Deadly Litter
 (1964)*
James White

Contents
	Grapeliner
	The Ideal Captain
	The Lights Outside The Windows 
	Deadly Litter

GRAPE LINER

Chapter One

	Like a silver ghost the ferry rocket slid out of blackness and, briefly transiting the dazzling globe of the five thousand miles distant Earth, checked its motion relative to the assembled passenger units with a short, savage burst of deceleration. Watching from the open airlock of the Engine unit, Captain Woodhill signalled to the space-suited figure of Sister Gallagher beside him and together they launched themselves towards the waiting ferry. Because they were both considerate types who understood and sympathised with the feelings of that rocket's pilot at this moment, they opened their suit motors to full thrust and brought into play every ounce of skill in their possession in an effort to shorten, if only by seconds, the time taken for the trip across.

	A very few minutes later Woodhill hit the side of the ferry rocket with a gentle thump and jetted across to the already opened cargo hatch. Closely followed by Gallagher he entered and made a slow dive nosewards along the narrow well of the ship. A long row of collapsed passenger capsules, suspended like grey, lumpy cocoons in their specially braced and sprung containers, slid past until they came to the inner control-room lock. While they were negotiating this a series of tiny shocks felt through the soles of their boots, told of the arrival of an unloading crew.

	While unfastening his face-plate inside, Woodhill examined the control-room's two occupants.

	Lying in one of the acceleration couches was a young man who must be Cummings, the new Steward. He was fully encased—except for the helmet—in the usual all-plastic spacesuit. His mouth was slack and his eyes dull and unfocussed, and altogether his degree of consciousness was very little better than that of the passengers being unloaded aft. Woodhill sighed.

	He understood the necessity for it, of course. The new Steward would have been thoroughly trained and tested by Earthside psychologists and was perfectly fitted for his life and duties in space. But repeated training flights into space were impossible for physical as well as economic reasons, so that a man called upon to leave his ship and dive across half a mile of nothing towards a living capsule which might be just barely visible in the distance, and do it on his very first time outside a ship, had to be practically saturated with tranquilisers and other psychological cushioning to withstand the shock.

	But the new Steward was Gallagher's problem.

	The other man in the control-room was also young, but conscious—far too conscious, perhaps, of the things going on around and inside him. The ferry's pilot looked pale and strained, and kept pulling himself backwards and forwards along the handrails and radiating anxiety and impatience from every line and feature in his face. Like a man, Woodhill thought wryly as he watched the other's quick, nervous movements, who is trying to keep dry in a rainstorm by running between the drops.

	But there was no way to avoid the radiation which sleeted silent and unfelt through this all-metal ship. The business of moving about was only a pilot's superstition. He might just as well sit down or stand still.

	" 'Night, Lieutenant," Woodhill said to the pilot when he had his face-plate open. "This is the last batch, anything about them we ought to know?"

	" 'Night, sir," said the other. He jerked his head in the direction of the passenger compartment and added, "Girl in there had to have treble the usual dose. Bad case of nerves, apparently."

	"A claustrophobe?" said Woodhill sharply.

	The pilot shook his head. "They checked her medical and psych records and there's nothing like that. She's a biologist joining her husband on Mars. These over-intelligent types scare themselves silly over nothing, the doctor said. He had to give her extra sedation, though ..."

	Sister Gallagher, who was bending over the new man, straightened up and asked for the passenger's name and capsule number. She noted them in the pad strapped to her arm, then resumed chatting quietly and reassuringly to the Steward.

	Woodhill could feel a constant, irregular vibration in the hand which gripped the back of the pilot's acceleration couch, a clear indication that the work of detaching the folded-up passenger capsules from their protective frames was well advanced. And in the direct vision port he could see a pattern of stars drifting slowly towards the edge, which meant that several of the passengers had already been thrown away from the ship and the reaction had caused a slight spin to be set up.

	Now that the conversation had dried up the pilot was beginning to look anxious again.

	"How are they making out with the latest anti-gravity ship?" Woodhill said suddenly. "I get some of the technical publications, of course, but there must be a lot more literature on the subject available on Earth ...?"

	The Captain wanted to know what they were saying and thinking as well as what they were writing about the anti-gravity ships. He would also have liked full, detailed information on such things as the latest-model cars, fashion trends and current slang expressions—with their derivations—as well. But there was never enough time to pump the ferry-pilots as thoroughly as he would have liked, so he had to rely for his information on the few passengers on every trip who were not so overcome by awe of him that their vocal cords went into a state of temporary paralysis.

	Captain Woodhill had a horror of growing old, of slowly slipping into habits of thought and speech which would harden into an impenetrable, inflexible shell around his mind; of becoming a sort of organic tape-recorder which reeled off sections of his life when the proper button was accidentally pushed, whether the pusher wanted to listen or not. He had a theory that if he could keep interested in things and continually adjusting to new situations and experiences—keep exercising his mental equipment, in short, on everything in sight—then no matter what his body did his mind would not grow old.

	The Captain was pushing eighty now, he couldn't afford to relax.

	But the pilot, his mind very obviously elsewhere, was not disposed to chat. Feeling both irritated and sympathetic at the same time, Woodhill fell silent.

	As far back as the days before the first manned satellite had been put up, the radiation Belt had been known. A layer of ionisation whose strongest concentration occurred between 30 degrees North and South Magnetic it extended—depending upon sunspot activity and other factors—at times outwards to a distance of six thousand miles. With a radiation level in the region of 50 Röntgens —and 15 R was considered the maximum safe daily dose allowable for atomic pile technicians and such—a ferry pilot naturally had to take his load through it fast. But getting through the radiation layer quickly enough to avoid a lethal dose was not the last of the pilot's troubles. There were the cosmic rays.

	Direct cosmic radiation, except when encountered constantly over very long periods, was harmless. But the secondary radiation released when one of these fast, superheavy particles struck the metal hull of a ship was a different matter. Yet the effects were unfelt and unseen to the person concerned ... then. It was only when a pilot's children and grandchildren were born that the effects became horribly apparent.

	So that it was not a selfish fear for his own safety which troubled the ferry-pilot, Woodhill knew. It was the thought of the terrible freak he would bring into the world should he exceed the safe time-limit which he was allowed to stay in orbit.

	The Captain suddenly took pity on him. With a gesture which took in the clock, the stars slipping past the viewport and the bumps and vibration being conducted through tje control-room's floor and bulkheads, he said, "This is a very experienced unloading crew. Another few minutes should do it."

	Immediately the other's face cleared. He began to talk so quickly that the words fell over each other. First he apologised for the fact that he might have seemed short and impolite to the Captain and Sister—not realising that ferry-pilots in orbit were always that way—and then went into a perfect babble of small-talk.

	"... And I almost forgot," he continued as he reached Woodhill the box containing the special lightweight copies of the books the Captain had ordered, together with his last-minute instructions from the ground. "The details are inside. You're to watch for an alien spaceship again— supposed to be made of glass, this time! It was Patterson on Ganymede who sent in the report. They're replacing him as soon as possible, of course.

	"That sort of thing happens so often—flying saucer sightings, alien spaceships and the Lord-alone-knows how many other wild imaginings." He hesitated, then added awkwardly, "I suppose it's the loneliness which gets them."

	"Yes," said Woodhill.

	The Captain was thinking that it had been tactful of the pilot to attribute Patterson's insanity to loneliness and not to senile decay. He had known ex-Captain Patterson —ex- because an accident in the airlock had lost him his arm. But Patterson had elected to take over the one-man Jupiter Observatory on Ganymede, and had looked after the equipment there and played chess with anyone within radio distance for a great many years. Even Captains and ex-Captains wear out eventually, however, and the process nearly always started at the brain.

	A glass spaceship, Woodhill thought. Good old Patterson. Mad, of course, yet logical to the end.

	His brief reverie was interrupted by a message from the Steward-in-Charge of the unloading party reporting that they were taking out the last passenger now. Woodhill relayed the news briskly to the others and stood aside to allow Gallagher and the new man to precede him through the lock. The pilot saluted, a courtesy which was optional in free fall conditions, with his eyes jerking sideways towards the clock. The Captain returned it gravely, closed his face-plate and left.

	He was only three hundred yards away when the Ferry's motors flared at minimum thrust, pushing it clear of the passenger assembly preparatory to its piling on maximum deceleration for the return trip. He overtook and passed Gallagher and the new man on their way to one of the Steward's Recreational globes, and a succession of passengers tumbling slowly through space, blissfully unaware of the apparent carelessness with which their precious persons were being tossed around. But they were on a divergent course to his own and soon he was alone, heading for the squat, awkward shape of the Engine unit.

	It resembled a cross between a space-going daddy long-legs and a horribly mutated wasp, the Captain thought. As well as the spidery framework which stretched out seventy feet from around the middle of its hull—which was designed to hold the towing cables free of the tail flare—it was painted in garish, zig-zag stripes of black, red and yellow to warn everyone that this structure was made of metal. This warning did not apply to the Captain, or Gallagher, or his two Engineers. Children and grandchildren, except for those already in existence, would never be a problem to them.

	When Woodhill entered the control-room and climbed out of his suit, Hutton, the Second Engineer, was at the large vision screen coordinating the efforts of the Stewards to prepare the passengers of the fourth ring for sleep. Hutton waited until the Captain was strapped into the couch beside him, then reported, "The cone is in thrust position and hooked on, except for a couple of passengers from the last batch who are being attached to Ring Five now. Rings One to Three are under sedation too, of course, and the passengers in Four—the ones who have been up here the longest, that is—have been fed.

	"Those that could eat," he added, smirking.

	One of Hutton's duties when he wasn't acting as the vessel's radioman or playing canasta with the First Engineer was to instruct the Stewards—especially new men —in their work and duties, and he had the irritating habit of telling the Captain things which Woodhill already knew or could see for himself. He was inclined to garrulity and repetition in his conversation, and altogether he was the sort of person that the Captain was deadly afraid of becoming himself.

	Woodhill said, "How are we for time?"

	"Thrust in twenty-eight minutes," Hutton replied, "Will you talk to Ring Four now?"

	The Captain nodded and pulled the PA microphone from its clip. Then he paused, looking out at his sprawling, nameless command.

Chapter Two

	From outriggers on the Engine unit, four thick and immensely strong cables of woven plastic led out to Ring One, were anchored solidly to it at equal intervals around its circumference, then led on and were simularly connected to the four other rings. Number Two, which was three hundred feet across, was fifty feet wider than One, and Three was wider than Two and so on down the line. Under thrust and in its proper towing position the Engine unit formed the apex of a long, narrow cone along whose open centre the exhaust gases passed harmlessly. The rings themselves were comprised of several thicknesses of plastic tubing—the tough, flexible and springy tubing which, when the rings were dismantled at the termination of thrust and the passengers were permanently awakened, would carry the air supply to the inflated passenger capsules.

	At the moment all the capsules, with the exception of those in Ring Four, were collapsed and drifted at the end of the short cables connecting them to their parent rings, Four towing cables, five gigantic but incredibly thin and springy plastic hoops and literally miles of rope scarcely thicker than a finger which held the capsules to the circumference of those hoops. It seemed to be a fantastically risky method of transporting nearly two hundred passengers across sixty million miles, Woodhill thought; but he knew that this apparently fragile structure would hold under many times the maximum stress which its Engine unit could put upon it.

	The Captain cleared his throat, thumbed the mike switch and began to speak.

	"Good night, ladies and gentlemen, this is the Captain," he said pleasantly. "We shall begin to apply thrust in a short time, but before the Stewards come around with your sedatives there are some things I would like to tell you, even though most of you will have read up on them before deciding to make the trip. They are important things and bear repeating.

	"First," he continued, "the acceleration. This will be maintained at one quarter-G for approximately eight days, with a break of four hours in every twenty-four for meals and so forth. This twenty-hour fast will do you no physical harm because you will be both asleep and resting in a gravity pull much lighter than normal, so that the fuel demands of your bodies will be correspondingly reduced. During the free-fall period of the voyage you will be amazed at how little you will eat.

	"Second; cosmic radiation."

	Woodhill paused to give emphasis to the words which would follow, then went on, "1 can assure you, absolutely and inequivocably, that during the six weeks you will be en route you will have nothing to fear—then or at any later period in your lives. A matter of weeks is much too short a time for the natural radiation to cause mutational changes, and there will be none of the more dangerous secondary radiation present at all. Towing cables, ring structures and your living quarters with all that they contain are all-plastic fabrications.

	"They can do wonderful things with plastics these days ..."

	Woodhill continued with the many times repeated pep-talk with only part of his mind, the rest of his attention being concentrated on the gradually diminishing activity along the rings. One and Two were ready to go; they looked like two slightly imperfect circles of mismatched beads which wavered gently with the tiny, conflicting motions given them by the vessel's personnel. The grey, lumpy cocoons which were the collapsed and folded-up passenger capsules made up the greatest number of beads on the strings, but they were broken at intervals by the huge white pearls of the food and water storage globes. He could also see the Stewards-on-Watch for each ring, wearing their duration suits, hooked on and waiting. Ring Three would be ready in a few minutes, Five would be close behind.

	The Captain thought suddenly that he should cut the talk as short as possible. Twenty minutes wasn't much time for Three and Five to be finished off and all the capsules in Four to be deflated.

	"... And you've had a chance to see how comfortable a twenty-foot living capsule can be. Everything is plastic, but tough. You can punch the transparent material of the bubble and it will simply give with you. It would take a knife, a very sharp knife, to put a hole in it. And all the fittings and the lock mechanisms are plastic, too, no matter how metallic they look. The only piece of metal in the whole construction," Woodhill added with a small laugh, "is the receiver which carries my voice. But don't worry about that. It is miniaturised and the total weight of metal used is less than half an ounce, which is too little to count.

	"One last request," the Captain ended, "co-operate with the Stewards who will shortly be coming to you. Probably some of you feel pretty miserable at the moment. Gravity sickness is bad at first, I know. But it leaves you very quickly, and then you realise why some of us prefer to live and die in space rather than on Earth. Good night."

	As Woodhill switched off Hutton snorted but made no other comment. The Captain gave him an irritated look. It was true that many Captains and Engineers preferred to live and die in space, and not just because their aged and enfeebled bodies could not withstand the three or four G's deceleration necessary to land them on Earth. There had been a time when he could have returned without it killing him, but he had chosen to stay. Only occasionally did he wonder if he had done the right thing.

	There was a sudden thump and a scuffling sound from the hull outside and shortly afterwards Sister Gallagher came in, her suit radiating cold all over the control-room for a few minutes. Unlike the others she retained her spacesuit when she strapped in and only opened her faceplate. If any of the passengers on Four objected to being put to sleep it would be Gallagher who would have to talk them round. She was very good at that.

	Woodhill hoped that there would be no need for her charm to be tested on this occasion; if she had to go out to Ring Four again, the blast-off would be delayed.

	"We'll have to treat our new Steward as a passenger for a while, I'm afraid," she said, her eyes on the activity around Four. "At least until after acceleration. Pity, those men could use some help."

	Gallagher possessed the severe, fragile beauty of an octogenarian nun, Woodhill thought, as he looked across at her; and a gentle, well-bred quavering voice which went with it. But that voice, which had terrorised, browbeaten and inspired the nursing staff of one of Earth's largest teaching hospitals, could be geared to the production of butter and sulphuric acid with equal facility. At the moment it was in neutral.

	"Probably the best thing," Woodhill replied a little absently. "If we can't use him at least he won't be getting in the way."

	He was wondering at what age a hospital retired its Matron. Gallagher had been around for a long time, but would divulge her age to nobody. Hutton swore that she was a hundred at least, and Woodhill thought that that might not be too much of an exaggeration. He could, of course, find out from the Earthside authorities if he bothered to take the trouble. But a direct question like that involving the age of one of his crew might be taken as a hint that the person was becoming inefficient because of that age, and that was definitely not the case with Gallagher. One had to be careful of words and actions, however, for the authorities on Earth were very distrustful of the old men and women who made space-travel and interplanetary colonisation possible.

	There was so much expensive equipment involved, and the borderline between efficiency and the complete irresponsibility of second childhood was very narrow.

	The sight of the clock on Hutton's panel put a sudden end to his musings. Seventeen minutes to go. "Reactor Room," he said briskly, "report, please."

	"Ready to go when you are," said the Chief Engineer in the bass growl he used for a voice. Carrington, who enjoyed being called 'Slim' because he very definitely wasn't, spoke from the control cubicle of the reactor in the stern section. After a moment he added cajolingly, "I could do with a sandwich ..."

	Woodhill acknowledged the first sentence and ignored the second. In several places along the circumference of Ring Four the taut, shining globes that were the inflated living quarters were wrinkling, shrinking and collapsing in a fog of released air. Inside them the passengers—encased in spacesuits as an added protection and with a self-regulating air supply—and the solid plastic fittings were being bundled up together in the thin sheeting of the envelope.

	Gallagher drifted up from her couch and dived gently sternwards. "I can't stand cruelty to animals," she said as she was leaving, "and his poor tape-worm must be starving ..."

	"Ham, please," called Carrington.

	The Chief Engineer did not have an excessive appetite despite his bulk, the Captain knew, but at the moment he was alone and within a few yards of a nuclear reactor. Power piles were considered to be safe gadgets these days, but this one might be the oft-quoted exception. Woodhill knew that lots of people munched sweets, chewed gum or stuffed themselves with various edibles in the most unlikely places and at the oddest moments. In times of stress there was comfort in eating: to certain types of people a full stomach represented security, and that was what Carrington was hungering for at the moment.

	Twelve minutes to go.

	Each globe which was collapsed freed more men for work on the number remaining, and taking into account the assistance being given by stewards from the adjoining rings Three and Five, the Captain had about decided that blast-off would be on time. Not that a few minutes delay would matter greatly—that could be made up by an hour or so's fractional increase in thrust. Only delays counted in the hours or days caused trouble.

	At minus four minutes he saw the last capsule go down and the gradual cessation of activity in the human gnat-swarm around Four. He said, "Mr. Carrington, stand by."

	The voices of the Chief Stewards began coming in: Ring Three reporting all secure and ready for thrust, closely followed by Two, One and Five. As expected Four was last, but still on time.

	"Stand by all," said Woodhill. "Thrust in one minute."

	As always the first thirty seconds dragged and the second galloped, then precisely on the zero second the pressure began. One quarter-G wasn't much, but after weeks of complete weightlessness it felt uncomfortable and vaguely frightening. Woodhill forced the thudding of his heart, the constricted feeling in his chest and the other subjective impressions out of his mind and concentrated on the scene outside.

	So far nothing had pulled loose. All five rings showed a disquieting tendency to warp and buckle where they joined the towing cables, but this was expected and allowed for. The Captain regarded the imposing sight of an inter-planetary passenger vessel under power, and told himself sardonically that it resembled nothing so much as a space-going spider's web hung with mummified flies ...

	The wall-speaker clicked, emitted heavy breathing sounds and climaxed with a voice saying sheepishly, "I fell off ..."

	"Cut!" said Woodhill sharply into the reactor room mike. Their acceleration dropped rapidly to nothing as Carrington shot in the pile's damping rods, and the couch upholstery bounced Woodhill gently against his straps. He returned to the general circuit then and said impatiently, "Who fell off and where?"

	"Melville, sir," replied the voice apologetically. "From Three, sir. We were helping out at Four and when I got back there wasn't much time so I just held on with my hands. That's no trouble under a quarter-G. But when I decided to hook on properly and let go with one hand to do it, the other hand slipped—"

	"How long between the time you fell off and our cutting thrust?" Woodhill interrupted.

	"Uh, about five seconds, sir."

	The Captain did some quick calculations and decided that Melville was dropping behind at a velocity of approximately thirty-five to forty feet per second. Woodhill relaxed; it could have been much worse than that.

	"Open your suit motor to full thrust," the Captain directed. "You should be able to check the fallaway and get back in about fifteen minutes. All right?"

	"I'm sorry, sir," said Melville again, "my fuel is gone and there wasn't time to fit a replacement tank, cither."

	Hot, scathing words rose in Woodhill's throat but got no further than the tip of his tongue. This was, after all, as much his own fault as that of the Steward. If he had not been so insistent on blasting off dead on time then people like Melville would not take risks to avoid the Captain's displeasure. Woodhill cleared his throat angrily and said, "Chief Steward on Five, come in please ..." and began explaining the situation.

	"I overheard everything, sir," the Chief broke in. "I take it you want me to snag him as he goes past?"

	"That's it," said Woodhill. "And hook him on to your own section rather than returning him to Three—that way we'll save a few minutes."

	The Captain watched the tiny figure of Haines, the very experienced senior Steward of Ring Five, swoop down to meet the receding form of Melville, and trailing a line of fog from his compressed air motor. He saw the two men come together and, with the velocity of two bodies to check now, a sudden intensification of the motor's vapour trail. They continued to recede, shrinking to a fuzzy point of light which was just barely visible. Then all at once, like a new comet swinging into the Solar System and dragging its tail behind it, they were coming back.

Chapter Three

	During the fallaway and return the Captain had been thinking of other things: chiefly of the springiness of his towing cables. When they had cut acceleration suddenly the tension of the cables would have thrown the engine unit and the rings towards one another. It was a slow, gentle process, of course, but already Woodhill felt that Ring One was crowding uncomfortably close behind him. And into a structure fabricated entirely of plastic—and because of this metal-free construction, guaranteed free of the mutant-producing secondary radiation—there was drifting a large, all-metal Engine unit.

	He couldn't check the drift with a surge of power because Haines and Melville were almost certainly in line with the exhaust flare, and neither could he apply thrust at right angles without snarling the cables and probably pulling the whole tow inside out. Woodhill was becoming really anxious by the time Haines reported everything hooked on and secure.

	"Nice work," the Captain acknowledged, and as Haines signed off he turned to the reactor room mike. "Take us away, Carrington. But gently, we don't want to jerk anything else loose ...!"

	There were no other mishaps, however. The Captain, as was customary, took the first watch while the others read, studied, gossiped or just moved about the ship getting used to the sensation of weight again. Watching them, Woodhill thought how fragile and feeble and awkward they looked even under a mere one-quarter-G. Weight made a man look and feel his age.

	The first period of acceleration came to an end and again all weight disappeared. Stewards-on-Watch hastily wakened the others who were not and the frantic scramble to waken, feed and put to sleep again their charges began, all within the allotted four hours. Food, water and reassurance moved continuously between the storage globes and the passenger capsules.

	Sometimes a passenger would be too much for a Steward to deal with and the Captain would be called in, and in turn he might have to send Gallagher. These troublesome passengers were usually the nervous, over-imaginative type who would later get a terrific kick out of the voyage, Woodhill knew. Then, after four hours of what seemed like utter chaos, everyone who should be asleep was asleep, the Watch were in position and the second period of acceleration began.

	Sister Gallagher was looking thinner and more tired, the Captain noted: like a nun who has been on a long and rigorous fast. He stood her watch with the excuse that he had some book work to do anyway.

	The end of the second and succeeding periods of thrust differed only in minor details. The small, routine crises were solved by Stewards on the spot without the Captain being asked or even informed about them. But at the conclusion of the eighth period of acceleration the vessel had built up to the velocity required to take them to Mars in the scheduled time of forty-three days. For the next four weeks, until deceleration of the same force and duration was applied to brake them into an orbit around Mars, weightless conditions would prevail.

	Some passengers would like that and some would not —at first.

	"Good Night, ladies and gentlemen, this is the Captain ..."

	The whole aspect of the vessel had changed. All the passenger capsules were inflated now, together with the four outsize globes which would be used as Steward's living and recreational quarters and the big, cigar-shaped envelope to house the air purification and recirculation machinery. All were still firmly anchored to their rings, but the layers of thin piping which formed the towing-ring structure were now practically invisible, hidden like the string inside a rope of outsize pearls. Very soon there would be another change, one for which the more nervous types of passenger should be prepared.

	"... In a few minutes time you will see members of the crew dismantling the rings to which your living capsules have been attached," said Captain Woodhill after a pause timed to gain him the maximum attention from his listeners, "and if you look out at this ring structure you will see that it is composed of several thicknesses of pining clamped together and overlapped for strength. Until deceleration begins four weeks from now this piping will have another purpose, that of bringing you air from the re-purification plant.

	"There is, of course," he went on, "a tanked air supply in each of the capsules. But the air we will pipe to you will be much fresher and more pleasant than the tanked stuff, and as well it will allow us to gradually reduce the pressure inside your living quarters so that in the event of a meteor puncture the pressure-drop will be less sudden and you will have lots of time to get into a suit ..."

	Woodhill wanted to stress the rule about always sleeping inside a spacesuit at that point. It was very easy to fall asleep in weightless conditions, and a man or woman waking to the ghastly realisation that his or her air was rushing away into space was almost certainly a goner— their brains might react quick enough but not their sleep-drugged and half-conscious bodies. It was a strict rule, therefore, that everyone slept inside a spacesuit with only the face-plate open. But he decided to wait a little while: the passengers were too newly awakened to be tired just yet, and it was bad policy to start scaring them with the meteor-puncture bogey so soon.

	"... Inside your quarters," the Captain continued pleasantly, "you will find thin plastic sheeting in various shapes and colours. These can be used to divide up your globes into compartments, for purposes of privacy or for cutting out unwanted light when you want to sleep. The Stewards will advise you on how to use these, but when you get the hang of them I expect everyone will have their own ideas for interior decoration.

	"That is all for the moment," Woodhill ended, "I hope you all settle down quickly and comfortably, and that you have an enjoyable trip. Good night."

	While he had been speaking the breakdown of Ring One had already begun. The thick, double piping it contained was disconnected, straightened and reconnected into a long, thin stem which was manoeuvered carefully into the centre of the hollow cone formed by the four remaining rings. Three men towing the air-plant container arrived and attached the big cigar shape to the end of the stem nearest the Captain, then more men flew out along it to fit couplings at six-yard intervals. The other rings were beginning to break by now and thinner sections of double piping were being brought to the main stem and coupled up. Couplings and piping both were numbered and colour-coded for quick assembly, and soon the stem had sprouted a small forest of subsidiary air pipes, so much so that it resembled a denuded pine tree. Stewards of the technical section moved along the stem and branches checking the joins and laying communications cable.

	During all this activity the passenger globes had been left to drift at the end of long safety lines which were connected now to one of the main towing cables. As the rings to which they had been attached dissolved from around them they began to break their circular formation. One or two of them floated right away from the main group and the Steward-on-Watch had to go out to calm the agitated passengers concerned by pointing reassuringly to the safety line. When they refused to be thus reassured he got behind them and, using his compressed air motor, gave their globes a gentle push back in the direction of the main group.

	"Carrington, Hutton," said the Captain suddenly. "Get the Weed out and throw it across to them, they're about ready for it now."

	The Weed was a specialised strain of Martian plant life which could synthesise a truly amazing quantity of oxygen from a roughly equal amount of carbon dioxide. It grew fast and flourished so long as the CO2 kept coming but tended to die of self-strangulation in its own oxygen if the supply diminished. Woodhill watched the two engineers climb into suits and take a container of frozen Weed into the airlock for tossing out. The men working around the stem would snag it as it drifted past.

	The four Steward's globes had been attached to the stem, with the food and water storage tanks beside them for handiness in serving meals. One by one the passenger globes were brought in and attached to the pipes which sprouted from the main air artery, and gradually the vessel took on the form so beloved by the travel poster illustrators.

	Captain Woodhill had watched this metamorphosis take place many times. First the overloaded spider-web which was the towing cone, then the transition period when the inflated capsules hung like five straggly ropes of pearls, and then this. It was beautiful and it possessed a random symmetry that was indescribable, the Captain thought as he looked out at his command which now hung like a bunch of silvery grapes against the stars.

	Things went smoothly for several watches after that. The passengers settled down nicely, and some of them began asking the Stewards for instruction in short-range suit navigation so that they could visit nodding acquaintances—nodding and waving and sticking the tongue out were about the only methods of communication between the globes at the beginning of a voyage—a few yards away, which was a very promising sign indeed. Then a small spot of trouble developed.

	At least, Woodhill thought it small. Gallagher had other ideas.

	"... I told her how it was affecting the other passengers around her," the Sister expostulated, after giving the facts of the case in a slightly quieter tone. "And the Stewards, too. That new man is useless for anything every time he comes within fifty feet of her globe. I told her how many married men we have aboard, and explained that when she attracts more than her fair share of Steward attention it means that the other passengers get less, which creates bad feeling and eventually ruins a trip for everyone."

	Gallagher took a deep breath, then plunged ahead.

	"She said she understood all that and she didn't want to cause trouble, but that where she came from there was very little sun. It's glorious out here, she says, and she's sun-starved. I told her she could sunbathe all she wanted but to use the screens inside her globe. She said she would, but didn't.

	"She's nothing but a hussy! A shameless exhibitionist who—"

	The Captain held a hand up to quell the tirade, then said, "Most of the men and Stewards are mature people, so that I doubt if there would be any trouble. But there's still a very small chance that ..." He paused thoughtfully, then shook his head. "I suppose we might as well crack down at the beginning. Do you want me to talk to her?"

	Sister Gallagher shook her head. "She would only say 'yes' to everything and carry on as before ..." 

	"Well, then?"

	"What is our position at the moment, sir?" said Gallagher, apparently going off at a tangent.

	Woodhill looked at her sharply, "The present position of Mars makes it necessary for us to approach the Sun almost to within the orbit of Venus before curving outwards again. Our nearest approach will be in eighteen hours—which reminds me, I'll have to issue warnings about over-exposure to the increased ultra-violet ..." He stopped, coughed, then added, "I won't have it, Sister. There would be the danger of a serious heatstroke."

	"No, sir," Gallagher said firmly. "1 promise I won't let it go that far. One of the Stewards will fix her receiver for me so she won't hear your exposure warning, that's all. You won't even know about it, officially."

	Woodhill sighed. "All right," he agreed, "but tell me how it goes."

	Shortly afterwards the Captain began the long job of making the rounds of his ship, and while inspecting the enormous mass of technical equipment and examining the Stewards in their fitness to perform their duties he managed to work in visits to passengers. His aim in this was to encourage as many of them as possible to leave their capsules and learn the rudiments of spaccsuit manoeuvring so that travel around and visiting within the ship would be possible for them. The interior of a twenty-foot sphere—even one that was a semi-transparent bubble hanging in interplanetary space—could become very boring to the inhabitant, especially when the weight allowance gave them only two pounds of reading material.

	The Captain would glide up to the passenger sphere, radio for permission to enter, then wriggle through the tiny airlock. Once inside he would exchange the greeting which had become traditional in a media where there was no day—the passenger a little awkwardly and himself with the ease of long usage. He would chat for a while before leaving, but the passenger would have very little to say on that first encounter with him.

	He could see the reason for that in their eyes, in the looks which were a nice mixture of awe and pure inquisitiveness. Awe at this frail, incredibly wasted and old-looking man who had not set foot on a planet or breathed other than repurified air for several decades, who would die helplessly of a ruptured heart and burst arteries within minutes of being exposed to an Earth-normal gravity, yet whose wasted muscles possessed a degree of control and co-ordination in weightless conditions which had to be seen to be believed. And there was, too, the fact that in the absence of gravity the human body lived longer, much longer.

	The curiosity, of course, was regarding the reason which had brought or driven him to space in the first place.

	In the past he had sometimes satisfied their curiosity, telling them of the car accident which had killed his wife and youngest son. And how the other two married children had blamed him for it and made his life a misery. But the passenger concerned invariably thought that the Captain was looking for sympathy, which he wasn't, and Woodhill had stopped letting his silvery locks down in this fashion.

	Sometimes he would look out at his command, at the weird complex of globes and plumbing and human life which was in his charge, and muse wryly, And they accused me of being too old to handle a car ...!

	His tour of inspection was nearly completed when the Captain began to notice a new word appearing in the lighthearted, slangy conversation of his Stewards. Curious, he asked Sister about it.

	"What or who is Minnehaha?"

	"Minnehaha, Laughing Water ..." began Gallagher, then: "Oh, hang it, I forget how it goes now. It's a poem called 'Hiawatha,' about Indians ..."

	Suddenly it clicked. Woodhill said, "You mean our one-woman girly show?"

	Gallagher nodded. "She'll stay decently covered up from now on if I know anything. I'm attending her regularly to spread that anti-UV goo on her. It's very good stuff even if I do slap it on a bit urgently." She chuckled softly and added, "A lovely tomato colour, she is."

	In reply the Captain made a non-committal sound designed to give the impression that while he was grateful that the problem was disposed of he did not altogether approve of the manner of its solution. Gallagher left, not seeming to worry too much whether the Captain approved of her methods or not.

Chapter Four

	The halfway point in the trip arrived and passed, marked by gatherings of the passengers and Stewards not on duty in the four big spheres used by the crew as living quarters. The interiors of the globes resembled a badly overcrowded goldfish bowl, the Captain thought, but the strangeness of being able to meet and talk to a whole lot of people at once—something the passengers had been unable to do since leaving Earth—more than compensated them for any discomfort they suffered from the frequent kicks and collisions. A game of follow-the-leader around and through the ship, performed by the passengers who had been taking instruction in space-suit handling, rounded off the occasion. This was an hilarious success from the spectators' point of view, but what the Steward-instructors thought of the debacle was not mentioned aloud—especially to those passengers who had got themselves inextricably tangled up in the rigging.

	So that the "Bunch of Gripes" as Gallagher called them would be under constant supervision by the officer on watch in the control room, the engine unit had been rotated so that its bows pointed back towards the assemblage. Rearview TV could have been used instead and without moving the ship, but this was subject to interference from the Sun and was not dependable. Hurtling silently tail-first now, and still connected loosely to the rest of the ship by the four towing cables, the engine unit maintained a constant radar sweep astern.

	And got a blip where no blip had a right to be.

	"... It seems to be a small, dense body," Hutton, who was on watch, reported, "and not another bunch of grapes. But the course and speed rule out its being a meteor or small asteroid with an eccentric orbit. If I hadn't heard that the last one had dropped into the South Atlantic I'd say somebody was testing an anti-gravity ship ..."

	Looking at the trace which was drifting slowly across the screen, Woodhill was inclined to agree with Hutton. Those anti-G ships, mankillers though they were, could be built much more cheaply than the reaction-propelled type, so that it was quite possible that another had been constructed since the last failure. And if it was 'way out here then it had been the most successful yet.

	The thought made him vaguely uneasy. On Earth most people believed that the anti-G vessels would replace the ships currently in use inside the next twenty years or so. Requiring very little metal in their construction they could be designed to avoid the secondary radiation hazard, and they could accomplish in a few days the same trip which it was taking Woodhill's ship six weeks to do. They would simply reverse the gravitic attraction of the home planet and fall rapidly away from Earth, at a constantly increasing velocity, until they began to fall towards the planet which was their destination.

	But antigravity was a cranky business at the moment, and its ships were just as prone to fall down as up. When people wanted to travel safely in space they used grapes, the Captain told himself smugly; grapes got you there.

	"Is it in telescopic range?" Woodhill asked suddenly. He had never seen one of the new ships.

	Hutton's face twisted into the pained, slightly harrassed expression he registered when a simple question demanded a complicated answer. He said, "We're overhauling it fast, but its lateral velocity with respect to us is so great that it will be out of sight to starboard by the time we draw level. I'd say its nearest point of approach will be in about twelve minutes time, but you'll have to have very good eyes to see details."

	"We'll try anyway," said Woodhill. He had the keenest pair of eyes on the ship.

	While Hutton aligned the telescope with the radar bearing the Captain tried to raise the other ship on the radio. He was still trying when there was a surprised grunt from the engineer. He hurried back to the telescope.

	There was no atmospheric or other forms of distortion in space so that very high magnification could be used. Looking at the tiny, glittering image centred in the instrument's field the Captain thought that a blind man could see this thing, whatever it was. He looked several times, moving his eyes to the side several times to rest them, then moved across to the intercom.

	"Carrington, come up here a minute."

	His hands had begun to shake.

	The First Engineer arrived and stared for several minutes through the eye-piece. Hutton had another look, then Carrington again. Woodhill said, "Well?"

	"Th—the radar indicates a small body, about half the mass of the engine unit here," Hutton stammered. "It's very bright, I ... I don't know ..."

	"Carrington?"

	The engineer hesitated, then said briskly, "Course and velocity are wrong for a body in a natural orbit around the Sun. I seem to see a fine fuzz around the image that could be towing booms or radio antennae, but my eyes weren't good enough to resolve it and it might have been my mind playing tricks with my vision because I know that it can't be a natural body.

	"The albedo is very high. It must be a nearly perfect reflector, like ice or glass ..."

	The Captain lost track of what Carrington was saying after that. He was wondering what it would be like to lose his command, to be banished to some lonely observation satellite where he would die or go mad talking to himself. But a job like that might be too much to hope for. It required an old man with an alert brain—old because those observation posts were full of metal equipment and the secondary radiation did not bother the aged. More likely he would be sent to that dome he had heard about on the Moon with the other 'retired' Captains and Engineers whose minds had begun to go or who had seen things.

	He was thinking about Patterson.

	It would be so easy to side-step the whole problem, too. Just make a brief entry in the log regarding the sighting of a peculiar object and leave it at that. Carrington and Hutton would back him up to that extent, he knew, and the authorities could not query something which had been sighted both on radar and by telescope by three separate people.

	But the Captain's eyes were very good; he had seen much more than the two engineers and he considered it his duty to report it.

	And if certain people drew the wrong conclusions from his report ... Well, he had always liked Patterson and they would be company for each other on the Moon.

	"Hutton!" he said abruptly. "Leave the telescope and return to your panel, you're supposed to be on watch anyway. I want you to send this . • ." He began to write quickly on a message pad, crumpled the first two attempts and tossed them away as being improperly worded, then handed Hutton the third. "Get that off at once and repeat until acknowledged."

	The Second Engineer began to scan the message. He looked suddenly frightened. "But ... but I didn't see anything like this! There was just a bright spot in the telescope and a blip on the ... I didn't see anything ...!"

	You stupid, frightened old man, thought Woodhill furiously, momentarily forgetting that he was both old and frightened himself. Aloud he said. "You will not, either of you, be required to lend verbal support to my hallucinations, if that is what they prove to be. Now get the message off."

	Hutton flushed at the anger in the Captain's voice and Carrington, who had been reading over the Second's shoulder, gave Woodhill a long, thoughtful look. Finally he said, "If it should be what you think it is ..."

	Without completing the sentence Carrington kicked his hulking body back in the direction of the reactor room.

	Because of its intense brightness the object remained visible for several minutes longer than expected, but eventually it was gone and the Captain returned to watching it on the radar screen. Behind him the Second Engineer was repeating the message as ordered, but in tones which disassociated himself from the contents. Woodhill had tried to make the message sound as concise, serious and sane as possible. But he could not help remembering that the copy of Patterson's report from Ganymede had sounded that way, too, and they were replacing Patterson.

	Now that it was gone from view Woodhill found himself wondering what exactly it was that he had seen. It had not been anything positive, he knew; he was sure only that the object resembled none of the current types of space-vessel, either in use or of the experimental anti-G type. Which left only one other possibility. And if the thing was of extra-terrestrial origin and a product of intelligence then people should be told about it, even if it was only a derelict falling endlessly through space whose course happened to intersect the Solar System ...

	A sudden, violent pattern of interference swept across the radar screen, halting the Captain's thoughts dead in their tracks. As he watched, the interference died but did not disappear entirely; the blip kept swelling and shrinking and wobbling all over the screen. He stepped up the sweep rate in an effort to increase definition, but without effect. Woodhill began to suspect that the object itself might be producing the interference, and if that was the case ...

	The Captain returned quickly to the telescope, and was not too surprised to find that the object was back in sight. He reached for the public address mike.

	"Good night, ladies and gentlemen, this is the Captain," he said, and began lying plausibly. "During every voyage we try to spring a little surprise item which usually takes the form of an emergency drill, and this is it. Whether you are awake, asleep or whatever, I want every one of you into spacesuits within the next ten minutes. When this is done you must stay inside your globes and await further instructions ..."

	Despite his efforts to retain a pleasant, half-joking tone his voice became suddenly harsh as he went on, "This applies also to all Stewards and Chief Stewards, who will immediately go to the assistance of the passengers in their charge who may not be able to manage their suits alone. You have ten minutes, move!"

	To the suddenly bewildered Hutton he snapped, "That applies to us, too. Tell Carrington."

	Five minutes later, encased in his suit but helmetless, Woodhill returned to the telescope. The object seemed to have gone. He searched carefully, sweeping the instrument back and forth in infinitesimal arcs so as to be certain of not missing it. The radar image was still too unsteady to give him a helpful bearing, and he had to break off several times to answer Chief Stewards wanting to know what was going on. He told them what he thought was going on and sent them to check again on the safety of their passengers, then returned to the 'scope.

	Suddenly he saw it pop into the field of view, appearing so big and close because of the high magnification that it made him gasp. He turned quickly and took the couch beside Hutton.

	"Rear vision screens, quickly!"

	Hutton gave a startled yelp as the alien spaceship flickered onto his screen. It was close, Woodhill thought fearfully, less than a mile away and looking as though it was bent on ramming them up the exhaust pipe. Head on like this it was hard to see details, but the hull seemed to be a semitransparent glass-like substance from which grew a fine, sparse fuzz of thin spikes, and at more infrequent intervals around the hull tripods of thicker piping surmounted by what looked like bowl reflectors. While his hands shook and the cold sweat began to trickle down his back a cooler, more objective part of Woodhill's mind noted that the alien's vessel seemed to be nonmetallic, which could mean that they feared radiation as much as the humans did, and that those reflectors looked remarkably like pictures he had seen of the gravity repulsion, bowls used on anti-G ships ...

	A harsh babble erupted from the speaker grill as everyone in the ship apparently started talking at once. The Captain yelled, "Quiet! I can see it, we can all see it! Stop tying up this channel telling us about it, and keep it clear for orders from myself. Understood? No incoming messages unless there's a grave emergency—"

	"It's going to hit!" shouted Hutton in terror.

	"No!" said Woodhill sharply. "Read the time and distance graduations on your screen. It'll be close but it won't hit us—"

	"Look ...!"

	Two of the six reflector bowls which encircled the waist of the alien ship had begun to glow red, and to centre themselves on the engine unit. Woodhill felt a shudder run through the whole ship and saw a blur of motion beside him as Mutton's hand darted towards the emergency thrust button. "Wait!" he called, but too late.

	It took all of three seconds to contact Carrington and countermand Hutton's signal, and by that time the engine unit was moving at nearly fifty feet per second, straight towards the centre of the passenger globes ...

	"Did you see that?" cried Hutton excitedly. "I nearly got him with our tail flare! That shook him, I bet—"

	"Shut up!" said Woodhill, then on the crew circuit: "Attention! We have been obliged to apply thrust for three seconds to avoid collision with the alien ..." He shot a withering glance at Hutton. "... and we are falling back on the passenger assembly. We can't apply thrust at right angles to avoid you because there isn't time for the gyros to swing the ship. So listen carefully, here is what you must do ..."

	The air-plant installation was to be disconnected from the main stem, also the food and water storage globes and the big crew spheres, and were to be held only by their long safety lines. Every available Steward was to go along the stem disconnecting the rigid air-supply piping which held the passenger globes to it, and push them out to the limits of their safety lines also. There would be a lot of air lost but that could not be helped, and at the earliest opportunity the air purifying installation must be stuffed with enough passengers to keep it from dying from lack of CO2.

	If the engine unit couldn't take evasive action then the globes would have to disperse to avoid it ... A strangled sound from Hutton made the Captain look round quickly. The alien vessel had drawn level with them and was pulling slowly ahead, four of its bowl reflectors glowing red and swinging about in apparently aimless fashion. Maybe that three-second dose of radiation from their tail flare had done some damage, the Captain thought. He was surprised how small the alien ship looked, too, and how fragile the projecting tripods seemed. At this close range he could see that the spikes covering its hull had their points capped by a tiny ball. He had to force himself to drag his attention away and back to his passenger globes.

Chapter Five

	It was a fantastic, awe-inspiring sight. The globes were opening out, bursting away from what would have been the point of collision and trailing the severed air-lines behind them. Because of safety valves inside the spheres they remained inflated, but the residual air in the lines together with that in the disconnected main stem burst out as an irregular, sparkling mist which sent ghostly pseudo-pods spurting out to the hurrying globes and beyond. The effect was of some weird and monstrous flower opening up to engulf them.

	The Captain knew that it did not represent a threat, but the aliens had no such comforting knowledge.

	He saw the glittering, transparent ship making frantic efforts to sheer off. But the passenger globes were still spreading out; they had not reached the Limits of their safety lines yet. The reflector bowls around the ship glowed red and whipped from side to side, and a sudden, violent wind seemed to shake the cluster of globes directly ahead of it. Yet even with the passenger spheres still spreading out Woodhill thought that it might have avoided collision, if it had not been for the towing cables.

	The increased slack on the towing cables caused by the engine unit falling back on its tow had sent them snaking and coiling all over the place, and those cables were of metallic hardness and strength. The alien ship blundered suddenly into one which tore off three of the tripod and bowl assemblies together with half a dozen of the shorter spikes. From the stumps a (hick, whitish fluid bubbled and hardened and the ship spun slowly end over end. It blundered into a passenger globe, ripping the thin plastic wall to shreds with its spikes. Air spurted out, hazing the details, but the Captain saw the ruptured sphere held to (he alien's hull momentarily before drifting off. Another collision and another globe burst in a shining cloud of air, but this one was dragged behind the ship by its safety line which had become entangled in one of the tripods.

	Still spinning the alien blundered into another globe's safety line, then another and another until it was inextricably tangled up in them. Reflector bowls, the only two left in operable condition, apparently, whipped about furiously for several seconds then became still. The ship came to a halt, with four inflated globes and the one collapsed and tragic remnant which it had destroyed trailing from it by their safety lines.

	"Gyros," said the Captain urgently. "And thrust. Three and a half seconds at one-quarter-G. Get us back here!"

	But it took many agonisingly slow minutes for the engine unit's gyros to make the ship swap ends, and more for its carefully timed period of thrust to bring it back into the vicinity of the globes. Woodhill's quick thinking in ordering the globes to scatter had kept them from colliding or being contaminated with the engine unit's still radioactive tail, but something which was much worse had happened as a result of it. Listening to the babble over the general and Steward's circuits he felt sick.

	This was too much for an old man to handle, he told himself wretchedly. His control of the present situation was nil, his effectiveness a zero quantity.

	The globes had spread out to the limits of their interconnected safety lines, been jerked to a halt and were already beginning to drift slowly together again. Sense and purpose had replaced the panic in the orders being shouted over the suit radios, and the Stewards began to operate as the highly trained and coordinated body that they were. Certain jobs just had to be done, and the fact that an alien spaceship was in their midst capable of negating all their efforts in a matter of seconds was not allowed to make any difference. If there was to be any safety at all it lay in flight, but before there could be any movement at all the towing rings had to be reformed.

	The only wild conversation in evidence now, the Captain noted, was that which referred to the passengers whose globes were entangled with the alien ship and bobbed within a few yards of it. The people inside those globes were visibly alive but definitely not safe—there was movement, too, from the ruptured globe, proving that its occupant had got into his suit in time and had survived the collision—and he would have to be evacuated at once before the alien decided to do something else.

	"... Go to that globe nearest to the alien ship's stern first," a voice, which the Captain recognised as belonging to Chief Steward Haines, was urging, "and bring the passenger out. Talk him into it if you can, slug him if necessary, but work fast. And be careful of that ship ..."

	"I will," came the reply in a voice thick with rage. "But if I had my way I'd go into that ship and tear every murdering, lousy alien apart."

	Woodhill saw a tiny figure in a spacesuit dart towards the alien ship and approach to within fifty yards. Then it happened. A thin, white line, perhaps ten feet long, detached itself from the alien ship and shot like an arrow towards the Stewards. It hit, and splashed.

	There was a panicky cry from the speaker grill.

	"They've hit me with something! I ... I can't move ...!

	"Thompson! Melville!" Haines voice rapped out. "Go after him. And take evasive action. Plenty of it, unless you want whatever that was to happen to you ..."

	Two more figures moved, ducking and weaving madly, towards the alien—and were speared by arrows of white which splashed against their suits and froze. Other men followed and met the same fate despite their ducking, feinting and wild acrobatics. The alien seemed to know exactly what they were going to do and how exactly they intended to dodge before they did it: reaction preceded action rather than following it. Seeing with what calm deliberation and lack of fuss the men were hit, and remembering back to the time when the panicky Hutton had reached for the emergency thrust button, and the alien ship had used the time-lag between the activation of the control and the seconds-later commencement of thrust to duck away from their tail flare, Woodhill came to a very frightening conclusion. The aliens had telepathy.

	When the eighth man had been hit the Captain decided that it was high time he resumed his responsibilities.

	"Haines! The Captain here. Call off all attempts to rescue those passengers, at least for the present. And those men who have copped it—wait until they drift well past the alien before picking them up, and tell the men bringing them in to make a wide circle around that ship. I'd say that the range of that white stuff is from fifty to seventy yards, so tell them to act accordingly. And where is Sister Gallagher?"

	"Yes, sir," said Haines, sounding relieved at being able to shift the load, and: "I think Sister is in SG2."

	At the back of his mind the Captain had been very worried over the safety of Gallagher. It was a relief for him to know that she was in one of the steward's globes. He said, "Very well, take the casualties there. And tell Sister I'd like a report on them as quickly as possible."

	The Captain went to the direct vision port and focussed a pair of binoculars on the alien ship. He examined the shining, glass-like structure closely, trying to draw some solid, accurate conclusions for the basis of future actions. He was trying to look and think ahead—and succeeding. In the process he was frightening himself half to death.

	He was running out of time, fast.

	"Gallagher here," said the 'speaker grill suddenly. "I've looked at those men, sir. The white substance was shot at them from those short spikes around the alien hull—they shoot out a jet of it which spreads and hardens on contact, the men say. The outside of their suits is covered with a thin, hard shell which makes it impossible to remove them. The stuff is so hard that nothing we have here will make a mark on it, though I've no doubt the heavy cutting tools in the machine shop ..." She left the sentence dangling.

	That was out, the Captain thought grimly, except as a last extremity. Bringing a young man into the repair shop of the all-metal engine unit, to undergo perhaps several hours of secondary radiation while he was being cut free ...

	But Gallagher was speaking again.

	"With an impenetrable shell covering most of the joins in their suits we'll have our work cut out for us simply keeping the men supplied with air—and even that, I might add, would be impossible if we go to towing stations. And naturally, we can't get food or water to them, so there isn't much time to come up with the answer."

	You don't know the half of it, thought Woodhill.

	The alien ship was small, and through its transparent hull he could see two dark, blurred figures whose size and mass was at least that of a human, so that Woodhill estimated their food requirement to be roughly similar as regards volume. Which meant, considering the small storage space available within it, that the vessel was simply a scout for some larger ship. Scout-ships could be expected to carry radios, which in turn meant that the mother ship must now be rushing to the aid of its distressed and beleaguered daughter. When it arrived it could be expected to be in a hurry and mad and prone to jump to wrong conclusions.

	So that taking up towing formation—and in the process sacrificing the lives of the men frozen inside their space-suits—and haring out of here at their snail-like quarter-G would be useless as a method of escaping a ship whose scouts had the gravity drive. Whatever was going to happen would occur within a few hours, or perhaps minutes, from now, and the answer would have to be ready then.

	It had to be the right answer, too. Anything else and at very least the passengers and crew of his command would die, and at most he might involve Earth in an interstellar war which would be the end of his race. He had to be very, very careful. Wrong thinking now could cause ...

	His mind became a churning mass of horrible effects which could arise from simple, innocent causes. Woodhill forced them into the background and spoke harshly:

	"Haines, we've got to attack that alien ship! I want every Steward and as many passengers as will volunteer.

	Start getting things organised right away. I've something in the engine unit here which should help, but more about that later."

	"Yes, sir!" said Haines, angrily enthusiastic. Other comments came through the general and crew circuits and were merged into a low, animal sound of rage and approval. Woodhill was glad the attack had popular support: it was imperative for the men to be in this frame of mind if his plan was to succeed—for the time being, that was.

	"I'll call you back," said the Captain, and broke contact.

Chapter Six

	The plan he had in mind was a desperate gamble, its success depending on the correctness of dozens of assumptions he had made from watching the alien ship and the recent activity around it, and if any single one of them proved wrong then his plan was a failure. Take the telepathy, for instance. If the aliens could and were reading his mind at the moment then he might just as well give up. But he was staking everything on the hope that the background noise from a large number of strange minds was confusing the aliens, that and the fact that there were strong indications that the alien telepathy was limited in range.

	Because the white stuff sent against the men could have been used effectively over much greater distances than fifty yards, but it had not been used beyond that range. Which could mean that it was only within that distance that the aliens could begin reading human minds well enough to know how they were going to duck.

	And the white stuff itself. Close examination through the binoculars had shown that there was a small nozzle mounted on a universal pivot fitted to the end of every 'spike.' The white substance hardened quickly and became transparent. Was it too much to suppose that the free-swinging nozzle arrangement was a meteor protection device, that its purpose was to replace and seal off any portion of the ship's hull which might be damaged. The fact that the aliens had turned them outwards and used them as a weapon only proved that the humans did not hold a monopoly on adaptiveness.

	But the most promising and hopeful fact of all was that nowhere on the whole surface of the alien hull or among the mechanisms visible inside it was there a trace of an airlock.

	However, there was no use going over all this in his mind again, the Captain told himself firmly. It was time to act.

	"Carrington, listen in on this, then come to the control-room, please," he said into the intercom. Then over the Steward's circuit; "Come in Haines. Now listen carefully. In a few minutes time I'll be throwing you some stuff in three-foot containers. These are plastic, so there is no radiation hazard, but they have to be handled gently. Contents are a new type of acid which is being carried in the engine unit because of the danger of it getting loose in the cargo sphere. To use them you'll have to build up speed and direction with your suit motors towards the alien—dive-bomb them, in other words. Make sure that the nozzle end hits first, it's very fragile and should break on contact. We'll work out the plan of attack later, but I want that ship clobbered ..."

	He could hear the excited, angry voices making a harsh rasp as they merged. Woodhill knew he was supplying a need, a magic wand which would open up the alien ship. They were too worked up to ask questions—such as what if the acid did not penetrate, or how come such a powerful acid was being stored in a plastic container ...

	"... And Haines, please ask Sister Gallagher to come to the engine unit immediately."

	When Carrington arrived he said, "I want you and Hutton here to throw those containers in D compartment across to SG2. But I want them painted first. Spray them a nice orange colour, or some other bright, dangerous-looking shade. The vacuum will have them dry before they arrive. I don't want anyone to know that they are empty air tanks ..."

	The two engineers began moving the containers to the airlock, taking turns at rotating them under the sprayer. As they were finishing, Gallagher came in.

	"Sister," he said briskly, "I want to observe the coming operation from close range and need a covering party—an unarmed covering party. You've been with Haines and seen the passengers who have volunteered for the attack. I want the names of five or six of them who arc the most nervous, impressionable and over-imaginative. You've met them all during the voyage and should know—"

	"But that's stupid! Why not take Haines and a couple of the senior Stewards ...?" She broke off, then ended shrilly, "Oh, all right, all right! You needn't look at me like that. If that's the way you want to do it I can give you the names. But I can't ..."

	Sister was badly frazzled, the Captain thought. Yet if he told her everything, he knew that she would feel much worse. Woodhill finished noting down the names and said, "I'm leaving now. You three stay here and on no account mention anything I have said recently to the crew or passengers, or anything you may deduce from what I have said. Don't even talk about it among yourselves. If possible don't even think about it. You don't know who might be listening ..."

	The Captain knew that he left them firmly convinced that he had well and truly flipped his lid, but he was hoping that the habit of discipline would persist long enough for his plan to be carried through.

	Under the Captain's direction the Stewards and volunteer passengers formed a wide globe around the alien and began to close in gingerly. Most of them carried the brightly painted cylinders which supposedly contained acid, and although they were now all within one hundred yards of the ship and all presumably thinking hard about the purpose of the cylinders, none of the white goo had been sent against them. This proved fairly conclusively, Woodhill thought, that the aliens' telepathic range was decidedly limited. He began to move towards the gap in the englobing force which had been left for the passage of himself and his covering party.

	Because the party was there to give him mental rather than physical courage, Woodhill kept up a low, nervous How of conversation, doing his best to scare the six men around him silly. In order to control the attack the Captain would have to be close to the alien ship, and a mind which was radiating the plan of attack as strongly as he would have to do would stand out like a beacon to the beings inside the ship. And if they read his mind before he wanted them to, especially with this mob of humans swarming around their vessel they would almost certainly jump to the wrong conclusions again. It was quite possible that his plan might just as well have been accomplished by his coming alone and unarmed to the alien ship. But the chances were that the aliens were so jumpy that they would simply have plastered him with their sealing compound, and that would have been that. On the whole this way was probably belter.

	The Captain could not shield his thoughts, but he could provide for himself an obscuring cover of frightened, confused and strongly radiating minds which would swamp out the quieter, more stable signals coming from himself. That was another assumption he hoped was correct. If it was, however, it meant that his own safety and degree of concealment was in direct proportion to the amount of funk he could induce in his covering party.

	That was why he talked constantly in a nervous, jerky voice about the aliens, wondering aloud what they were like, what they would do if they got to a passenger and similar disquieting subjects. He interspersed this scarifying monologue with orders to the attackers.

	"Haines," he said sharply, "send in a few men twenty or thirty yards, and tell them to be ready to duck out again quick. And listen, on no account are they to release their acid bombs—"

	"But that's ...!" Haines choked back words that would have been sheerest mutiny, breathed hard into his suit mike, then protested, "Shouldn't we consider the element of surprise and hit them first time with everything ...?"

	"Do it my way," Woodhill rasped. To the men beside him he said, "... And it must be pretty terrible inside those frozen-over suits. Imagine being able to see and hear your friends but never able to touch them. That's if you're lucky and your face-plate can be opened for food and drink. But suppose it wasn't and a dollop of that stuff landed on your air tank supply line. They wouldn't be able to change the tank and after a bit when the air ran out ..."

	Three figures trailing lines of fog from their compressed air motors darted towards the ship, and suddenly all hell broke loose. Woodhill knew what had happened—had been expecting it, as a matter of fact. With the entry of the men into telepathic range the aliens knew—or thought they knew—what the brightly painted cylinders were for. Thin lines of white speared out from practically every projector in the ship, not only towards the three men but aimed at every man in the vicinity who carried one of them. Two of the men headed towards the ship were hit and spun away, in awkward, frozen postures, to be picked up by passengers hovering outside the englobing force. The men surrounding the ship were still outside telepathic range, of course, so that their minds were not being read while they took frantic evasive action. They were able— just barely—to avoid being hit.

	Almost without noticing it he found that he was within the fifty yard limit and drifting closer, yet none of the projectors had been directed at any of his party. Unarmed and radiating fear at a high and sustained rate as they were doing, the aliens disregarded them and concentrated on the targets which they knew were dangerous—the men carrying the "Acid" tanks.

	The rate of fire from the ship began to slacken off. Obviously the aliens were conserving their store of the sealing compound. Woodhill did not want that.

	"Haines," he called quickly. "Send in some more men, from several directions at once. Just have them duck into range and out again, I want to draw their fire ..."

	The reaction this time was not nearly so spectacular, and there were no casualties.

	"Everybody move in," Woodhill ordered, "but slowly! Get ready to use the acid tanks, but not until I give the word. Keep harrying them ...!"

	Like an enraged porcupine flinging off its quills the alien ship sprayed the englobing force with the silent white jets: it was a panic reaction. One of the Captain's covering party was hit and spun away in a stiff, unnatural posture, and the others scattered leaving Woodhill alone.

	Then suddenly it stopped. The attackers continued to close in, moving the bright orange cylinders into position as they came, and still there was no response. Woodhill, who had been trying to calculate just how much of the scaling compound a scoutship could afford to carry, began to feel hope.

	Haines had realised what had happened, too. The Chief Steward's voice came blasting out of the phones urging, "Attack, attack now! They're out of ammo, go in and plaster them ...!"

	"Attention!" roared the Captain suddenly. "You will do no such thing! Move in close, but do not use the tanks —there's nothing in them, anyway. Now listen to me ..."

	Speaking quickly because the men were in no mood for a long, closely-reasoned sermon, the Captain recounted the series of incidents—accidents, he put in, was a better word—which had occurred since first contact with the alien ship, but from the viewpoint of both sides. The alien had come in too fast and too close, causing the engine unit to apply thrust rather than risk collision. The unit's tail flare spewing out in their faces must have given the aliens quite a fright, too. Then when the engine unit drifting back had caused the passenger cluster to scatter, opening and swelling outwards in a fog of escaping air to ten times its original size, the aliens must have thought that some terrible space-dwelling monster was getting ready to swallow them up.

	The damage done among the passenger globes had been inflicted during their desperate efforts to escape, and the reason they had all been shaken up so badly when the red-glowing reflectors were pointed their way was because these were the ship's means of propulsion—a repulsion beam or some similar means of gravity control—and they had just happened to be in the way.

	He explained what the white stuff was and the panic which must have led the aliens to using their meteor protection as a weapon. Then he had to tell them about the aliens' telepathy, which made it necessary for him to dupe his passengers and crew into thinking he intended to destroy the alien while all the time he merely wanted it rendered helpless so that he could get close enough to talk.

	"... The mother ship will be arriving any time," Woodhill continued, "and we must straighten out this misunderstanding before it gets here. That is the only course open to us. Escape is impossible and the only help that can be given to those men frozen into their suits must obviously come from the aliens themselves. Remember that there are no airlocks on the alien ship—apparently they seal themselves in and dissolve their way out, so they are bound to have the solvent for that white stuff.

	"Now I want you all to move back to your quarters, and stay there until I'm finished here. But first, a few of you tow away the passenger spheres that are entangled with the ship." The Captain hesitated, then waited until a party of Stewards hurried to do his bidding. Until that moment he had been unsure whether or not the anger he had aroused had gone beyond his control.

	"I've explained how the proximity of so many minds using, to them, alien thought processes confuses the beings in the alien ship," he said in conclusion. "Had this not been so, my plan of attack would not have worked. But now everyone but myself must be out of range. They must have only one mind to read: mine. There must be no more confusion, no more misunderstandings ..."

	But when he landed on the alien's hull a few seconds later and saw the two beings—they were just enough like humans to seem horrible—looking through the transparency at him, the Captain began to have doubts. The beings showed no signs of agitation as they watched him out of large, soft eyes, which meant that they must have read his mind and now knew that the humans were not and never had been a threat to them. It also meant that the aliens might ignore him, coldly certain that the Captain and the rest of the humans would be eliminated as soon as the mother ship arrived.

	Maybe the aliens were the type who held a grudge.

	Angrily, the Captain pushed these negative thoughts out of his mind. To the beings in the ship he was an alien, with alien thought processes which—in spite of the possession of telepathy on one side—would require "keying-in" with some common denominator. Woodhill brought out the tube of cargo marking paint he had with him and prepared to illustrate Pythagoras' Theorum.

	But he was forestalled by one of the aliens who came close to him and began drawing on the inside surface of the hull. When the being had finished there was a simple, graphic picture of a solar system containing live planets, the third and fourth of which were ringed. Then the alien raised an arm which was joined in the wrong places and pointed. Woodhill judged the direction as being towards Bootes. He sighed and began to feel easier about everything.

	When a stranger tells you where he lives it is a sign of trust, an indication that he wants to make friends.

	Woodhill was confident now that he would be able to make his needs understood and that there would be no bloodshed when the mother ship arrived. He knew it with a certainty that made him wonder if the telepathy was—just a little—a two-way process. But all this was only the beginning: the Captain foresaw the meeting of two races and the problems which could arise, problems which he would have to solve. Because he would be hailed as the expert on these matters simply because he had made the first contact.

	Woodhill had always longed to keep a flexible mind, to keep abreast of events and seek new experiences, and now he was getting his wish with a vengeance. His mind protested so violently at the load it would be asked to bear that he thought it must go mad. But that was only on the surface.

	Underneath, the Captain was a very happy man.

THE IDEAL CAPTAIN

Chapter One

	The pre-takeoff instrument checks were complete, from the control-room speaker the one-minute warning had sounded its raucous, faintly derisive note, and there was nothing now to do but lie listening to the small busy sounds from the ship's automatic machinery. Not for Mizar, thought Surgenor drily, was the long and rather theatrical count-down of the Americans, or the stirring beat of Tchaikovsky's 1812 to which the Russians lifted ship. The Navy had a simple, restrained and more traditional way: at minus ten seconds a bosun's pipe sounded "Hands to Stations for Leaving Harbour"—a recording timed to last for exactly ten seconds—after which ...

	Surgenor's foam-padded couch became transformed suddenly into a slab of lumpy rock as he was jammed downwards. Acceleration sat like a very fat man on his chest and made it nearly impossible for him to breathe, and it pulled ridges of flesh backwards from his face and made him feel as if his eyes were being pressed out of shape. Altogether he was suffering considerable bodily discomfort, yet Surgenor knew that these few minutes of initial acceleration were likely to be the only worry-free period for himself during a voyage which could last nearly a year. Knowing this, he immediately began to spend the time worrying in advance.

	Lieut-Commander George Adrian Surgenor, R. (S). N. ... he thought.

	The "S"—which stood for Space, of course:—was sometimes written as a dollar sign by good-naturedly envious brother officers in the sea-going Royal Navy because of the vast difference in the rates of pay. But considering the fact that an engineer had to possess at least a Doctor's degree in physics to be even considered for a commission, it was understandable why nobody really begrudged them their high pay. The space-going branch of the service was, in short, a corps of the elite, and Surgenor felt that he was wearing, his rank and uniform under false pretences.

	On Mizar the duties entered against his name were pretty much in the third leg category; Radioman and Medical Officer. It previous voyages, Surgenor knew, what little communicating which had been necessary had been handled as a small extra duty by the Pilot, and the services of a doctor were likewise superfluous.

	In space, accidents were generally either trivial or fatal: cuts, abrasions and minor scalds through mishandling tools or while cooking on one hand, a suit rupture or a case of kissing Hardy on the other. Every member of the crew knew enough to deal with the former, but no doctor in existence could help a man whose suit had been opened to space or who had suffered a blast of hard radiation from a badly shielded reactor. Yet Surgenor, whose duties were of least importance, was the ship's First Lieutenant: his name was listed next to the Captain's.

	Suddenly the acceleration cut out and the couch upholstery threw Surgenor gently against his straps. They coasted free for the customary ten minutes while the Engineer officer, tucked away in his tiny cubicle atop the drive reactor, assured the control-room that there were no indications of overload, radiation leakage or other malfunction in his department due to the period of maximum stress that was takeoff.

	Listening to the quiet, unhurried tones of Lieutenant Murchison making his report, Surgenor felt a little of his anxiety leave him. The engineer Officer had a very comfortable belief to the effect that if he did his job properly —which he did—so that the mechanisms in his care did their jobs, then there was no need to worry. Murchison was the sanest man in the ship.

	At the Captain's Interview—at which Surgenor had been unobtrusively present—Lieutenant Murchison had appeared to be very much impressed by the new skipper. The engineer's reactions indicated very strongly that he considered the Captain to be at least his equal in knowledge and experience of Murchison's department, and moreover, that Murchison found in the Captain a personality—a quality of easygoing, unworried competence —which was closely akin to his own.

	All of which, Surgenor thought with a touch of self-gratification, was exactly as it should be.

	Their course had been plotted to curve Northwest, so as to avoid by the greatest possible distance the present positions of the two missile-launching platforms which paced each other around the thousand mile circumpolar orbit. The personnel on armed space stations were said to be very jumpy people. But the coast of China was coming up already. Surgenor leaned forward to set the transmitter to the general ship-to-ground wave length, then spoke slowly and carefully into the microphone.

	He spoke Chinese, or parroted it, rather—he knew only enough to identify the ship to the detector stations below and assure them of its peaceful intentions. It had been eight years since a ground launching site had fired on a spaceship—they weren't nearly so jumpy on the ground as they were in space stations—but it cost nothing to be polite.

	Surgenor repeated the message at short intervals until the Chinese mainland passed them, then he continued to identify himself and express friendship only this time in Russian. Some of the ground stations responded with the conventional formal replies in Russian, others replied simply "Okay" and one, whose operator seemed intent on practising his English, talked until out of range. Soon they were over the Arctic Circle and beginning to slide Southwards into Canada. Surgenor switched to English, and relaxed.

	"... This is Her Majesty's Space Vessel Mizar, for Mars on a colonial supply cruise," he said. "We are not contemplating dropping an atomic bomb on you—"

	"I should hope not!" a female voice broke in from a station somewhere below. There was a soft laugh, then, "Pass, friend. And safe home, fellows ..."

	They spiralled out beyond the thousand-mile vertical limit which marked the end of territorial boundaries, and the polite apologies for trespassing the very thin air of space above those territories became unnecessary. With the post-takeoff checks completed Mizar again accelerated, this time at one half-G. This, which was the most economical thrust for her reactor, would be maintained for fifty hours. Lieutenant Selby, the Astrogator—and, as the ship's most junior officer, the cook, barber and general bottle-washer—had his first approximation already worked out. Surgenor watched him copying it into a virgin page of his scratch-pad and in painfully neat script for handing up to the Captain. Next to Murchison, Lieutenant Selby was the sanest man in the ship.

	Selby was young, he had steeped himself in the great traditions of the service, and enthusiasm burst from him at a constant, unvarying pressure. Surgenor had privately summed him up as a sincere but noisy idealist.

	Lieutenant Selby had arrived at Mizar's enclosure, Surgenor remembered, literally hanging onto his current girlfriend's neck with one arm while his free hand gripped a heavy cane. To someone ignorant of the traditions it would have seemed a ludicrous sight, but any girl anywhere would have been outraged if her space officer escort had offered to walk beside her in any other way. That was one of the traditions which were really appreciated by presentable young officers of Selby's type. When he had crossed streets, Surgenor knew all traffic stopped for him, and with no bad-tempered hooting, either. And on crowded public transport will he dare offer his seat to anyone, no matter how many female strap-hangers surrounded him.

	Tradition.

	Space personnel nowadays were as healthy as anyone, but that had not always been so. Thirty years ago the drive reactors had been shockingly inefficient, a trip of one year was considered short and shipboard conditions —to put it kindly—were hellish. Marked atrophication of the main motor muscles resulted, also eye conditions due to improper filtering of raw sunlight, and very often sterility because of faulty shielding on the pile.

	Nowadays people could not forget the time when a spaceman just back from a voyage was the most heroic and pitiful sight in the world. It was funny, and rather awe-inspiring, how the whole thing had come about. In the late nineteen-sixties when, last as usual, the United Kingdom was in a position to put up its first manned satellite, it fell to the Navy—which still maintained a force of supersonic fighters operating from carriers—to supply the pilot for the vehicle.

	Other ascents were made, culminating in the one which circumnavigated the Moon, and all were piloted by Naval officers. And so it was that a service which was newer than tomorrow became part of one whose proud history and traditions stretched back for centuries. Then, with the return of the first ship to reach Mars after a voyage lasting two and a quarter years, it began to develop traditions which were uniquely its own.

	Conditions were much better now, though. It was the psychological rather than the physical health that was in danger these days. But a spaceman was still considered a very special person, and officers like young Selby still got a kick out of carrying a cane and hanging a cheek-to-cheek stranglehold on a girl in public.

	Selby had the course in his hand and was on the point of handing it back to the Captain when Surgenor, with careful casualness, intercepted it. With the figures in his hand Surgenor paused and looked questioningly at the Captain's position, then he said "Yes, sir." and passed the paper directly to the Pilot, Lieutenant Kelso. You'll never carry this off, dammit! Surgenor told himself furiously, you were nearly stuttering just then ... But the two other occupants of the control-room had not noticed anything, apparently. He gave an inconspicuous sigh of relief.

	Kelso and Selby were engaged on making course corrections with the utmost speed and efficiency, so as to impress the new Captain. The pilot rotated the gyros while the Astrogator, his eye to the finder which was part periscope and part sextant, called out figures. Watching them covertly, Surgenor thought, What a pair of opposites ...

	To Selby the Captain was definitely not the chummy type. A disciplinarian, cold, stern and distant, was how the Astrogator saw him, Surgenor knew. With creases in only the right places on his coveralls and cap just so, and with an aura of calm authority and competence radiating from his whole personality. The tradition-soaked mind of Selby had certain fixed ideas of how a spaceship captain should look and behave, and Surgenor knew that their present Captain was Selby's ideal.

	The ship's Pilot, on the other hand, was a more complicated person.

	Kelso was a realist: he thought that he could see through the Captain. That business of the skipper taking a back seat and allowing him to handle the takeoff, for instance. That was an incredibly rare occurrence, because newly-appointed Captains usually wanted to do everything themselves for the first few months and their Pilots especially became little more than passengers. This Captain had acted differently and, although Lieutenant Kelso suspected that the whole thing was just a means to gain his loyalty and support—that in some obscure fashion he was being suckered by the Captain—he still appreciated being allowed to handle that takeoff. That, no matter what the reason behind it, had been a very real professional compliment.

	At the moment Surgenor knew that both Kelso and Selby—the latter especially since his course had been returned to him for execution without being given the usual checkover by the Captain—were solidly and wholeheartedly behind the skipper. They swore by him in all the languages they knew. Surgenor hoped profoundly that they would stay that way.

	Looking at the empty Captain's position—empty to Surgenor, that was—he found his mind slipping back to that small room in Woomera's Space Medicine building, to another empty chair and to a Captain's Interview the like of which had never been seen before, for the simple reason that it had been conducted without a Captain ...

	Unaware that they had been the subjects of a radical hypno-conditioning process that was both subtle and fantastically thorough, the crew of Mizar had arrived one by one, supposedly for their interview with the new captain. To Surgenor and the other naval psychologists present, Kelso, Murchison and Selby had chatted, talked shop and discussed their technical qualifications with the thin air above an empty swivel chair. But to those crew members that chair had not been empty, just as at the present moment the Captain's couch in Mizar's control-room was not empty ...

	Then, as now, the Captain that the crew saw and spoke to had no actual existence. He was an hallucination— three different hallucinations, in fact. Kelso saw his Captain as a sharp, shrewd, hard-headed individual, a know-it-all who really did know it all. Murchison's ideal was the soft-spoken, easv-going type, and Selby saw something of a Captain in the romantic tradition, a sort of cross between Captain Bligh and Horatio Hornblower. But in each case the individual members of the crew saw a Captain who inspired in them the maximum amount of confidence, loyalty, and respect of which they were capable.

	And Surgenor's chief duty—the one which was not listed against his name—was to keep the crew from discovering this deception. He, who possessed none of the technical abilities usual with the post, was the real Captain of Mizar. And the successful completion of his project demanded that he at all times act only the part of First Lieutenant, second-in-command to a figment of his own devising ...

	"Ship on course. One half-G thrust, sir," Kelso announced suddenly, with a glance towards the Captain's position.

	This was the point, Surgenor thought, where he should exert his authority just a little. He put a sarcastic edge to his tone and said, "1 suppose we'll hit what we're aiming at, Selby?"

	The Astrogator laughed. "Yes, sir. Eventually." To him the question had obviously been a huge joke. A joke ...!

	Surgenor had trained himself, when faced with an unusual or inexplicable reaction to what should be normal stimuli, to do and say nothing until the explanation appeared. He did that now, but his mind was working furiously. Back at Woomera the authorities concerned with the economics rather than the romance of spaceflight were becoming worried over the quantities of reserve reaction mass being used by ships making drastic and wasteful course corrections. Over a distance of thirty or forty million miles a small navigational error could become a very big thing indeed, and could cause a severe drain on the ship's safety reserve of working fluid. The time to correct faults was at the earliest possible moment, and Surgenor's ambition was to have a nice, smooth trip with neither excitement nor minor blemish—such as fuel wastage—to mar it.

	But junior officers did not laugh when their First Lieutenant made pointed remarks about their astrogation—not like that, anyway, as though sharing some secret joke.

	Shelving the problem temporarily—it was high time he got busy with his main job—Surgenor twisted around to face the Captain's couch. Careful now, he warned himself, don't act nervous, or stammer, or lick your lips. He said crisply, "Lieutenants Kelso and Selby have the first watch, sir. Permission for Lieutenant Murchison and myself to go below?" He waited just long enough for permission to be granted, then spoke into the intercom telling Murchison that he was relieved. While Selby moved to bring the power room repeaters under his eye Surgenor unstrapped and stood up.

	The expression "going below" merely meant that he was off-duty and not that he had to go to his cabin or the wardroom; normally it was in order for a relieved officer to remain in the control-room and chat. Surgenor, however, was going to see that the expression was taken literally on this voyage. At the descending ladder he turned and spoke again:

	"There's—ah—no need for you to stay here, sir. I think you should get your head down for a while. And have I permission to speak to you, sir, in your cabin?"

	He had a glimpse of raised eyebrows from Selby and the Pilot at his temerity in practically ordering the Captain out of his own control-room. That, Surgenor admitted, had been a risk, but they were probably expecting him to be well and truly told off about it when he got to the Captain's cabin, so there would be no harm done.

	The wardroom occupied the level immediately below the control-room, and underneath that the galley and the cabins of Kelso, Murchison and Selby. On the deck below that again were the cabins of the Captain and First Lieutenant, the water recovery unit and the Binder, after which the ship was a mass of fuel tanks, cargo space and plumbing to the stern stabiliser fins. It was when Surgenor was about to enter his cabin that he met Murchison on the way up.

	"If you're going up to the control-room," Surgenor said lightly, "don't."

	"Why not?" Murchison's tone was not annoyed, just mildly curious.

	"The Captain says only watch-keeping officers are to be in the control-room," Surgenor replied. "Q.R., A.I. and all that. Social gatherings are to be confined to the wardroom."

	"I didn't think the Captain was regulation minded," said Murchison equably. A slow smile grew around his mouth and he added, "New Captains have to be strict for a while, or they don't feel like Captains. I'm going to read a book."

	The Engineer Officer was Surgenor's smallest worry, he thought as he entered his cabin and sat awkwardly on the spring hammock. Murchison's isolated position while on duty and his appetite for massive tomes on nuclear physics when off were the reason for that. Definitely, Murchison should not be a major problem, but the same could not be said for Kelso or Selby—especially not Kelso and Selby together.

	The principle of divide and rule, Surgenor thought sardonically; or more accurately, divide and avoid gossip, comparisons and eventually friction. It was imperative for Surgenor's purpose that he keep the crew apart, doubly so that not more than one at a time aired problems with the Captain. Traditionally the Captain held himself aloof—took his meals in his own cabin and so on—so that part of it should not be too difficult. But Surgenor was thinking of the time fifty hours hence when Mizar would no longer be in powered flight. Then there would only be one watch-keeping officer needed in the control-room, and when that one was himself the other three would be free to get together and talk anywhere in the ship ...

Chapter Two

	Surgenor felt restive. There were books which he could study, or the ship was still within receiving distance of Earth commercial broadcasts if he wanted relaxation that way, but he could not settle to either. Half angrily, he reached across and switched on the cabin intercom. It was much too early to be doing this, he knew—three or four days at least should have been allowed for the situation on board to stabilise itself—but the uncharacteristic reaction of Selby a few minutes ago had Surgenor puzzled.

	The intercom in Surgenor's cabin was not standard equipment, the difference being that it could be switched on without the fact of its being in operation registering on the indicator light at the other end of the line. He hunched forward, prepared in the manner of all eavesdroppers to hear a certain amount of ill about himself.

	"... Stupid, d'you think, or just ignorant?"

	The voice was quick, impatient, high-pitched. Selby.

	"It must be ignorance," Kelso's voice replied more slowly. "Nobody could be stupid enough to practically order a Captain out of his own control-room." There was a pause. "But Lieutenant-Commanders, Space, have no right being ignorant. It's peculiar. We happened to shake hands, you know, just before he took me in for the Captain's Interview. He ... didn't know how."

	There was an unusually long period of silence then Selby, strangely subdued, said, "If he's ignorant—real ignorant, I mean—how will that affect the other business?"

	"I'm hoping it won't," Kelso replied quietly. "The Captain, theoretically, is supposed to be absolutely in the dark about these things: he turns a blind eye, but for various reasons cannot be involved directly. An uninformed or over-zealous First Lieutenant makes things more difficult. But not impossible. We'll just have to see that he stays ignorant."

	"Good!" said Selby with returned enthusiasm. "I was worried there for a while. We'll just have to do something this trip, and no excuses. Last time it was Captain Ellis going sour on us, and the time before that I was the ignorant one—the ship will be getting a bad name! So let's plot a little sedition, eh?"

	"Lieutenant Selby," said Kelso, suddenly authoritative, "don't be so blasted eager! We have eight months, maybe more, to think of something, so keep your eyes on your panel and—"

	Surgenor switched off at that point, he had heard enough. Then he thought deeply for several minutes.

	So the crew thought their First Lieutenant ignorant. He smiled at the thought; they did not know how right they were. Surgenor did not possess one-tenth of the technical knowledge necessary to a space officer, but he was hoping to keep that fact hidden from the others. This ignorance referred to something else entirely, and he thought he knew now what it was.

	The handshake, the password, the secret recognition signals ...

	When Surgenor's project had been approved and he had been transferred into the Service, the Naval psychologists had told him to expect something like this. Maintaining mental and physical health in a ship in space—a highly artificial environment comparing unfavourably with the worst of Earth's penal institutions—called for a rather special type of man, and even then it was necessary to bring certain stabilising influences to bear. These included the traditions and strict discipline of the Service, and the fantastic amount of responsibility and technical competence placed on and required of its Captains. But for a long time now there had been another influence at work. Apparently a sort of secret society had grown up among the space-going personnel—its existence was known, but nothing else. However, no official cognisance had been taken of it—certain high Naval authorities plus the Service psychologists had decided that it was an added stabilising influence and that anything which helped maintain the sanity and efficiency of space officers was not to be risked by an official investigator, especially an influence so juvenile, melodramatic and obviously innocent as this.

	Maybe Surgenor would find himself being inducted into this secret society during the voyage, and maybe not. If he was, then he did not want to eavesdrop on the little secrets and seditions of the organisation now in case his reactions when he came to be initiated were not convincing. He smiled to himself, looked at his watch, then got up quickly. It was time he relieved Selby in the control-room so as to allow the Astrogator to prepare dinner.

	On the way up he realised that he still did not know the reason for Selby's joking acceptance of his crack about the other's astrogational ability. But that would probably make itself clear with time. Certainly there could hardly be a connection between secret societies and bad navigation.

	After he had given orders to prepare the meals, Surgenor decided to lay a little more groundwork for the voyage ahead. He added, "The Captain, as is customary, will be taking all meals in his cabin. He has asked that I take them to him and not Lieutenant Selby or anyone else. Also, if anyone wants to see him on either a technical or personal matter, they must arrange it through me, and sec him only one at a time—he was very particular about the last."

	Surgenor softened his tone slightly and went on, "So it looks to me as if we are going to be allowed to run the ship pretty much as we like—the Captain will only take a hand if we make a muck of something. But if we do, God help us!"

	He ended, "You're relieved, Selby. Carry on."

	In a way Selby was more servant than officer, having practically all the odd—and sometimes dirty—jobs to do about the ship. But Surgenor knew that before the trip was far advanced Selby's senior officers would be clamouring to relieve the lieutenant of some of his chores simply as an escape from the boredom of just lying around or studying.

	Dinner was brought in, and because the ship was under half-G acceleration the liquids only were in no-weight containers. Little was said during the meal, and at its conclusion Surgenor went to the galley to collect the Captain's rations.

	He knocked politely at the cabin door—a habit he would have to develop—and entered. The Captain's cabin was slightly bigger than the First Lieutenant's, and more luxuriously appointed—there was a tiny square of carpet on the floor. Surgenor put the food down then went to the spring hammock.

	The spaceship hammock actually comprised two rectangular sections of woven plastic rope anchored solidly to the nearby bulkheads, one section paralleling the other with about two inches between them. The user lying sandwiched between the sections, protected against surges of acceleration, and with a couple of blankets insulating him from the cold plastic.

	Surgenor slid himself into the Captain's hammock and squirmed around until the blankets were properly disarranged, then he got out, straightened his uniform, and attacked the Captain's dinner. While eating he made a mental note to tell Selby that both the Captain and himself were very light eaters—Surgenor did not think he could manage full double rations for very long. Finished, he rose and left, calling out "Yes, sir!" for the benefit of anyone who might have been within earshot, then he entered his own cabin.

	Five minutes later, his belt let out three notches, he was in his own hammock reading one of the half-inch thick, one-thousand-page books that were specially prepared for a service where weight was money, cubed. Surgenor might not have the technical qualifications for his position, but he had at least to know the correct orders to give and have a general idea of what they referred to if he was going to appear to be an efficient First Lieutenant.

	He surprised himself by going to sleep.

	As watch succeeded watch the half-G acceleration maintained by Mizar piled up a velocity that had to be expressed in the thousands of miles per second. Their scheduled fifty hours of powered flight—with its comfortable meals, easy sleep and two-man watches of eight hours each—was coming to an end. Surgenor was in his cabin when the intercom beeped at him. It was Kelso.

	"Shutting down power in ten minutes. Number One," he said. "I tried to call the Captain but apparently he's out. Can you—"

	"He's here," Surgenor interrupted; then, "Very good, I'll be up directly."

	Precisely on the calculated second the damper rods drove silently into the pile and all weight disappeared from the ship. It was a simple evolution, but one which regulations stated must be carried out in the presence of the captain or First Lieutenant—a carry-over from the time when drive reactors were not the relatively safe things they were nowadays. Surgenor muttered something about the Captain being busy in his cabin, then flicked on the PA switch. This was for Murchison's benefit, the other two being already in the control-room.

	"Cruising stations," he said quietly, giving official permission for the eight hours on, eight off duty schedule to be replaced by the six hour on and eighteen off, which operated during free flight. Then, more briskly, he announced, "All hands rig dust covers! All hands! Stand by the personnel lock for suit inspection. Number Two suits, with addition only of extra magnetic clamps and safety line, will be worn ..."

	Kelso looked startled. Selby gaped, then said, "The Number Two suits ...?"

	"This time," said Surgenor coldly, "we will perform the evolution unencumbered by suits carrying such unnecessary equipment as spare water tanks, reaction pistols, radios, iron rations and such like, therefore the lightweight Number Twos will be worn. With the added freedom of movement they will allow I hope—I expect, rather—that we will finish in record time."

	"But we'll have no radios!" Selby protested. "If something goes wrong and we want to call the Captain ..."

	"With safety line and clamps," Kelso cut in, addressing Selby, "the only thing that can happen is a ruptured spacesuit. I think it's a good idea." Callously, he added, "If you did happen to rupture your suit, Lieutenant Selby, I'd prefer not to hear the noise you would make."

	It was nice to have Kelso back him up like that, Surgenor thought, even though it was unnecessary—the extra gold band on Surgenor's sleeve would have insured them doing and wearing whatever he liked, anyway. Furthermore, he did not care whether the covers took a shorter time than usual to rig—that job was performed to completion immediately after powered flight ended, instead of in easy stages, mainly for psychological reasons. If the men were not utterly bone weary and ready to drop with fatigue the first time they put their heads down in free flight, then they got falling dreams every few minutes for hours on end, and psychologically speaking the voyage got off on the wrong foot. The protection of the ship's hull was of secondary importance.

	The crew might not be as fagged out as usual when they were finished this time, but that was a small risk which Surgenor did not mind taking so long as they wore suits which were not equipped with radios. The whole project depended on the crew not being able to talk to the Captain at times like this.

	"Right," Surgenor said briskly. "Get into your suits— I'll stay here until the Captain relieves me, then I'll join you. Stack the covers beside the lock until 1 come down."

	Surgenor waited ten minutes in the empty control-room—sufficient time, he guessed, for a Captain to come up, take over and discuss a few technical matters with his First Lieutenant. While waiting his mind busied itself with thoughts about space-travel, space itself, and its effect on the men who travelled in it. His mind often held such thoughts—indeed, as a naval psychologist it was his job to think them. Had he not done so his current project would never have got out of the pipe-dream stage ...

	The purely physical problems of space-travel over extended periods of time were practically solved, and quite a few of the mental ones. On the technical side more efficient reactors and improved spaceship design help by shortening the duration of a voyage and cutting down the secondary emission from cosmic rays to the minimum. Advances in dietetics together with intelligent indoctrination with Service traditions and discipline took care of the nutrition and exercise angles. It was the more subtle problems which demanded answers now.

	The Captain problem, for instance.

	It was a fact well-known to Naval psychologists that a ship which possessed a really good Captain was sure to return safely time after time, while the rate of loss in those captained by good or merely brilliant officers was one in five after three voyages. The answer was, of course, to use only really good Captains in all ships, but this was easier said than done.

	The persons qualifying for the post of spaceship Captain, or the type called really good, were exceedingly rare.

	It was also well-known that ordinary spacemen—the healthy, well-adjusted, technically brilliant and, by normal standards, extraordinary men—were affected by a subtle neurosis while on prolonged trips which was potentially dangerous unless the proper steps were taken to guard against it. When allowed to progress unchecked, this neurosis manifested itself first as a vague unwillingness among officers to make decisions, an increasing tendency to pass the buck. Coupled to this was an urge to huddle together as if for mutual protection—there were many theories about the impact of Space on the subconscious mind which sought to explain such behaviour—so that self-confidence among the crew deteriorated further through their unburdening themselves to each other by confessing about their own abilities. With each member of the crew trying desperately to shift responsibility onto the shoulders of another who in his turn showed himself completely incapable of accepting it, the effect snowballed rapidly until the officers were not only unwilling but actually afraid to perform even the most elementary jobs in their specialties.

	A really good Captain, however, did not allow things to go that far. Before the rot could set in, at first sign of a lack of confidence in one of his officers, he stepped in with reassurances that he would be responsible for everything, at the same time proving that he was capable of assuming such responsibility. The crew were each brilliant in their specialties, the Captain had to know more than all of them, and be strong-minded and stable enough to withstand the same environmental influences which were affecting his crew. Given such a super-stable, super-genius—such a veritable paragon of a Captain—the crew, confident that any mistakes they might make would be rectified, carried on normally and did not make mistakes.

	But if a Captain did not measure up to this standard, and either showed that he was not the intellectual superior of each and every member of his crew or, by the smallest hint, suggested that he might be wanting to shift a little responsibility onto them, then the situation became very serious.

	As a neurosis it was passive and quite unspectacular, but in space it was deadly.

	Surgenor glanced at his watch, ironically saluted the empty Captain's chair, then left for the airlock chamber. The covers, twenty-eight rolls of tough, lightweight plastic four yards wide and varying in length from a few yards to more than the widest diameter of the ship, were stacked ready when he arrived. He checked to see that the whole chamber was sealed off from the rest of the ship—the unwieldiness of the rolls necessitated both inner and outer seals of the airlock being open at once to allow them to be passed outside—and only then donned his suit. He told Murchison to short out the safety device which allowed only one seal to open at a time, then the sudden tug of outrushing air sent him drifting towards the open lock.

	Apparently he had given all the relevant orders correctly—Surgenor had studied them hard enough, the Lord knew, together with the vocabularies proper to the various departments and the bare minimum of radio-operating and languages to fit him for his communications duties. The medical end had not worried him—all psychologists these clays had to be MD's first. But he was very much relieved all the same. Through luck or ability he had come this far without trouble, he hoped that whichever it was that was responsible would stay with him.

	With his body occupied with the purely menial task of moving out the first covers, Surgenor found his mind wandering back to the time when he was pestering the Admiralty with a new idea for ship command. With paying colonics on the Moon, Mars and Venus, space-travel was entering the stage where ships should be filled with tired businessmen instead of the intrepid adventurer types. But this state of affairs would never come about with the present system: good Captains being too scarce, and the merely adequate officers good for only two or three trips, their long and expensive training being wasted thereafter so far as space-travel was concerned. Basically the problem was psychological, and the answer lay in the same field.

	And Surgenor had convinced them that he had the answer, at least to the extent of letting him try out his theory in Mizar.

	Briefly, Surgenor's idea was to cut out Captains entirely and replace them with psychologists whose job it would be to induce in the members of a ship's crew the belief that they were commanded by a Captain who was ideal in every way. Up until a decade back when psychology was still more an art than a science—and there were a number of indifferent artists practising it—this would not have been possible, but induced hallucinations for therapeutic purposes was becoming common. In such a ship the psychologist must possess enough authority to direct the other members of the crew in their duties and when the space neurosis began to develop to arrange meetings between them and their mythical Captain for a pep-talk. The psychologist need not even be present at these meetings—the crew-man concerned would simply unload himself to the person who was most fitted to assume all his responsibilities and was competent to handle every contingency, the illusory personality created by the psychologist to fulfill his every mental need.

	In actual fact the crew-man would both ask the questions and—in the person of his ideal Captain, answer them himself. The psychologist was aboard merely to see that all the members of the crew did not shoot questions at their three ideal and individually different Captains at one and'the same time.

	No hallucination could hold up under a strain like that.

	But at the moment the Ideal Captain was supposed to be in the control-room and the suits the crew were wearing did not have radios. Surgenor could forget about him for the next few hours.

Chapter Three

	When the first roll was brought outside, Surgenor and Murchison anchored one end of it while Kelso and Selby traversed the ship's hull laterally, paying it out as they went. A few minutes later they had come full circle and the two ends of the roll were buttoned together. Like a great, translucent tapeworm the first section of dust cover encircled the ship, writhing, twisting and bunching slowly into irregular corrugations as the various motions imparted to it during the process of unrolling were exaggerated by the absence of gravity. Without stopping to admire these weird undulations—they would be cursing them with great fervour and fluency in a short time— they brought out the next roll.

	The procedure with this was the same as before, but then the two sections had to be joined together ...

	The third roll was joined to the second, the fourth to the third, and so on until the level of the airlock was passed. Then the job really became difficult, because the ship was now covered by a loose, wrinkled and fragile skin for more than half its length, under which the crew had to crawl with the rolls for the forward sections. Surgenor could see that faces inside their helmets were red and that lips were moving constantly as if their owners were continually cursing something.

	Had their helmets been in contact or their suits fitted with two-way radio, Surgenor knew that enough abuse would have been released in two minutes to put the whole crew in the can for insubordination for about fifty years.

	Yet at the same time, while sweat blurred his eyes and stank up his suit, his tired, numb fingers fumbled doggedly at a seemingly transfinite number of fastenings and he ached in more places than he knew existed, a cool, analytical portion of his mind was noting that this swearing and abuse towards seniors and subordinates within the confines of a spacesuit could be an important means of releasing tensions. Had the suits been fitted with radios, Naval discipline would have forced those tensions to be bottled up.

	After a sweaty, muggy, fulminating eternity the ship was covered from nose to stabilisers. The stabiliser fins themselves were not covered, but the dust cover was attached to them a few feet from where they joined the hull and the join sealed with a film of fast-setting plastic from a hand-sprayer. This part of the job was done with great speed and efficiency, because nobody in their right mind who hoped someday to raise a family stayed longer than was necessary around a ship's stern.

	Working steadily forward then, the button fastenings were sealed with sprayed plastic film. The joins were not strong, but they would hold up to two pounds pressure with the ship in free fall, which was more than adequate. Finally the whole wrinkled, sagging, undulating mass was reasonably airtight and Surgenor ordered some air bled from the emergency tanks. With only a fraction of a pound pressure being exerted on its inner surface, the plastic envelope covering Mizar swelled slowly and became taut. Surgenor ordered the men back inside the ship, relieved that they had completed the business without tearing, and having to patch the dust cover. That had been known to happen sometimes.

	At the airlock he looked out through the plastic at the blurry stars. The romance of space-travel, he thought tiredly, and the sleek, silver beauty of the space-ranging ships ...!

	Mizar now looked like a sausage loosely wrapped in cellophane paper with only the stabilisers, radio antennae and viewing periscopes sticking out.

	The reason for the dust-covers was simple. Micro-meteorites with their mass of only a few molecules did not penetrate a ship's plating, even the thin metal enclosing the living quarters necessary to inhibit secondary emission of cosmic rays. Instead their insignificant mass and considerable kinetic energy was converted into heat —a tiny burst of incandescence which vapourised the metal at point of impact and caused pitting sometimes to a depth of a quarter of an inch. Such pitting could be dangerous not only because of the slow erosion of the hull plating on long voyages but because it affected the streamlining of the ship and caused excessive heating on re-entry into planetary atmosphere.

	Nowadays most of them expended their energy on the plastic outer skin which all ships carried for this purpose, and only the relatively big ones got through to the hull. Plastic dust covers could be patched or replaced much more economically than large sections of hull plating.

	When he had his helmet off Surgenor said, "I will take the next watch, the rest of you get your heads down. See to supper first, Selby, and bring sandwiches to the control-room for the Captain and myself."

	Selby clenched his jaw and stifled a yawn so hard that his eyes watered. "Yes, sir."

	The next six hours, with everyone but himself asleep in their cabins, would almost certainly be the period of the voyage when he would not be under pressure of some form or other and it was during this time that he should try to plan for emergencies. He should review the behaviour charts he had drawn up for his three charges and see how closely their words and actions over the past few days agreed with them, and make note of any small divergencies or inconsistencies that became apparent for later correction. There was that business of Selby and his navigation, for instance.

	But Surgenor's mind was too tired to weigh inconsistencics, or plan ahead, or even to think of anything except sleep. But he was on watch and couldn't sleep, so that if he could not keep himself awake by thinking he would have to try something else. In the weightless condition there was not even the warning of one's chin dropping onto the chest to jerk one awake, he knew, you just dozed off sitting bolt upright in your acceleration chair, or even hanging like a bat with the legs curled around the ceiling plumbing—a position favoured by some humourously inclined officers. Surgenor unstrapped and pulled himself around the control-room a few times to waken himself up. Finally he strapped down before the radio panel and began hunting for something worth listening to.

	He found one station where the orchestra—it sounded like the NBC Symphony—were presenting Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, which was one of his favourites. But it was being broadcast on. three-hundred twenty metres, and medium-waves lost heavily in their passage through the heaviside layer at the best of times, even without the current burst of sunspot activity to further hash things up. When Surgenor contrasted this static-riddled, wavering and well-nigh toneless signal with the quality of the hi-fi tape he had of the same work back home, he felt like strangling somebody. Angrily he turned out and went hunting again.

	Suddenly he heard ... something: a faint signal, a voice, talking steadily against overwhelming interference so that only occasional groups of words came through. Surgenor turned up the volume, then changed his mind quickly and plugged in headphones instead of the wall-speaker—to hear the voice at all he would have had to bring in enough static with it to wake everybody in the ship.

	The voice had an impatient quality as though it had been repeating its message for a very long time, and the signal was on the frequency reserved for ship-to-ship transmissions. It was with a shock that Surgenor realised that the message was for them!

	"... Is on their trail, so be good boys this trip. Mizar, Mizar, Mizar. Wake up, are you drunk! Misery loves com ... getting out of our range, relay please! Potommy is five days ahead ... don't know ... renick del. Don't, repeat don't, try it this trip ... Mizar, Mizar, Mizar. Get the wax out ... loves company ..."

	Surgenor flicked the transmit switch. He said, "Mizar here. Who is this, please?" He had come to the conclusion that somebody was trying to be funny, but did not mind joining in to pass the time.

	"... Stohlmeyer, Executive Office ... onion girl. Did you receive ... repeat it back to me, please," the voice replied.

	"The message was not clear," Surgenor said in mock severity. "Clarification requested on terms potommy and renick del. Surgenor, First Lieutenant Miz.ar, here."

	There was a crackling, static-filled silence which lasted longer than the time-lapse necessary for the speed-of-light message to make the double journey, then:

	"Surgenor, eh? Don't know you ... pass it on to Kelso, Murchison or Selby whether ... understand it or not. Sort of chain letter ... very bad luck if you don't ... Repeat, whether or not it makes sense to you, pass it on to Kelso or ... forget. Over and out."

	Surgenor shook his head soberly. Even if this Stohlmeyer was playing a joke of some kind, the obviously senseless nature of it made him wonder if the executive officer of—onion girl?—had a well-developed space neurosis. And most definitely he would not pass messages of that kind on.

	On impulse he reached for the "Janes" and turned to the ships of American registry. There it was; he wrinkled his nose at the pun. Lady of Shalotte, American built capital ship, crew of fourteen, Haley-Edmunds reactor. She was supposed to have taken off for the American base on south Polar Venus about the same time Mizar lifted, but rumour insisted that this was a cover for an attempted landing on Mercury.

	For the remainder of the watch Surgenor thought about Stohlmeyer and tried to make sense of the Exec's nonsensical message—clinical sense, that was. He considered it as being symptomatic of a mind which was not quite sane. He made no progress. The constant repetition of the message indicated that it could not be entirely purposelcss, and the sudden change of tone when Surgenor had replied was also peculiar. When Selby relieved him he was still trying to puzzle out the meaning of the words potommy and renick del, or dey-yel.

	By the end of the first month the routine of the ship had settled into the form Surgenor had intended. As wardroom President he let it be known that the Captain preferred to dine alone at all times, so there were no invitations for him to eat with his officers. He also told Selby that henceforth the Captain would tidy his own cabin, thus relieving himself of the necessity for disarranging the hammock every day. Both these requests were not only normal but expected; many Captains held themselves aloof from their crews for the reason that a commanding officer who became familiar with his men could not help showing that he was human, and had human weaknesses. Captains were not allowed to have weaknesses. And at long last he had succeeded in impressing on Selby the fact that both the Captain and himself were very light eaters— Surgenor was no longer forced to put away enough food for two men. He also did his own tidying up: Captains and First Lieutenants could grow bored with inaction, and their wanting to do odd jobs to pass the time was not considered a weakness.

	The only drama that came to the Mizar happened in the middle of the ninth week of the voyage. Murchison was on watch and Kelso and Selby were extending the mural on the wardroom ceiling when the meteorite struck, punching a three-inch hole through the wardroom plating and exiting via the galley. The sharp Bong which reverberated throughout the ship told everything, and Murchison had the airtight doors closed split-seconds before the drop in pressure could cause this to happen automatically. The ship had already made the change from normal air to low-pressure mixture of oxygen and inerts used in flight so that the pressure did not fall very quickly. Kelso and Selby had patches in position within eight seconds, and pressure was up to normal in the wardroom again two minutes later. Surgenor was in his hammock at the time—though in touch through the intercom—and missed all the fun.

	The edges of the meteor puncture were red hot, which partially melted the plastic patch and made a perfectly tight seal. Kelso painted the patches to look like something else, and Selby later reported a cup broken. This was small loss because they could only use cups when the ship was on the ground or under acceleration.

	For some reason a harmless encounter with a meteor was considered lucky, possibly because the occurrence was such a rarity that the fact of it happening at all was insurance against something else happening.

	The meteor puncture furnished interesting discussion for nearly two weeks before boredom began to reassert itself. There were moody silences increasingly punctuated by bickering, and with very little to do and plenty of time to do it, there were some who perversely wanted to do even less—a sort of chain reaction boredom. Kelso, and to a lesser extent Selby, were the worst offenders.

Chapter Four

	In the fifteenth week of the voyage Surgenor had to get tough.

	To begin with he gave them all a thorough physical check-up, then summoned them individually to his cabin. There was nothing at all wrong with them but Surgenor did not tell them that, and as Medical Officer of the ship as well as First Lieutenant there could be no disputing his findings.

	"You have been developing lazy habits over the past few weeks," he told Kelso and Selby in turn. "Enforced boredom tends to produce laziness, I know, but you are making no effort to combat this process, which has now begun to show effects on the physical level.

	"I am referring," he continued harshly, "to indications of atrophication of the motor muscles in your legs and arms."

	He went on to point out that, with the provisions made to counter it in present-day ships, atrophication reflected nothing but shame and disgrace on the sufferer. He had communicated his medical findings to the Captain, and the Captain agreed with his suggestions for remedying the matter. Henceforth, and until further notice, six out of their eighteen hours off duty would be spent in the Binder.

	"This is not to be considered as a punishment," he had reminded them, "nor will it be entered in your records. It is simply a medical prescription, unpleasant perhaps, but necessary."

	The Binder was a complicated mechanical device designed to make its users exercise all their muscles. It was best described as part treadmill, part rowing machine and part mediaeval torture rack. Normally it was used to prepare crews for planetary conditions after a very long voyage. It was not a popular device.

	Surgenor kept them on the Binder for three weeks, then he relented. In the case of Selby, however, he had to order him off the Binder in no uncertain terms. The Astrogator had begun to grow muscles at an unusually rapid rate and he wanted to continue doing so until he was, as he laughingly put it himself, a young, muscle-bound Adonis. But Surgenor, as a Doctor, advised him against it on account of the danger of his eventually running to fat and ordered him as his First Lieutenant to cease forthwith and to spend more of his free time at the course of studies he had laid out for himself. He reminded Selby that no spacemen ever considered that he knew all there was to know about his profession.

	As the weeks wore on Surgenor did not actually forbid the members of the crew to meet together; when he found them gossiping he simply found jobs which split them up until they themselves decided that he was the type of officer who automatically associated gossip with idling— a fairly common type in the Service. The work he set them to was chiefly decorative and essentially useless.

	Surgenor had started the rumour that there was to be an Admiral's Inspection on their return to Earth, and that the Admiral in question had once let drop the hint that he was sick of interminable expanses of grey paint covering the interiors of spaceships. Wardrooms and cabins were exempt from this, of course, but there were still large areas of interior plating finished in drab, flat grey. Surgenor therefore suggested that the paint could be removed from the mass of plumbing which ran practically everywhere in the ship, and this metal piping kept polished instead. There were other painted gadgets and projections which could be similarly treated, and he knew that there was sufficient work of this kind to keep the crew busy for the rest of the outward voyage if he rationed it out carefully.

	Everyone studied in their free time, and it was a peculiar truism that a highly intelligent mind did not object to—in fact found pleasure in—performing simple, noncerebral and useless tasks as a relaxation from study.

	His own studies consisted of trying to learn enough about the workings of the ship to be able to pretend that he knew all about the workings of the ship. The crew did not know why an officer of Surgenor's rank was filling the lowly position of Communications and Medical Officer while being second-in-command to the Captain, and neither did they suspect that he was a psychologist. There had been no mention as yet of initiating him into their little secrets, but that did not worry him.

	The pilot, engineer and astrogator were firmly convinced that they had a really good Captain. As yet there had not been the slightest indication of space neurosis. Those were the important things.

	Mizar had curved Sunwards to within a few million miles of the orbit of Venus and had pulled out again to well beyond the orbit of Earth on the other side. The outward part of the voyage was two-thirds over, the ship was a going concern and everything was fine. Surgenor began to feel just a little bit complacent.

	Then he found out what potommy meant, and knew that his ship was rotten ...

	Murchison was in the Captain's cabin talking about some technical problem and Kelso and Selby were together in the control-room when Surgenor made the discovery. As it was supposed to be his sleep period he could not very well go up and give Kelso—the officer not on watch—a job somewhere else because, while it was permissible to split up groups of three on grounds of apparent slacking, forbidding two people to talk to each other would smack of petty tyranny. But Surgenor was usually able to monitor such meetings, and only in the rare event of the Captain being discussed in great detail was it necessary for him to break it up, or guide the conversation into safer channels. This time, however, the Captain was not being discussed. Only Kelso was talking, but the Pilot was not speaking to Selby ...

	"... Potemkin, Potemkin, Potemkin," Kelso's voice droned out. "Victory in defeat. Calling Potemkin, Potemkin, Potemkin ..."

	For a shocked instant Surgenor's mind could not think, then it literally seethed. Part of the nonsense message which had puzzled him at the beginning of the voyage— the signal from Stohlmeyer of the Lady of Shalotte—had become a little clearer. Potommy was obviously a familiar reference to the crew members of Potemkin, and Potemkin was one of the latest Russian vessels which rumour had it was scheduled for a Mars trip about the same time as Mizar. Victory in defeat would refer to the original Potemkin, an old-time battleship whose crew had rebelled; Mizar, miser, misery loves company, both were, must be, recognition signals of some sort. Kelso was calling up a Russian ship.

	Surgenor's angry speculations were cut short by a sudden change in Kelso's tone..

	"... Oh, there you are," There was a short pause, during which Surgenor concluded that Kelso was using phones with the receiver instead of the speaker, then the pilot resumed. He sounded slightly impatient:

	"Yes, yes, misery loves company. But don't be so blasted cautious, who d'you think would be calling you! ... Yes, we can talk freely—for a while, anyway. The usual arrangements will not be possible, that's definite. Matching course and velocity so you can come aboard would be too wasteful of fuel ... Yes, you heard me correctly. We've a new First Lieutenant who wishes to save fuel, with all that implies! It's safer for me to call you, the other way he might walk in in the middle of it ... Yes, real ignorant. But he looks as if he might be possible. In time, and with a few, ah, reorientation talks ..."

	Kelso's voice had dropped to a conversational level, and the transmitter mike was eight feet away from the one serving the intercom system. Surgenor pressed his ear against the speaker grill in his cabin, straining to catch every word. He was still too stunned by what he had heard to have any coherent thoughts about it yet. He only knew that he had to hear more, collect more data, and that he had never been angrier in his whole life.

	"... We've nothing new this trip except some modifications of the reactor, it's safer and more efficient. But you don't need to see it. Murchison will read the details across to you when he has time—apparently a few fancy equations tell the whole story ... Oh, we'll manage something this trip; it's just that with this new Jimmy we have aboard we have to be careful ..."

	There was a long pause, during which Surgenor heard Selby's voice for the first time. The Astrogator said, "Tell him what we have planned, sir."

	"In a minute," Kelso said shortly, then, "Listen, our idea is this. We fake damage to the stabiliser shortly after touching Martian atmosphere. We have only partial control, which fact causes us to land close to your Syrtis Colony instead of Hesperia. Your people come out and impound the ship and cargo for violating territorial limits. Just make sure that nobody makes a slip, because our Number One will be writing the whole thing up in the log."

	There was another interval of silence.

	"I know it's crude," Kelso continued suddenly, "but in my opinion we've been finessing too much lately. There'll be an awful stink, of course, and I'll probably get a reprimand when we get back, but for once the thing will have happened right out in the open, and that should divert suspicion from us nicely. Did you ever hear the saying that the best way to be inconspicuous is to be obvious?"

	For the next few minutes there was nothing coming through to Surgenor but occasional grunts, then Kelso spoke again:

	"If that's the way you want it, I suppose we'll have to.

	All right then, we land on Deimos and pick it up. Thirty yards from the Braun marker, got it. Good-bye. Over and out."

	For several minutes Surgenor felt too sick and disgusted to move. In his book treason was the dirtiest, lowest and most heinous crime there was, and even after what he had just heard he found it hard to believe that an officer in the proudest of all services could be guilty of it. But it wasn't just one, the whole of Mizar's crew with the exception of himself was corrupt, rotten with treason ...

	His first impulse was to go storming up to the control-room and confront them with it, but then a more steadying thought came. What would happen to the ship, and its crew, and himself, if the situation got out of hand and somebody was hurt? Theoretically the Captain could perform any members of the crew's duties, but the Captain of Mizar was a figment, an induced hallucination. Also, a charge of treason was something the Captain would have to be brought in on. Thinking over the implications of what he had just heard together with something Kelso had said at the beginning of the voyage, that the Captain turned a blind eye on certain things, Surgenor wondered suddenly which side the non-existent Captain would be on, his or theirs?

	Savagely he flicked the switch on the intercom which allowed him to eavesdrop on the Captain's cabin.

	The slow, even tones of Murchison sounded in the speaker. Murchison also was talking treason, which meant that his Ideal Captain was talking it, too ...

	He could not blame the Captain, Surgenor thought, and laughed mirthlessly, it was the same as blaming a mirror for reflecting a true image. It was his own fault for not probing more deeply into the mental processes of the crew when he had the chance. Surgenor had had to work on them through subordinates, of course, to insure that he would not be recognised when they later met him on the ship, but he should have found this rotten, reeking core in those apparently sound mentalities.

	Suddenly he cursed. He couldn't understand it.

	The space-going branch of the Navy was comprised only of the most intelligent, stable and morally sound individuals available. Intelligent indoctrination with the traditions of the Service and the sheer necessity for strict discipline was what gave it its extraordinary high standards—intelligent indoctrination: its members were too bright to be taken in by mere propaganda in the old sense. Surgenor himself was a case in point. As a psychologist he would have detected any phoniness or mental sleight-of-hand and automatically negated it. Instead he believed fully in the ideals and traditions of the Service because he was completely and intellectually aware that those ideals were sound and the traditions truly great.

	Even though the planet had progressed into the first decades of the age of spaceflight, it was a very uneasy peace that lay upon Earth. What was perhaps worse, people had become almost used to this peace of the powder keg. The situation being what it was, there was, of course, such lesser symptoms as intensive Security measures and the classification of practically every new scientific fact to be discovered.

	Spaceships in this day and age, embodying as they did the very latest in nuclear and engineering science, were extremely valuable pieces of machinery. Their secrets had to be protected, and to this end there had been developed a very Top Secret drug which, when administered together with certain harmless hypno-conditioning, made it impossible for any information to be extracted from space personnel by any form of coercion—the person possessing the information simply forgot it until the coercion was withdrawn. It was a simple, foolproof and harmless technique, and over the course of the years it went the way of all Top Secrets until now everybody used it.

	So Surgenor could not even bring the extenuating circumstance of coercion to excuse the behaviour of Mizar's crew. They were immune to coercion, and their intelligence and well-developed moral sense and pride in the Service should have stopped them giving away information voluntarily. But it had not.

	There was something terribly wrong somewhere. The thing which most sickened and horrified Surgenor most was the sheer scope of these treasonous activities. Stohlmeyer's apparently nonsensical message, although he still did not understand it fully, had proved that the sedition was not confined to just Mizar. Now Surgenor was beginning to realise that the little secret society which existed among spacemen, with its handshakes and recognition signals and which the Naval authorities smilingly ignored as being harmless, was in reality a cover for an espionage system which extended all through the Service.

	But how were they recruited? In what fashion were their minds changed? What could so reverse the allegiance of men who were so loyal, well-adjusted and above all, so intelligent?

	Suddenly a snatch of Kelso's conversation with the Russian ship sounded again in his mind, to the effect that the First Lieutenant was real ignorant but might have possibilities after a few re-orientation talks. That, thought Surgenor viciously, is what you think! With a swipe at the intercom switch he cut off the voice of Murchison which was still drifting softly into the cabin, and changed to the control-room pick-up.

	Selby was talking.

	"... And sometimes I can't help thinking of what would happen if they found out about this back home. I mean, I like the Service, its ideals and ... and everything. But if they found out, our reputations would be dragged in the mud, and everything I've dreamed about would ... Well, the stars would look awful far away through the bars of a prison."

	"There, there," said Kelso's voice.

	"I'm not getting cold feet!" Selby protested, then complainingly, "It's just that I wish being a spaceman wasn't so ... complicated."

	"Don't worry," said Kelso nastily, "they'd probably shoot you, anyway."

	"... You were saying that the potommies are worried about their Meeneestyerstvoh Vnootrenikh Dyehl?"

	"Lieutenant Selby," said Kelso sharply, "say MVD like everybody else does and stop trying to show off your Russian! Yes, they're worried. They think the MVD might be on to something, but they aren't sure."

	Abruptly the listening Surgenor knew what "renick del" meant, the last three syllables of MVD, and Stohlmeyer had spoken it in full to insure its being received despite the fading. The American had been trying to warn Potemkin that the MVD was following and not to pull anything this trip. That could only mean that the Russian ship was also guilty of something, otherwise their Ministry of Internal Affairs would have given the ship its blessing rather than checking up on it. The business was getting dirtier and dirtier. Not only was information being passed to another government, but apparently there was a Russian ship playing both ends against the middle.

	Surgenor listened for nearly an hour, but the conversation between Kelso and Selby had petered out. He wriggled into his hammock again, but did not sleep.

Chapter Five

	There were three main colonies on Mars, the American one in the Trivium Charontis, the Russian in Syrtis Major and the British group of settlements in Hesperia. All were roughly in the equatorial belt with slightly less than a thousand miles separating the Trivium and Syrtis colonies and with Hesperia placed half way between and a little south of a line joining the other two. It would be very easy to overshoot Hesperia and land in the Syrtis Major, especially if there was supposed to be something wrong with the stabilisers. Nobody would suspect that it had been anything but bad luck.

	But the Russians were not, Surgenor swore fiercely to himself, having Mizar handed to them as a present. Something had to be done to stop it.

	Surgenor was too angry to think of the consequences of drastic action on the peculiar balance of psychological forces currently at work in the ship, or of the affect on himself personally should those induced hallucinations break down. He only knew that Mizar must be put down in Hesperia, and because the authorities there would not be equipped to deal with a conspiracy of such incredible scope, he must take word of it back to Earth.

	The spring cables creaked and the hammock oscillated wildly as Surgenor tossed and twisted, worrying at the problem. It seemed insoluble, yet by the time he was due to take the watch in the control-room he thought he saw a way out. All that it required was a few months frantic studying, the temporary abrogation of his Hippocratic Oath and a really fantastic amount of luck.

	By a strange coincidence it was during his watch that Surgenor got the trace on his radar screen. It was the characteristic long, foggy streak from the hundred-mile-long trail of ionisation left by a spaceship in powered flight. That would be the MVD-crewed ship applying acceleration to catch up with Potemkin, Surgenor knew, and he also knew that but for the ionisation trail it would have been undetectable at its present distance. When that acceleration was shut down, as it was certain to be soon, Potemkin would not suspect that it was being trailed, or paced, or overtaken and passed as the case might be.

	He had not mentioned Stohlmeyer's message to the crew, and he was not going to tell them about the ship which had passed them. Kelso or one of the others might put two and two together and warn Potemkin. Surgenor thought that if Potemkin was caught red-handed in something they deserved all they got. He strongly disapproved of traitors, even when they were on the other side.

	Now that there was so much for him to do, the remaining weeks of the voyage seemed to rush past. Hitherto Surgenor's technical studies had been general, now they were specialised. In his locker there were ingenious devices which he had managed to construct from directions in the manual whose purpose was to train and speed up the reflexes. And every time he had the watch his first act now was to switch out the leads to Kelso's control panel and strap in before it. Hour after hour, day after day, Surgenor made practise runs on the board. There were so many indicator lights, and pile gauges, and complex permutations of toggle switches that he felt that he was displaying symptoms of insanity by continuing with it. But gradually the Pilot's Control Position began to grow familiar to his fumbling hands and later they showed signs of finding their way about the panel with a fraction of the necessary speed.

	And he had laid the groundwork for the second part of his plan, by appointing himself the job of preparing meals when Selby was on watch—ostensibly to have something to do.

	Surgenor continued to listen in on the Mizar's half of conversations between it and Potemkin. Once there was a very spirited discussion on the prevention of space neurosis as practised by the three major powers. The Russian idea, which was to carry a small reserve of technical brains under sedation during a trip until they were needed, was bad physiologically for the technical brain boys, because of the long periods of forced inactivity which was not completely countered by exercise machinery. But the presence of persons aboard who could be awakened any minute to take over had a very steadying effect on the other members of the crew. This method was compared with the American idea of making every voyage a sort of training flight, with two full crews competing at every stage for graduation honours.

	But Kelso, Murchison and Selby held the opinion that such fancy methods of beating space neurosis were artificial and unnecessary provided a ship had a good Captain. Mizar, they affirmed, had a very good Captain.

	Surgenor had smiled when he heard that, but coldly— he was still a very angry man.

	In the forward viewing panel the disc of Mars grew steadily until it became a giant pink football streaked with patches of pale brown and green. The minutely detailed and exhaustive checks necessary before power was reapplied were completed, then on the eighth day before landing the evolution of dismantling, repairing and stowing the covers was ordered. At exactly ETA minus fifty hours the dampers were withdrawn from the reactor and Mizar, its tail now aligned on Mars, began deceleration.

	When Kelso requested permission for a landing on Deimos, giving as his reason a suspected flaw in one of the stabiliser control surfaces, Surgenor had been expecting it. He went through the motions of referring it up to the Captain, then gave assent. The landing, he knew, was simply to pick up something Potemkin had left for them beside the Braun marker, and was probably the payment for services rendered as well as strengthening the fable about a faulty stabiliser which would later excuse their landing in the wrong place. Unknown to them, however, Surgenor intended seeing that they landed in the right place ...

	In the attenuated atmosphere of Mars even a gale possessed only a fraction of the force of its Earthy prototype—though the low gravity allowed quite impressive amounts of dust to be blown about at times—and conditions in the Martian stratosphere were proportionately mild. Provided there were no snags Surgenor thought he could manage a landing and takeoff on Mars. When, or if, Mizar reached Earth again help would be sent up to him when he explained the circumstances, because he knew that if he studied and trained for ten years he would never be able to land there.

	But all that was required at the moment was the removal from duty of the ship's present Pilot.

	With this idea in mind Surgenor had long since taken on himself the chore of serving food when Selby was on duty, so that no suspicions were aroused when he brought it to Kelso and Selby in the control-room two hours before they were due to touch down on Deimos. It was a simple, if rather melodramatic, matter to doctor the Pilot's food, and although Surgenor had thought first of administering an extra heavy dose of sedative in this way, he later thought that less suspicion would arise if it took the form of violent stomach cramps which could later be blamed on any number of things. Surgenor was still in a savage mood: if Mizar got back its crew would suffer their just deserts, but at the moment he did not mind one of them paying a little on account.

	Strapped into his couch in the control-room, with Murchison at his station, then to his non-existent Captain in the chair beside him and the forms of Kelso—who would very shortly be taken sick—and Selby in front, Surgenor began thinking of the harebrained plan of his with a measure of objectivity.

	It was not a good plan.

	The first part of it should go off all right; the sense of righteous anger and disgust he felt towards his crew and what they were doing would carry him through. But anger was not a reliable driving force over long periods, it flared into violence or else died away, and if either occurred on the long trip back the results would be equally disastrous. With the secret knowledge of their activities festering in his brain Surgenor knew that the psychological balance of the ship would deteriorate steadily until he either became so apathetic that he neglected or—because of space neurosis perhaps—became too unsure of himself to maintain the myth of the Ideal Captain, or he started laying into his bunch of traitors with the nearest blunt instrument. Killing the non-existent Captain or killing the crew would be equally fatal—the ship would never reach home. It was not a good plan at all.

	Kelso was moving restively and his voice was strained when he announced that the ship was at rest with respect to Deimos and that steering jets only would be used for the actual landing. The gravitic attraction of the five-mile-diameter jumble of rock that was the outer moon of Mars was so slight that a ship simply stopped beside, then sort of nuzzled up to it. The viewer showed the bright area where the first ship to orbit Mars had connected with a charge of magnesium and at whose centre, still too small to see, had later been placed a metal plinth. By the time they had touched rock, Surgenor noted with satisfaction that the Pilot was wincing frequently and rubbing his midriff when he had a hand free to do so.

	"Permission to take a party for exercise, sir?" Kelso said when his controls were neutralised. There was no attempt made to disguise the undercurrent of double meaning in his tone—both the Captain and himself knew the real reason for the request. Affirmation was apparently received from the presence in the Captain's chair because he called, "Murchison! Suit up, we're going for a walk. You, too, Selby. And you might find it interesting as well, sir," he added, looking slyly at Surgenor.

	This was a totally unexpected development. Kelso and the others did not know that if he went out with them the ship would be empty. Their Captain was in the know, however, though unofficially, which meant that there was not likely to be radio contact between them while the crew were picking up the little gift the Russians must have left them. Surgenor decided to risk it—it would be a chance to gain more evidence against them, after all. He asked permission to join the party from the Captain's chair, then climbed into his spacesuit.

	Only then did it occur to him that he might have made a slip; that Kelso and the others knew that he knew all about them, and that when he went out he might not come back ...

	The secret of successful travel on light-gravity bodies was to take it easy and not strand oneself with both feet off the ground, so that it took nearly fifteen minutes to travel the short distance from Mizar to the Braun marker. There was a little pile of vacuum-sealed packets some distance from it. Surgenor, who had thought that this was a trip to pick up the payment for the earlier passage of information, was puzzled.

	Kelso, who was beside him, motioned for Surgenor to switch on his suit radio. "Those containers," his voice came tinnily, "arc for delivery to some friends of ours—" He broke off with a grunt of pain and involuntarily bent forward. Surgenor knew that he must be in considerable distress at the moment and felt a twinge of remorse; he did not approve of sheer cruelty, and now wished he had used something milder. Kelso went on, hesitantly, "I don't know where you have served previously, sir, but I suspect that there are aspects of this job which you have never considered up to now."

	In a carefully neutral voice, Surgenor said, "Indeed."

	"Yes, sir. You see—"

	A guttural, jabbering bedlam burst from their headphones, a howling babel that made conversation impossible, and simultaneously Surgenor's eyes were dragged upwards by a bright spear of flame which was burning a zigzag path across the stars. He watched fascinated as the missile curved upwards wavered, then plunged towards the grounded Mizar. It crashed through the hull in the region of the control-room and exploded on the way out at the point where the retractible antenna emerged from the hull.

	A radio-controlled, armour-piercing projectile with a small chemical warhead, his mind noted, then Selby's voice was adding to the uproar already dinning in his ears.

	"Captain! Captain! Are you all right, sir? What's happening?"

	Surgenor tapped him sharply on the helmet and pointed to the tangle of wiring and lattice-work drifting slowly down the Mizar's side: even if the Captain was all right he couldn't reply, even if there was a Captain. He felt vaguely pleased with himself for keeping his head and noting details at a time like this. Maybe he was made of tougher stuff than he'd thought. Or was he just too stunned to panic?

	Two more missiles climbed above the close, ragged-edged horizon and snaked downwards, both wide of Mizar. The first hit must have been a fluke. But one landed quite close to them. There was a small, soundless explosion, a tingling shock struck upwards through Surgenor's boots, and twenty yards away rock in assorted sizes began to move upwards and outwards. Above the babble in the phones Kelso's voice shouted, "Get down …!"

	From behind a low outcropping Surgenor watched rock fragments sail slowly past overhead while he frantically tried to pull himself in closer to the ground. There was a sudden, sharp cry in his phones and he saw Kelso's arm pinned momentarily to the ground by a rock half as big as himself which bounced slowly into the air again. Surgenor cringed, but there was no sudden spurt of escaping air. The arm of Kelso's suit was dented deeply but not holed, and the arm inside it must have suffered considerably.

	Suddenly Murchison's voice, a slow bellow of tremendous volume, roared out: "Stop all talking at once! Who is speaking?"

	The babble diminished to just two voices, one of which spoke haltingly in English and the other which tried to shout it down in Russian, but Surgenor could not separate them well enough to make sense from what he was hearing. Murchison and Kelso had their heads together and Selby was joining them: he moved over and touched helmets also. They could talk together comfortably that way with their suit receivers switched off. Surgenor said, "What is happening, Lieutenant Kelso?"

	"I was starting to explain the setup to you when ..." He waved his good arm weakly at another missile which was arcing downwards. His voice was slurred with pain. "Oh, this is one hell of a mess!"

	Surgenor said that he had already guessed that, he wanted details.

	"It's like this ..." Murchison broke in, and went on to explain that one of the voices they had just heard— the one trying to speak English—belonged to the astrogator of the Russian space-vessel Potemkin, and the second to an officer from another Russian ship which had been sent out secretly to keep tabs on the first one. The second Russian ship was crewed with MVD men with inadequate space experience, and when Potemkin had left part of her cargo on Deimos for later collection by Mizar, the ranking MVD man had immediately accused Potemkin of treachery. The second ship had also overheard the radio conversations between Potemkin and Mizar which further substantiated this charge.

	"We've been talking to Potemkin during the trip, sir," Selby put in quickly. "While you were asleep, mostly. And if you'd overheard some of the talk ..."

	Another missile landed and the ground did its best to shake them off. A jagged rock about two feet in diameter came rolling and bouncing in crazy slow motion towards them, to slide silently overhead with inches to spare. A drift of smaller stuff followed it.

	"But there was nothing—intrinsically—wrong," Kelso came in again. "You must believe that."

	"All right. I'll accept that for the time being," Surgenor lied quickly. "But what is happening now?"

	The first shock of surprise at being precipitated into the middle of a shooting war was wearing off. Surgenor was getting scared. But as he listened to Kelso's summary of the situation he forgot his fear for a moment; the chill he felt was one of horror.

	The MVD ship's Commander had ordered the crew of Potemkin out onto the surface of Deimos in spacesuits while a search was made for further incriminating evidence in their ship, the order being backed by the threat of missile bombardment. In addition to searching the ship, the MVD officer had jettisoned all of Potemkins working fluid, then proceeded to play cat-and-mouse with her crew by sniping at them every time they tried to return to their ship. Potemkin's captain had had the forethought to take extra air tanks, but they had no food and their water was running out.

	And they had been stuck inside their spacesuits for nearly two days ...!

	"We've got to help them!" Surgenor burst out in spite of himself and his earlier feelings.

	"Not just them, we're in quite a mess ourselves if our ship is a write-off," Kelso replied. "And maybe the MVD types need help most of all. Potemkin's commander says they're no longer sane. He says they are not being wilfully cruel. It's just that nobody will allow anybody to take the responsibility of ordering Potemkin's crew back to their unarmed and defuelled ship in case they escape. Escape! He says he's never seen such an advanced space neurosis before, and he doesn't know how they managed to get this far unless it was their fanatical belief that they were hunting traitors which kept them going.

	"But this has got to be stopped," Kelso went on vehemently. "This sort of thing could start a war, and that would wreck our plan of—yeow!" He broke off, swore and said, "What a damned inconvenient time to get a belly-ache!"

	Surgenor felt another twinge of regret at the size of the dose he had given Kelso, but he had not foreseen anything like this happening. He said curtly, "Have you any suggestions, Lieutenant? I notice that accuracy of the missiles has fallen off badly since that first hit, I'd almost say they were shooting blind—"

	"They are," said Kelso. "That first shot was pure luck. Their ship tipped over on landing and they camouflaged it with dust covers to wait for Potemkin. We are just below the horizon to them and they've been firing roughly in the direction they saw us come down. Potemkin is about two hundred yards on the other side of them from us."

	Surgenor fought a brief, internal battle with himself, then came to a decision.

	"Suppose we tell Potemkin's crew to circle around to us here. We'll take them aboard Mizar until something is worked out. It's against regulations, I know, but we'll just have to try and keep them from seeing too much of our equipment ..." Surgenor left the sentence hanging as he suddenly remembered that Potemkin already knew everything there was to know, and who had told them.

	There was an awkward pause, broken by Kelso.

	"It won't work, sir. They're pinned down so that whether they try for their ship or try to get away from it they'll be picked off ..." He grunted with pain, then gasped, "And we can't just up and leave, either, even it we wanted to, because as soon as we rose above the horizon we'd be a dead duck. There's only one solution, we'll have to capture their ship."

	Surgenor thought for a moment, then said, "Granted. But how?"

	It was a simple, direct plan which Kelso put forward. By tracing back the trails of the missiles they knew the position of the MVD ship, and if they were careful they could get very close to it without being seen—they would be considerably aided in this by the fact that Deimos was fast moving into the night-side of its primary and the Sun, which was sliding down towards the limb, would be on their backs and in the opposition's eyes. The actual capture must depend on conditions on the spot, but Kelso had ideas on this, too.

	"We're unarmed," said Surgenor quickly. "There's a pistol in the Captain's cabin, should I ...?"

	"No," said Kelso, "To a man in a spacesuit a chunk of rock coming at his faceplate is much more effective than somebody pointing a gun. So all of you, pick up any handy pieces as you go and push them, gently, ahead of you."

	"Right," said Surgenor. "Let's move."

	They switched on their suit receivers, pulled their helmets out of contact and moved off. Somebody on the MVD ship was screeching threats at them—they sounded like threats, but Surgenor's Russian wasn't too good— and the Potemkin commander, whose English was not good, was pleading desperately and incoherently for help. But they could give no reassurances, or even risk answering at all, in case the MVD ship might guess their intentions. Then Kelso, who had been cursing and groaning at increasingly frequent intervals, could not force himself to go on. He was doubled in pain and one arm was useless. Surgenor found himself in charge of the operation.

	In the training manual there were seventeen pages devoted to techniques for close combat in vacuo. Surgenor had been tempted to skip that particular section as information for which he never expected to have a use. He was very glad now that he had read it.

Chapter Six

	Half an hour later they were in a cleft thirty yards from the MVD ship, and the two men who were operating the missile launcher clamped to its hull were under observation. Selby and Surgenor braced themselves firmly inside the cleft in the rock, then each grasped one of Murchison's legs. Thus anchored, the engineer was able to throw the loose rock they had gathered without the reaction from his efforts sending him spinning backwards. Immediately the last rock left Murchison's hand they broke apart and launched themselves in the wake of their makeshift barrage.

	It was the longest thirty yards Surgenor had ever known.

	The two men at the spidery framework of the launcher saw them only when the first rocks began bouncing around them. One made a determined effort to draw the gun strapped to his waist, but broke off to shield his faceplate from silently hurtling rocks. The other scrambled for the nearby airlock. Then suddenly they were there. Murchison landed on the man trying to draw his gun, batted it out of his hand—space gauntlets did not allow a firm grip—and disconnected his safety line all in one tangled blur of motion, then tossed him upwards out of the way. Selby caught his man in the airlock and threw him up, too—just managing to keep his own magnets in contact with the hull while doing so. Surgenor crashed into the launcher, converting it to junk in the process, then extricated himself. He went sliding around to the other side of the hull where Potemkin's commander had said there was a sniper. He waved for Murchison to enter the ship and cut control between the reactor and the control-room —he didn't want some MVD man to panic and take off with his men and himself on the outside of the hull—and motioned Selby to follow himself.

	The man with the rifle actually nodded to him, thinking that he was his relief, probably, then continued to watch the little group of spacesuited figures huddled among the rocks a hundred yards away. There was a searchlight focussed on them as well, now that Mars was eclipsing the sun. Surgenor slid closer, then pounced. His hands shot to the quick-release catches holding the man's helmet in place and twisted. The man got the idea all right, his face went chalk white and he threw the rifle away. Surgenor wrapped his legs around the ex-sniper's waist, and with his hands still threatening the seal of the other's helmet, motioned him towards the airlock.

	Selby bundled into the lock behind them, just as Surgenor was operating the outer seal control. With one hand thus engaged the Russian must have thought he had a chance to escape—he started kicking and struggling violently. One of his threshing feet caught Selby in the shoulder, sending him spinning sideways.

	Surgenor saw the projecting tank-bracket on the lock wall, and Selby's head towards it ...

	"Selby, breathe out!"

	The seal was only half shut when Selby's helmet splintered. Surgenor had a glimpse of a contorted face, mouth wide open and eyes jammed shut, then he was flooding the lock chamber with air. He spun the quick-release fastenings of his prisoner's helmet, flipped it back, then smashed his gauntleted fist into the other's face. Air pressure was at ship-normal by then. He dragged both limp bodies into the ship.

	Space personnel were accustomed to low-pressure air in their ships, it minimised the shock of decompression, or pressure-drop, in the event of a puncture. As Surgenor bent over him he could see that Selby's nose arid ears were bleeding and that his eyes, though still tight shut, were wet as a result of boil-off from his tear ducts. Water blisters had begun to form all over his skin due to the vapour pressure underneath it, and it would be a while before he was good-looking again, but he was breathing harshly and did not seem to be coughing blood. He must have evacuated his lungs when Surgenor shouted and equalised inside and outside pressure sufficiently to escape death or permanent damage. Selby would be all right. He straightened up.

	Suddenly he made a dive for the gun at the prostrate Russian's waist: four spacesuited figures were emerging from the well. Then Murchison's voice came booming at him through the phones.

	"It's all right, sir." he called, "They're harmless." He indicated a figure with its helmet thrown back and added, "I found this one in the control-room trying to shoot himself. The others were locked in their cabins—I made them put on suits." He tapped his head significantly. "They're sick men.

	"But we've got to get out of here," he went on, displaying strong emotion for the first time since Surgenor had met him. "The reactor has been set to melt and the damper controls are smashed. We've got about twenty minutes ..."

	Kelso's voice broke in on them: "What's happening? Is everything all right ...?"

	"Yes, yes, just a minute!" said Surgenor brusquely, then: "Murchison, get these people ready for outside! Sure this is everybody? Right, and help Selby into another suit, then go out and fish down those two we threw away outside. And Kelso, are you listening? Tell Potemkin everything is all right and to come over here and help with the prisoners. Everybody is to be brought to Mizar until we sort things out. I ..." He allowed his tone to alter subtly. "... want to see about the Captain."

	In the excitement of the past half hour Surgenor had forgotten all about the Captain. He had to get back to Mizar to make sure that the Ideal Skipper was placed neatly out of the way before the Russians started commenting on the fact that Mizar's crew were taking orders from somebody who wasn't there. He would have the Captain injured, he thought as he hurried towards the ship, suffering slightly from shock and a minor decompression caused when the missile struck the ship, and temporarily confined to his hammock. That should keep him out of the way nicely.

	As to the rest of it, what he was going to do with the crew of Potemkin, and the MVD crowd, and how he was going to avoid news getting back of an incident which would almost certainly touch off the Hell-War, he did not know.

	The holes in Mizar's plating were repaired very quickly by Murchison, luckily the missile had gone right through and only exploded among the radio gear outside—the damage had looked much worse than what it actually was. Surgenor had peeled Kelso out of his suit, discovered that he had a fractured ulna and put it in splints. The pilot's inexplicable—to him—belly-ache had died down. He had bandaged Selby's legs where the pressure-drop had caused distensions which might later, if untreated, become varicose veins. Knowing what he did about them, and what he intended doing when he got home, Surgenor wondered why he bothered.

	Potemkin's crew had been attended to first and allotted the wardroom, and the gentlemen of the MVD were under deep sedation in the cabins of Kelso, Murchison and himself, when Selby came down to tell him that he was wanted in the control-room. Incredibly, the wardroom was empty when he passed it and Potemkin's commander, Colonel Dhiageviloff, was occupying the control-room with Kelso. The pilot spoke quickly:

	"I'm sorry if I seem to be taking over from you, sir, but in this matter I happen to be better informed. Here is what we have decided.

	"First: the MVD ship will be a heap of slag within a few hours, and too radioactive for the next fifty years or more for a close investigation to be made. Dhaggy here will note it in his log as an accident to an unknown ship and no more. We will not mention it at all. That way nobody at home will be any the wiser, and there will be no hot-heads screaming for war. Its crew, of course, will never leave Mars—after what they've been through they won't want to.

	"Second: we have transferred sufficient fuel from our tanks to allow Potemkin to land on Mars." Kelso hesitated, looking a trifle apprehensive, then went on, "We will have to think of a good story to explain the wastage of fuel, but most of us are used to that now. The only trouble at the moment is me." He indicated his splinted arm. "I'm not sure if I can land us on Mars."

	"You seem to have it all buttoned up, Lieutenant!" Surgenor began hotly, then suddenly checked himself. His chief concern had been to find a way to stop news of the clash on Deimos reaching Earth, now that worry at least was gone. "Very well," he said, then added drily,"

	"I will take the ship down, 1 had intended to do so, anyway."

	Kelso's eyes opened wide. "I didn't know you were a Pilot, sir," he said, then shot a rapid gabble towards the Russian. The Colonel looked greatly pleased and slapped Surgenor on the back. Slowly and thickly he said, "Thank you for fighting for us, Lefnet Commander. Though ignorant, you are a great man." He turned and hurried out.

	"Thrust in five minutes," Murchison's voice announced from the wall speaker. "Strap down, all."

	Hurriedly Surgenor took the Pilot's position and Kelso took his. He said, "I suppose that was a compliment?"

	"Yes, sir," said Kelso, and added, "We're landing in Syrtis colony."

	Surgenor shook his head. "In Hesperia."

	"Three minutes," said Murchison.

	"No, sir," said Kelso firmly. "Syrtis, the Russian Colony. Potemkin is going to Hesperia. But maybe I'd better explain ..."

	When Mizar pushed herself gently away from Deimos a few minutes later, Kelso had explained and Surgenor felt very, very happy. He was now a member of a secret society which numbered its members among the famous, possessed the usual recognition signals, and whose great motto was bigger and better treason! He spoke suddenly:

	"Kelso when we touch down, I want the best psychologist in Syrtis to come to the ship. It's very important."

	"Yes, sir," Kelso said. "I know a good one—speaks English too."

	He thinks I want him for the MVD people, Surgenor thought. Let him think so. The real reason was that Surgenor, too, had a secret to give away: the Principle of the Ideal Captain. When he explained the setup on Mizar to the Russian psychologist, and reported on its successful first trial, they might adopt it, too. And the Americans as well. Suddenly he laughed.

	Surgenor the man who would form a secret society within a secret society—a brotherhood of First Lieutenants who were in reality Captains ...

	The way Kelso had told it, the first instance had occurred a long time ago; two ships belonging to mutually unfriendly nations had found themselves in trouble together. They had helped each other out and kept quiet about it, and had decided in the process that being unfriendly was stupid. This idea had spread with incredible rapidity until now ...

	Every new invention or device or operating procedure, no matter what nation of origin of the ship concerned, was made public to every other ship no matter what their nation of origin. A ship's crew learning of a new device in this way would carefully feed the idea for it to their own governments, and in a very short time their ship would be equipped with it also. There was no classified information in space, and space technology forged ahead of the ground-based sciences. But that was not all.

	Theoretically there were three separate colonies on Mars: the Russian, American and British. In actual fact each colony was made up of equal numbers of Russians, Americans and British. And no matter where a Mars-bound ship put down, it was home. Frequently equipment which was scheduled for, say Hesperia, could be put to much better use by the British-American-Russian engineers residing in the Syrtis colony, and a naval vessel would land in what was theoretically Russian territory. Such had been the case on Mizar's current trip, and Potemkin—bound for the technically British colony—had left a few packets that just had to go to Syrtis on Deimos for Mizar to take down.

	Space was a bright, black curtain, Surgenor told himself, and the things that went on on the other side of it were just nobody's business!

	Earth was an uneasy balance of heavily-armed powers where nobody trusted anybody. That disgust stayed with the highly-intelligent, stable and morally sound individuals who came out into space—for a little while. Because they were what they were it took only a statement of the facts—an outline of the position and aims of the secret brotherhood among spacemen—for them to feel it their bounden duty to join the ranks of their fellow traitors. Mars was the pointer of things to come.

	Given another generation of intermarrying among the colonies and there would be no nationality on Mars but Martian. The few officials who visited the planet in the meantime—the very few, that was, who braved the trip and were yet too narrow-minded to embrace the ideals of the brotherhood—would have a convincing show put on for their benefit. But soon, maybe thirty or forty years, this secrecy would no longer be necessary.

	Surgenor remembered Kelso's thin, intense face, the awkward gesticulations with his good arm and the disparaging tone of his voice as he tried not to show his true feelings ...

	"... On Earth we're heroes," he had said, grinning sardonically, "and when we retire we're still heroes. Nothing's too good for us—the best jobs, the highest positions, you've seen it yourself. The whole political field—Governorships, Foreign Office, Cabinet appointments—is lousy with retired spacemen, and in every country. If we can keep that up for a little while longer it will be impossible for anybody to start a war ...!"

	Surgenor was really and sincerely sorry that he had given Kelso a belly-ache.

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

	Seen through the direct vision port the receding planet Mars was a completely uninteresting object—a pink circle roughly the size of a golf ball held at arm's-length with blurred, uneven edges, the brighter stars in the background showing as faint smudges of grey on the surrounding blackness. The Glory of Space! Captain Miller thought sardonically, and made a face.

	To show their faith in the Starfire's Captain the powers-that-be had allowed her to have one small view-port— two square feet of transparent plastic—in her private cabin. But their faith must be something less than complete, however, because the material was about as transparent as cut glass. Carefully, so as not to send her hammock into oscillation, the Captain turned her back upon Mars, stretched and tried to go to sleep.

	But it was not to be. The intercom beside her burst suddenly into a furious babble of speech:

	"He's breaking my engine! He's breaking it! Stop him, he's breaking my—"

	"I'm not breaking it—"

	"He is! He is! He's smashing the whole—"

	"Shut up! I won't hurt your silly old engine. Besides it's not really yours ..."

	The Captain reached out and flipped over the "Transmit" switch. With just the proper amount of reproof in her voice, she said, "Now boys, one at a time. Manners, remember, and discipline." She paused, then: "You first, Jimmy."

	It seemed that Chief Drive Engineer James Hollingsworth, Ph.D. etc., etc., was having a row with the equally well-degreed Christopher Barnsley over the engine. Captain Miller knew that engine of old and had been expecting it to undergo its periodic metamorphosis at the hands of her crew at any time now. The outrage from the more conservative-minded individuals was also expected. But she was a good enough psychologist—an exceptionally good psychologist or she would not be Captain of a spaceship—to know that there was no real danger as yet, and so began the verbal pouring on of oil that had become almost automatic with her. She ended by telling Chris and Jimmy that she would be with them shortly. The knowledge that they had caused her to cut her sleeping period short for them should have a chastening effect, though the truth was she could not sleep anyway.

	As Captain Miller struggled into her uniform, the blurred, pink orb of Mars stared in at her. She found herself staring back, and thinking—with a peculiar mixture of irritation and amusement—of their recent landing there.

	The secrecy and almost mystic ritual surrounding the touching down of a Star Line spaceship had become a joke on the three worlds and five satellites served by that Company—one of those jokes which are funny, but which leave a bad taste in the mouth and a doubt in the mind as to who exactly the joke is on. For one thing, the ship's personnel never left the vessel anywhere but at home base—and then only in screened cars. For another, the passengers were loaded and disembarked while under sedation by medical orderlies, with Company guards present to see that they did not let their curiosity get the better of them by ducking into restricted sections of the ship. Because of the necessity of talking to Ground Control, arranging for food, fuel and the like, the only fact generally known about Star Line ships was that they possessed women Captains—voices could not be completely disguised even over the RT.

	It was this fact which had caused the rumours to grow, and given birth to three songs, scores of allegedly humourous verses and probably hundreds of stories all of an unprintable nature. This was the cause of the Captain's mixture of emotions. It was laughable, if it was not for the fact that sometimes she felt mad enough to spit.

	When she thought of Traffic Control on Mars with their sly, "Did you have a nice trip, Captain?" she felt like opening up on them with a couple of home truths about themselves. But she would not do any such thing, no matter how much she felt like it. Not for some time, anyway.

	Star Lines had a trade secret, and if it was to survive and grow against the competition of the larger Government subsidised Companies, it was natural for this small independent outfit to keep that secret until it was at least as strong as its competitors. After that their methods of training and ship operation would be published, Captain Miller and her sister Captains would become famous, and a lot of hyper-curious and over-imaginative would-be poets would look awfully silly.

	Miller smoothed the wrinkles from her one-piece white coverall, checked that her hair was clipped down securely at the back of her neck, then kicked herself into the corridor outside. The sight of its green and white striped floor, walls and ceiling acted as always, as a sort of Pavlovian bell to her mind.

	The conquest of space became a fact when, while astronauts all over the world were still trying vainly to produce a manned satellite vehicle, the superbly efficient and economical Spencer-Hoist Drive was discovered by two physicists who were not even interested in astronomy. With it the inner planets were only weeks away, the Moon merely a matter of hours. Oh, yes, Captain Miller thought bitterly, the conquest was certain—if it had not been for the flaw in the mental equipment of the would-be conquerors.

	Quite simply, men could not stand Space.

	But spaceflight had become a matter of national prestige as well as of population pressure. The colonisation of the inner planets became a crusade which was fought with the determination and heroism which had characterised the wars of recent history. And it became expensive not because of the power needed to send a ship from planet to planet but because of the fantastic lengths some Governments went to protect or cushion their crews against the shock of Space.

	Green and white zebra stripes, Miller thought; corridor to be entered only by the Captain. A black and white diamond pattern on a corridor, storage compartment or dormitory meant that ground staff-medical orderlies, maintenance men and cargo handlers together with their respective guards—only were allowed there. A red and white check motif was used throughout the crew's quarters, and for the duration of the voyage they stayed happily within their three-dimensional draughts board with no inclination whatever to leave it. The conditioning which made them behave thus was most subtle; a crewman was not verbally forbidden to go to the green-white or black-white sections. But if Captain Miller was to ask one of her officers to come to her cabin or to meet her outside the passenger dormitory, that man would find some weird and wonderful excuses for not going, and if forced he would become a very sick man rather than go.

	The crew were conditioned in other ways, too, of course, the exact nature of that conditioning being the trade secret.

	Only Captain Miller could go anywhere she pleased on the ship. She alone was not conditioned. At least, she was fairly certain that she was not. You never could tell.

	She passed from stripes into the black and white diamonds of the passenger section, then paused. Soft bumping and scraping noises were coming from the dormitory where Billy was laying out the food containers preparatory to administering the shots which would wake the passengers up for their next meal. Billy, as Chief Steward, Cook and Medical Officer, was the only member of the crew allowed in the passenger section, and of course he was never present when its occupants were conscious. His job was to set up the food and leave before his charges woke up, then return to clear away again when the sedatives contained in the food had done their work. He also saw to it that body functions continued in a healthy manner during these awake periods by the administration of other, cruder types of drugs. He was a Doctor, of course, and a good one, but Miller prayed continually that nobody on board would take seriously ill. The sense of medical responsibility tended to become lost on a ship like the Starfire.

	There was really no reason for her to check the passengers again. It would only make Billy flustered and hold him back, and she would not do that merely to satisfy the vague uneasiness she had felt since the discovery that Danny had been assigned to her ship. She had to call him Danny and treat him like any of the others despite the relationship existing between them on Earth, but it was a strain. Miller shrugged angrily and continued on her way.

	When they got back. Miller vowed to herself, somebody was going to suffer for that little mix-up. Danny normally was Second Officer of Starflame, but some idiotic personnel man had his flames and fires confused so that he had been sent aboard the sister ship Starfire by mistake. If Captain Miller slipped off the psychological tightrope which that error had caused her to walk, it could quite easily prove fatal.

	It was considered extremely unwise for a Captain to have even a distant relative in her crew, and to have had a prior emotional attachment to a crew-member was simply asking for it. If she had only discovered the mistake early enough to rectify it.

	There was a peculiar and highly artificial balance between the Captain and crew of the Starfire. The men had been so conditioned that they naturally gave her all their trust, loyalty, and a love that amounted almost to worship. On her side she had to love them in return, but with the utmost impartiality, and guide them and the ship to safety by seeing to it that that balance was preserved. But the slightest sign of favouritism would have been fatal to that delicate structure, and she suspected that she was leaning over backwards in not showing favourites where Danny was concerned. That could be dangerous, too.

	Captain Miller swore helplessly under her breath. They were babies, just babies, despite their degrees and vast specialised knowledge. She could not feel annoyed with them for long. Besides, if they had not been as little children they would not have been here in the first place.

	A bulkhead door with a lock on it led to the Crew and Control section of the ship. She fastened it behind her, then kicked out towards the open door of The Mess which was about fifteen yards along the corridor. At once she saw that one of the crew was lying in wait for her. She sighed.

	A knee, shoulder and the top of a head showed around the side of a tool locker. Had a little more been visible Miller would have known who the man was. However, as he was trying to hide she would play along by pretending not to see him—she would find out who it was soon enough.

	As she drifted gently past the locker a long familiar voice said "Boo!" loudly. Simultaneously a heavy body collided with hers and a pair of massive arms wrapped themselves around her waist. Miller's perfectly-judged dive along the corridor ended in a chaos of arms and legs against a section of wall-netting, but luckily only her dignity was bruised. She steadied herself with the aid of the net and used the knuckles of her other hand to rap sharply on the ambusher's forehead.

	"Danny! Behave yourself!"

	There must have been more irritation in her tone than she had meant to show. The wide, exuberant grin on Danny's face was abruptly wiped away and for a moment she thought that he would burst into tears. She said hastily, "There, there. I'm not angry at you, Danny. It's just ... Well, you startled me."

	Danny's expression became suddenly contrite. "I'm awful sorry," he mumbled, then half fearfully, "I ... I thought maybe you didn't like me anymore ..."

	Miller looked into those desperately pleading eyes, then away quickly. This wasn't fair, she thought wildly. The strong, mature, well-integrated person that she knew so well on Earth, and on whom she had depended so much, should not be looking at her like this. It was tearing her apart. She said roughly, "Of course I like you, Danny. I love all of you equally. You know that. But now 1 have to go to The Mess. Are you coming?"

	Danny nodded vigorously and chortled, "Yes. Oh, yes. Chris and Jimmy say they're gonna fight for who gets the engine."

	That's what they think, Miller thought grimly as she resumed her interrupted journey. She had not realised that the situation had become as serious as that.

	Technically, the place where the four-man crew of the ship spent their off-duty periods was called the Wardroom, but to the personnel of the Starfire it was referred to simply as The Mess. And not without reason, Miller thought, as she halted herself at the entrance and surveyed the interior once again. Men, she reflected for at least the hundredth time, will be boys!

	The ceiling and walls were covered by a complicated layout of narrow gauge railway track. A model railway enthusiast afflicted with surrealistic nightmares might have dreamed up something like this, Miller thought, with its signal boxes, stations and bridges sticking out at all sorts of unlikely angles, and with sections of track actually looping the loop in some places to avoid outgrowths of the ship's plumbing. But the wildly three-dimensional nature of the layout was due simply to its having to operate in the absence of gravity, during the weeks of free fall between the sustained high-acceleration periods at the beginning and end of the voyage. Chris, the Starfire's Communications man, was kept constantly busy re-magnetising the tiny metal sleepers so that the rolling stock would stick to the track and not go drifting off into the middle of the room.

	But at the moment operations were at a standstill because the reason for being of the whole thing, the locomotive with the long-running clockwork motor, was being hugged protectively to Chris's chest. The rolling stock stood neglected in the sidings while a bitter argument raged between Chris and the Engineer Officer, Jimmy.

	Miller took a deep breath, then said with mock severity, "What's all this about breaking our engine? Speak up, now."

	"I wasn't going to break it," Jimmy said, with a withering look at Chris. "I just wanted to take out the motor for a while ..." He went on to explain the idea he had for fixing a propeller to the driving shaft and building a model aeroplane around it. He was fed up with Chris and the railway and wanted something different.

	Chris was protesting loudly long before he had finished talking, and Danny was butting in with arguments about the technical difficulties of making a model aeroplane fly realistically in -weightless conditions. Miller found her head beginning to spin: her degrees were in applied psychology, not advanced aerodynamics. But one fact emerged quite plainly, Danny was about to side with Jimmy. In those circumstances there was only one thing she could do.

	"I'd like to see Jimmy make an aeroplane," she said in cajoling tones, looking at Chris. "Wouldn't you? And if we don't like it when it's finished then he can put the motor back again. You'll see, you'll have lots of fun with an aeroplane." Her eyes sought confirmation of this from the others, trusting to their childish imaginations to come up with something which would divert Chris from his beloved trains. She was not to be disappointed.

	"Sure," Danny burst out excitedly. "We could play Air Raid." He looked quickly at the Communications Officer. "You've got pieces of plastic insulation we could use as pea-shooters. The man that hits it the most as it passes over—"

	"We could darken the room," Jimmy broke in, "and everybody could have a flash-lamp as well as a peashooter. Searchlights!"

	Chris began to look interested.

	Captain Miller knew that her Communications Officer would not have gone against her wishes once she had made them clear, but she did not want Chris sulking for the rest of the trip. His voice was never heard over the ship's sender, of course, but he was necessary in case the Starfire's electronic gear went wrong.

	But Chris was happy now. Miller left them all talking excitedly together and unobtrusively moved into the Control-room which adjoined The Mess where, theoretically, Danny was supposed to be standing watch. She would have to remind him gently of that, and he Would probably say that he had grown bored and had decided to go in and play with the others. Miller smiled.

	For roughly two in every ten hours she checked—without understanding—the workings of her command. She never expected anything to go wrong, naturally, especially during the three weeks of free fall conditions which most of the ship's automatic devices were shut down. But if something did go wrong then she could interrupt the play of one of her highly qualified "boys" and make him play Spaceman until it was fixed.

	It was a crazy way to operate a spaceship. Miller knew, but not nearly as crazy as some of the methods currently in use. Giant, unwieldy, inefficient ships which carried two—sometimes three—separate sets of operating personnel, and frequently went through all of them on a round trip. Then there were the more imaginative ones who designed their spaceships to resemble the interior of an ocean-going atomic submarine, complete with moving pictures of fish swimming outside its "Port-holes." But that required a one-G acceleration at all times during the voyage, which was a ruinously wasteful and expensive level of operation for the Spencer-Holst Drive. But even then accidents occurred. Somebody was sure to look through the wrong porthole at the wrong time ...

	It had been Captain Miller's grandfather who had first brought back the proof that Space was not for Man—and incidentally, who was primarily responsible as President of Star Lines for later proving himself a liar. History had it that Dr. Ernest J. Miller was awarded a place in the first S-H powered space vessel because of his contributions to the field of space medicine, but the truth was that he had made such a nuisance of himself that they let him go simply to get him out of their hair. He had infested the crew's hair during the trip in various ways until the ship actually sat down on the Moon. It was then that Dr. Ernest J. Miller became an historic figure. Of course, the official accounts call it scientific caution, but with all due respect to her grandfather, Captain Miller knew that he had been scared stiff of leaving that ship.

	The ship had made the approach and landing on instruments, and because a fault in the two-ply glass of the direct vision port—faulty insulation had caused it to frost over, luckily—the crew were anxious to get their first look outside the ship. Its Captain and another crew-man had suited up and, watched enviously by the other two officers—but not Dr. Miller—they had jumped the short distance to the Lunar surface. They had looked all around them, talking excitedly into their suit radios, then they had looked up.

	The talking stopped. With arms akimbo and heads thrown back they remained motionless. They stayed that way while another officer became worried and went down to see what had happened to them. He also became a motionless, upstaring statue before he could report anything helpful to the two still in the ship. It was two hours before the remaining ship's officer ventured down to them, watched by a jittery Dr. Miller.

	The Doctor had formulated an ingenious and utterly fallacious theory having to do with the effects of Lunar gravity on the semi-circular canals of the ear and the sense of balance, so that the officer had the strictest possible instructions for rescuing his friends. On no account was he to look up or move his head quickly in any direction. Acting on these instructions he succeeded in returning his three companions to the ship. But while in the airlock on his last trip, curiosity got the better of him.

	He had remained lucid for over half an hour, sufficient time for him to tell the Doctor how to put the ship on long-range automatic control—so that Earth Base could bring it home—and for painting over the direct vision port in case the frosting melted away.

	Men could not take Space—or rather, they could not look at it and stay sane. In space the Universe could be viewed in 3-D as it were; the distance between the heavenly bodies and the awful masses of nothing at all were placed in their true perspective. To say that a man felt insignificant at the sight was a pitiful understatement, like saying that he acquired a severe inferiority complex. Hut this was not the worst that happened to the man who looked into Space.

	Psychologists likened it to the experience of being torn prematurely from the mother's womb, but with all the adult faculties and sensitivity present during the trauma instead of the undeveloped senses of an infant. Certainly the spaceman's conscious mind recognised the fact that he was only leaving the womb—the Earth—temporarily, but his subconscious most decidedly would not. Under the double shock of "space-gazing"—which among other things paralysed the time-sense—and the "space-birth trauma," the male human mind collapsed.

	The male mind ...

	A young, mentally healthy and mature woman was not bothered much by the sight of Space because, after the nature of her kind she possessed a very practical, down-to-Earth mind. Absence from that same Earth did not bother her cither because—to over-simplify an extremely complicated subject—she was conscious of carrying her world inside her. This was the discovery which the Star Line psychologists had made, and it was only a step to the present highly successful crew-system used in their ships.

	For the duration of the two-way trip the Starfire's crew were hypnotically conditioned into believing that Captain Miller was their mother. The conditioning—which lasted only during the voyage—also gave them an emotional age of about four years, though their technical skills remained unimpaired. It also, in a most subtle way, caused them to think that they were not really in a spaceship but in some complicated mock-up in which they were training to become spacemen when they grew up. Four was a very credulous age. They only pretended for the Captain's sake that they were in Space—she was their mother after all and they liked to please her. In this way the "space-gazing" danger was avoided, and Mother Earth was replaced by the symbol of a loving" Captain. The system so far had worked perfectly.

	Miller, of course, was the only normal person apart from the doped-up passengers in the ship, or she was supposed to be. Sometimes she wondered if there had not been a little reciprocal conditioning used on her, the way she felt about her crew at times, or was she simply suffering from an over-developed maternal instinct?

	Her thoughts were interrupted by Danny entering the Control-room in search of a screwdriver suitable for dismantling toy locomotives. As he left again the intercom buzzer sounded on the Captain's desk indicating a call from the passenger section.

	"Yes, Billy?" she said, switching to sound and vision.

	"Th—there's a man who won't go to sleep," Billy stammered, his eyes wide with excitement. "And ... and he's trying to get out!" The combination cook, steward and medic swallowed, then added nervously, "He heard me outside and tried to talk to me."

	"Did you answer him?"

	Billy shook his head hurriedly.

	"That's a good boy," Miller said, then: "You can come back to clear the dinner things in about an hour. He'll be asleep by that time." She smiled reassuringly and switched to the screen showing the interior of the passenger compartment, her eyes sweeping it for an empty hammock.

	Number 15, that was a man called Gordon. And he had not eaten his dinner or he would not have been up and about.

	"Mr. Gordon!" she said sharply. "Please return to your hammock and eat. You are endangering the efficient operation of this ship. Behave yourself!"

	Gordon had his feet planted against the door of the passenger dorm and was working at the handle. He gave a start, then looking in the general direction of the concealed 'speaker and vision pick-up, he said, "I just wanted to see a bit more of the ship. No harm in that, is there?"

	He was a big, dark man, Miller saw, who could have been a miner or an engineer if it had not been for that crafty look in his eyes. She guessed that he was in the business end of the Colony—the funny business end. Miller exhaled heavily through her nose. She was becoming angry, which was unusual for her, and she felt angry at herself for being angry. This trip was getting her down, Danny was getting her down ...

	"You are forbidden to leave the dormitory during the voyage," she said angrily. "You know that, it is one of our conditions of carriage. Kindly return to your hammock ..."

	"Look," said Gordon, a wheedling note creeping into his voice, "1 know there's something in the food which puts us under, that's why I didn't eat anything this time. I'm curious, you see. Why not let me see round the ship, or even part of it, and meet you. 1 wouldn't cause any trouble—"

	"The regulations are for your protection, not mine. I'm sorry, Mr. Gordon."

	"I'd keep quiet about it, Captain. Honest." Gordon paused, then went on quickly, "I'm not a rich man, but I could pay to have my curiosity satisfied."

	"Please return to your place."

	Miller often had trouble with passengers asking questions on these trips, but this was the first time one had tried to bribe her. Seeing that Gordon was about to renew his arguments, she angrily broke contact with him. His image was still fading from her view-screen as she pressed the button on her desk which released Morpheum into the passenger dorm.

	She would wait five minutes for the sleep gas to do its work, then go down and tuck the recalcitrant Mr. Gordon into his hammock. He would be hungry at the next waking period, of course, but it jolly well served him right.

	Eight minutes later she was at the entrance to the passenger dormitory. The door was open and Gordon was missing.

	Her first concern was for her boys. Gordon loose among the crew could cause serious harm—she might have to recondition some of them, and that was a dangerous business with the limited facilities aboard ship. A normal adult tangling with a bunch of emotional four-year-olds ... She pushed the thought hastily out of her mind while she fumbled for the nose filter which would protect her against any residual Morpheum seeping through the entrance, then she stopped abruptly.

	Gordon, she realised now, must have had a similar nose filter. But in common with all the other passengers he had been searched carefully before embarking and again on the ship. That meant the filter had been placed in the dormitory beforehand for his use, which in turn meant that Mr. Gordon had not merely been personally curious but was engaged on a piece of well-planned espionage.

	But all that was a job for the Star Line security section when she got back. Now she had to find him before he ran into one of the crew. Which way had he gone?

	She felt rather than heard a slight shock from astern. It could have been made by shoes striking the metal plating of the ship. The crew always wore soft sandals. Miller headed in the direction of the sound.

	As Miller moved into the red and white checks of the crew territory she was thinking that perhaps she could do a little work on Gordon's mind to keep him from blabbing about anything he might have found out in his travels. She thought she could do that without damaging him. She would have to find him first, and gain his confidence …

	Suddenly out of the corner of her eye she saw Danny following her. As if she hadn't troubles enough already! She pretended not to see him, then scaled the next bulkhead door she passed behind her. That would delay Danny for a few minutes anyway. If she could only get to Gordon quickly enough before Danny arrived to complicate things ...

	Ten yards further on, she found Billy.

	He was clinging to the wall-net with one hand while holding the side of his face with the other. He said tearfully, "He hit me. I—I tried to stop him, because you told us that the lights outside the windows makes the passengers sick. B—but he hit me." The account ended on a wailing note.

	"Where did he go, Billy?"

	Billy pointed to a branching corridor behind him. Miller mentally ran over the plan of the ship, then dived hurriedly into it. The galley and certain sealed portions of the Drive were there, also one of the ship's life-capsule bays.

	She actually saw Gordon as he slammed the air-tight seal of the launching bay behind him. It took a few minutes then for Miller to reach the spot herself and remove the opaque shield covering the seal's inspection window. When she did so, Gordon was already slapping paint onto the transparent canopy of the life-capsule. In a few minutes he would be gone.

	She knew what had been planned now. This Gordon character was supposed to find out all he could about the ship, then escape in a life-capsule. Each capsule mounted a small reaction motor and fuel sufficient to take it a safe distance away from an exploding or otherwise distressed mother ship, together with a two-way radio. He would launch the capsule, check the Starfire's Earth-wards velocity which he shared by use of his rocket motor, then await pick-up by the ship which was undoubtedly hanging on Starfire's tail just beyond detection range. After that, in due course, the Star Line Company would again become a minnow among sharks.

	But she could stop him yet. If only he did not know too much about spaceships.

	"Mr. Gordon," she said crisply, switching on the mike to the capsule compartment. She also activated sound and vision recorders all over the ship, just in case there was an accident and subsequent investigation by the authorities—she had to play safe both for the Company and herself. "Mr. Gordon," she repeated, "Cease all movement at once. You are in great danger. The mechanism of that capsule is faulty ..."

	While she was speaking Miller kept her face at the inspection window, but her hands were wrestling with the stiff manual control of the air-tight door. Gordon had cut out the servo-motor which normally operated it, but if she could open it manually then the outer seal of the bay would not open and the capsule could not leave the ship. But the fact of her trying to open the inner seal would set off all sorts of warning indicators inside. If she could only keep Gordon's attention ...

	Gordon looked up startled at the window which he had thought was solid metal, and at the voice issuing from the 'speaker above it.

	"Well, well," he said mockingly. "It was nice to have seen you, Captain ..."

	Suddenly his eyes slewed sideways and his face went white. He had seen the warning lights blinking on the nearby bulkhead and come to his own conclusions. "Oh, no you don't," he said thickly, and called Miller several extremely dirty names. He began wriggling frantically into the life-capsule.

	Miller took her eyes from the inspection window then and bent to concentrate on turning the manual control. She strained at it, red-faced from the wholly uncalled-for language which had been used on her as much as from her exertions.

	Abruptly the control locked fast and an indicator above it blinked "Outer Seal Open." There was a whooshing noise which diminished rapidly into silence. Through the inspection window Miller was in time to see the flare of the life-capsule's motor receding in a long arc at full power. As it curved out of sight she shook the locked control angrily and felt an urgent desire to burst into tears.

	But maybe things were not all that bad, she told herself consolingly. True, Cordon had seen a little of the ship before escaping, but what really had he found out beyond the fact that Billy had a rather childish personality and that certain sections of the Ship's interior were colour-coded with garish check and diamond patterns?

	The answer was an awful lot.

	If Gordon had not been himself a psychologist, then trained psychologists would shortly be questioning him under drugs which allowed total recall. In those circumstances a few facts plus a little imagination could give the whole game away.

	Her thoughts were dramatically interrupted by a crash which sounded like the Crack of Doom, but with tinny overtones—she had never before heard anything like it. From nearby came the suddenly frightened cries of Danny and Billy. The ship had been holed, obviously, but Miller could not hear the hissing sound which would have told of air escaping in the vicinity. She called out reassuringly, "Emergency Drill, boys! Get into your spacesuits."

	A clause in Space Regulations stated that interplanetary ships must carry sufficient spacesuits so that, should an emergency arise in any part of the vessel, a crewman trapped therein could reach one and don it within two minutes. This meant that there was a spacesuit to be found in every ten yards of corridor and up to six in any compartment where the Starfire's crew were likely to gather, not counting the dormitory supply. There was no shortage of suits, Miller thought grimly as she struggled into the tight-fitting plastic and sealed it all but for the face-plate. The trouble was that her crew could not be trusted to use them properly, if at all. She would have to check that first before she could start thinking about whatever catastrophe it was which had overtaken the ship.

	It had not sounded like a meteorite, somehow.

	Danny was talking to a scared-looking Billy when she came up to them. He was saying scornfully, "... And anybody knows it's not a real emergency. It's a test. But if you start being a sissy, shouting and crying that you want to get off, then when we get to run real live spaceships they won't let you on ..."

	He broke off as he saw the Captain and went red with embarrassment. "I'm sorry," he mumbled awkwardly.

	"That's all right," Captain Miller said, allowing her tone to sound hurt. "I've suspected that some of you think that this isn't a real ship, but that is a matter for the boys concerned—I shall not tell them whether they are right or not." Her eyes ran over the two spacesuited figures, noting that less than half the seals were fastened properly, and the helmets were not even connected. She went on sternly, "Let me remind you, however, that whether you believe this to be a real ship or not, the outside is probably a vacuum, or at least at an uncomfortably low air pressure.

	"You have been trained in the use of spacesuits. See that the ones you are wearing now are sealed, and properly!"

	She brushed angrily past them and headed in the direction from which the crash had come.

	Danny and Billy were undoubtedly deeply hurt by her tone. She could console them later, if necessary. At the moment they were unaware of how lucky they were. They did not have to bear the responsibility for a multi-million-pounds ship, a crew of four highly immature adults and the safe delivery of thirty-odd passengers. She went suddenly cold. Supposing the crash had been in the passenger dormitory? Her mind tried to shy away from that thought, but could not quite manage it.

	If only she could be like the crew, just playing at spaceships. Suppose this was just an elaborate test after all, a test for intending psychologist-Captains as well as of their crews? If she pretended to worry, went through the motions, but secretly aware that nobody was going to die or be hurt ...

	But no, Miller told herself savagely, she recognised that kind of thinking for what it was, an attempt to escape reality; madness. The reality was that she was Captain of a damaged—to an as yet unknown extent—spaceship en route between Mars and Earth, and with the safety of some forty souls in her hands. It was not a very nice reality, but there it was.

	She passed through two bulkhead doors on the way forward before coming to one, which, because of a difference in air pressure on the other side, would not open. The damage was in the next compartment, then. There was a transparent panel in the bulkhead door. She peered through it.

	Because of the danger of secondary radiation from cosmic rays the hull plating was kept thin, but it was extremely tough. A few yards from the bulkhead Miller could see where one of the superhard alloy plates showed a distinct bulge inwards, and at the centre of the bulge a small, jagged hole through which protruded what looked like a six-inch length of buckled piping. In the immediate vicinity hoarfrost had formed showing where air was escaping to space. It looked for all the world as though Starfire had been stabbed with a length of piping; Miller could make nothing of it at all. Then her eyes travelled further into this punctured section of corridor, and she felt herself shiver involuntarily.

	This was the stretch of corridor leading into the passenger dormitory, and she could see where the airtight door of the dorm had closed automatically, as it was designed to do, an instant after the corridor had been opened to space. But when Gordon had been escaping he had discarded the plastic harness used to keep him in his hammock during free fall. It had drifted across the threshold of the door so that it had been unable to close properly. At one corner Miller could see a hair-thin line of frost beginning to form.

	The passenger compartment was losing air, too.

	There were over thirty passengers in there, she thought in agony as she made for the nearest communications point; thirty people drugged into sleep and utterly helpless. What good were spacesuits to sleeping men?

	When she raised the control-room Miller had to quell an incipient panic there as well before she was in a position to have her instructions carried out. But eventually she said, "Chris, train a vision pickup on the air-supply panel of the control board like a good boy, and connect it so's I can see it from back here. I want to check on something."

	She squinted into the tiny view-screen before her at the needles which registered air supply and density all over the ship. Only the punctured section was airless, but the dormitory was losing it at a slow but steady rate. She did some fast mental arithmetic and decided that the passengers, being reasonably healthy specimens, might be able to live and breathe for a little more than an hour.

	And Danny, Billy and herself were cut off from the forward section of the ship. She could lead them across the outer hull in their spacesuits; of course, there were personnel locks conveniently placed for that to be possible. But the crew's conditioning was not meant to stand against a test like that. Space to them was some rather uninteresting lights outside windows in the hull which were used occasionally in conjunction with astrogation tables. Confronted with the stars all around them ... Well, she would probably end by leading in two empty-eyed things which had once been men.

	But the thought of what might happen to her crew—even of what would happen to Danny—did not bother her half so much as the picture she had of the passengers. There were spacesuits all around them, but they lay there in their hammocks, drugged, slowly strangling to death in their sleep. They were not scheduled to wake up for another three hours, so there was no hope of them being able to help themselves. They were just not due to wake up. Period.

	Gordon getting away had been bad enough, but when Starfire arrived with thirty frozen, blue-faced corpses aboard, that would be the end of the Company for sure. Yet somehow Miller could not feel very strongly for the Company, not now.

	Ten yards away a lot of people were dying without knowing about it, and if they died she would die, too. Not physically, maybe, but with her nature and training the loss of those people would affect her only slightly less than if her "boys" in the crew were to be wiped out to a man. Empathy, the maternal instinct, whatever people chose to call it, could be a double-edged weapon.

	"There's a puncture in the hull!" Danny's voice broke in on her suddenly. "How do I get in? I'm supposed to fix thinks like that, you know."

	Miller watched Danny tugging at the handle of the airtight door for several seconds before it dawned on her that here was the answer, the problem and its solution stated in two short sentences. In sudden excitement, she said, "You can't open it because there is no air on the other side. But you can drill through it, letting the air out of this section and so equalise pressure. It would open then.

	"The airtight door behind us would automatically seal itself then, but before drilling we could bring up repair tools to fix the puncture. We would be safe inside our suits while you did the repair job, then when it was finished I could get the control-room to by-pass the safety cut-off and pump air back into these two evacuated sections, and everything would be all right again ..."

	Miller felt like kicking herself for the scare she had thrown herself into. Women might be practical in many ways, but they were not good mechanics. And men thrived on mechanical problems and in learning the skills necessary to solving them. Women did not. Had that not been so, spaceships might have been flying crewed entirely by females.

	Danny had his suit helmet pushed back and his face pressed against the inspection window. Suddenly he turned away from it, looking frightened. He said, "I—I can't do it. I can't go in there. You know I can't."

	But of course! The holed section was painted a vivid black and white diamond design. Of the crew only Billy and herself could go there. The others were conditioned against it as a precaution against them accidentally running across normal adults during a swap-over. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell Danny about the plight of the passengers and order him to do the job, but she knew that it would be useless. The conditioning was thorough.

	But the idea was still workable, it must be. If it was not, then there was one way that Danny could enter the holed section and repair it ...

	She pulled her mind away from that idea, fast.

	"How about Billy doing it?" she said suddenly. "You can instruct him from here. He's allowed in there, you know."

	"Billy can't use a welder," Danny stated. "It's tricky. He'd probably burn his own feet off."

	Miller's heart seemed to be stopping, paralysed by the dread that was growing in her. She said desperately, "If you explained it to me, could I do it?"

	"Maybe," Danny said, obviously embarrassed at having to tell the Captain that there was something he could do better than her. "You'd have to practice a lot first. In a couple of days, maybe ..." His voice mumbled into silence.

	Miller pressed her hand over her eyes to hide from Danny and Billy the struggle that was raging in her mind. Despite her duty as Captain to treat each member of the crew with the strictest impartiality, she knew that she was selfish enough—weak enough, rather—not to do this thing to Danny if another crew-man would have served in his place. But only Billy, the steward, and herself could enter the holed section, and both were useless for the job.

	Jimmy, the other Engineer, was out of reach in the control-room.

	There was the intercom, of course, but even with a vision link-up it was impossible to de-condition a man in that manner. It had to be Danny or no one.

	But was it true, she asked herself desperately, that she did not want to de-condition Danny, the man she had been forcing herself to think of and to treat as one of her "boys?" It had been a terrible strain maintaining that pretence, much worse than she had believed it was possible for her to stand. Was the truth not that she wanted this man as the intelligent, strong and infinitely reassuring adult that he really was instead of a hulking four-year-old? Maybe there was a chink in her mental armour, maybe she was no longer suited for this work ...

	Only in the worst possible emergency was she supposed to de-condition a member of the crew. The shock of a normal adult personality emerging suddenly into the—to him—nightmare environment of a ship in Space could very easily destroy that personality there and then. And if it did not do so, then by the accident of sheer curiosity the person would look out into Space. Everybody knew what happened then.

	No prior emotional attachments ...

	Miller took her hand away from her eyes and said gruffly, "Billy. There's a tool cabinet near the life-capsule bay. I want the welding gear, and bring a few spare oxygen tanks for our suits." She turned quickly. "Danny, come over here beside me. Real close. And watch my eyes, there's a good boy."

	Danny did as he was told: he must have thought it some new kind of game.

	If he takes the awakening shock all right, Miller swore to herself, I'll make sure Space doesn't get him if I have to ... Aloud, she began the timed combinations of keywords that would replace Danny's four-year-old personality with his true one. As she finished he gave a convulsive wriggle and his hand drifted away from the wall-net which he had been holding. If there had been gravity he would have collapsed. He swallowed several times, looking around him wildly, then burst out, "Hey! We're on a spaceship!"

	There was astonishment in his eyes, and excitement, but that was all. He was all right so far. Miller saw him looking at her uniform collar visible above the helmet line of her spacesuit and forestalled the questions by speaking first.

	"Yes, we're on a spaceship," she said quickly. "Now listen carefully, please, we've very little time ..." She began to explain the predicament they were in and the conditioning of the crew which was partly the cause of it. She told everything. She ended by trying to apologise for restoring his adult personality in an environment which was all too likely to cause its destruction.

	He waved that aside, then, looking shrewdly into her face, he said, "You've had a tough time with me being on your ship, quite a strain, eh? Better for all concerned if you keep calling me Danny, don't you think?" He trailed off as his eyes took in the various items of equipment around him. "I'm glad it was me," he said suddenly. "A real ship! I wouldn't have missed this for the world."

	His eyes came back to her admiringly. He went on, "I knew I was spacecrew, of course, we all did. But we never remember being on a trip. One day we go into the briefing hall and four or five weeks later we come out again— though we think no time at all passes—and somebody tells us we've been on a trip. The paycheck proves it, too.

	"But I never suspected that you were spacecrew, too. How does it feel to be an intrepid spacewoman?"

	"I haven't time to tell you, even if I could," Captain Miller replied, strain putting a harsh note into her voice which she had not wanted to be there. "The passengers, remember?"

	Danny said, "I'm sorry."

	"No matter. But I hear Billy coming with the welding gear. When he arrives, don't say anything at all. Pretend to be sulking about something—I won't ask you direct questions and you can simply ignore him. You see," Miller explained, "your voice has deepened and there are marked changes in your face and carriage. While talking to the others would not break their conditioning, it certainly would make them feel frightened and unsure of themselves. So stay quiet and sulk, OK?"

	Danny nodded, suppressing a smile, and turned to examine the hull puncture through the inspection panel. Miller relieved Billy of the welding equipment and began checking that his suit was sealed in readiness for the moment when the section they were now in would become airless. She was convinced that her worries regarding the passengers were practically over. And she had an idea for keeping Danny safe, too.

	When the puncture was fixed she would tell Billy that Danny was sick, and was to be treated as a passenger for the rest of the voyage. He would occupy Mr. Gordon's hammock—Mr. Gordon having gone away—and take sedation with the rest of them, and have no contact with the rest of the crew whatsoever. That would take care of Danny all right, though he would be like an old bear towards her for not allowing his adult personality to see all over the ship. But when the Company psychologists got at him when he returned, he would cease to remember that he had even been de-conditioned on this trip.

	A better way would have been simply to convert him into an emotional four-year-old again, but that type of work could only be done properly on Earth where the right facilities were available.

	A tap on the shoulder made Miller turn sharply. Danny had his helmet in place and was motioning her covertly to do the same. Puzzled, she did so.

	"I had to talk to you," his voice squeaked from the helmet ear-phones. "It's about the puncture. It can't be fixed from inside. I'll have to go onto the outer hull."

	"No!"

	"But I'll have to. What hit us anyway? It wasn't fast enough to make a clean puncture, and yet it had enough mass to push a hole through the plating. The edges of the hole are turned in and jagged—unsuitable for patching without first cutting and planing down, and that couldn't be done in time to save the passengers. That metal is tough. The only way of fixing an airtight patch over it, without completely replacing the hull plate, is to weld it on from outside."

	He sounded completely sure of himself: there was no other way in which it could be done.

	"You can't go outside in your present mental condition," Miller said desperately. "There must be some other way."

	Danny's head shook inside his helmet. "I know what's supposed to happen to men who look at Space. I'll be careful. We could fit some type of blinker arrangement to my helmet so that 1 could see just a small area directly ahead, and I'd keep my eyes on the hull the whole time. I'll be all right," he ended drily, "and 1 promise not to peek."

	Miller tried to argue. She advanced many wild and totally unworkable ideas. She had to stop when the rather hurt and puzzled Billy started putting on his own helmet to hear what all the talking was about. Danny had the last word.

	"The passengers, remember?"

	They left Billy at the bulkhead door adjoining the holed section with instructions to drill through it when they signalled that the repairs were completed. Air would then fill the damaged compartment giving a cheek that the repaired hole was not leaking before Miller ordered the control-room to equalise pressure there. It was on the way to the small personnel lock that Miller made the decision to accompany Danny onto the hull. Only by doing that could she make sure that his curiosity did not get the better of him.

	At the entrance to the stern airlock Miller painted out Danny's face-plate, with the exception of one half-inch slit at eye-level. This she covered with a double turn of thick webbing. She then checked communications with Billy and the control-room, warned Danny against touching his blindfold until she told him it was safe to do so, then led him out.

	It was the first time Miller had been outside the ship during flight—it was supposed to be unnecessary for anyone to walk the outer hull at all. But the Starfire was packed with safety devices for use in the most highly unlikely circumstances, so all suits were equipped with magnetised boots, wrist-and-knee-plates as a matter of course. Miller was surprised how quickly she was able to slide herself along the hull, even with the blindfolded Danny in tow. And when she moved beyond the shadow of the port stabiliser, she was surprised again. Unpleasantly.

	Mr. Gordon had returned.

	It was plain what had happened now. The life-capsule in which the escaping passenger had left so hurriedly had returned. Like some diminutive swordfish attacking a whale it had rammed the side of the Starfire at full acceleration, penetrating the super-hard hull with its fixed rod antenna. As well as puncturing the hull the crash had forced the greater part of the antenna, together with its mounting, backwards into the life-capsule like an irresistible piston. The things its had done to their late passenger were not pleasant. Miller felt suddenly sick.

	Pieces of the capsule's transparent canopy still clung to the wreckage, some of them smeared with paint. Looking at them and remembering Gordon's last angry words to her—swear words, mostly—Miller realised something which made her feel even worse. She, herself, was responsible for Gordon's death.

	When she had been working the manual control of the life-capsule bay, Gordon must have thought that she was trying to kill him by opening the bay to space instead of opening the inner door as she had been trying to do, hence the foul language. He had panicked and left in the Capsule before its transparent canopy was fully blacked out. Space had taken him just as he was beginning the curve backwards which would eventually have taken him to the ship following in their wake. His time-sense paralysed, held like a bird by the mesmeric stare of a snake, Gordon's mind was already dead before that initial curve became the full circle which smashed him into the mother ship's flanks.

	There was a cruel sort of justice about it, Miller thought wildly. She had caused Gordon's death. Had Gordon returned to bring about the mental destruction of Danny, her ...

	"What's wrong? You're talking, muttering to yourself.

	Something about retribution. Retribution for what?" Danny's voice was brusque and just a little frightened. Instinctively his hands had gone up to the blindfold. "What's happening, 1 can't see!"

	"Don't!" Miller cried. "Keep your hands down! I'll tell you what has happened …" Speaking quickly she described the situation, then concluded, "The antenna rod has gone through the hull plate. It's twisted on the inside, so we'll have to work the capsule around a bit to pull it free. It will be quicker that way than by sawing through the rod, 1 think.

	"Now," she went on quickly, "there's no reason for you to see what you're doing just yet. I'll guide your hands to a good grip, then when I tell you, lift."

	They tugged and strained for several minutes trying to pull the obstruction free, but in vain. Miller was glad that they were not using the suit radios at the time, but a three-yard length of cable connecting their helmet 'phones direct—a sealed, two-way communications system. The other members of the crew would have wondered at all the sighing, and grunting being broadcast. Danny took a deep breath and said, "All right, we'll try again. One, two, three, hup!"

	There was the snap of the antenna rod breaking, the sound transmitted through their metal boots, then everything happened very slowly.

	Like in a nightmare.

	The battered life-capsule broke free of the hull and rose ponderously upwards. Caught off-balance Miller fell over backwards, but managed to keep one foot and one arm-magnet in contact with the hull. It was not so with Danny. Danny had a good grip on the capsule, so good in fact that he was unable to disentangle his fingers when it began moving away from the ship. Slowly, at a speed of no more than three inches a second, it pulled him away with it, the resistance of his magnetic boots scarcely slowing it down as they parted from the hull.

	Miller, with the frantic slowness necessary if she was not to lose contact with the ship, struggled to her feet and made a grab for his retreating legs. But Danny was kicking, a purely reflex action, and her hand was knocked away. At that moment the lead joining their helmets was jerked from its socket and all contact with him was lost.

	Just out of reach she saw Danny wrap his legs around the middle of the capsule, let go with one hand, then reach up towards his blindfold with the other. Miller found that she had launched herself towards him without even thinking about it.

	Her helmet struck his shoulder. Her arms wrapped themselves around his body at elbow level, the instinct to hold on to something lending them desperate strength. He was temporarily unable therefore to uncover his faceplate. Miller pushed her helmet against his, reassuring him desperately—though she felt in dire need of it herself —and begging him not to look out and so leave her all alone. With a shock she realised that she was crying. But when her hand found the disconnected helmet lead and plugged it in again, her voice was almost back to normal.

	"We're only about twenty or thirty feet from the ship's hull," she said, forcing a note of confidence. "Now if you just stand up on this thing I'll point you in the right direction, and all you need do is jump. Not too hard, of course—"

	"I'm not jumping anywhere. Not unless I can see where I'm going."

	He was very definite about it. His grip on the life-capsule tightened. The ship crept further away.

	Their safety lines—all eighty feet of them—were attached to lugs inside the personnel lock. They were not therefore, completely detached from the ship. At the moment their outward movement had been arrested by the safety lines and they were slowly travelling the arc of a circle which had the lines as its radius. Eventually they would wind themselves back onto the ship. Or maybe, she thought, remembering the passengers, they could climb back along the lines and save time. It would be hard to get a decent grip on the thin nylon lines with the suit gauntlets, but ...

	She was about to outline this plan to Danny when she mentally bit her tongue. It was not necessary to climb back along their safety lines. They would get to the hull again fast enough. Far too fast.

	They were circling Starfire on the end of an eighty-foot, line, moving at a relatively slow speed. But their radius as the line wound itself around the hull was being shortened steadily, which meant that their speed was steadily increasing. Miller could not work the answer out in her head, but she suspected that they would arrive on the hull so quickly that they might not live through it. If the impact did not kill them outright it must certainly crack their suits.

	She refrained from mentioning any of this aloud.

	Miller watched the Starfire's almost imperceptible rotation eighty feet below them. Then it was fifty feet beneath them and moving appreciably faster. They spun faster and nearer. She kept telling Danny that everything was all right, when secretly she wanted to cling to him and cry, as she used to do, for him to protect her and not let anything hurt or frighten her. They kicked free of the Life-capsule, then the individual plates of the hull were beginning to blur with speed and they were ten feet away. They struck.

	Only one thing saved them. The safety lines, now wound together, had been caught loosely over one of the stabilisers. In the instant before they struck the line had slipped off the projection, thus allowing them more line just when they needed it most. The result was that they struck the hull at a relatively shallow angle and slid forwards until the tightening line brought them up with a jerk. Miller felt as though she was one great bruise, but nothing seemed to be broken. And Danny was all right, too. His choice of words while telling her so was lurid.

	"Listen carefully," Miller broke in. "Walk in the direction you're pointed for twenty paces, that will bring you close to the puncture. I'll fetch your welding gear from the airlock and bring it to you. We've got to hurry! But whatever you do, don't try to see where you're going."

	"I won't," Danny said. He was breathing heavily.

	Five minutes later his blindfold was off, but his eyes were on the section of damaged hull plating and on the bright blue flame of the welder. Miller stood over him, but with nothing to do but watch that his attention did not stray away from his job, her mind began to slip back to her main problem. Or was it a dilemma, an insoluble problem that, far from wanting to solve, made her want to go away to some dark, quiet place and hide and forget it all ...?

	She was convinced that the passengers were already dead. They must have died while Danny and herself had been interminably circling the ship on their safety lines. There would be an investigation that would very likely end in the criminal courts. Thirty people dead because the Star Line method of operating their ships could not cope with a one-inch hole in the hull in time to save them. That was not quite accurate, the passenger Gordon was the true cause of the disaster, but they would not look at it that way on Earth—their rivals would see to that. They would say that Captain Miller was solely responsible for her ship and those within her, and that Captain Miller was guilty of multiple manslaughter. And the trouble was that even if they acquitted her, she would feel herself guilty for the rest of her life anyhow.

	She had no friends. The big, warm-hearted man so grimly working at the hull beside her would not want her after this, nor his father. She had ruined them both, three generations of space-travellers, even though the last was the only one to actually see Space ...

	It was very, very black when you didn't look near the Sun, and between the stars there was plenty of room to hide. It was funny, but she had never really looked at the stars before ...

	Velvet blackness and stars were all around her, then they flicked out of existence to be replaced by the interior of the stern air-lock. Like frames picked from a film at random and thrown onto the screen at normal speed, various sections of the ship nickered into being around her and were gone again. In most of the frames a white-faced and sweating Danny was bent over her, holding her in his arms and trying desperately to tell her something. Why, she found herself thinking bemusedly, this shouldn't happen to me, I'm a woman! Then: I've been Space-gazing—my time-sense is all snarled up …!

	Miller opened her eyes again to find herself still held protectively by Danny. She giggled suddenly, and said, "I feel silly calling you Danny, as if you were a kid."

	The grey, tensed face above her relaxed, but only slightly. It still looked much older than its forty-five years. He said with a great sigh of thanks, "So you're back. I thought I'd lost you altogether. But listen. 1 don't know what happened to you exactly, I'm no psychologist, but it seems to me that you had an insoluble problem and worked yourself into a case of space neurosis to escape it. Well forget it. The passengers are all fine, everything's fine. We weren't outside the ship more than half an hour, no matter how long it felt like. So your problem is gone. Understand?"

	The eyes looked long and searchingly into hers, found what they were looking for, and the fear went out of them. He said gruffly, "You're all right now."

	Miller replied by throwing her arms round his neck and bursting into tears. She felt wonderful.

	"There, there," he said, holding her awkwardly because it was a great many years since he had held her like that. "You've had a bad time this trip, I'm not surprised you cracked a little. Imagine foisting me onto you and expecting you to treat me like a son along with the rest of them—me, your own father. It was enough to tie that alleged mind of yours into granny-knots. And the Gordon accidents on top of everything else ..."

	"Look," he went on softly. "The psychological balance of this ship's crew is shot to h——, er, excuse me. The crew still need you, but you need somebody to lean on a little yourself as well. Don't you think that I could fill that little job? You keep the crew in line, and I keep you from running off the rails. It will work, you know. I won't go space-gazing after seeing what it nearly did to you, be sure of that!"

	For the first time since leaving Earth Captain Miller felt herself really begin to relax. This was going to work, she knew it was, but there would still have to be precautions taken. She said, "You'll have to sleep most of the time, Dad. And keep out of the way—"

	She broke off as the intercom buzzed imperiously. Her father's surprised grunt was drowned by the wailing voice of Chris blaring loudly from it.

	"... He broke it! He broke it! Jimmy did it! He wound it up too tight and the spring broke and ... and now we can't play aeroplanes or trains or anything and he said he'd be careful and he's a dirty sneak and ... and ..."

	At that point the Starfire's Communications Officer burst into tears.

	Captain Miller sighed, then forced her stiff and aching muscles to propel her in the direction of the Control-room. "Spacetravel," she muttered resignedly, "is just one blasted crisis after another."

	She could hear her father laughing softly as she left.

DEADLY LITTER

Chapter One

	The man who opened the door did not waste his breath asking who they were or what they wanted, he merely stared at Captain Gregory and the two space officers behind him and waited. The frightened expression in his eyes—the only features capable of registering emotion in the stiff, shiny mask some plastic surgeon had given him—made it plain that he had been expecting this visit, that he had been expecting it and worrying about it for years.

	"You are James Andrew Caulfield," said Gregory quietly, "one-time Engineer on the passenger-carrying freighter Sunflower. May we come in?"

	The man nodded and they all filed inside. Gregory sat facing Caulfield while his men, Hartman and Nolan, remained standing with their eyes fixed unblinkingly on the ex-Engineer. Behind those eyes were remembered pictures of contorted faces, frozen, brittle bodies and the riddled, battered and totally wrecked ships which were the end results of some spaceman's dirty habits. The hatred which Lieutenants Nolan and Hartman felt towards Caulfield and the others like him was controlled—just barely controlled—but they made no effort to conceal it.

	"You have the choice of imprisonment or of coming with us," said Gregory suddenly, and added: "Unless you can throw all the blame onto your late Captain—and you might have a job doing that after all this time—your sentence will be heavy. Alternatively you can come with me and revisit the scene of the crime."

	"I'll come with you, of course," said Caulfield; then with a note of derision in his voice, "But don't you think the scene of the crime is just a little bit out of range by now ...?"

	Hartman leaned forward and cleared his throat threateningly but Gregory decided that the time for getting tough with this man was not yet. Ignoring the other's tone, he said, "I am aware that our Sun shares a general rotation around the galactic centre, that the Galaxy as a whole is in motion towards someplace else, and that the exact positions in space occupied by Sunflower eleven years ago are very far away by now. But for our purpose the Sun, together with its planets, moons, meteorites and the variegated junk which has been added by ourselves, can be considered a closed gravitational system.

	"You're allowed seventy pounds of luggage. Start choosing what you want to take along."

	Gregory was thinking that Caulfield sounded more like an astrogator than an engineer. And it was a great pity that the prisoner hadn't been Sunflower's pilot instead of just its reactor-man. But he was the only man now living of that ship's original crew, and Gregory had to use what material there was available, poor though it might be.

	Watching Caulfield pack—he took technical books mainly, a large photograph of his late wife and various odds and ends—Gregory learned a great deal about the man. The apartment he occupied told him a lot, too, much more than the civil police who had tracked down Caulfield had been able to do. The information was going to be very useful when the time came to put the pressure on this particular ex-Engineer.

	"This one gave in very easily, sir," Nolan observed while Hartman and Caulfield were settling up with the building's supervisor. "Usually they object more. Most prefer gaol."

	"Maybe he loves space and misses being out," Gregory said a little absently. "You know how some of these ex-spacemen are. Maybe he wants to get out again under any circumstances."

	Nolan granted. He said, "If he loved space that much, why did he have to do such a thorough job of mucking it up?"

	There was no simple answer to that.

	On the way to the spacefield Gregory was silent, thinking mainly about the apartment they had just left. The contents of the bookcases had made it plain that Caulfield had tried to keep abreast of things, that he must have been passionately interested in spaceflight as a whole and not only in his own specialty. The over-all decor had indicated a woman's influence, that of a neat, pleasant, feminine but no-nonsense type of woman. But dust had gathered in odd corners where no woman would allow dust to be, and there had been other pointers that the influence which had made the place what it was had departed. Gregory knew from the police that Caulfield's wife had died two years previously, yet there had been strong indications that he had not moved a thing since, although continuing to keep the place as clean as he knew how.

	An intelligent, sensitive type obviously, with a lot of respect for his dead wife's memory. Gregory thought that he would try the sympathetic approach with Caulfield. For a while, anyway.

	At the field's main gate and passenger terminal they had to stop while Gregory showed his credentials. One of the ever-present hawkers, catching sight of Caulfield's civvie dress, hurried up to try to sell him a packet of used tea leaves which were purported to have made the trip from Ganymede. In an under-tone, but with a command of language which made even Hartman look interested, their prisoner told the man what he thought of his well-travelled tea leaves. He was beginning to make equally pungent suggestions as to their disposal when the gate official waved the car through.

	Out on the field they were twice held up by lights as passenger shuttles took off, but eventually they reached the ferry which would take them up to Descartes. And less than three hours after knocking on Caulfield's door they were in space.

	The Police Survey Ship Descartes was a large vessel which could, if necessary, make a direct landing on a planet, and for this reason it possessed the large stabiliser fins and streamlining which normally was confined to small ferry rockets. Most of her interior was taken up by fuel tanks for the landing motors and practically all of what was left was filled by the reactor, electronic computers and a wide variety of measuring and direction-finding equipment, so that the living quarters were cramped and not very comfortable. But Gregory was intensely proud of his ship, so much so that it didn't bother him at all that everybody in space called it "The Dust-car" ...

	Lieutenant Allen was on orbit watch in the control-room when they transferred from the shuttle. He gave Caulfield a brief, unfriendly look, nodded to Hartman and Nolan, then launched into his report to the Captain. Nothing at all had happened—which was normal for a ship in the two-thousand-mile orbit—but several signals had come in. All were routine notices except for one reporting dirty habits on the part of an unidentified crewman from Cerberus. One of the passengers had sent it up from the ground after landing ...

	"I distrust passengers' reports," Gregory broke in irritably. "Even when they're sincere and not just imagining things they frequently mistake what they think they see. We've found Cerberus to be a tidy ship ..."

	Part of his irritation was due to having to delay questioning Caulfield. The matter of the Sunflower Drift was most urgent, and Caulfield was obviously on tenterhooks waiting for the grilling to start. But maybe it would be a good thing to keep him stewing in his own juice a little longer.

	"Very well, Mr. Allen, we'll check on it," Gregory said finally. "Off you go, and have a good leave."

	"Thank you, sir," said Allen briskly, and left to board the ferry which had brought Gregory and the others up.

	Hartman took the astrogation panel, Nolan the Engineer's position, and Gregory went to his post between and slightly behind them where he could watch everything. Caulfield had one of the two extra acceleration chairs near a direct vision port. Hartman fed the figures of their own orbit into the calculator together with those of Cerberus and quickly came up with the corrections necessary to make them intersect. He passed the figures to Nolan who looked enquiringly at the Captain. Gregory nodded to go ahead.

	"Straps, everyone," said Nolan quietly. "Twelve and a half seconds at two-G."

	The gyros whined briefly and died as they brought the ship into correct alignment. Chemical rockets flared, ramming them deep into their chairs, and also died after what felt like much longer than twelve seconds. All that remained was to wait for Cerberus to come up to them and match velocities, which would happen in twenty-seven minutes.

	Gregory spent the time watching their prisoner.

	Despite the enormous and steady increase in space commerce which had taken place over the past quarter century there was still no shortage of parking space around Earth. It was very rare, however, for a ship taking up orbit not to be within visual distance of at least three others. Caulfield was dividing his attention between the fuzzy points of light which were orbiting ships and the silent occupants of the control-room. When he looked out the port he was relaxed and almost happy, but when he glanced inwards lines of tension formed around his mouth and eyes. As the minutes dragged by he was looking inwards more and more frequently.

	Watching him, Gregory was not in the least surprised by the outburst when it came.

	"What are you waiting for?" Caulfield shouted suddenly, "You want to ask questions, well ask them! Start with nice easy ones! What was Sunflower's exact position, course and velocity at 1603 hours August Twelve eleven years ago? Was I by any chance feeling hungry and did we make tea? What happened to the dishes? Am I sure that was what happened ...?"

	Lieutenant Hartman cleared his throat again, but very properly did not look round from his panel, and Caulfield broke off awkwardly.

	Gregory said evenly, "You've got the right general idea, Caulfield, but there have been improvements in technique since your time. We have drugs nowadays which give you total recall—"

	"No," said Caulfield, looking frightened.

	"The law does not allow me to administer these drugs against your will," Gregory went on, "but the penalties if you refuse to co-operate are likely to be more severe. The treatment has no permanent ill effects on the brain ..."

	"No!"

	"Be realistic, man!" Gregory said sharply. "I already know that you married your late Captain's wife very soon after his death, and that could mean a lot of things. But I need certain data only. Anything else I find in passing, besides being of no interest or concern to me whatever, is privileged information."

	Caulfield began protesting fiercely that there was nothing off-colour in his private life and went into a welter of explanations, during which Gregory found out a few things which he did not know already and which gave him a clearer picture of the other's personality and motivations.

	When Caulfield had been in the hospital after the accident on Sunflower the Captain's widow had visited him a lot, wanting to hear about her late husband. Apparently both of them were in need of sympathy and consolation, so they teamed up and made a go of it. But his new wife had lost one husband in space and she made Caulfield promise never to lift out again. He had not been completely happy on-planet, but for his wife's sake he had kept his promise. Until now, that was ...

	"Closing with Cerberus," announced Nolan at that point. "Ten seconds acceleration warning. Straps."

	Suddenly thrust made conversation not worth the effort. When it had gone, Cerberus hung framed in the viewport less than a quarter of a mile away. Gregory saw Caulfield's jaw drop open.

	Lit harshly both by the Sun and reflected light from the cloud layer below, the big colonial supply vessel looked as if it badly needed a pruning. From all three spheres of the enormous triple dumb-bell and their connecting structure there sprouted gaudy profusion of flowers, grass and climbing plants. What looked like dark green ivy softened or concealed the outlines of the radar and periscope extensions, colourful flower beds broke up the clear areas of the hulls—cunningly arranged so that at certain angles the viewports gave the appearance of being small lily ponds—and where the dictates of efficiency made it necessary for bare metal to be present, this was so skilfully painted up that it went almost unnoticed. In Gregory's opinion the garden of Cerberus was stylised and showed little imagination, but like her skipper whose personality it, to a certain extent, reflected, it was solid, conservative and law-abiding.

	"This is another recent development," Gregory said to Caulfield. "Probably you've seen pictures of these space-going back gardens, but I expect the sight of the real thing comes as a bit of a shock." He turned to Hartman and said, "Radio them we're coming aboard, then stand watch until we get back. Nolan, you suit up and come with me. You, too, Caulfield."

Chapter Two

	Their prisoner was a little awkward on the way over, but Gregory wasn't worrying about that—a spaceman never quite forgot how to handle himself in weightless conditions. It was like learning to swim or ride a bicycle in that respect. When they arrived on Cerberus' hull Nolan and Gregory went for a walk in the garden rather than entering the ship immediately, with Caulfield tagging along.

	Gregory paused in his inspection of the artificial growths to ask, "D'you know why ships have gardens, Caulfield?"

	"I think so," the ex-Engineer replied, his voice flat and distorted through the phones. "Claustrophobia among the passengers and crew was a problem even in my day, especially in ships on the longer runs. Ships tend to be cramped, which begets claustrophobia and allied neuroses. These can get out of control and wreck a ship as surely as a reactor blow-up. Yet theoretically there is enough empty space outside to cure any claustrophobe, or even knock him over the hump into agoraphobia, if it could be used right.

	"What they did was to steer a path between the two phobias," Caulfield went on, "by rigging the outer hull of a ship to look like a garden. Besides giving the crew something to do on a long trip, this meant that a man who was beginning to feel the bulkheads closing in on him could go out and sit or walk on the hull and fool himself into thinking that he was in an Earthly garden at night with the stars shining brightly. There were anomalies, of course, but it was all very reassuring to the subconscious mind. It is easy to fool a mind that wants to be fooled, especially one's own, and the garden therapy worked in most cases."

	"That's right," said Gregory, trying to hide his surprise. There had been a strange air of authority in Caulfield's tone in spite of the distortion. This was certainly an unusual Engineer.

	Gregory and Nolan continued to examine random sections of the ship's hull. Close inspection revealed the grass-like areas to be the product of skilful painting on a roughened plastic surface thin enough for their boot magnets to hold the metal plating underneath. The flowers were also plastic as were the bushes and creepers which broke up the "lawn" at intervals of ten or twenty yards— due to a careless job of painting one of the bigger leaves still had the name of a food company on its underside. But each and every item of this luxuriant but artificial greenery was solidly anchored down—in the case of the longer stems or branches they were held in several places to the numerous metal projections from the ship's hull. Gregory gave several of them a sharp tug to make sure of this.

	"As well as the psychological angle," he explained to Caulfield, "this stuff makes an effective meteor shield. And as it is composed of the organic and inorganic waste products from the ship, surplus rubbish can be carried in this way. But there are strict regulations governing the construction of these gardens, designed to make sure that a glancing collision with a meteorite will not carry away a large section of it and further increase the hazard to—"

	"I know about the regulations," said Caulfield shortly.

	"I suppose you do, considering how many of them you must have broken," Gregory said drily. He straightened up, looked across at the smoothly-rounded hillock that was the cargo sphere set between the tall clumps of bushes which were the control globe's radar extensions, sighed and added, "Let's go inside."

	Captain Stillson, a large, worried-looking man whose knees did not suit the shorts customarily worn by officers in space, met them at the lock. The Captain of Cerberus was a bit of an old woman, but Gregory felt more than usually well-disposed towards him for the simple reason that he was both strict and extremely tidy, and if more Captains were like him Gregory would have a lot fewer headaches.

	"Well, Captain," Gregory said smiling, "how does your garden grow?"

	"Slowly, I'm glad to say," Stillson replied in his prim, colourless voice. "Especially since we installed that new waste converter and storage bins. I expect you want to see them?"

	"Later," said Gregory. "First I have to investigate a dirty habits charge ..."

	The friendly atmosphere inside the lock chamber congealed suddenly, as if space had been let in. After a shocked moment of silence Stillson reacted. He demanded to know the details, particularly who the lying so-and-so was who had made the charge. His tone had become anything but prim.

	Gregory supplied details and presently two of Cerberus' officers arrived. They were the Communications and Engineer Officers, and they looked wary but not guilty to Gregory's experienced eye. Still, he could be wrong.

	"The charge has been made," said Gregory sternly, "that while you were on the outer hull two days ago, one of you threw away or otherwise discarded into space a body or bodies of small mass and at present unknown composition. What have you to say?"

	The two officers had plenty to say, and early in the proceedings Gregory decided quite definitely that they were not guilty as charged, but he kept on with the grilling for a solid half hour despite this. He made them go through their stories forwards, backwards and sideways— and from the middle out to both ends at once. He did it partly as a demonstration of technique for Nolan's benefit and partly to bring home the fact to the watching Caulfield that, when it came to his turn, it would be futile to lie. It would also clear the possible misconception which Caulfield might hold that the anti-rubbish laws were as lax now as they had been in the old days.

	So Gregory made the Engineer and Radio Officers sweat, and only with an appearance of reluctance did he allow them to convince him that they had been engaged in straightening a warped retractable loading boom, that it had been necessary to align it against the hundred yards distant antenna projecting from the control globe, and that the directions for aligning it had been given by the radioman to the engineer via hand signals because the suit radio circuit was tied up with the transfer of passengers to the ferry. It had been a tricky job and sometimes the engineer had over-corrected, so that the radio officer's signals had been a bit violent at times. From certain angles they could have looked as though he was throwing something away into space ...

	Finally Gregory let them go, then went to inspect the new waste converter and storage bins. While this was in progress he found himself thinking several times that a policeman these days, as well as being a psychologist, astronomer, cybernetics engineer, et al., would find a grounding in good old-fashioned sanitary engineering useful also.

	Back on Descartes Captain Gregory decided that he owed himself some sleep. He gave Hartman the course, showed Caulfield his cabin and just managed to reach his bunk before the half-G from the reactor began easing the ship out of orbit. Once settled, however, Gregory found that his mind would not believe his body when the latter told the former it was tired.

	He kept thinking about ex-Engineer Caulfield, lying within two feet of him and separated only by a quarter inch of plating. An officer guilty of dirty habits, or whose crew-mates had been guilty of dirty habits, or whose late Captain had been so guilty—it didn't really make much difference where Gregory was concerned. The crime committed aboard Sunflower eleven years ago had cost one ship and eighteen lives to date and the total would pile up for years to come, perhaps for hundreds of years to come. The size of that future-stretching casualty list depended on three things: how much Caulfield knew, how fully he could be made to remember it, and how effectively Captain Gregory could put the information gained to use.

	It was a heavy responsibility and weighty enough to make sleep difficult for any man. And just as an added edge to his unease was the knowledge that if he slipped up on any one of those three items he would probably lose his life.

	One hundred and fifty years ago in the early nineteen fifties the problem had not existed. Except for the naturally occurring phenomena such as micro-meteorite dust, periodic meteor showers and the extremely rare pebbles of over an ounce or so in weight, space had been a clean, empty and fairly safe place. But then the first artificial satellites had gone up, followed by manned temporary and permanent satellites and eventually by the giant multistage vehicles which took men to the Moon and nearer planets. All rockets were chemically powered in those days, of course, so that weight-saving became almost a mania with their Captains and crews.

	Nothing was carried an instant longer than was necessary. Reserve fuel tanks, food containers, scraps and all the organic and inorganic waste products of the ship which could not be re-used were discarded so as to lighten ship, and by so doing save reaction mass for emergencies. An extra half-ton of fuel in reserve—especially when landing in bad weather—could make all the difference between a ship dropping gently onto its landing apron and one that dug a deep grave for its crew somewhere in the desert.

	So everything was dumped; promptly, automatically, unthinkingly ...

	But this mania for saving weight persisted long after the necessity for it had gone. The arrival of atomic powered ships which did not have to land, served by ferry-rockets to transfer cargo and passengers between the ground and orbit, made the saving of weight a matter of economics rather than one of life and death, and even this item became less important as better fuels and reactors were developed. But still the habit continued. During the eighty-odd years following the first manned trip to Mars, when space commerce proved itself to be a paying proposition between the rapidly expanding colonies on Mars and Venus and the cold-research establishments on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and when the number of space vehicles in commission had passed the thousand mark, all those crews on all those ships making all those round trips had unknowingly been committing what was now the dirtiest crime in the book!

	Gregory squirmed in his bunk, which under the ship's present half-G thrust was as soft as a cloud, and swore helplessly. If someone could only have told them.

	Consider the contents, detailed composition and method of disposal of a simple everyday bucket of trash. And especially what happened to it after its disposal ...

	There would be food scraps, potato peelings and a number of food containers of the plastic, disposal kind designed for us in weightless conditions—both empty and partially so. Also unused, wrapped sugar lumps and a fair quantity of wet tea leaves. The steward or crew-man assigned to the galley would put on a suit, take his load into the airlock and wait a few minutes. The delay was to allow the moisture content of the trash to boil off into space so that when he got rid of it the stuff would be dry and would leave the bucket clean. Washing anything in weightless conditions was a horrible complicated business besides being wasteful of water, so that practically everything was dry-cleaned in this way. Its disposal would then be accomplished by giving it a short, sharp swing and jerking it empty. There would be considerable muscle-power exerted during the throwaway because in free flight objects tended to be attracted back to the parent ship if not expelled with sufficient force, and passengers complained and the Captain had harsh things to say to the culprit.

	The individual particles of the material spread, having been given motions tangential to the arc of the steward's swing. Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space, and years later it was still spreading. Possessing as it did the velocity of the ship at the time of being ejected, it was moving many times faster than the natural meteor swarms which fell around the Sun. Its velocity might be great enough to take it well beyond the orbits of the major planets before the tremendous gravity pull of the primary first braked it to a halt and then began accelerating it Sunwards again. By this time it would have expanded and joined with other ejections which had occurred from the same ship hours or maybe days earlier while the vessel had held the same course and velocity, and a too-close contact with the gravity-field of a planet might have set it spinning about itself, or condensed it or pulled it farther apart.

	And decades later it would arrive where the traffic was heaviest, within the orbits of the inner planets, a deadly, superfast and ultra-destructive meteor shower extending across hundreds or thousands of miles of space.

	Space was vast and the particles Of such a swarm were so widely separated that a ship might run through it without damage. But there had been an awful lot of rubbish dumped into space in one hundred and fifty years and a ship might not always be lucky.

	There had been a time when people thought it funny that a ship could be wrecked by a few tea leaves or a frigid, iron-hard potato peeling. But among spacemen, Gregory thought sourly, it was the sort of joke at which you died laughing.

	Suddenly he gave a prodigious, eye-watering yawn and went to sleep.

Chapter Three

	Six hours later he woke, dressed and went into the control-room to relieve Hartman. Nolan had another four hours to do and was at the communications panel keeping a radio watch, and in his usual efficient fashion doing two things at once. How Lieutenant Nolan could listen to the mush in his headphones while both hands were searching up and down the shipping frequencies, and at the same time catch up on his technical reading from a book propped between his knees, was something that Captain Gregory could never understand. He told Hartman that he wanted to see Caulfield at once, and to rout him out of his bunk. Also would the Lieutenant then be good enough to make them all something to eat, after which he could hit the sack himself.

	Briskly and unobtrusively in the way expected of junior lieutenants, Hartman went to do as he was told.

	When Caulfield arrived, looking sleepy and anxious and generally as if his resistance was low, Lieutenant Nolan glanced up. For a few seconds Gregory watched him fight a mental battle as he tried to decide whether the book or listening to the questioning would be more educational. Suddenly he closed the book, moved one ear-phone away from an ear and prepared to listen in two directions at once.

	Gregory switched on the recorder, then said briskly, "Hope you slept well. Sit over there, please. Now tell me about the accident—not the version you gave eleven years ago, but the truth.

	"And don't waste my time and patience by lying," he added, "because I know just enough to catch you out."

	The ex-Engineer looked confused for a moment, then he stammered, "I ... it was a meteor that did it, a big one, but moving relatively slowly with respect to us—it didn't vaporise on contact. It side-swiped the control globe, mashed up most of the radio gear, then went through the reactor shielding and out. After the damaged areas were sealed-off and the passengers quieted down—

	"When was this? When exactly?"

	Caulfield rubbed his eyes. He said, "We left orbit around Earth on June Eighth at 1200, built up our mps until the same time July Fifteenth when the reactor was shut down. We were supposed to coast free for twenty^ five days before deceleration began for orbit around Ganymede. It was early on the seventh day of free flight that the meteor hit. Or maybe it was the ninth ..."

	"You'll have to be more accurate than that," said Gregory drily. "But we'll come back to the timing later, go on with what happened after the accident."

	A lot had happened after the collision, Caulfield told him. Reactors were heavy items of equipment which could not be lifted into orbit in toto, so that the shielding resembled a three-dimensional, interlocking jigsaw composed of shaped lead bricks. The meteor had carried away part of Sunflower's reactor shielding and knocked the rest of it loose so that it leaked radiation like a sieve. They had to jury-rig remote control manipulators to try to rebuild the shielding, but with their limited resources the job wasn't completely successful—the reactor worked, but it still leaked slightly and would not deliver full thrust.

	They had been in free flight for nineteen days by the time the reactor was patched up, and it was then that they realised that they would overshoot Ganymede, that even if the reserves of chemical fuel were used in conjunction with the faulty power pile their velocity could not be checked.

	There only chance, and a very slim one, had been to lighten ship.

	"And you did so, obviously," Gregory cut in, "because you succeeded in reaching Ganymede. But what exactly did you chuck out, and when? And what did the passengers and crew think of all this?"

	The passengers knew nothing and the crew had kept quiet so as to protect their Captain, Caulfield replied. The anti-dumping laws were tightening up in those days and the penalties were heavy, but at that time there were a lot of space personnel who did not consider dumping to be a crime—at least, not a very serious one. Besides, the Captain's main concern had been for the safety of his passengers.

	"A nice, noble-sounding secondary reason," Lieutenant Nolan interrupted, "for wanting to save his own neck."

	For a moment it looked as if Caulfield was going to take a swing at the Lieutenant, but then he relaxed into an angry silence. Watching the ex-Engineer, Gregory thought that his reactions were a little too strong, that he had behaved as if he was being personally insulted. Caulfield must have been very close to his late skipper to react in that way.

	"Be quiet, Nolan," Gregory said mildly, then to Caulfield, "Go on."

	"We emptied the rubbish storage bins first," Caulfield continued in a soft furious voice, "and then got rid of the less important personal possessions. We thought of dumping the cargo but that was something which could not be hidden either from the passengers or the port authorities on Ganymede, and anyway it was mainly lightweight precision instruments for the research labs there and suspended on rope slings—its mass was negligible. Finally we used up the reserve chemical fuel and this both slowed us down a lot and lightened the ship by several tons.

	"The collision earlier must have damaged one of the valves in a fuel line, because there was an explosion in the line just as the last of the fuel was being burned. That was when I copped it.

	"The explosion jerked loose some of the bricks around the pile," Caulfield went on more quietly. "The ... the Captain was in the reactor room alone at the time. Apparently he considered the situation serious enough for him to start rebuilding the shielding right away. By hand."

	Caulfield paused in an unconscious, three-seconds silence for the dead, then went on, "By the time he'd finished he was so hot that nobody could go near him. He had taken much more than a lethal dose of radiation and could only have lived a matter of hours. He radioed us that it was his duty to lighten ship, swore a bit, then jumped off ..."

	Gregory was silent for several minutes after Caulfield had finished, thinking vaguely philosophical thoughts. The fast-thinking, brave, practical and guilty Captain Warren of Sunflower had been in a tight spot eleven years ago with a hard decision to make—in danger of falling past or into Jupiter and no radio call for help, even if it was available. It was possible that those circumstances would have been considered by the courts sufficiently extenuating to excuse him lightening ship and he might simply have lost his ticket. If he had been honest about the whole thing, that was, and kept a full and accurate log as to the mass and other relevant data of the material which had been dumped. As it was, if Captain Warren had lived and the truth had come out they would have crucified him, so maybe it was a good thing he had died then.

	But this kind of thinking was getting him nowhere, Gregory told himself irritably; he had better stick to business.

	He said, "I suppose you don't know the direction he jumped in ...?"

	"They tried to keep me informed of things after the explosion," Caulfield said coldly, "but I was full of dope because of my burns. If they told me I don't remember."

	The ex-Engineer was looking at him in a way which said plainly that anyone capable of asking the foregoing question was a callous, inhuman unprintable. Probably, thought the Captain, he's right.

	Lieutenant Hartman arrived at that point with coffee and sandwiches. The coffee was in squirters because even under half-G thrust drinking from a cup was a tricky business. Hartman distributed the food, excused himself and left for his bunk.

	"A while back you stated that the meteor hit you on either the seventh or ninth day of free flight," Gregory said suddenly, speaking around his sandwich. "I'm going to have to pin it down more accurately than that. To do so I'll have to run you back repeatedly over that whole period, isolating each day by identifying incidents. It will be dull, repetitious, mentally fatiguing work. You'd better drink all that coffee.

	"Now to start with," he continued, chasing the remains of the sandwich with near-scalding fluid, "what do you remember of the first day of the free flight period ...?"

	Three hours later Caulfield's eyes were bloodshot and he looked infinitely more wretched than when Hartman had dragged him out of bed, and Gregory felt like the prisoner looked. He decided to let up on the questioning for a while, having learned the day and to within an hour or so the time of Sunflower's collision with the meteor. He had also found out the approximate mass of the material jettisoned, though not the times at which it had been dumped. And surprisingly, he had obtained remarkably accurate data on Sunflower's course and velocity, all of which made him feel almost well-disposed towards the prisoner.

	"You surprise me, Caulfield," Gregory said smiling. "Some of this stuff ... well, I could almost think you were the astrogation officer instead of an engineer."

	"I was the nosey type," Caulfield said, looking down at his hands, "and interested in everybody's job."

	"Bully for you," said Gregory, "and as things turned out, lucky for us. Now if you'd like to rest for a while—"

	He broke off as Nolan stiffened suddenly in his seat and covered both his ears with the phones. The Lieutenant fine turned, listened briefly, then reported, "Viper calling, sir. Will I switch in the speaker or ..." He looked meaningly at the prisoner. "... will you use phones?"

	"Speaker." He took the mike Nolan handed him and said, "Gregory, Descartes, here. What's the trouble, Commander?"

	The voice of Commander Keatly, the Captain and sole crew of the police patrol ship Viper, was a dry, emotionless rustle almost indistinguishable from the crackle of background static. Keatly was a disquieting person close up, but any man who could stand both space, and his own company for months on end without one or the other driving him insane just had to be a little bit off to begin with. Gregory therefore ignored the seeming lack of formal respect in the other's words—and would have done so even if he had not known that the Commander was at present engaged in both running before and trying to keep pace with a meteor swarm whose size, composition and velocity were only roughly known—as Keatly said, "I have avoided trouble so far, but I need more data if I am to continue doing so. Do you have it?"

	"A little," Gregory replied, and began digesting the information he had just acquired from Caulfield. In conclusion he added, "Run this stuff through your computer, we'll do the same and have a discussion on it when we rendezvous. That should be in ten days. Meanwhile stay as close to that swarm as seems compatible with minimum safety requirements, and report every twelve hours."

	"Right," said Keatly.

	"Very well. Message ends and signing off." 

	"Right. Me, too."

	Shortly afterwards Caulfield left for his cabin, followed half an hour later by Nolan whose watch had ended. Captain Gregory found himself alone in his control room with nothing to occupy him but the radio watch and his thoughts. There were other jobs which he would have liked to do—breaking down Caulfield's figures and seeing what the ship's computers made of them, for instance. But people in space were always getting into trouble, so regulations stated that everybody must listen to their cries for help. There was no way at all of enforcing this regulation, of course, but most spacemen held the strong feeling that if they were to avoid this boring job even for a few minutes, then when they themselves got into trouble there would be nobody listening for them.

	It was a case of the precept "Do unto others" transplanted to space.

	The processing of the figures could wait a few hours until Hartman came back on duty, Gregory told himself. At the same time they gave him a fairly clear picture of the birth, growth and movements of the Sunflower Drift which he could think about while listening.

	This man-made meteor swarm which they had been ordered to investigate must now be assumed to comprise two separate drifts sharing roughly the same course but possessing different velocities, the reason for this being that material had been dumped both before and after a period of sharp deceleration by Sunflower's chemical engines. Fortunately the velocities were known fairly accurately although the exact times and masses of material jettisoned were not. This was information, however, which could and would be wrung out of Caulfield in the near future.

	As Gregory saw it, the first series of dumpings while the ship was in free fall had produced a long, gradually expanding cylinder of debris which was more fast. After the period of deceleration a second and similar collection of material had been ejected, but this time moving more slowly. The first and faster component had overtaken, inter-penetrated and passed the second. Then during the close passage with Jupiter which followed, both of these diffuse, non-homogenous cylinders of debris would have been pulled out of true—bent, twisted and probably set slowly spinning. They would have proceeded outwards towards their aphelion, the faster of the two going the farthest. Approximately five years later die tremendous gravity-pull of the Sun would have checked even their enormous velocity and begun to slowly drag them back.

	So they returned, accelerating rapidly as they neared the Sun. On the way they encountered the passenger ship Santa Isobella and left it a total wreck in which only one man was left alive, and then only long enough to radio the time and position of the disaster. The Leningrad, a larger ship which fortunately was travelling in the same direction as the swarm, received a glancing hit which left a dent in her hull and a smear of fused plastic in its wake. The smear was scraped off, and analysed and it eventually led to the identification of the ship which had produced it. 

	The two components of the swarm swung fast and close around the Sun and headed out again, still widely separated but closing steadily with each other. And three weeks hence, at approximately the distance from the Sun of their first inter-penetration they would do so again. The cylinders by this time might be a thousand or more miles in diameter—if they were still cylinders and if they had not begun to spin. Spinning, which would periodically present their long axis to their direction of motion, would make them an even worse menace to navigation.

	Definitely, thought Gregory, this is going to be a tricky one.

	His job was to investigate this newly-discovered swarm so thoroughly that its position at any time during the next half century would be known—that was how far ahead such things were listed in the Ephemeris. He knew that the computers on Descartes and Vixen were equal to tasks much more tricky than this, provided they were given accurate data to work with. Without that data ...

	Gregory resolved to tackle Caulfield again about the total recall drugs during the next session. In the meantime he tried to emulate Lieutenant Nolan by doing some preliminary calculations on the scratchpad with one hand while searching the radio frequencies with the other. Unsuccessfully.

Chapter Four

	On the fifth day out from Earth, Viper reported that the leading section of the drift was now a fuzzy patch on his rear radar screen. In Keally's estimation he had matched course and velocity with it exactly. Not very respectfully he requested permission to drop back for a closer look.

	"No!" said Gregory firmly. "Stay out until we know more about it, that's an order!" He signed off, then returned to his interrupted questioning of Caulfield.

	He said, "You tell me that it wasn't until early on the tenth day after collision that the decision was finally taken to lighten ship. You had been working for sixteen hours on the damaged pile trying to make it develop full thrust, but without success. Then the crew were told to dump the waste. We've already arrived at the cubic capacity of your trash containers, but now I must know at what intervals they were emptied from the airlock. Think hard."

	"A—about 0700 or 0800," said Caulfield tiredly.

	"I want it closer than that," said Gregory sternly. "Are you sure you didn't hear the lock being opened and closed? Or see crew-men go past with the waste? Where were you at this time?"

	"All over. With the passengers, at the reactor, in the control-room ..."

	"In the control-room?"

	"Yes, when the ... the Captain was looking at the pile. He had an atomics degree, too, you see."

	"I see," Gregory said, and pressed: "But you must remember something. The locks aren't completely silent."

	"Yes, I do," said Caulfield suddenly. "When I was in Control the airlock indicators flashed a couple of times. But I don't know the exact minute—this was eleven years ago, dammit!"

	"There is always a chronometer above the main control panel. You saw the times at which the indicators flashed by peripheral vision even if you didn't look at the clock directly, and the incident is recorded in your brain. I want that memory.

	"No," Gregory continued in his quiet, inexorable voice, "we'll start again from the time you finished working on the reactor ..."

	Two long, slogging, dry-mouthed hours later Caulfield said suddenly:

	"I remember a sort of jerk now as well as the indicator lights. Yes! And they pulled an acceleration chair apart for the springs. It was the Steward's idea—a flat sheet of plastic with springs at the corners. They made a sort of spring-loaded catapult in the airlock, filled the lock completely with rubbish, then released the springs.

	"It was much faster than emptying can-fulls at a time. They must have got rid of all the loose trash in a couple hours!"

	Gregory compressed his lips and made rapid notes on the scratchpad. The cubic capacity of Sunflower's airlock was on record, as also were the specifications of the springs used in acceleration chairs of that period. This was the sort of data which computers could get their teeth into. And most important of all, if the waste had been gotten rid of as quickly as Caulfield said then the dimensions of the first component of the drift might be smaller than first imagined. Much smaller. Gregory began to feel a definite thrill of excitement which was, he had to admit, not unmixed with relief.

	He said, "On the nineteenth day of free flight and the tenth after the collision you decided to shed weight. A day or so later occurred the explosion of the chemical motor feed-pipe in which you were burned and the Captain was exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. You also said that dumping was carried out after the explosion. What did this consist of?"

	"The useless radio gear, I think, and what little waste there was produced at that time," Caulfield replied in a thick, weary voice. "I don't know exactly. I was burned, I told you, and full of dope."

	For several seconds Gregory was silent, then he said, "You could be made to remember even that, after a fashion. But not right now. You can go, Caulfield. Sleep tight."

	When the prisoner had gone Captain Gregory closed his eyes, leaned back and simply enjoyed the sensation of not having to talk. He thought that Caulfield was a bit of an odd fish. That business of the TR drugs, for instance. The ex-Engineer shut up tight and dug his heels in with panic whenever Gregory mentioned total recall. It didn't seem characteristic, somehow.

	Perhaps Gregory himself was being rather squeamish, but he did not like to force prisoners to take the total recall treatment or to stress its harmlessness too much. He happened to know that three out of every twenty people who underwent the treatment became hopelessly insane, though the indications were that in those cases there were certain mental weaknesses to begin with. Gregory felt easier, however, when a prisoner volunteered for the treatment rather than being blackmailed into it.

	Caulfield was a surprisingly knowledgeable person, however, and must know the odds against emerging from the treatment insane. But Gregory was convinced that the risk involved was not what stopped the ex-Engineer from undergoing TR—it was something else entirely, something in his past life.

	Gregory snorted in sheer impatience. In the past he had heard subjects relate incidents which would have made his rather sparse hair curl, if he had been the type to gain vicarious excitement from someone else's moral shortcomings. He wasn't and didn't, yet he could not make Caulfield understand that. And until the prisoner could be made to undergo TR—so that Gregory could obtain all the data available as well as checking the accuracy of that already received—they were all headed for an extremely dangerous situation wearing earmuffs and partial blindfolds.

	It was time, he decided suddenly, to drop a few shots around the target instead of constantly pounding the bull's-eye. And so it was that all next day, while the police survey ship Descartes drove at one-half-G along a course plotted to intersect that of a smaller police ship and a certain uncharted meteor swarm. He didn't ask the prisoner a single question. But on the following day he invited himself into the six-by-six box which was Caulfield's cabin.

	"You lie where you are, I'll sit here," Gregory said pleasantly as he entered and pulled the folding seat down from the wall. "I'm here to discuss private matters with you. I thought you might prefer to talk to me alone."

	Caulfield looked suddenly wary, but didn't speak.

	"As I said before I'm not interested in your private life as such," Gregory went on smoothly, "but such a talk has considerable therapeutic value—you know, relaxing your mind with normal, pleasant, everyday things as opposed to the grilling I usually give you.

	"Would you like to talk about your student days, or your first ship? Or your wife, maybe ...?" Gregory nodded towards the photograph on the wall beside him. "Or if you absolutely have to, the accident on Sunflower?"

	"I've already told you all you need to know about my wife," Caulfield said harshly. "She came to the hospital to talk about the Captain. She was sorry for me because I was badly burned, I pitied her because of her loss.

	That started it. A few months later we married and lived happy ever after until two years ago when she died."

	"Are you sure?" asked Gregory gently. ''You know, we did some checking on the James Andrew Caulfield of before the accident, and he did not seem to be the type to settle down like that. A bit of a hell-raiser, he seems to have been. Of course, maybe your wife was a special type of person—"

	"She was a very special person," Caulfield interrupted sharply, "and I don't want to discuss her with you. Neither will I submit to Total Recall ..."

	Angrily, reluctantly, Captain Gregory went back to pounding the bull's-eye.

	Four days later the long-range radar showed a solid blob of light which was Viper and, approximately two thousand miles astern of her according to the scale, a formless, sparkling cloud that was the leading face of the meteor swarm. In Descartes' control-room the atmosphere, so far as Hartman and Nolan were concerned, was one of visual daggers and ice chips. Caulfield sat pretending that the hostility of the two officers meant nothing to him, and Captain Gregory—who had strong feelings of personal inadequacy over his failure to talk the prisoner into taking the TR treatment—stared silently through the viewport where, two hours later, Keatly's ship appeared and closed to within jumping distance.

	Unlike Descartes, Vixen was never meant to land on a planet. It possessed, therefore, a garden. But the place where Commander Keatly went to escape temporarily from the incredibly cramped interior of his ship was not as other space gardens. There were no flowers or bushes or simulated grassy hillocks, no resemblance to Earthly surrounding at all, in fact. Instead there sprouted from Vixen's dumbbell hull a mass of shapes—weird, twisted, undefined shapes so softly yet coldly painted that they merged perfectly into the infinite backdrop of space beyond them. Yet Keatly's garden was a beautiful place, a harsh, cold, unutterably lonely and beautiful place. It made Gregory think of stars shining above a wind-stripped, polar mountain range, and planets glaring like lidless eyes from the frigid blackness all around.

	It was a beautiful and frightening place, Keatly's garden, and a perfect illustration of how well the Commander was adjusted to space. But a very small dose of it was enough for most people.

	Gregory was still staring when Vixen's captain came through the airlock and shortly afterwards joined them in the control-room. They got down quickly to the job of sectioning up the swarm to be charted, and Descartes' computer worked overtime. Gregory was so engrossed that for nearly an hour he completely forgot Caulfield's existence, as opposed to pointedly ignoring him as the other officers were doing. Then a sudden question by Keatly just as the Commander was about to return to his ship brought the ex-Engineer into existence again.

	"The data supplied by the prisoner is both inadequate and in some respects extremely inexact," Commander Keatly said to Gregory. "Is there not a possibility that he produced it to avoid the fatigue of further questioning rather than it being a product of memory? That he made most of it up, in other words?"

	Caulfield's face was its usual stiff, expressionless mask, but his eyes showed anger as he said, "I know better than to try that." He rose suddenly and without receiving instructions or asking permission left for his cabin. Gregory let him go.

	Fifteen minutes later the real job began.

	Gregory spun ship and applied an exactly pre-calculated amount of thrust to allow the swarm to overtake them. Keatly in Vixen followed suit but veered towards the probable fringes of the cloud rather than heading for its centre as was the larger ship. On the forward radar screen the drift expanded like a horde of frightened fire-flies, opening up slowly until it became a formless, unimpressive collection of blobs which were too widely distributed to give the appearance of being a threat. But that was because Descartes was running into the swarm at a relative snail's pace, a velocity measured in hundreds of miles per hour instead of the thousands of miles per second at which a normal commercial vessel might encounter it. The fuzzy points of light crawled off the edges of the forward scanner and spilled onto the lateral radar screens, and a truer indication of their deadliness was given by the rapidly mounting figures on the counter which gave the number of particles per hundred cubic miles of space.

	To the unaided eye there was nothing at all to be seen, apart from the awful splendour which was always out there.

	On the high speed sweep reducer screen the swarm was given shape and form, however. It appeared as a diffuse, irregular cloud whose edges almost touched the centre spot of the screen which represented Descartes' position. A short, tenuous filament of material was projecting to one side of the main body. Gregory directed Vixen towards it, then returned his attention to the reducer.

	To his right Hartman bent forward in his straps with one finger on the emergency thrust button. On the other side Nolan's eyes were flickering back and forwards between the screen and the recording equipment, and Gregory wondered suddenly if he would go cross-eyed trying to watch both at once. The thought almost made him laugh, but he checked himself in time. Both officers looked like he felt at the moment. Tense.

	He would have felt much easier if Caulfield's data could have been checked, preferably by a couple of sessions in total recall. The ex-Engineer was hiding something, obviously, and undergoing the TR treatment would have made it impossible for anything in his mind to remain hidden—those drugs were mainly pentothal derivatives. By refusing to undergo total recall, Caulfield had placed him in the position of planning and carrying out this whole survey operation on the basis of the prisoner's unsupported word.

	True, Caulfield seemed to be trying his best to be helpful, and the data he had supplied was beautifully complete and accurate so far as it went. But just suppose the figures had been doctored to hide something, something which might have happened on Sunflower? Caulfield, the engineer who admitted freely that he had been a jack-of-all-trades on his ship, knew enough to be able to do that. But what could possibly have happened on Sunflower that would land Caulfield in more trouble than he was in already?

Chapter Five

	In the reducer screen the leading edges of the swarm crept like a filament of mist over the centre spot. The figures of Nolan and Hartman were statues whose only movement was the constant, jerky movements of their eyes.

	But it was much more likely, Gregory told himself angrily, that Caulfield's secret had something to do with his private life after the accident. His behaviour then— voluntarily grounding himself to please his new wife— was at variance with the character Gregory had built in his mind from the records. Unless Caulfield had had a tremendous change of heart ...

	There was a sharp, metallic tap, loud only because it was being so strenuously listened for. Gregory jerked involuntarily, then relaxed. Hartman and Nolan blew clearly audible sighs of relief. Caulfield's figures, for this component of the swarm anyway, had been accurate.

	The particle which had just struck Descartes—a frigid, dehydrated, steel-hard breadcrust or potato peeling or some such—had been travelling at a velocity of perhaps half that of a rifle bullet. That meant that they were moving through the swarm at a speed slow enough to be safe, yet fast enough for the job of charting to be carried out in a matter of days. All that remained for them to do was to make a series of dog-leg jumps through the drift and let the super-sensitive radar and other recording devices bring in the information that would make it possible for the computers to form a picture of its size, composition, development and future movements for the next half-century to come.

	For a while Gregory forgot his suspicions regarding Caulfield's data. But at the end of the first day inside the swarm he found them returning. By the third day he was frankly worried, and decided to call Vixen. Keatly had a mind every bit as sharp and quick as any one of his ship's computers, with an added spark of intuitive genius which no electronic calculator could match, and while Gregory might be the other's superior officer he was not a proud man.

	"I have been puzzled by the size and extent of this part of the swarm also," Commander Keatly replied when Gregory had unburdened himself, "but didn't like to mention it. Definitely this component of the swarm is much too large."

	"Any idea why?" asked Gregory.

	Keatly was silent for a moment, then said, "The Sunflower Drift has two components, a fast one whose material was dumped before Caulfield's accident and whose composition he says he remembers fairly well, and a slow one released while he was under sedation for his burns. This one he doesn't remember so well, but says that it was the smaller of the two and contained only a little trash and a few pieces of broken radio gear and other light, removable fittings.

	"As laid down by yourself," the Commander went on, "our course was to chart this slower and a smaller component first—which we have just finished doing—and then accelerate ahead so that when the faster component arrives and overtakes us the difference in relative velocities will be small enough not to damage our ships."

	"Correct," said Gregory patiently. He knew Keatly would get to the point, sometime.

	"My thought is this," Keatly said seriously, "that Caulfield could not have been so doped as to make this big an error in the quantity of material in the second component. It follows therefore that what we have just finished charting is not the slow and smaller component but the large, fast one."

	"I've been thinking the same," Gregory said worriedly, "but was hoping you'd disagree with me."

	Keatly did not have to belabour the obvious. If they accelerated to get away from the fast section of the drift which they had assumed was closing with the slow component surrounding them, and it turned out that the section they had been charting was actually the fast section, then the slow section must be ahead and they would be accelerating straight into trouble, because they would hit it with a speed composed of the closing velocity of the two components plus the product of Descartes' own acceleration.

	That would not be a safe speed to hit anything.

	"I had assumed that this was the slow component," Gregory said, looking coldly towards the prisoner. Caulfield, who had been present during the conversation with Keatly, stared back uneasily. Viciously, he went on, "Let us say, rather, that the manner in which the data was presented led me to believe so.

	"Any comment, Mister Caulfield?"

	The ex-Engineer was scared, Gregory realised suddenly, deathly scared. His shiny, immobile face was sweating and his knuckles were white as he gripped the sides of his chair. His eyes were looking everywhere except at the radar screens. He shook his head.

	"I should have known that the data you gave me was too good to be a product of unaided memory," Gregory said self-accusingly, "and that you must have deliberately remembered it for all these years, and probably altered it as well, for reasons of your own. What those reasons were—"

	"It boils down to this," Keatly's voice interrupted from the wall speaker, "we either run ahead or fall back, either of which might be the wrong guess. But you've another ten hours in which to decide, according to the data we have ..."

	"If my guess is right," Gregory cut in, still too furiously angry at the prisoner for the other's extreme fear to have communicated itself to him, "we don't have any time at all."

	It was approximately three seconds later that Nolan said in an oddly hushed voice, "Look at the reducer!"

	Along the forward edge of the reducer screen a bright, deadly image was taking shape. The swarm which they had finished charting had been a misty, insubstantial trace—this was like a dense, irregular-shaped star cluster which was coming into view. Each bright point of light represented a body of many pounds in mass, and they were clumped tightly together and coming fast.

	"Swap ends! Decelerate!" Gregory called urgently, then contradicted himself. "No, suits first, it's nearly on top of us ...!"

	"You gave us bum data!" Hartman yelled, swinging round on Caulfield with bloody murder in his eye. The prisoner shook his head numbly, apparently hypnotised by the reducer screen he stammered, "No. I—I mean yes, a little. But I didn't know about this—I wouldn't try to hide a thing like this ...!"

	"Shut up, both of you!" Gregory snapped, then: "Keatly, get that eggshell of yours out of here. Keep your radio open and recorders going. Move! Nolan, rotate us one-eighty then give me full emergency thrust. We've got to slow down ...!"

	Ponderously the big ship swapped ends and the reactor built up to its maximum of three-quarters-G thrust. This would check their speed considerably, but not nearly enough. Meanwhile the return of weight aided in the donning of spacesuits. During the five eternal minutes which it took him to put on his suit and help Caulfield seal his, Gregory's eyes never left the reducer screen. The image was of a small, dense globular star cluster fully formed at the edge of the screen and sliding slowly and remorselessly towards Descartes. But the slowness was only apparent, because the screen represented ten thousand miles of space.

	"Straps!" barked Gregory when everyone was sealed. "Nolan, chemical engines. Four-Gs for five minutes ..."

	Gregory was rammed down into his seat as the landing motors flared out, augmenting the thrust of the long-range nuclear drive. With four-and-three-quarters-Gs sitting on him Gregory fought to stay conscious, to do the muscle tensing and relaxing exercises which were supposed to equalise body pressures and allow a man to stay at least semiconscious under high-G. He didn't pass out, quite, but neither could he see the screen.

	After what seemed much, much longer than five minutes it stopped. With clearing vision came a splitting, banging headache. Gregory took one look at the screen and snapped, "Not nearly enough. Same again."

	The second time it took longer for his vision to clear. On the screen the leading edge of the new swarm was almost touching the centre spot, which meant that it was not more than a few hundred miles away. Beside him Nolan's nose was bleeding—but luckily not onto his visor—and the acceleration pressure had made a mottled horror of Caulfield's rebuilt face. Gregory made a croaking sound, then cleared his throat and tried again.

	"Kill the landing motors," he said. "Blow the fuel lines clear and seal venturis. Maintain reactor thrust."

	Descartes continued to brake towards the rapidly approaching swarm at the maximum thrust of her power pile. Three-quarters-G wasn't much, but it was a reasonably safe method of deceleration when a collision was imminent. The chemical landing motors, although much more powerful over short periods, were not safe in these circumstances. If a meteor was to rupture a fuel tank while that half-mile-long blow torch was squirting out of their tail, Descartes would go up like a miniature nova.

	The bright, tight, sparkling globe—Gregory had never before seen anything like it—had reached the centre of the reducer. Gregory found himself holding his breath, and his jaw ached with the intensity with which he clenched his teeth. He began to think about the inadequacy of the routine safety drills. True, he had closed the tanks, cleared the fuel lines between them and the motors, and closed the venturi orifice. But a fluky hit could still open up the ship in the wrong place, bludgeon a path between the fuel tanks and that still white-hot venturi ...

	The first hit took them amidships and the meteor ploughed through the hull plating almost parallel with their long axis, and passed out via a corner of the control-room. Gregory saw the wall plating tear apart, a radar screen shattered and some lights went out on the control panel while others burned an urgent red. He guessed that the meteor had possessed roughly the weight, velocity and destructive force of a three-pounder armour piercing shell, and that all things considered they had been very lucky.

	His suit creaked faintly as the last of the air rushed into space. Gregory switched to radio and said, "Nolan, check the reactor."

	"Thrust steady at three-quarters-G," Nolan reported in a shaky voice. "No apparent damage ..."

	The second impact was unheard but their suits jolted to the shock of it, and it did not pass upwards through the control-room as had the first. Obviously the ship had been knocked into a spin. Gregory gave orders to check it just as the third hit occurred.

	Analysing that sharp double-shock, Gregory decided that their three-quarters-G was beginning to show effect—their speed with regard to the swarm was decreasing steadily. And had the meteoric material been the normal small stuff which they had been expecting, he knew that at this speed it would have bounced harmlessly off the hull. But it wasn't. They were riddled and battered into scrap, and Gregory still couldn't imagine what those small, ultra-dense bodies could be.

	The floor erupted beside him and a smashing, agonising shock struck upwards through his feet. Caulfield's acceleration chair jerked up and over as its rear support was torn away, and toppled across him. Gregory instinctively threw up his arms to protect his visor. There was another soundless crash and the lights went out.

	An eerie, greenish glow from the reducer screen—the only piece of radar equipment still working—made the control-room resemble a badly lit nightmare. There were soft, rounded shadows of figures in spacesuits, hard, jagged shadows of ruptured plating, and the shadowy, angular lines of trailing plumbing. He couldn't see anything, really, and yet he saw too much. Gregory felt suddenly, blindly terrified. He wanted to switch on the standby lighting, but the weight of Caulfield on his chest made it almost impossible for him to move. Then all at once he didn't want the lights on for fear of what he would find.

	"Check the reactor," he said harshly, automatically. Right then he didn't give a damn about the reactor, but he desperately wanted to know that he was not all alone. "W—we're losing thrust, sir," Nolan's voice replied. He, too, sounded overwhelmingly glad that there was someone there. He added, "I don't know why—most of my control and information circuits have gone. Will I shut down?"

	"No," said Gregory, taking a good, firm grip on himself. "Not until we match velocities with this stuff. Watch through the port—this stuff is so blasted dense you can see it go past! And when it stops moving, cut everything." He paused, then: "Hartman, are you all right?"

	"I can't see," said Hartman.

	"Neither can I. Caulfield?"

	"Yes."

	Never, thought Gregory in awe, have four people been so lucky. Then aloud he said, "Caulfield, get off my chest."

	While the prisoner was disentangling himself from the wreckage of his acceleration chair the ship took another hit. But the shock was not nearly so severe this time, and from the feel of it Gregory knew that that one had not penetrated the hull. Then, a few minutes after he had the emergency lights on, all weight disappeared. They had stopped moving with respect to the swarm. Deceleration had ceased; for the moment they were safe.

	"Nolan, go below and check the pile," Gregory said quickly. "Wear a radiation card and take a geiger. Hartman, start listing the damage. Start with ... Nolan!"

	The Lieutenant hadn't moved. He started slightly when Gregory raised his voice, then pointed towards the viewport.

	"There's a spacesuit out there," he said shakily. "About fifty yards away. It ... it must be Captain Warren ...!"

	"Forget him," said Hartman bitterly. "He can't do us any more harm now, he's done all that he could do already."

	"No!" Gregory contradicted suddenly, then went on, "Nolan, check the reactor. Hartman, shoot a magnet at that suit out there and reel him in. Move!"

	With the ship in its present chaotic condition using time to fish for an eleven-years-dead body seemed pointless, and the two officers showed their surprise. But they had not been watching Caulfield when the body had been spotted. The look in the ex-Engineer's eyes had been something Gregory had never seen before and hoped never to see again. Somehow he knew that when that body out there was brought in, all things would become plain.

Chapter Six

	Nolan reported twice during the next few minutes, saying that he was finding it heavy going—the central well which led to the reactor room was partly blocked with wreckage which he was having to clear away. He added that one of the chemical fuel tanks had been holed. All around him were steaming, iridescent globules of fuel which looked rather pretty. The radiation level was rising, also ...

	"Get down to that reactor, quick!" Gregory snapped. "And don't stop to admire the scenery!"

	He was being unfair to the Lieutenant, Gregory knew. But there was a very real possibility that the power pile might decide at any minute to become a slow atomic bomb. He could make amends later, if there was a later.

	"I did cook the figures," Caulfield burst out suddenly. The words rushed from his mouth faster and more high pitched, like a gramophone record speeding up. "But only slightly. I wanted you to go through the swarm without stopping, without finding him. But I didn't expect this to happen. Honest, I don't know what caused—"

	"Shut up!" said Gregory viciously. He was thinking of his lovely ship and the effect those slightly cooked figures had had on it. But before he could say anything else Hartman came swimming into the control-room with the spacesuited body in tow. He also had a shapeless grey something in his hand which he pushed gently towards Gregory.

	"1 found that below," he growled. "It must have been one of the later ones which punctured the hull but hadn't enough momentum left to go right through. It explains a lot of things, doesn't it, sir?"

	It was a small, dense, roughly cubical block of lead of the type used as shielding on spaceship reactors.

	Suddenly Gregory remembered the prisoner telling him that Sunflower had made Ganymede with fuel to spare, that they must have lightened ship too much. Looking at the body Hartman had brought in, Gregory thought, You fool! You brave, noble, criminally stupid fool!

	This had been the man who had taken a lethal dose of radiation while repairing Sunflower's reactor, then had further lightened ship by removing his dying body from it. But even that had not been enough for him. After fixing the pile—reducing its operating volume and rebuilding the shielding around it—there must have been upwards of a hundred lead bricks lying around loose, and these he had tossed out as well. Some repair shop, thought Gregory angrily, had been paid plenty to keep quiet about the condition of Sunflower's pile ...

	"I didn't know he threw away shielding bricks ...!" Caulfield began, then stopped as he saw Gregory start unscrewing the helmet and shoulder piece of the body's suit.

	Gregory's actions were nearly automatic. The dry, brittle, sun-blackened face which he uncovered did not bother him too much, he had seen many others just like it. And while there was very little doubt as to who the man was, checking his ID disc was also automatic. As he drew it out Hartman spoke, but not to him.

	"What's the matter with you, Caulfield," the Lieutenant said derisively, "seen a ghost?"

	With the identity disc cupped in his gauntleted hand, Gregory thought, Yes, Hartman, he has. He has seen a ghost. Because the body, according to the ID disc, was one James Andrew Caulfield!

	"Captain!" Nolan's voice broke in on them urgently. "We're in a mess. The pile's overheating—large sections of shielding knocked loose and the geiger's gone mad! Total meltdown in about half an hour, I'd say, then blooie—"

	"Be specific!" said Gregory sharply. "What is the position down there exactly?"

	The last piece of the Caulfield puzzle had just fallen neatly into place, but there was no time to think about it. As Nolan began putting in the fine details of the picture in the reactor room, Gregory found himself thinking that it would have been a good thing if one of Sunflower's shielding bricks had hit him as well as the pile. He would have been where good space captains go, with no necessity of pretending to be fast thinking and resourceful and the type who fights to the last gasp. The position looked hopeless.

	"I'll send Hartman down to give you a hand," Gregory said, to give himself time to think. But Nolan didn't give him any time at all, he said, "No ...!"

	Apparently there was wreckage blocking the approach to the power pile so that only one person at a time could get close enough to work it. This was further complicated by the high level of radiation there and the fact that most of the long tongs and other handling equipment had also been damaged. What there was left, if it was to be of use at all, would mean going dangerously close to the pile.

	"Use it," said Gregory, "we've no other choice. See what you can do in the next ten minutes, then I'll spell you. The radiation is too high for continuous working, but with three of us taking it in shifts—"

	"Four," said the prisoner suddenly.

	"Right, four then." He looked hard at the ex-Engineer, then added, "But I want no stupid heroics. You will all wear radiation cards, and if they start turning blue you pull out of there immediately. Understood?"

	Hartman nodded. The prisoner said, "Can I go to my cabin? I've got a good luck charm there."

	"Go ahead," said Gregory impatiently. Somehow he had not thought of the other as the superstitious type, but he had too much on his mind to wonder about it for long.

	The approach to the reactor was by a long, narrow well about two feet in diameter. A metal ladder projected a few inches from its inner wall so as to give a secure grip for hands and feet. Gregory could see that a meteorite had passed diagonally through the lower end, ploughing through the rungs, wall-plating and supports and practically scaling it off with wreckage. But the well was passable, because at the other side of the tangle he could see Nolan's legs. He ordered the Lieutenant to back out, then wriggled forward to take his place.

	Nolan had set up mirrors and clamped the long tongs onto their bracket, which had been loosened badly by the meteor. Gregory could see clearly what the trouble was, but with the equipment at their disposal it would be a miracle if they fixed it.

	The pile had been struck twice. One had been a glancing blow which had peeled off a large section of the outer shielding—there were about fifty of the small, interlocking lead bricks drifting about the room—and the other had been a solid puncture. There was only one opening, so the body which had done the damage must still be inside the pile. The immediate, most urgent danger was caused by several of the loose shielding bricks having become jammed against the damper rod stops. All the pile damper rods were fully out in the maximum thrust position, they were stuck there, and the reactor was steadily turning itself into a slow atomic bomb.

	Descartes' acceleration had been cut by interrupting the (low of working fluid to the pile, and Gregory thought desperately of checking the meltdown by giving it something to work on again. But that would only have delayed the blow-up slightly, if the sudden renewal of thrust at three-quarters-G didn't shake the reactor apart and bring about the explosion there and then.

	With careful haste Gregory checked the four tong controls, two for rotating the jointed head and two for closing and locking the clamps. They were so loose that he knew that they would slip more often than hold. Using the mirrors to guide him he brought the head of the tongs against the score or so of lead bricks which were jammed between the damper rod stops and the wall of the pile. With frantic patience he began to worry at them. But the metal teeth of the clamps could not get a grip, they slipped again and again. The sweat ran into Gregory's eyes and his suit was like an oven.

	Then suddenly a brick moved.

	Gregory forced himself to do nothing for all of ten seconds, relaxing both hands and nerves for the effort to come. Carefully he eased the clamps around the loose brick and tightened them, trying to take up the slack in the joints and loose supporting bracket. Then he took hold of the controls, muttered a prayer that was almost blasphemous in its fervency, and pulled.

	The brick came away. Two others adjoining it drifted free and he was able to poke a third one loose. The others were jammed as tightly as ever. But he had accomplished something.

	"Try Number Six," he told Nolan.

	Cleared of obstructions Number Six damper rod slid into the pile. With one rod in the time to meltdown would be delayed ten or fifteen minutes, which wasn't much considering there were nine others still to be freed and this had been the easiest one.

	"Your time's up, sir," Nolan said warningly, and added, "Caulfield's waiting to relieve you."

	Gregory took a last, brief look through the mirrors. He thought that if he could just go in there for half an hour and use his hands instead of a sloppy pair of tongs he could free the damper rods, gather up those loose, floating bricks and rebuild the shielding. But there were two holes in the shielding big enough to jump through and the radiation level within the room was such that he could not risk even two minutes inside.

	And if he should take such a risk his officers would feel obliged to take similar risks, and everybody in space knew where that course led. It had not been the first time that officers had saved their ships only to die on the way home with radiation poisoning—blind, raving, with their hair falling out and bleeding through the pores. Gregory would prefer a nice, quick atomic explosion every time.

	"You might be feeling responsible for all this," Gregory said harshly as he passed the prisoner in the well, "and you are responsible. But if you get any stupid ideas during the next ten minutes, forget them. Hear me?"

	"I understand," said the prisoner bitterly. "You've suddenly realised my true value and don't want to lose me."

	Gregory wanted to tell him that it wasn't that at all, and that he had other, unselfish reasons for wanting the other to stay alive. But there wasn't time to start that sort of argument, and if Gregory had done so he would have badly confused Nolan and Hartman and probably distracted them from their work. The two officers did not know yet that the ID he had found on the eleven-years-dead body identified it as James Andrew Caulfield, so that the man they had come to know as Caulfield must be someone else. Gregory thought he knew who, but he also knew that this was no time to be going into a long-winded Sherlock Holmes act, so for the time being the prisoner's name remained Caulfield and he could think about Captain Gregory what he liked!

Chapter Seven

	Angrily, Gregory kicked himself in the direction of the control-room, passing Hartman who was splicing a severed bundle of wiring which bore the reactor colour code. Hartman had been working to good effect because he found Nolan bent over a panel which was again comfortably full of indicator lights. He was about to compliment the junior lieutenant when Caulfield's voice forestalled him.

	"Try Numbers Eight and Nine."

	Nolan's gauntleted fingers stabbed at the control panel and two red indicators flickered and became green. "Good man!" he burst out, then to the Captain, "This gives us another twenty minutes to work in. We might be able to do it."

	"Caulfield!" snapped Gregory, "I told you not to enter the pile room ...!"

	"I didn't," the prisoner broke in. "I was lucky, that's all. You and Nolan must have loosened a lot of stuff for me. My card is still a nice bright red."

	"I don't believe you," said Gregory. "Hartman, go down and check. Caulfield, meet him at the end of the well."

	He heard the prisoner muttering to himself and Hartman's heavy breathing as he pulled himself sternward. Less than a minute later the Lieutenant reported, "Red like he says, sir. He's clean."

	"Carry on," said Gregory, feeling foolish.

	His eyes were caught by the reducer screen and the dense, sparkling cloud centering it. There was a large blurred smudge of light on the fringe of the swarm which could only be Keatly's ship, or the wreck of Keatly's ship. Until that moment he had been too busy to think of Vixen. He asked Nolan if he had tried to contact her and received the reply that Descartes' transmitter was a mass of scrap. Gregory asked about their stand-by receiver. Nolan admitted shamefacedly that he hadn't thought of that.

	"Try it," said Gregory, "maybe he's trying to call us." A few seconds later Keatly's voice came through his 'phones.

	"... If there is anyone left alive, answer please. If you are receiving me but are not able to reply, light a flare—I have a telescope on you. Vixen to Descartes ..."

	Gregory laughed suddenly. "Do what the man says, Nolan," he said.

	"... Hearing me but can't reply," Keatly was droning , out, "light a flare ... Oh, my eyes.'

	"I'm glad somebody's alive," he went on in a relieved voice. "My ship is slightly damaged. A few control circuits cut—it will take about four hours to fix and get across to you. I'll have to go easy with this heavy stuff floating about ..."

	"Nolan!" said Gregory urgently. "Start digging into that receiver—I want it revamped to transmit. It will be weak but should reach him at this range. Tell him our pile could blow anytime. Tell him to stay clear ... I"

	"Try Number Three," said the prisoner.

	Nolan pushed a button and another light changed from red to green. The Lieutenant said, "But, sir, we're freeing the pile. Why not let Vixen come over—"

	"We've pushed the blow-up back an hour," said Gregory sharply. "Up to now that's all that we're sure of. Do as you're told."

	As the exchange inside the ship ceased the voice of Keatly gained prominence again. The Commander was saying, "... And I've identified those heavy meteors as shielding bricks from Sunflower. You realise what this means? With the second component of the swarm so thoroughly seeded with this heavy stuff, the gravitic attraction of the pieces has overcome the original scatter effect. This part of the swarm is condensing! Therefore its danger to shipping is a reducing one, and in another couple of decades it will have shrunk so much that we could load it on a ship and take it away.

	"But we can talk about this later," Keatly ended. "I have full data recorded on the drift, which lacks only TR corroboration, so don't worry if your equipment suffered. Be seeing you."

	The last syllable had scarcely faded when Caulfield's voice returned. "Try Five," he said.

	Nolan touched the control which would send Number Five damper rod back into the pile. The light beside it flickered, but continued to burn red. Nolan looked up quickly at the Captain, and Gregory barked, "Caulfield, what's happening?"

	The prisoner reported that Number Five had been cleared where it projected outside the pile, but when it had gone one quarter of the way in it had stuck. The trouble was inside the reactor. Caulfield had an idea how to fix it but his time was nearly up. Could he have another five minutes?

	"No," said Gregory.

	"But I'm getting into the swing of this thing," Caulfield protested. "I've done better than the rest of you put together. Let me have five minutes, my card's still red ...."

	"Very well," said Gregory.

	He wondered briefly what had happened to the supreme authority of the Captain on this ship, which led him straight into thinking about the present state of the vessel itself. Even if the pile was made safe, and that looked extremely doubtful since Caulfield's last report, the ship had taken an awful beating. It would take a week at least to repair and check the wiring, go over the fuel plumbing and render the ship airtight again. But he had the horrible feeling that time was running out, that there were only minutes left instead of hours or days. Gregory felt tense and cold and there was a highly unpleasant feeling in the pit of his stomach, and he realised suddenly that these symptoms were due to the plain, old-fashioned fear of dying.

	It was then that Gregory felt a series of tiny shocks being transmitted through the arm-rests of his chair. Almost querulously he asked, "Caulfield, what's happening now?"

	"I'm moving the tongs ... further up ... to get more reach," the prisoner said between pauses for breath. "As things are I can't ... get into the pile."

	Gregory began to sweat suddenly, because the other was quite definitely lying. Those tongs could not be moved as he had said, they weren't designed that way. But why was he lying? What was he doing down there?

	A little earlier Gregory would have thought that he knew the answers to those questions. That was why he had insisted on radiation card checks and had stressed to the prisoner the undesirability of doing anything stupid. Because a man who had been responsible for creating a deadly menace to navigation which had already cost many lives and wrecked two ships might have feelings of guilt about the matter. He might feel that some atonement was due, and that taking chances with hard radiation might help to square accounts. For the prisoner was responsible all right, completely and damnably responsible.

	For eleven years, Gregory now knew, he had been hiding his true identity. All that time the penalties for the crime he had committed had grown in severity and his fear of discovery must have mounted in proportion. And he had continued to hide his identity right up to the last moment, by refusing TR and giving false data on the second component of the swarm so that they would pass through it without finding the body. But the eleven-years-dead body had been found, and with it the dog-tag which identified it as James Andrew Caulfield.

	Most definitely the prisoner must be feeling afraid and guilty and altogether pretty horrible. Because he wasn't Sunflower's ex-Engineer, he was her ex-Captain, Warren.

	Quickly Gregory left the control-room, signalling for Nolan to be quiet. Still without speaking he tapped Hartman's helmet and motioned for him to follow. Together they descended to the well. They found it packed loosely with wreckage—which explained the vibrations Gregory had felt and which the prisoner had ascribed to moving the tongs—so that while they couldn't pass along it they could see its entire length quite clearly. The prisoner was not to be seen, which meant he had to be in the reactor room.

	"He's jammed that stuff into the well by hand," Gregory said urgently. "We can move it the same way. Hurry, we're running out of time!"

	"Stay away from me!" Caulfield-Warren said sharply. It was followed by the voice of Nolan asking plaintively, "What are you all talking about? What's happening ...?"

	But there was no time to explain. Gregory seized a piece of loose plating and began working it free, his desperation sending a flood of mad, inconsequential thoughts roaring through his mind. There was that genii in the Arabian Nights story, the one locked up in a bottle, who promised himself during his first thousand years of captivity that he would reward his deliverer with all the riches of the world, and during the next thousand years that he would kill him ...

	Warren had been a Captain well-liked by his men, and headed for trial, disgrace and possibly prison. Then his face and hands had been burned in a fuel line explosion, obliterating features and fingerprints alike, and the dying ship's Engineer had jumped into space. So Warren had taken Caulfield's identity and the crew had gone along with it. And in the Earth hospital Mrs. Warren had discovered that she wasn't a widow after all and had remarried her supposedly dead husband.

	And Gregory had been thinking in terms of a murky private life!

	"Sir!" Nolan's voice burst on them. "He's over-riding my controls! Withdrawing those four working damper rods by manual! What ...!"

	"I'm trying out something," the prisoner said impatiently. "Shut up and let me think."

	"But with all the dampers out again ... meltdown ... she could blow in ten minutes ...!" Nolan protested, nearly incoherent. "Run them in again ..."

	"Caulfield, stop that!" Gregory called sharply, the name slipping out by force of habit. "Do as he says. And come out of there at once!"

	There was no reply.

	The second thousand years ...

	Captain Warren had been an intelligent, sensitive, professionally competent man. During those years of hiding he must have constantly watched for news of shipping losses caused by the swarm he had created. That would have made him feel bad, and his promise to his wife to stay out of space would have hurt him, too. And the steadily increasing feeling against spacemen with dirty habits—especially Captains with dirty habits—which amounted almost to blind, killing hatred. Fear and frustration and guilt, mounting and growing for eleven long years.

	Too much pressure could break a mind as well as bend it, Gregory knew, and guilty fear could change to a sudden blind, unreasoning hatred of its persecutors. The finding of the real Caulfield's body must have been the factor which knocked Warren over the hump, and the ex-Captain's persecutors were the crew of Descartes ...

	Gregory pulled and tore at the wreckage, frantically unaware of the danger he ran of a suit puncture. There was a madman in the reactor room. Their lives depended on getting him out and undoing the damage he might have done, quick.

	Seven minutes later the prisoner appeared at the other end of the well. He said, "It's all right, gentlemen, I'll come quietly ..."

	"The pile's been deactivated, sir," Nolan's voice broke in exultantly. "We're safe!"

	And so they were, thought Gregory soberly, but not all of them. The prisoner was still twenty feet from Hartman and himself, and Gregory's radiation counter was already having hysterics.

	Working at top speed they set up a temporary lock outside one of the undamaged compartments and peeled him out of his suit; he had taken enough radiation already without re-radiation from his "hot" suit adding to it. In the process they discovered that he must have been entering the pile room from the very start, because the "radiation card" he wore was nothing but a piece of red cardboard cut from the back of a notebook ...

	"So that was your lucky charm," Gregory muttered, and left shortly afterwards to find out if Nolan had jury-rigged a transmitter yet. He had, and Gregory's instructions to Keatly were urgent and brief.

	Vixen would rendezvous with them as soon as possible, take their prisoner aboard and proceed to the hospital on Titan at maximum speed and without regard to fuel economy considerations. Descartes' reactor was badly damaged but there was no immediate danger, and Vixen could leave them some of her remote-handling equipment which would aid in the repairs. They would be able to make it home under their own power, but slowly, which was why Gregory was transferring the prisoner to Vixen.

	Then he went to see Warren again.

	"For a while back there I thought you were intending to blow us all up," Gregory began awkwardly as he opened his faceplate. "I mean, pulling out all the damper rods ..."

	"I needed room to clear the blockage inside," said the prisoner shortly, and turned his face away.

	There were words which Gregory wanted to say, words which were difficult for one of his character and background, and the other was not making it any easier for him. He tried again: 

	"The hospital on Titan is good—they specialise in this sort of thing, you know. You weren't in there for more than twenty minutes. Provided we get you to them quickly, and we will, you stand a very good chance. You'll see, in a few months' time I'll be out to badger you into a TR session—"

	"How very like you," said Warren tiredly. Physically there was no change in him yet, but that was because his injuries were in the blood-producing marrow of his bones and other non-obvious places. Already he must feel— psychosomatically as yet—the developing lassitude of advanced leukemia. Dully, he went on, "I honestly believe the data comes first with you, and the kudos you'll get for tracking down the supposedly dead Captain of Sunflower—"

	"Listen, Caulfield!" Gregory began angrily, then stopped.

	He was thinking that the subconscious mind was a funny thing. When the real Caulfield's body had been taken aboard he had continued to call the prisoner Caulfield, and later when there had been time to tell Nolan and Hartman about it he had continued to hold off—when ordinarily he should have been bursting to tell them of his discovery. He also thought about the circumstances of the Sunflower accident and of how Warren must have suffered because of it in the eleven years which followed. Finally he remembered the business with Descartes' reactor and thought that his own subconscious was a bit of a softie, and decided that actions always did speak louder than words.

	Quickly he fastened the ID taken from Caulfield's body around the prisoner's neck. "Good luck, Mr. Caulfield," he said stiffly, then left.

	That dog-tag had been the proof that the prisoner was not Caulfield but Warren. If Gregory had held onto it he might have weakened sometime at the thought of the glory which would accrue from turning in a Captain, and decided to tell all. So the only thing to do had been to give it to the man calling himself Caulfield. Either that or throw it away.

	Gregory might be guilty of turning a blind eye and of committing various other sins of omission, but throwing things away into space was one of the things which were just not done.

The End

* * * * * *
Front cover

SPACE GARBAGE

Common litter, trash—tossed from a speeding rocket, flash frozen in the void, whipped around the sun and hurtling in orbit—can prove as destructive as a guided missile, and less predictable. So destructive, in fact, that in crowded space traffic, littering may well be the future's worst crime.

So Captain Gregory must track down the one survivor of an eleven-year-old space collision to find out just what the Sunflower had jettisoned that might now be returning to Earth as a deadly meteor shower.

DEADLY SPACE

Everything happened very slowly. As in a nightmare. The battered capsule broke free of the hull and rose ponderously. Caught off-balance, Miller fell backward but managed to keep one foot-magnet in contact with the hull. Danny, however, was unable to disentangle his fingers when the capsule began moving away from the ship, and it pulled him with it.

With the frantic slowness—vital if she was not to lose contact with the ship—Miller struggled to her feet and made a grab for Danny's retreating legs. He kicked in reflex action, and her hand was knocked away. The lead joining their helmets was jerked from its socket and all contact with him was lost.

Just out of reach she saw Danny wrap his legs around the capsule, then reach up toward his blindfold. Blinded, he would never reach the ship, would die in deep space.

But if he could see, Danny would go mad.

DEADLY LITTER

James White

DEL
REY
A Del Rey Book 
BALLANTINE BOOKS 
NEW YORK

Contents
	Grapeliner
	The Ideal Captain
	The Lights Outside The Windows 
	Deadly Litter

A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright © 1964 by James White
All rights reserved. 

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto, Canada.

ISBN: 0-345-29640-0

Manufactured in the United States of America 

First Ballantine Books Edition: October 1964 
Third Printing: September 1981 
Cover art by Matt Davis