In space, people can get lost for a looooong time! Then, mere physical rescue is not enough; there’s little point rescuing a mans body, if you kill his mind doing it!
Illustrated by Cartier
In space, people can get lost for a looooong time! Then, mere physical rescue is not enough; there’s little point rescuing a mans body, if you kill his mind doing it!
Illustrated by Cartier
Collins floated through the jet blackness with every sense alert. He heard the low hum of voices welling up out of the emptiness ahead of him and the oxygen in the still air tasted sweet to him as he drank it into his lungs. The cold smell of metal was all around him, hemming him in, and he shivered involuntarily in the darkness.
At precisely the right instant, he extended his hand forward, made contact with an invisible brace that felt rough and dead to his tingling fingers, and changed direction with a light, delicate shove. The new tunnel was almost as dark as the one he had left behind him, but he could see a faint luminous haze in the distance. His pulses quickened as tiny warmth currents touched his skin and he caught the smell of men in the abyss ahead of him.
It was good to be going toward men, Collins thought. It was a good feeling. He kept to the exact center of the shaft, as far away from the cold metal taste as he could get. A man knew loneliness in the eternal night, alone with his thoughts. A man knew fear—
He guided his body around another turn, and still another, and felt the sudden life shocks in front of him. He closed his eyes to narrow slits, letting them adjust. He could feel space and air on all sides, and the cold, unpleasant smell of metal receded into the distance. Warmth currents bathed his skin—and yet there was a coolness even here, an icy coolness of hostility that mottled the warmth tides like a cancerous disease—
Collins shook the feeling from his mind. Slowly, gradually, the chamber took shape around him, although he still could not look directly at the intolerable, flickering flame that hissed and sputtered atop the fire torch. Black shadows writhed in the gray halflight on the periphery of the fire-glow and white bodies floated all around him, waiting.
Collins took a deep breath. He could see again.
“Class will come to order,” he said into the silence.
The men—young men, all of them—hesitated and then moved into a circle around him. The circle was composed of three distinct layers, one even with Collins, one slightly above him, and another just below him. Each layer contained four men. Collins forced himself to look directly at the fire torch, even though the unaccustomed brightness lanced little needles of pain through his eyes and narrowed their pupils to tiny dots of black. It was not easy, but he kept his face expressionless.
Men were made to live in light.
“Before we start, do any of you have any questions about your work for today?” His voice was soft, patient. But it had a firm edge to it—sheathed now, but capable of cutting like a knife when the need arose.
The young men looked at each other, faintly hostile, uncertain.
“Speak up,” Collins said, smiling. “Asking questions is not a sign of ignorance, you know. It is only the stupid who never ask questions.”
One of the men cleared his throat. It was Lanson, one of the most intelligent of them. Collins nodded encouragement.
“We don’t understand our problem for today, sir,” he said, faintly accenting the sir to give it a slightly contemptuous ring. “We’ve talked it over among ourselves, but we can’t seem to get it.”
“Be specific, Lanson. Exactly what is it that you do not understand?”
Lanson shifted nervously in the still air. “It’s about this problem of falling bodies, sir,” he said. His voice was genuinely puzzled now; Lanson was interested almost in spite of himself. “You stated that, because of gravity, two bodies will fall through a vacuum at precisely the same rate of speed, regardless of weight—that is, if we get your meaning correctly, a heavy body will fall with the same speed as a light body, or, to use your example, a piece of paper and a chunk of metal will hit the floor together.”
“O.K. so far, Lanson,” Collins braced himself, knowing what was coming. It was difficult.
“Well, sir,” Lanson continued, choosing his words with care, “we sort of see what you’re driving at in the concepts heavy and light—but what is falling? What pushes the piece of paper and the chunk of metal down? Why don’t they float like we do?”
“They do float,” a voice whispered loudly. “Everyone knows that.”
Collins looked at the white bodies around him, pale and ghostly in the dancing fireglow. Beyond them, the great darkness hovered like a gigantic beast, shadow tentacles writhing, waiting to envelop them, pull them all into the black vault of the abyss. Collins shivered again as an icy chill crawled down his spine. They couldn’t go on like this forever, he knew. They weren’t trying the way they used to—it was very hard, and they weren’t trying. Every day, every hour, they lost ground. And below them, dancing around their great fires—
He had to make them see.
“You are right, in a sense,” he told them carefully. “I’m glad to see that you’re using your minds and not just accepting what I say without thought of your own. They do float, as you’ve seen—here. The point is that conditions here are unnatural, not normal, although they are the only ones we’ve ever known. I’ve tried to tell you about gravity—”
“Him and his gravity,” someone snickered.
“We’re not approaching the situation with the proper gravity,” someone else whispered. Several of the young men laughed aloud at the pun, staring at Collins with ill-concealed contempt.
“Yes, but what is gravity?” Lanson persisted. “You say that in science we experiment, we measure, we deal with facts rather than wishful thinking. Very well—show us some gravity then.”
Collins breathed deeply, feeling the doubt all around him. “I can show you no gravity that you can recognize as such,” he said slowly. “Nor can I show you the atoms of which matter is composed, much less the subatomic constituents of the atoms themselves. You must be patient, you must consider the situation in which we find ourselves. Even in science, gentlemen, there are times when we must go along on faith, do the best we can—”
“We’re not trying to dispute your word, sir,” said Lanson, who was doing precisely that. “But it seems to us that even if all this stuff were true somewhere, sometime, we still have to live here and not there. Since we have to live here, why not confine ourselves to this world, to what can be of practical use to us, and just forget about—”
“No!” Collins said sharply, the anger rising in him like a hot flood. “That will do, Lanson, unless you wish to be reported. We must not forget, or we are lost, we are animals, we are no longer men. One day you will see and understand. Until then—”
He stopped, suddenly. The men shifted uncertainly in the air. Collins tensed, every sense alive, vibrant, questing. He probed the deep shadows. His skin tingled. Something was out there—those shadows were no longer empty. Something—
“The other men,” he hissed. “Kill that torch.”
The flame sputtered and died. The men drifted backward, united now against a common danger, fighting to adjust their eyes again to the absence of light. Collins felt his heart hammering in his throat and cold sweat in the palms of his hands. He drew his knife, waiting.
In the dead silence, panic stalked on padded feet through the chamber of darkness.
Ship’s Officer Mark Langston tossed off a few choice expletives and permitted them to explode harmlessly within the confines of his book-lined office. He flipped open a desk drawer, removed a well-worn flask, and treated himself to a short snifter of Scotch. Then he replaced the flask, banished the contemptuous expression from his face, and glued a patient smile to his mouth.
“Come in,” he said, bracing himself.
The office door opened with a calm precision that hinted at a hurricane just below the horizon. A tall, angular, hatchet-faced woman marched inexorably into the room with her teen-age daughter following meekly in her wake.
“You are the Ship’s Officer?” inquired the woman in a voice like a file sawing on iron.
“Right the first time,” said Mark Langston.
“You’re not the same man I spoke to last time,” the woman stated suspiciously. “Where is Mr. Raleigh?”
“He jumped overboard,” Mark Langston wanted to say.
“Mr. Raleigh is not on duty at the moment,” Mark Langston said. “My name is Langston—may I be of service?”
“Well, I should certainly hope so. I am Mrs. Simmons, and this is my daughter Laura.”
Mark Langston nodded and glanced at the note that Raleigh had left on his desk. As a small token of my esteem, I have willed you Mrs. Simmons, the note read. May God have mercy on your soul.
“What seems to be the trouble, Mrs. Simmons?”
Mrs. Simmons sighed deeply, giving an excellent imitation of a death rattle. “It’s this excruciating artificial gravity, Mr. Langston,” she said. “I simply cannot stand it another moment. I’m having terrible pains around my heart and my back aches. I’m a nervous wreck. You’ve got to do something, my man. And my darling Laura absolutely can’t sleep at night—she does need her sleep so, she’s such a delicate child. Aren’t you, Laura?”
“Yes, mother,” said Laura in a delicate voice.
“Well now, Mrs. Simmons,” Langston said carefully, struggling desperately to maintain the smile on his face, “I find this most difficult to understand. Do you have these symptoms back on Earth? You see, ship’s gravity is kept at all times at Earth normal—there’s no difference whatever, in effect, between artificial gravity and the gravity you have lived with all your life.”
“My good man,” Mrs. Simmons said, drawing herself up haughtily, “are you accusing me of—”
“Not at all, not at all,” Langston lied. He forced himself to remember Mr. Simmons and his power and influence with the Interstellar Board of Trade. “It’s quite possible that the machinery is out of adjustment or something. I’ll check into it at once, Mrs. Simmons. We will spare no effort in securing your comfort during your stay on our ship. In the meantime, won’t you check with Dr. Ford on Three Deck? I’m certain that he’ll be able to help you and your daughter.”
Mrs. Simmons brightened visibly. “Oh Mr. Langston!” she breathed. “Do you really think I require medical attention?”
“It’s entirely possible, Mrs. Simmons,” Mark Langston said, and meant it. He neglected to mention what sort of medical attention he thought Mrs. Simmons needed, but that was a minor detail. “I’ll buzz Dr. Ford and he’ll be ready to take care of you instantly.”
“Thank you so much,” Mrs. Simmons said happily. “Come, Laura—now watch your step, dear.”
Mrs. Simmons and her offspring left the room and the door hissed shut behind them. Mark Langston maliciously neglected to warn Ford in advance; it was a dirty trick to play on the Doc, of course, but Ford was capable of handling the situation and would duly dispatch Mrs. Simmons and Laura to some other luckless official.
Langston got up from his desk and limped over to the private screen against the outside wall. He flicked it on and an infinity of night reached coldly into his soul and pulled him out among a myriad of incredible stars—
There it was, right in his office with him. Space, deep space, the endless darkness and the stars that had been his life, his very being. He lost himself in the ever-new immensities. This was space—the space that he had helped to conquer, the star trails that he had made his own. This was the strange world that he had chosen for a home. Out there, far beyond imagining, distant beyond belief, the men and the women that he had lived with, fought with, laughed with, flashed forever into the deeps of night. They carried the great adventure onward, always, and now—
And now he was no longer with them.
Mark Langston turned off the screen and limped back to his desk. They had opened up the greatest frontier of them all—and for what? For Mrs. Simmons and Laura? For stupidity and greed and ignorance? For wealthy tourists who made the Earth a world to be ridiculed? For what?
Yes, he was still in space. He smiled without humor. He would have been wiser to have stayed on Earth, or on one of a hundred worlds that he had known. Wiser to have cut it cleanly and for good. Wiser to have left space behind him. Once, on the long runs, the new runs, he had been proud and happy to be a man; he had gloried in it. Now—
But he could not leave space. It was a part of him.
A red light flashed over his visibox. He switched it on. It was Stan Owens, the ship anthropologist. He looked excited, which was profoundly unusual.
“What’s up, Stan? More of those pesky space pirates?”
“Cut the clowning, Father Time. We’ve run smack dab into the middle of something.”
“On the Capella run? What is it—the Ultimate Boredom at last?”
“On the level, Mark. We need you in the control room on the double.”
Mark Langston eyed his friend’s face with sudden interest. “Hey,” he said, “you’re not kidding!”
“Come up and see for yourself,” Owens smiled, and switched off.
Mark Langston left his office at a thoroughly respectable speed, hurried down the corridor with scarcely a limp, and caught the lift to the control room. He stepped out and instantly it hit him—the spirit, the feel of a ship up against the unknown. He had known that feeling a thousand times in his life, and he responded to it with a spreading grin.
Owens collared him and pulled him toward a knot of men gathered around a subsidiary computer. “Hang on tight, old son,” the anthropologist said. “This may be too much for your ancient nervous system—this crate has hit the well-known jackpot.”
The men stepped back to make room and Captain Kleberg welcomed Mark by shoving a computer report into his hand. “Take a look at this, Mark,” he said, running his fingers through his iron-gray hair. “I’ve about decided that the computer’s psycho, or we’re psycho, or both.”
Langston examined the report with a practiced eye. It was a sub-space survey report—normal space being sub-space with respect to their ship, the Wilson Langford, in hyperspace—and seemed to be routine enough at first glance. There was the usual coordinate check, the drift check, the hydrogen check, the distress beam check—nothing to get excited about. In fact—
Then he saw it.
“But that’s impossible,” he said.
“Agreed,” said Captain Kleberg. “But there it is.”
“You figure it out,” Owens suggested.
Mark Langston checked the report again carefully. “Is this a gag?” he asked, knowing full well that it wasn’t. “There can’t be a ship down there.”
“Just the same,” pointed out the Navigation Officer, “thar she blows!”
“Maybe it’s the Flying Dutchman,” Owens offered.
Langston tried to think the thing through logically. But it simply wasn’t logical. There evidently was some sort of a ship down there, in normal space, light-years out from any planetary system. What was it doing . there? How did it get there?
“Any distress calls of any sort?” he asked.
“Dead silence,” said Captain Kleberg. “And we can’t get a blip out of her.”
“How about positioning?”
“We’re almost directly ‘above’ her,” the Navigation Officer reported. “We’re practically back-pedaling to keep from losing her.”
“How about acceleration?”
“Hard to tell, but I’d guess that she’s in free fall. Absolutely no energy tracings at all, and no radiation. She’s dead.”
Langston let that sink in for a minute. “Have you got a picture yet?” he asked finally.
“They’re building one up downstairs,” Captain Kleberg said. “It isn’t an easy job, of course, but they should be getting something soon.”
“Just wait until some of our noble human cargo gets wind of the fact that we’re off our course and will miss scheduled landing time by a week or three,” Stan Owens chuckled. “We’ll have everybody down on us like a pack of hyenas.”
“That isn’t funny,” said Captain Kleberg.
“We’ll probably get strung up by our thumbs,” Mark Langston said, “while the esteemed officials of the Interstellar Board of Trade dance around the tribal fires and massage our toes with jolly acid.”
“That isn’t funny either,” the harassed captain pointed out.
“Have you met Mrs. Simmons?” asked Stan Owens fiendishly. “A very interesting cultural phenomenon—”
“You and your cultural phenomena,” shot back Captain Kleberg.
“You anthropologists think you’re so—”
There was a whirring buzz and a three-dimensional mock-up thumped out of a chute. Captain Kleberg snatched it up and put it on a chart table where everyone could get a good look at it.
There was a dead silence in the control room.
“It just can’t be,” Captain Kleberg said finally, his voice very small.
“No,” Mark Langston agreed softly. “But it is.”
The men stared at each other, searching for words that were not there.
They came up from the depths, spawned in hate, fed on fury. Collins could smell them, feel the warmth currents from their bodies and the rush and surge of air currents from beating wings. They choked the chamber, tilling it, strangling it, shooting up like gas under pressure from the world below.
Like creatures from hell, and yet—Collins edged back to the mouth of the tunnel and stopped, letting the rest of the rear guard slide into position around him. Differences were forgotten now, melted in the flame of danger. Collins smiled without humor. It was ironic—they respected him only as a fighter—
He floated down to the very floor of the chamber and touched the cold metal. He blanked his mind, watching his chance.
The other men came in high, as they always did, and he felt and smelled and heard the battle in the darkness above him. Knives and clubs and spears collided with clanging crashes and the echoes of harsh breathing filled the chamber with sound. He strained his eyes, trying to see. Something wet and sticky brushed his face—blood pumping in a warm pulsing stream from a punctured artery.
With a blind rage seething within him, a rage as much at himself as his enemies, Collins launched himself from the floor. His nostrils quivered and he angrily choked off a low animal growl of defiance in his throat. He went up, high and hard, his knife extended in front of him. For a long, intolerable instant there was nothing. And then—contact.
Collins cut and slashed with methodical accuracy, giving no warning and no quarter. Like so many men who see fighting for what it is, he cherished no illusions about it and was chillingly effective. His invisible antagonist fought in silence and then stopped, suddenly. Collins moved on, pushing the body away from him. He went up again, slowly, trying to sort the sounds and smells and feelings of battle into some kind of a coherent pattern that would enable him to tell friend from foe. He hesitated, briefly, sensing danger, and then shifted just in time as something hissed past his head and struck his shoulder a numbing blow.
Fighting to see, Collins closed to the attack. The man almost got away from him, but he grabbed a foot and held on. The man suddenly lurched forward and up, and Collins felt the rush of air from his wings. Desperately, he lashed out with his knife. He had to get the mutant before he was smashed against a wall—those fragile wings gave the man an impossible advantage in the open air.
A foot kicked him over and over again, methodically, in the face. There was a complete absence of vocal sound, lending to the combat the unreal deadness of a dream. Collins twisted into position, ignoring the kicking foot, and slashed at a wing. The knife punched home, and Collins carefully ripped the thin membrane to shreds. His opponent faltered. Collins cut him again, and then was pushed away. Collins let him go and dived for the tunnel. He could feel the battle receding around him as the other men began to turn back. The smell of blood was sickening in the still air. His shoulder throbbed with pain and his throat was dry and thick with dust.
Collins darted into the tunnel, gasping for breath, and pushed himself forward. He hadn’t gone ten yards before he contacted someone else—going the other way.
A knife whirred past his ear and he caught an arm and twisted. There was only a weak, hopeless resistance. Tired or wounded, or perhaps both, he thought grimly. He moved in for the kill, his own knife ready.
“You’re beaten,” he whispered. “Surrender.”
By way of reply, a hand reached out of the darkness and fingernails clawed at his face. Collins closed in warily, seeking an opening. A cornered animal was always dangerous, he had read, and man was no exception. But he was sick of the killing, sick with horror and the smell of blood. His anger was gone, leaving the man. But he could see no way out. What could you do with such a man? When you gave him a chance for his life, he thanked you with renewed fury. His enemy was not a man, he caught himself thinking. He was an animal—
He raised the knife.
“My spirit will return to destroy you,” the man hissed weakly. “My spirit will not forget!”
Suddenly revolted by the thing he had almost done, Collins returned the knife to its sheath.
“You are my prisoner,” he said quietly.
The man laughed in his face and clawed him again, feebly. Collins hit him once, wincing as his fist smashed into his jaw, holding on to the other’s arm to keep him from floating away. Then he pulled the inert body with him down the tunnel, away from the chamber of death and into the endless darkness and the silence.
After turning the man over to Malcolm, and resting briefly in his quarters, Collins swam up through the dark tunnels to the captain’s room. He tried the door, found it unlocked, and floated inside.
The captain’s torch was burning as always. It was a wonderful thing, as all the special torches were with their combustion draft chambers, but more wonderful still was the soft, steady light from the myriad of stars that were suspended like gleaming jewels in the black velvet of the viewports. Collins drank in their beauty with his eyes and then turned toward the captain.
“Sit down, my boy,” the captain said. “I was just having lunch.”
The captain was eating alone at the little table in the center of the control room. His long, snow-white hair was silver in the flickering torchlight and his dark eyes flashed in his hard, deeply-lined face. The captain had strapped himself into his chair and fastened the plate and glass to the nailed-down table. It was far simpler to eat while floating, but the captain refused to do so.
Collins slid into the chair across from him and buckled himself in place. He ate in silence for a moment, swallowing the sticky synthetics without relish and washing them down with drafts of water sucked up through a straw from a closed glass.
“We’ve got to find a way,” Collins said finally.
“Yes. We lost a man.”
“There must be a way.”
“There is no way,” the captain said slowly. “But we must keep trying.”
Collins looked at the captain, his mind tired with worry. The captain was very old now, he thought. Very old, this man who had held them all together for so long. When he was gone—
“They are beginning to slip, my boy,” the captain said. “I don’t know how much longer we can hold them. They are turning into animals like the rest of them. And when that happens, we are through. The fools! Do they believe that the food and water will last forever? Time, time—we must have more time, and it is running out on us.”
Collins shrugged. “We’re losing the fight as it is,” he pointed out. “Let’s not kid ourselves. We need more than time, and dreams won’t change the situation any.”
“You’re young yet, my boy,” the captain said softly. “There will come a time when dreams will be all you have left.”
Collins was nervous, sitting there in the great loneliness with the captain. The turn their conversation had taken worried him, and his worry was tinged with embarrassment. It was not good to sit in on another man’s innermost thoughts; that was why there were barriers between human beings. And the captain was so old, sitting there—a shell of a man with his strength eaten away by long years spent in a futile battle. If there had been but one real victory, rather than an endless slow defeat—
But there hadn’t been—and yet the captain must not give up, for when he went down they all went down. “This is a real problem, sir,” he said, “a problem in science. As such, it has an answer. You’ve told me that all of my life. If it isn’t true—”
“Oh, it’s true, it’s true,” the captain sighed, running a thin hand through his snow-white hair. “It’s true as far as it goes. But it isn’t just a problem in science we have to face here—it’s a problem in human relationships. We have to solve that problem first, and even then I’m no longer sure that we’re capable of solving the other. It’s been so long—”
“It’s impossible,” Collins stated flatly, drawing the captain out. “It just couldn’t have happened. What could have gone wrong? We’ve been over it a thousand times, all of us—studied the plans, the records, the theories. There must be an extra factor somewhere, some strange and unknowable—”
“Rubbish!” exclaimed the captain violently, stung out of his apathy. “Let’s have no metaphysical gibberish, my boy—not in this room.”
“But how did it happen?”
“That’s not the question,” the captain snapped, his eyes flashing again. “The question is, what are we going to do about it? Here we are—accept that. Where do we go from here?”
Collins didn’t answer him, for a good and simple reason. There wasn’t any answer. The two men sat silently at the strange table in the semidarkness, watching the shadows on the walls and the stars beyond. A cold knot of despair gnawed at Collins’ stomach. What chance did they have, really? What were the odds against them? It might be easier to give up, to let yourself drift forever down the soft corridors of thoughtlessness, to forget—Then he looked at the captain, who watched him wordlessly. He had not quit—he had fought and tried and worked and dreamed until his blood grew slow within him and still had not surrendered to the shadows and the darkness. He had nagged them and ridiculed them and hurt them—but he had kept them men.
Collins unfastened his belt and floated free of the chair.
“I’m going to see the other man I brought in,” he said. “Maybe I can find a lead.”
“Good luck, my boy,” said the captain softly.
Collins pushed off against a brace and swam into the darkness. All life ended in death, that he knew. But it was how you met that death that made the difference, that marked off finally one man from another. When his turn came, as he sensed it was coming now, he wanted to go out the way a man should—and not like a mindless beast that screamed and struggled in a black vault of emptiness, unloved and alone.
The four men eyed each other over the bottle on Captain Kleberg’s private table. All of them occupied chairs, but other than that their positions were remarkably dissimilar. Captain Kleberg sat in a remotely orthodox position, looking, Mark Langston thought, as though his best friend had just strolled in and punched him in the face. Stan Owens, an enigmatic smile playing around the corners of his mouth, had tilted his chair back at a precarious angle and propped his large and unlovely feet up on the table. Jim McConnell, the lanky chief engineer on the Wilson Langford, slouched far down with his long legs extending far underneath the table and his face just about even with the neck of the bottle. Mark Langston had turned his chair backwards and perched on it like a saddle, puffing steadily on a thoroughly venerable pipe and occasionally bombarding all concerned with an ominous cloud of blue smoke.
“Well, gentlemen,” said Mark Langston, “we seem to have walked smack into a double-dyed purple whiz.”
“You’ve said that before,” Captain Kleberg pointed out gloomily. “I want to know what we’re going to do about it.”
“And just take your time, boys,” Owens said airily. “Kleberg can always find another job. He might become a tramp or something.”
“They’ll grind me up for glue,” Captain Kleberg announced unhappily.
Jim McConnell uncoiled somewhat and cocked a finger, pistollike, at his companions. “I’d just like to point out that this conference is getting nowhere fast,” he said lazily. “Suppose we either get down to business or get out the cards and be done with it.”
“Nice words, Jim,” Mark Langston said. “Back them up with something.”
“O.K.,” agreed McConnell, hanging a cigarette at a miraculous angle out of his mouth, “here’s the way I see it. First of all, we’ve found a derelict. It happens to be the old Viking, but what’s the difference?”
“What’s the difference?” echoed Mark Langston. The first ship, his mind whispered. The first of them all. “If you meant that, it’s a singularly cold remark to make.”
“Agreed,” Jim McConnell nodded, smiling faintly. “If I meant it. I’m just trying to jolt you jokers down to earth, or at least to ship-level. We won’t get anywhere with this ah-the-wonder-of-it-all attitude. That dead ship down there is the Viking, the first of the interstellar ships, the ship that vanished—the ship that was, in fact, an anachronism almost before it got started—but as far as we’re concerned it might just as well be the Mudball X. With reference to this problem, it’s just a ship and the sooner we start looking at it that way the sooner we’ll start getting somewhere. End of speech, protected by copyright.”
“Don’t stop now, Jim,” Captain Kleberg said. “Let’s see where we get.”
McConnell lit a new cigarette from the remnants of its predecessor and shifted his shoulders against the back of the chair until he was comfortable. “Here’s the deal then, as I see it,” he said slowly. “The Viking down there has been unreported for over two hundred years. As far as we can tell, there’s no life on her—or at any rate none that’s capable of handling her technological equipment. The Viking appears to be good and dead. But when she blasted off, back in the year 2100, she carried a crew of two hundred—one hundred men and one hundred women. Every schoolboy knows their story. First question: Is it possible that anyone is still alive on that ship?”
There was a long silence in Captain Kleberg’s room while the four men thought of that lonely ship, alone for centuries, dead and silent and outmoded. A heroic thing, reduced to tragi-comic dimensions by the onrush of technology, and yet—
Mark Langston put his cold pipe on the table and leaned forward. “My guess is yes,” he said carefully. “Yes, it’s possible.”
“Air?” questioned Captain Kleberg doubtfully. “Water? Food? Gravity? The ship is dead, you know—there’s no question about that part.”
Langston nodded. “Yes, I’ve taken that into account. Look at it this way: First of all, the Viking was not, of course, a faster-than-light ship. The trip to Capella was expected to occupy the better part of two hundred years, with the descendants of the original crew finishing the trip. The food would be synthetic, and there would of necessity be plenty. The air supply on the Viking was supplied by sealed hydroponic tanks, the valves of which, unless I’m greatly mistaken, were pressure affairs that operated independently of the main power source. I think the air supply would hold out—it’s at least possible. The water was carried in tanks and wouldn’t be markedly affected by a power failure. Gravity? Well, there wouldn’t be any, as far as I can see—”
“Man is a very adaptable animal,” Stan Owens said, anticipating him. “He could survive—theoretically at any rate.”
“That’s it, then,” McConnell said. “Until we find out differently, we’ll have to assume that there is life of some sort still present in that hulk. Two hundred plus years isn’t a fantastic length of time; there may very well be people on that ship. That takes care of our plan of action. It’s simple. They’re there, trapped. We’re here, with a nice new ship. Solution: Go get them and bring them aboard.”
Stan Owens’ chair hit the floor with a bang.
“Beg pardon,” he said, “but that’s the one thing we can’t do.”
Mark Langston turned and looked at him.
Stan Owens picked up the empty bottle from the table and jabbed it in McConnell’s general direction. “Think a moment, all of you,” he said. “This thing isn’t quite as simple as it looks and going off half-cocked isn’t going to get us anything but a nice soggy fizzle.”
“O.K., ape-man,” McConnell sighed at the anthropologist. “I might have known that you would come up with something complicated. You guys wouldn’t fix a bicycle without a field report and culture analysis.”
Mark Langston found himself grinning broadly. It was a good feeling. Up here, with these men, things suddenly began to make sense again. It was not anything concrete, nor could he have put it into words if he had been asked. It was simply that he was once more proud and happy to be a man. Mrs. Simmons and others of her ilk seemed to be denizens of another universe, living in another world—as, in a sense, indeed they were.
Captain Kleberg drummed his fingers on the table. “Well?”
“Look,” said Stan Owens patiently. “Let’s assume that everything Jim has said is true—if it isn’t, if the ship is dead inside as well as out, it doesn’t concern us. Let’s assume that there are people, human beings, still alive on the Viking—people who have lived their entire lives in the darkness, who have never known gravity, who have lived in a world as different from ours as hydrogen is from uranium, who have lived in a static world of death and decay, a world slowly running down—”
A cold chill seemed to seep through the little room like an icy mist. The children of the Viking, Mark Langston thought with a feeling akin to awe, the strange children of the Viking—
“Let’s not have any romantic hog-wash, now,” Stan Owens continued, waving the empty bottle. “We have no way of knowing how long the Viking has been a dead ship, nor do we know what happened to her. But the drive was automatic, wasn’t it, Jim?”
McConnell nodded. “That’s right. An early atomic drive, kicking up a thrust about equal to a bit less than one-fifth light-year per year in terms of unit distance.”
“It wouldn’t have just failed,” Mark Langston added. “It must have been tampered with.”
“Well, that’s all conjecture,” Owens said slowly. “The important point is that at best that ship has been dead for a good hundred and fifty years, otherwise it would have been contacted by the first faster-than-light ships that tried to hunt her down. That gives us a span of four or five generations living under those upsetting and difficult conditions. Don’t fool yourselves, gentlemen—man is not even a constant biologically, and when you get into psychology and culture you can expect practically anything. If there are people on that ship, I don’t profess to know anything much about them—but I’ll tell you for sure that they won’t be like any people you ever saw before.”
The other men remained silent, watching him. The great ship around them seemed somehow fragile now, and Mark Langston thought of the infinite sea in which they swam, the dark sea of space that washed the black shores of more mysteries than man could ever know—
“O.K., there they are,” Owens went on. “A hundred and fifty years is a long time—those people, if there are any, have changed. By this time they have either adapted themselves to their new environment or else they’re long ago kaput. We can just forget any drivel about their forgetting where they come from, or who they are, or what they’re doing there in the middle of nowhere. Some of them are bound to know—there were books on the Viking, certainly, and records, to say nothing of word-of-mouth communication. They’ll know, no question about that. Whether they’ll all believe it or not is something else again.”
Jim McConnell shook his head. “O.K.,” he said, “then what’s the trouble all about? I still can’t see—”
Stan Owens spun the bottle on the table with one hand. “We’ve got two possibilities,” he explained. “One, they know full well what the score is. In that case, their whole lives, their very reason for being, is tied up with the Viking—that ship reaching Capella under her own steam and through her own efforts is the only thing that can make their living hell mean anything. Take that away from them and they are broken, dead. Take that away from them and you are murderers.”
“And if they don’t believe?” suggested Captain Kleberg.
“The second possibility is tougher,” said Stan Owens. “If they have completely adapted to their new environment, then the shock of putting them on this ship would probably be fatal. The change would be too much; their whole culture, the very fabric of their lives, would be shattered with one blow. Ignoring that little point meant the extinction of more people than I like to think about, on Earth and elsewhere, to say nothing of butcher-wars and revolutions. We are smarter now, or at least we like to think that we are.”
Mark Langston nodded at his friend. He had seen enough in his life to back up everything Owens had said, with interest. When you were dealing with human beings, you ignored the human element at your risk. “There’s the question of gravity, too,” he said.
“Of course,” Owens agreed. “If there’s been no power on the Viking for over a century, and thus no artificial gravity, the sudden change would wipe them out—crush them like flies in a vice. And I dare say that Captain Kleberg wouldn’t care to throw this ship into free fall from here to Capella with a load of unconditioned and generally hysterical passengers. We’ve got a culture too, you know.”
Captain Kleberg gave his best approaching-the-guillotine smile. “Don’t even think about it,” he advised. “We’ll all wind up in the funny room. But remember—we’ve got to make it fast, whatever we do. And no mistakes, of course. This may be a life or death matter for those people, and our own orbital error isn’t going to be any joke, even for the computers. I’ll hold this ship in position as long as necessary, but we’ll have to get with it. If there are people on that ship—”
“That’s enough ‘ifs’ for one session, I think,” smiled Mark Langston, stoking up his pipe again. “This reminds me of that old problem in which some bright boy points to a wastebasket and asks his friends if they’ll bet him a million dollars that there isn’t a turtle in it. Chances are that there isn’t, but how do you know? You can theorize and reason all night, but there’s only one way to find out for sure whether or not there as a turtle in there under the daily garbage.” He paused, blowing a cloud of blue smoke across the table. “And that one way,” he finished, “is to go over and look.”
The small but rugged space launch, utterly dwarfed by the vast distances all around her, came down with a wrenching whine—out of hyperspace and into normal sub-space where the dead Viking waited. The shock of the transition stunned even the trained crew, and offered convincing evidence of why the great star ship, the Wilson Langford, could not be so maneuvered into normal space without a minimum of five days of physical and psychological conditioning for her passengers.
Mark Langston nursed the launch toward the dark shadow of the Viking, which was now visible to the naked eye. It floated ahead of them, cold and alone, like a vast creature of the ocean deeps that had grown old and tired and now only floated mindlessly with the currents it once had challenged. Despite the faint throbbing in his bad leg, Mark Langston felt better than he had in a long, long time. He was home, lost in the stars, and the weary years fell away from him one by one and left him young again.
The Viking swam nearer, dominating space. Mark Langston guided the launch with well-remembered skill, listening to the hum of conversation behind him.
“I guess my education’s been sadly neglected,” a voice belonging to one of the forced-entry technicians was saying, “but I swear I don’t see why the Viking started for Capella in the first place. Why not head for Alpha Centauri? They could have made that in twenty-plus years. Capella, unless it’s all hokum put out by the Interstellar Board of Trade to justify extortion rates, is forty-two light-years from Earth.”
“It’s fairly simple, actually,” Stan Owens said. “They didn’t head for Alpha Centauri for the same reason you don’t go to a zoo when you’re looking for a dream-blonde in a bar—it didn’t suit their purpose. You have to think back and remember what conditions were like when the Viking left Earth. What had they found in the solar system?”
“Same as now, more or less,” the man reflected. “Except for what we’ve built, Mars had those lichens left from better days, Venus her dust cacti, and that’s about it.”
“O.K.,” Owens continued. “Unless he could reach the stars, man was alone in the universe to all practical purposes. And they were after a planet almost exactly like Earth, only older, following the logic that evolution there would have advanced the planet correspondingly and thus making it possible to harvest the fruits of many thousands—or even millions—of years of scientific advancement in just the space of time required to go from Earth to another Earth circling a Class G star of exactly the right specifications. They were hoping, of course, to find a faster-than-light drive to speed up the return trip for their children’s children—it seemed like quite an adventure at the time, with fabulous prestige for the crew, and the possible returns to Earth made financing no problem. It just so happened that Capella was the closest star that would serve their ends, and so that was their destination. As we know, it was a wise choice—”
The launch swung alongside the Viking and Mark Langston eased her in toward an exact velocity-match. A wise choice, he thought, looking at the black tomb before him. A wise choice, but they couldn’t have known that we’d perfect a faster-than-light drive that would render them obsolete before they ever arrived, couldn’t have known what was to go wrong with their plans within fifty years there in the mute corridors of the Viking—
“How about that?” questioned Jim McConnell thoughtfully. “If we find anyone alive in there, and manage to do anything for them, what becomes of them when they chug into Capella some twenty-thirty years from now and find out that interstellar travel is already old-hat? You talk about destroying their values, Stan, but how do you think they’re going to feel when they find out that it’s all been for nothing, that they might as well have stayed home?”
The launch hovered next to the black hulk of the Viking and Mark Langston swung her abreast of the engine room and clamped her there with gravitraction beams.
“Spacesuits,” he said shortly.
“That isn’t quite as tough a problem as it looks like,” Stan Owens explained as he struggled into his suit. “Remember that these are not the original members of the crew—they are a wholly new group, with new values. If they manage somehow to bring the Viking in, that in itself will be enough. Anyhow, in a sense they are the first. We’ve got lots of time before the Viking lands, if she does, and we can set the psychology boys to work in that interval. Don’t worry—when the Viking approaches the Capella system she’ll get a hero’s—or is it heroine’s—welcome that’ll put all others to shame, and what’s more it’ll be completely genuine. There are other distinctions in life besides winning the race, you know.”
“You seem to have this all figured to the last decimal point,” laughed McConnell, “and we don’t even know whether or not the Viking is empty. Nothing like looking ahead.”
“The time to make your plans is before the action starts,” Mark Langston said, talking now through the suit phones. “It’s only in quaint types of fiction that the hero strolls thoughtlessly into a hornet’s nest and then formulates stunning plans with his brilliant brain while being clubbed to death with crowbars. If he’s got brains enough to think his way out of a situation, then he’s got brains enough to do a little thinking before he gets up to his neck in hot water.”
“You’re mixing your metaphors, boy,” said Jim McConnell, moving into position. “What happens to all your fine plans if I can’t fix the drive on that baby?”
Mark Langston grinned. “One vote for technology,” he said.
The efficient team of the launch, spacesuited for protection, swung the emergency air lock and cutter into position between the launch and the dark shell of the Viking. McConnell’s crew set the cutters with meticulous care. There was a brief whine and the lights dimmed. That was all.
“Let’s go,” said Mark Langston.
Cautiously, ready for anything, the men moved through the air lock one by one into the black interior of the dead Viking.
Four “days” passed. A class was taught and a battle fought, and an old man spoke with his son—
Floating through the dark tunnels, smelling the cold metal all around him, Collins thought of destiny. Destiny, so the books would have you believe, was what you made of it—fate was up to you. But it was a strange destiny, surely, that had placed him in this dark asylum, protected for the moment against the frigid death outside, even deluded into a kind of comfort, but sinking, always sinking, into a living death in the black shadows below.
Sometimes, it did seem hopeless. Without the captain; he knew, they would be lost—the captain would lead them to safety if anyone could. He thought of the early days of the Viking, the early halcyon days that he had read about, when the scientists had lived in a veritable artificial paradise, with unlimited time at their disposal and the company of intelligent, congenial friends to make the long hours pass quickly. Collins wished fervently that he might have lived then, in the golden age—
Ruthlessly, he thrust the thought from his mind. What was it that the captain had said? Man could not move backwards and survive—he must go forward, not to the good old days, but to the good new ones.
But how much science had they managed to keep alive? Was it enough? Time was running out, and the problems yet to be solved were staggering. What was wrong with the engines? Even if they knew, could they fight their way through the world of the other men to the engine room? Where was the ship? If they could manage somehow to bring her to life again, would they have time to go anywhere—go before the synthetics were just a memory and the ship turned into a total horror of starving maniacs? And how long could even the captain bind the men to his will—men who had never known anything but darkness and free flight, men who with each passing “day” became more and more adapted to their ship asylum in the black sea of space and less and less suited for the lives of human beings? Was their fight only a hopeless race up a blind, fantastic alley?
Perhaps the younger men were right—perhaps they should simply treat the other men, with their back sliding primitive culture and superstition, as animals and try to exterminate them to make the synthetics last longer. Perhaps, from the initial revolution down to the present, it had all been their fault—perhaps they should forget about being men, forget about saving the ship, and just make the best of the life with which they were confronted.
Collins shook the thought from his mind. That way only seemed to be the easy way, he knew. That way meant death for all of them. The time would come, the time must come, when they would need those savage people who now crouched around their strange fires in the black world below.
Collins drifted around a corner and there was Malcolm.
Malcolm, now growing old but still with a twinkle in his eye, seemed dignified as always in the light of his small torch. He floated rigidly in the air, his spine unbending and his clothing faultlessly neat as usual.
“I say, Collins,” he said briskly, “good to see you.”
Collins smiled. Malcolm had discovered from the records that his parents had been British, and he had therefore read all the books he could find upon an incredibly distant England and her people. He had picked up what he fancied to be British phrases, and he used them doggedly—a pathetic thing, to be sure, and a trifle comic, but Collins respected the man’s effort to build a desperate individual personality in the midst of chaos. Once he had even tried to find tea, although he hardly knew what it was.
“How’s the prisoner? ” Collins asked.
“Quite well,” Malcolm replied. “He seems to be much stronger now than when you brought him in. Beastly business—what are you going to do with him?”
“Couldn’t say,” Collins shrugged. “You go and get some sleep and I’ll have a talk with our friend, O.K.?”
“Righto,” Malcolm said brightly and shoved off down the corridor.
Collins smiled again. Malcolm always made him feel better somehow. He often wondered what the man was like, deep in the innermost corners of his being—what thoughts did he have that he never shared with anyone? There weren’t many like Malcolm around any more, and when they were all gone—
Collins unlocked the corridor door and floated in to where the other man waited in the darkness.
The man watched him steadily, without fear. Collins could feel his presence in the room, vibrant, unafraid.
“You have come to kill me,” the man stated calmly.
“No,” said Collins. “I only want to talk to you—you will not be harmed.”
The man laughed in his face.
Collins ignored him and fired a torch. The flame sputtered and caught as the torch built up air pressure, pushing the shadows back and filling the room with warm orange light. Collins narrowed his eyes to slits against the glare and looked at the man. He returned the gaze frankly. He had a strong face, Collins decided. His hair was long and wild and his teeth were sharp and white. His clothing was old and wrinkled, but not unclean. There seemed to be intelligence in his eyes—or was it only the uncertain light from the torch that made it seem so?
“Start talking,” the man said shortly. “Or do you always speak without words?”
“My name is Collins,” he said, forcing a smile. “I’m the one who—”
“I remember,” the man said.
“Do you have a name, or must I make up one? I’m quite willing to call you Thing or Ug, but maybe you prefer your own name.”
“My name is Owens.”
“O.K., Owens. Now, look—I’d like to help you if I can. I know you’re in a difficult position here—”
“I’ll do my worrying,” Owens said. “You do yours.”
Collins felt himself oddly drawn toward this man before him. A savage? Perhaps. But courage was courage, and even in an enemy it commanded respect.
“You know you could be killed,” he told him quietly. “I may not be able to save you for long. Our food supplies are short. I know what would happen to me if I were your captive.”
“You might make a good meal at that,” Owens stated.
“You,” Collins informed him, “are not exactly a born diplomat. Doesn’t the prospect of death mean anything to you? Your situation is not ideal, you know.”
“Neither is yours,” the man said surprisingly. “I have known death all my life. I know that it comes whether you are afraid of it or not, so why be afraid? Your own life will soon be over; perhaps you would do well to reserve your charity.”
Collins floated toward the man through the shadows, his own eyes cold and hard. He gripped Owens’ arm tightly and applied pressure until his fingers ached. Owens did not flinch and continued to meet his gaze squarely.
“What did you mean by that?” whispered Collins tensely. “What do you know about my life?”
“Your world will be dead within twenty sleep periods, and you will die with it,” the man said, his voice edged with hate. “The world will be ours.”
“Those are big words,” Collins said, fingering his knife with his free hand. “But they are only words.”
Owens smiled coldly. “You think that we are fools because we do not believe as you do,” he said evenly. “You think that we are fools because we know the stars are gods. But we know other things as well, my stupid friend.”
“Such as? ” suggested Collins, drawing his knife.
“You threaten me?” the savage asked, and laughed.
Collins pressed closer, his heart pulsing in his throat. What did this man know?
“The tanks, the air tanks,” Owens hissed, his eyes wild and bright. “You think we don’t know where the air comes from? We do know, and the tanks are in our part of the world—we’re going to seal you off from your air, and the work has already begun.”
Collins floated back, stunned. The air—
Before he had a chance to recover himself, the door to the room burst open. Young Lanson hurtled through, his body quivering with excitement.
“There he is, there he is!” Lanson screamed, pointing at Owens. “Kill him!”
“Calm down,” Collins snapped. “What’s the matter?”
“Matter?” whispered Lanson hoarsely. “You fool, it’s the captain, the captain!”
Collins just stared at him, unable to speak.
“Your father is dead,” Lanson said, his voice breaking with hysteria. “He’s been murdered.”
Slowly, inexorably, Collins felt the fury creep through his veins. Not rage, not hot, blinding madness, but fury—cold, chill fury that seeped like ice through his body, into his heart, his mind—
The captain—
Shielded now by a wall of ice, his mind took command. He gestured toward Owens. “Bring him,” he said shortly, and launched himself into the dark corridor. He left his torch with Lanson and hurtled through the darkness that was his home, his mind refusing even to think of what the captain’s death meant to them now. He must think ahead, keep moving—
He swam into the control room, and there was the captain. His chest was red where they had pulled the knife out, and he was very still. His people were clustered around him in the control room and the torch cast broken shadows on the walls, but the captain could not see them. His dead eyes looked outward, out to the silver stars, and now he was alone.
“Dad,” said Collins, and his voice was very small. He could not speak further. The captain had been a symbol to him all his life, a force, a principle, that held the ship together. But now, in death, he was only an old man again, an old man with snow-white hair, and Collins was his son.
Collins felt a hand touch his. He looked up to see Helen, his wife, who knew that she could not comfort him but was brave enough to try. Collins squeezed her hand to show that he understood and then turned to his people.
“We will elect a new captain soon,” he said quietly. “I will not try to assume the position unless I am asked. We have other problems before us now.”
There were murmurs from the crowd, but Collins ignored them. He moved slowly over to where Owens was floating, guarded by Lanson. He looked at Owens coldly for a full minute, staring into his eyes. He waited, smiling very slightly. Then he hit him in the face.
Owens reeled back, shaking his head. Collins hit him again.
“We’re going to get through to the engine room,” Collins hissed, his face very close to his prisoner’s. “This time we’re going to get through, and you’re going to take us.” He hit him again and watched the blood trickle from a split lip. “Understand?”
Lanson pressed in, knife blade gleaming. “Kill him;” he screamed. “Kill the—”
“Shut up.” Collins looked at the man once, and that was enough. “We need our friend here. The other men are blocking off our air supply. This is our last chance. If we fail this time, we die.”
The crowd shifted and moved with the shadows and tension filled the air.
“If he won’t take us through—” one voice began.
“He’ll take us,” Collins replied.
“If we can’t fix the drive after we get there—”
“We’ve got to try,” Collins said coldly. “I tell you, those engines couldn’t have failed! They were tampered with, shut off! If one man can turn them off, another can turn them on.” He paused. “I’ll kill any man who stands in my way.”
“I’m on your side, old boy,” Malcolm said, and didn’t smile.
Collins shot him a glance and then relaxed a little. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to strike any heroic poses.”
Malcolm shrugged. “You lead,” he said. “I’ll follow.”
“No, that won’t do,” Collins pointed “You pick a detail and stay back here—we may not come back, you know. Set the controls, and make certain that the gravity is adjusted to not more than one-fifth Earth-normal. Understand?”
“Righto,” said Malcolm, and moved off about his task.
“Webb, Renaldo, Echols—you older men who learned your science from the captain—are you with me?”
The men smiled their assent. One muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “At last” and went to get his equipment. Spirit and enthusiasm, as though kindled out of the very air, needing only an initial spark, filled the chamber.
And the old captain floated alone, his dead eyes on the stars—
Collins spun Owens around and twisted the man’s arm up behind his back. “O.K.,” he whispered. “Let’s go.”
Lanson hesitated. “Now?”
“Now,” said Collins flatly. “We can pick up weapons and synthetics on the way.”
Quite suddenly, Owens twisted himself loose. He floated there before them, his keen eyes flashing.
“Fools!” he said clearly. “He would lead you all into death—we would be butchered before we even drew near my people’s world. Do you think that my people are imbeciles, that you can simply move in and succeed where all others have failed? Your leader is a fool!”
Collins icily hit the man again in the face. Owens just laughed at him, wiping the blood away with his hand.
“You prove nothing,” Owens said calmly. “You cannot answer my arguments with your fists.”
Collins moved in close again and there was death in his eyes. “It’s up to you to get us through,” he told the man, beginning to feel the doubt slink back into the chamber and take its ugly hold on the people. “If you do not, we’ll tear you apart—inch by inch.”
Owens hesitated, cold sweat standing out on his forehead.
“There is a way,” he said finally. “There is one way—”
Collins gripped his arm, digging his nails into the man’s flesh.
“If you cannot go through,” Owens pointed out, “you have to go around.”
Collins felt his body go dead within him. Around? That meant—
“There’s only one way,” Owens said. “We’ll have to go—Outside.”
Stars. It was one thing to view them from the shelter of the control room but a different proposition entirely when seen from Outside. Cold they were, and close—it seemed to Collins that he had only to reach out a space-suited hand to pluck an ice-diamond from its field of velvet black. If he should lose his footing, float off into nothingness, forever alone—
He tried not to think about it. If the dark and brooding Viking had seemed quiet in her strange Odyssey through the star-seas, how much more was he conscious of the silence now—not merely silence, but an absence of all sound, utter and complete. The old radios of the suits no longer functioned; the air supply was uncertain. Almost Collins fancied that his breathing was already flat and stale.
Inch by inch, foot by slow, agonizing foot the men pulled themselves like ants along the silent side of the Viking. Collins could see the monstrous, incredible figure of Owens ahead of him, like a robot-suit without a human being in it. Behind him he sensed his people—Webb, Echols, Renaldo, their equipment strapped to their backs, feeling their way along the emergency guy rod even as he was doing. Were they good enough? The thought crept, unbidden, into his mind. They had worked hard, they were good, but they had learned under terrible handicaps. Their tools were inadequate. Could they fix the drive? If not—
Getting out of the Viking in their old spacesuits had been something of a feat in itself, although the problem was not in getting through the small air lock but in not getting blown through it into infinity. Getting back into the ship again through the engine room was, to say the least, going to be something else again. Owens had said that there was an operable air lock there that he had seen, one that could be opened from Outside, but—
Was the man leading them all to their deaths? Was this all simply a last, ironic gesture of defiance?
Collins inched his way along. He had no choice, he realized. It was act now or not at all. A chance, however desperate, was still a chance. Owens. There was something strange about the man—
Collins stared at the cold metal side of the Viking as he crept along it. In there, separated from him by scant feet, were the other men, the children of the revolutionaries. He was in their territory now, their part of the ship, where they gathered around their great synthetic fires and lived their proud but futile lives, sliding back, back, back into a cold death in an empty ship—
Could they be saved, turned to use, if the ship were recovered? Collins had always said that they could, and he believed it. For all their differences, for all their strangeness, these were yet people—people who had chosen to follow a different path from his, but people none the less. A common goal, a common hope, might yet unite the two—and all hands would be needed if the Viking were to come through at last.
Collins smiled bitterly. What was that expression he had read in his youth? Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. Collins laughed, and the sound was eerily deafening in the closeness of his suit. He had never seen a chicken, and he was unworried about the hatching of an egg. He didn’t have any eggs.
His stomach was a hollow knot within him and the palms of his hands, although beginning to freeze, were clammy with sweat. It seemed to him that he had been crawling for an eternity, crawling forever, crawling through the night and under the merciless stars.
The engine room—Where was the engine room?
They made it. Somehow, they made it. One minute he was crawling inch by inch along the endless guy rod and the next he had stopped, behind Owens. He breathed a cold breath of relief. There, bulging oddly out from the side of the dark Viking, was an air lock. Owens had maneuvered himself into position in front of it and was attempting to turn a valve handle. It did not move. Owens waved a gloved hand urgently.
Collins managed to get himself into position next to the other man, and together they twisted at the valve. It didn’t budge. Collins felt the cold seeping into his suit and his lungs were choked and constricted. He looked at Owens. Owens looked at him, and for a moment they hung there, motionless, on the brink of eternity.
Then Collins waved to Echols, who slowly made his way over to join them. Wordlessly, Collins fumbled with the pack on Echols’ back. It was slow work and his hands were very cold in their thick, insulated gloves, but he finally managed to extract a large hammer. Clumsily, he signaled to Owens and Echols to hold onto him. They braced themselves and got a firm grip on his legs.
Desperately, Collins swung the hammer at the valve. He knew that he might jam it hopelessly, but he had no time now for niceties. The valve had to be jarred loose somehow, and that very quickly. The cold was growing worse—
Collins swung the hammer with as much force as he could muster in his awkward position and then the three men hit the valve together, pulling and tugging and clawing at it with the frenzy and the strength of men who see death staring them icily in the face.
The valve moved. With numbing fingers, they spun it until it would move no more. Then Collins and Owens grasped the handle. Together, they heaved with all their strength.
Nothing happened. The stars seemed to creep nearer—
They pulled again, despair lending strength to their numb muscles. Collins gasped, his heart pounding in his throat. Had it moved? Was it frozen? There—
With a sudden, silent explosion the air lock door puffed outward. The men held on and then moved into the small air lock one by one, almost completely filling it. Coughing for breath and numb with cold, they sealed the outer door again and went to work on the inner one. Collins tasted blood in his throat and a dead whiteness was washing over his brain.
This time, it was easier. The inner door burst open as the ship’s air rushed into the air lock and then Collins led his men into the ship. Instantly, without waiting even to look around them, the men ripped off each other’s helmet and gulped in great drafts of heady air. Never before in the lives of any of them had air tasted so sweet; never before had they fully realized the ecstasy of breathing.
When he had partially recovered, Collins secured a synthetic torch from Renaldo’s pack and coaxed it into flame. Light leaped out, blinding his eyes, and the room jumped into sharp relief. Owens had not lied. Collins felt something that might have been tears start to his eyes as he looked around him.
They were alone in the engine room.
Collins rallied his mind, still somewhat stunned from its brush with an unfamiliar Outside, and set to work. The first requirement was safety and he floated across the chamber and checked the after door. It was closed, but unlocked. He threw the switch on it and then turned back to his companions.
The next necessity was light. Together, the men kindled torches and planted them strategically around the room. The light was flickering and uneven, but it would have to do. Even at that, it hurt their eyes; Collins doubted that they could have stood much more.
He looked around the engine room, and his doubts returned. The main plutonium pile, together with its water reactant, was of course invisible behind its graphalloy shielding. If the trouble proved to be not at the surface, but deep within the pile itself, Collins knew that the situation was probably hopeless. But he felt a strange exhilaration none the less. Here, at last, was a straight problem in technology—a problem too difficult for his limited means, perhaps, but still a problem he could sink his teeth into.
Collins eyed the shielding and the dials and switches with a feeling akin to awe—not superstitious awe, nor unreasoning wonder, but simply a healthy respect for a supreme accomplishment of his people. This was the power that had lifted the Viking long ago from the bonds of Earth, carried her beyond Pluto and into interstellar space—and this was the power that had been silent for more than a century. Had the power failed the men, or had the men failed the power? It was no mere rhetorical problem—upon its solution hinged the fate of Earth’s first emissary to the stars.
The men set to work with a will. Collins, Echols, Renaldo, and Webb, the cream of the ship’s scientists now that the captain was gone, went at their job with the cool precision of men who have studied and planned for many lonely years for just such an eventuality. Owens stood alone, watching, making no sound, with his face beginning to swell painfully from the blows he had received. The chamber was quiet, but filled with a tense, electric anticipation that was a tangible thing.
Invisible behind its shield, the great pile waited. Outside, hovering beyond the air lock, the stars floated in austere splendor—
The crew of four worked on, absorbed in their problem, oblivious to time. The silence was broken only by the harsh breathing and the short, staccato sentences as the men exchanged information and asked questions. They had pitifully little to go on, with their limited instruments, but they had knowledge and understanding. And they had something else—a burning, unquenchable ferocity of purpose that would not be denied. Man’s problems have often been insoluble, from those of the nameless Pleistocene hunters who challenged the mighty mammoth, to Fermi who had engineered the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction beneath the stands of faraway Chicago, to Wilson Langford who had given his life that man might reach the moon of Earth, to a host of others on the black star trails to forever—but they had always been solved.
Man was writing another chapter now—and Collins and his tiny band would not give up.
Time passed as the minutes slipped into hours and the hours crept forward into a day and on—
Finally, they had done all they could.
“It all checks, as far as I can see,” said Webb, rubbing his bloodshot eyes, his great beard floating free in the air.
Renaldo nodded. “Someone threw the rods,” he agreed. “That’s all—there could have been no other failure, or why are the rods in place?”
Echols, thin and pale, said nothing. There was only one thing to try, his expression seemed to say. They must simply try it, and if it failed then that was that.
Collins was the first to look up. Startled, he surveyed the engine room with quick eyes. “Owens,” he said quietly. “He’s gone.”
The others followed his gaze to the air lock door, almost without interest. They had greater problems than Owens to worry about; the man’s usefulness was at an end.
“He didn’t get out the door into the ship,” Renaldo offered. “I would have noticed that. He’s gone Outside.”
“Why?” speculated Collins, and then let it drop. It could not concern them now.
“I guess we’re as ready as we’ll ever be,” Webb said shortly, a tight little smile on his lips.
“Sequence pull,” Collins said.
No man spoke what was in his heart, for there were no words. Even their thoughts were under control; they thought of the problem before them and nothing else.
One by one, the damping control rods were pulled. There were eight of them; Renaldo pulled the last.
Nothing happened. There was a deathly silence.
Collins held his breath. It might be that Malcolm, in the control room, had not followed instructions. Or they themselves had miscalculated. Or—
A tiny, feeble clicking sounded in the room. In the silence, it was almost deafening as each fragile click was magnified in the listeners’ imagination until it became a thundering roar.
“The counters,” whispered Collins. “The counters—”
With a mounting intensity, the clicks increased in both numbers and strength. They beat a tattoo in the chamber, a tattoo that modulated into a smooth whir of power.
Suddenly, there was light—white, blinding light that slashed at the mind and burned into eyeballs.
Someone screamed, then choked it off.
A crushing, terrible force leaped from the floor and smashed the men down. They fell sprawling, gasping for breath, flecks of blood touching the corners of their mouths with crimson. They were pressed into the hard floor—it seemed that they must press through it entirely and out into space to perish.
A humming roar filled the engine room and the great ship, still for numberless years, vibrated with a surge of power and energy.
“Wrong,” gasped Echols hoarsely, his mouth pulled out of shape by the terrible pressure. “What went wrong?”
“Nothing,” coughed Collins, pulling himself along the floor like a snake. “That’s it—don’t you see? Nothing.”
The four men stared at each other then, wincing from the pressure pull and the glare of the white lights. And there, prostrate, in fearful pain, they smiled.
The dead Viking had come back from a nameless grave; now, at last, she lived again.
Captain Kleberg, his iron-gray hair neatly combed, leaned back in his chair and with an expression almost of contentment on his face puffed on a pipe which had seen better days. Mark Langston, Jim McConnell, and Stan Owens challenged their chairs in their usual ways and perhaps drank more of Captain Kleberg’s Scotch than the rule book strictly allowed.
Mark Langston’s leg was throbbing unpleasantly but he ignored it. The murmur of the vibrations, the distant hum of buzzers, the clicking of instruments, the far-off song of the jets—all these were once more blended together into the music he had known. What he had done, and what he had seen, on the dark Viking had washed his bitterness away as though it had never existed. He could look his fellow man in the eye again, with pride. That was one of those things you never discussed with anyone, that stayed bottled up within you always—but that was also one of the things that counted in the long run.
“They never would have had a prayer alone,” Stan Owens said. “Not a prayer.”
“Hardly,” agreed McConnell. “It was almost more than we could manage, even with the power unit from the launch, to clear that drive and rig the rods so they could handle them. They wouldn’t have had as good a chance as a man trying to build a spaceship with a screw driver.”
“From one point of view they were ridiculously overconfident in even trying to get that ship going again,” Owens said thoughtfully, sipping his drink. “That was one reason the captain had to go—he knew too much to try. As long as he lived, the situation was static; if he had remained in command we couldn’t have done a thing.”
The captain. Mark Langston chewed on the stem of his pipe but didn’t light it. He could see the captain now, alone in that great control room, his old eyes alert as he listened to them explaining to him why he had to relinquish his command for the good of his ship. He could hear Owens’ quiet voice showing him how his men put their trust in him as a symbol, and waited for him to save them—waited too long. He could hear the captain’s slow, careful questions. And he could see—the knife, the sudden knife, the knife they had not been able to stop. The captain, sizing up the situation, had taken his own life to give his people the best possible chance. No man had ever given more—
McConnell hung a cigarette at an impossible angle out of his mouth. “You feeling any better?” he asked Owens. “You took quite a beating in there.”
Stan Owens fingered his battered face ruefully. “I didn’t see any other way to handle it,” he said. “Next time I’ll just walk through a meat grinder.”
Stan Owens. Mark Langston looked at his friend. It had all been his plan, his responsibility—and he, more than any other man, had brought life again to the lost Viking. The old captain, his son Collins, Webb, Renaldo, Echols, the strange and wonderful Englishman Malcolm—these would one day be household names, known to every schoolboy from the saga of the first of the interstellar ships. But who would ever hear the name of Stan Owens, save perhaps as a dimly-remembered legend, a ghost-name? Would historians of the future ever figure out what really had happened on that dark ship—and would they correctly identify Owens as the “savage” who had led Collins to the engine room? Would they puzzle unduly over the extra air lock that had not been present when the ship left Earth? Would they ever understand that a switch had been made with Collins’ original prisoner, with Owens taking over with his story of a vanishing air supply to goad the desperate Collins into action?
It had been a masterly plan, considering the time handicaps under which it was devised and executed. The prisoner they had removed from under old Malcolm’s eyes had been closeted and given a strong psychological conditioning—he himself had helped in that—so that he would exert a favorable influence among his people when the ship came to life again.
It would take the Viking thirty years or more to finish her incredible voyage to Capella—but she would get there and find a subtly-directed welcome that would surpass her wildest dreams. Civilization would thrill to her story, and Collins and Webb and Renaldo and Echols would be immortalized in story, picture, and legend.
And Stan Owens? Jim McConnell? Captain Kleberg? Members of the complement of the Wilson Langford, inexcusably late on a standard run from Earth. Except in a few forever-secret records, they would be unknown.
And it did not matter—that was the best part of it.
Mark Langston came back to the present with a start. He glanced at his watch. Almost time to go back on duty again—
“I want you to know,” Jim McConnell was saying, “that I now qualify as an expert on primitive plutonium drives. Me and the boys, we can go roost in a museum in our old age.”
“My only regret,” said Stan Owens, “is that I have not one report I can give for my profession. Those two halves of the Viking, the one oriented around the captain as a symbol of security, the other slipping back into a never-never culture that would delight the boys at the Academy, form just about the most magnificent examples of belief systems under stress that have ever gone unrecorded in the annals of—”
“O.K., O.K.,” interrupted Captain Kleberg. “We surrender.”
Mark Langston dismounted from his chair. “Time for me to be thrown to the wolves,” he announced sadly.
McConnell laughed, waving one of his eternal cigarettes in the air. “A reward for a hero,” he said cheerfully. “For unprecedented valor, we award to you Mrs. Simmons.”
“Thank you,” said Mark Langston. “I am overwhelmed.”
“Good enough for you, boy,” Stan Owens said with a smile. “I’ll always believe it was you who fixed that jam on the air lock—you were trying to turn me into an ice cube, and you deserve a fate worse than death.”
“Coming right up,” Mark Langston assured him. “Dear Mrs. Simmons, the scourge of the spaceways, and that devil’s brood of hers, are hot on the trail now that they’ve found out how late we’re running. Poor Raleigh has been righting her for hours.”
“Time to rush in another cavalry troop,” Captain Kleberg ordered gravely. “Carry on, Langston—chin up.”
Kleberg, Owens, and McConnell applauded wildly as Mark Langston left the room to return to his post. He grinned and limped down the corridor to the lift. One thing was sure—if he was still alive when she came in, he was going to be there to watch the Viking land. With that to look forward to, he could stand a lot.
Whistling a thoroughly bawdy and completely off-key tune, Mark Langston marched in to face Mrs. Simmons and extricate young Raleigh from his peril.
Four weeks passed. A skip lived again, and a son spoke to his father—
Collins stood alone in the midst of the noise and activity of the control room. The white lights beat down on him and even behind his standard dark glasses his eyes hurt. To every man, woman, and child on the ship, he was the captain now—with one exception. To Collins himself, there would always be only one captain.
He walked carefully over to the viewport, forcing his untrained muscles to carry him through the light gravity. It would be years, he knew, before they could stand one-half normal gravity—but they would make it.
Collins stood alone, looking out at the stars his father had loved. Very softly then, so that only he could hear, he whispered a promise:
“We’re coming.”