Captain Jock Warren came out of his drunken
stupor to check the flight of his ship. What he
found aboard made him dash for blessed oblivion!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
May 1953
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_Two hours before the vessel plunged into minus point, building up
for a hundred and fifty parsec jump through hyperspace, Capt. Jock
Warren was so high on narcol he couldn't read his own manifest.
Not unusual on this milk run. After two hours inside of minus
point, his sober gray cells were functioning like blaster tubes--but
by then, it was too late. The skags had taken over control of the
ship._
--_Charlie Guhn's Log._
The Star Rover, a rusty freighter that shuttled between Rigel and the
home system, hovered above a transfer station some two million miles
out from Rigel's twelfth planet, awaiting port clearance. Every crewman
knew the skipper was oiled, but they knew the entropy barrier would
set him back a full day, shocking him into cold alertness.
Second Officer Charles Guhn knocked at the captain's cabin, entered and
saluted: "Sir, cargo's loaded and customs cleared."
The skipper, his face bagged like the Coal Sack, his blood-cracked
eyes possessing chilling steel-blue irises that could blister a
super-cargo's hide at fifty paces, was unable to focus on the papers
handed him. He growled, "Blast off, Mr. Guhn! Blast off!"
"Aye aye, sir," Guhn paused, then reported: "I thought you should
know, Captain. We just brought on some skags. Some archeology outfit's
shipping the things to Earth for further study."
"Blasted mummies. Next, we'll be hauling heathen idols." Captain
Warren glanced at his chronometer. "Shove-off time, is it? Go to the
bridge and tell Mr. Caldwell I said to make her grunt."
This was his final utterance. His massive head slumped back into narcol
stupor, his sotted brain dreaming of days when every space lane was a
new frontier and adventure lurked on all unknown planets.
On his way up to the bow, Charlie Guhn poked his head into the
wardroom, thinking it possible First Officer Mark Caldwell might be
getting off one last message to the brunette on Rigel. But no one was
in the lounge. Guhn followed the catwalk over the pulsing auxiliaries
and mounted the starboard companionway to the bridge. There, he found
the astrogator, pouring over a set of star charts.
"The old man says shove off," Guhn greeted him. "Got your DS done?"
Caldwell grinned, without looking up from his desk: "A DS is just
a formality the rule book says you've got to enter in the log.
Hyperspace's too slinky to obey normal laws. That's why we cut it in
fifty parsec slices--to see how far we've drifted."
"You brain boys and your double talk."
"Not at all. Normal Einstein space is curved. Hyperspace isn't. Very
simple."
"Simple like wombat chess, huh?"
"You can politely remove yourself to the deck," Caldwell replied. "I've
got to get our junk pile coasting through the midnight black. Any women
on board?"
"None your speed, Romeo ... unless you like skags." A split second
dodge through the hatchway eluded the waste basket hurled at him.
After his calculations looked satisfactory, Caldwell unhinged his
solar plane compass. Its needle pointed not to Earth, but to that vast
imaginary plane in the galaxy to which the home system was horizontal
and to which a line drawn through the sun and Polaris was nearly
perpendicular. Once a heading was determined, it was possible by
quadrangulation to arrive at an effective course.
The transparent stardome that enveloped the bridge admitted the light
of a thousand molten suns from this crowded corner of space. The
astrogator looked at the clusters and thought how glad he was to leave
the hot dry climate of Rigel's dusty barren worlds, not to mention
the primitive women. Now, Arcturus was an exciting run, he'd heard. A
spaceman's Paradise, with an exotic native culture and a nitrogen-major
atmosphere. Not like the damned helium envelope of the Rigellian
system, in which a man's voice rose to female pitch.