he noted the fading amusement in her face and glibly ad
libbed--"to congratulate you on your choice of young men? The space
commodore to whom you bade farewell in Chicago was an up and coming
man, I'd assume."
"I rather imagine he's out here somewhere in the search group," she
said.
"He may even be directing it," Andrews said carefully.
One thing he knew well--never run down a rival. It always brought on
a defensive attitude. Build the rival up, and the return might be
sympathetic. A clever course could be traveled between build-up and
tear-down.
* * * * *
Looking at Alice thoughtfully, Andrews got up and began to rummage
through a few lockers. Eventually he found a blanket and brought it to
her.
"I'm not too familiar with these life cans," he told her, with a
disarming smile. "I hope I remain in ignorance of them. But I found
what I was after. Now, Miss Hemingway, if you'll stretch out, I'll tuck
you in, and you can get some shut-eye."
"That I can use," she said honestly.
The blanket felt good. So did his hands, smoothing out the blanket, but
being carefully tender and proper. Andrews was a smooth operator of
many years' experience.
Eventually she slept.
Andrews found another cigar, and smoked it languidly, his eyes roaming
around the metal walls of the cabin. He was thinking that he disliked
Jack Norton immensely, although he knew that chances of survival were
better with Norton's boorish, interfering presence than without. He was
bored, he was angry, he was above all resentful of the time wasted in
this spacewreck business....
An orderly tapped Commodore Wilson on the shoulder. "Message from
Terra," he said.
Wilson groaned and reached for the telephone beside his bunk. "Wilson
here," he said. "Go ahead!"
"Admiral Stone. Wilson, a new ship is on the way. I want you to get
into this thing fully, so I'm briefing you now."
"New type of ship?"
"Well, not a new ship, but some new equipment. The Infrawave Section of
the Space Department Radiation Laboratory has some experimental gear
they want to try in actual service."
"Experimental gear?"
"Sheer experiment, Wilson. It's supposed to be an infrawave detecting
and ranging device. It's shown low grade response so far, and it may
be entirely useless to you. But Radiation feels that even something
incomplete and erratic may be better than going it blind."