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Introduction “Brake” Afterword
Meanwhile, far uglier experiments were underway on Ganymede where a few hundred psychotechnicians had fled during the Revolt. The refugees subverted the colony of reactionary cultists already living there and warped their totalitarian society even further. Apparently, the psychotechnicians planned to breed a mindlessly loyal army of genetically modified troops who would restore the Institute to its old position. The conspirators were unmasked early in the twenty-third century by the Planetary Engineers they had hired to terraform Ganymede and Callisto. The Order subsequently took the colonists under its protection until they were ready to function normally.
Half a century later, the Engineers still patiently toiled on Jupiter’s moons. But the minions of chaos were as diligent and unyielding in pursuit of their goals as the forces of order. A collision was inevitable.
— from Cold Victory
In that hour, when he came off watch, Captain Peter Banning did not go directly to his cabin. He felt a wish for uninhibited humor, such as this bleak age could not bring to life (except maybe in the clan gatherings of Venus—but Venus was too raw), and remembered that Luke Devon had a Shakespeare. It was a long time since Banning had last read The Taming of the Shrew. He would drop in and borrow the volume, possibly have a small drink and a chinfest. The Planetary Engineer was unusually worth talking to.
So it was that he stepped out of the companionway into a-deck corridor and saw Devon backed up against the wall at gun point.
Banning had not stayed alive as long as this—a good deal longer than he admitted—through unnecessary heroics. He slid back, flattened himself against the aluminum side of the stairwell, and stretched his ears. Very gently, one hand removed the stubby pipe from his teeth and slipped it into a pocket of his tunic, to smolder itself out. The fumes might give him away to a sensitive nose, and he was unarmed.
Devon spoke softly, with rage chained in his throat: “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!”
“Not so hasty,” advised the other person. It was the Minerals Authority representatives, Serge Andreyev, a large hairy man who dressed and talked too loudly. “I do not wish to kill you. This is just a needler in my hand. But I have also a gun for blowing out brains—if required.”
His English bore its usual accent, but the tone had changed utterly. It was not the timbre of an irritating extrovert; there was no particular melodrama intended; Andreyev was making a cool statement of fact.
“It is unfortunate for me that you recognized me through all the surgical changes,” he went on. “It is still more unfortunate for you that I was armed. Now we shall bargain.”
“Perhaps.” Devon had grown calmer. Banning could visualize him, backed up against the wall, hands in the air: a tall man, cat-lithe under the austere stiffness of his Order, close-cropped yellow hair and ice-blue eyes, and a prow of nose jutting from the bony face. I wouldn’t much like to have that hombre on my tail, reflected Banning.
“Perhaps,” repeated Devon. “Has it occurred to you, though, that a steward, a deckhand . . . anyone . . . may be along at any moment?”
“Just so. Into my cabin. There we shall talk some more.”
“But it is infernally awkward for you,” said Devon. “ ‘Is it a world to hide virtues in?’—or prisoners, for that matter? Here we are, beyond Mars, with another two weeks before we reach Jupiter. There are a good fifteen people aboard, passengers and crew—not much, perhaps, for a ship as big as the Thunderbolt, but enough to search her pretty thoroughly if anyone disappears. You can’t just cram me out any convenient air lock, you know, not without getting the keys from an officer. Neither can you keep me locked away without inquiries as to why I don’t show up for meals . . . I assure you, if you haven’t noticed, my appetite is notorious. Therefore, dear old chap—”
“We will settle this later,” snapped Andreyev. “Quickly, now, go to my cabin. I shall be behind. If necessary, I will needle you and drag you there.”
Devon was playing for time, thought Banning. If the tableau of gunman and captive remained much longer in the passageway, someone was bound to come by and— As a matter of fact, son, someone already has.
The captain slipped a hand into his pouch. He had a number of coins: not that they’d be any use on Ganymede, but he didn’t want to reenter Union territory without beer cash. He selected several of nearly uniform size and tucked them as a stack into his fist. It was a very old stunt.
Then, with the quick precision of a hunter—which he had been now and then, among other things—he glided from the companionway. Andreyev had just turned his back, marching Devon up the hall toward Cabin 5. Peter Banning’s weighted fist smote him at the base of the skull.
Devon whirled, a tiger in gray. Banning eased Andreyev to the floor with one hand; the other took the stun pistol, not especially aimed at the Engineer nor especially aimed away from him. “Take it easy, friend,” he murmured.
“You . . . oh!” Devon eased, muscle by muscle. A slow grin crossed his face. “ ‘For this relief, much thanks.’ ”
“What’s going on here?” asked the captain.
There was a moment of stillness. Only the ship spoke, with a whisper of ventilators. The sound might almost have belonged to that night of cold stars through which she hurled.
“Well?” said Banning impatiently.
Devon stood for an instant longer, as if taking his measure. The captain was a stocky man of medium height, with faintly grizzled black hair clipped short on a long head. His face was broad, it bore high cheekbones, and its dark-white skin had a somehow ageless look: deep trenches from wide nose to big mouth, crow’s-feet around the bony-ridged gray eyes, otherwise smooth as a child’s. He did not wear the trim blue jacket and white trousers of the Fireball Line but favored a Venusian-style beret and kilt, Arabian carpet slippers, a disreputable old green tunic of possibly Martian origin.
“I don’t know,” said the Planetary Engineer at last. “He just pulled that gun on me.”
“Sorry, I heard a bit of the talk between you. Now come clean. I’m responsible for this ship, and I want to know what’s going on.”
“So do I,” said Devon grimly. “I’m not really trying to stall you, skipper—not much, anyway.” He stooped over Andreyev and searched the huddled body. “Ah, yes, here’s that other gun he spoke of, the lethal one.”
“Give me that!” Banning snatched it. The metal was cold and heavy in his grasp. It came to him with a faint shock that he himself and his entire crew had nothing more dangerous between them than some knives and monkey wrenches. A spaceship was not a Spanish caravel, her crew had no reason to arm against pirates or mutiny or—
Or did they?
“Go find a steward,” snapped Banning. “Come back here with him. Mr. Andreyev goes in irons for the rest of the trip.”
“Irons?” Under the cowl of his gray tunic, Devon’s brows went up.
“Chains . . . restraint . . . hell, we’ll lock him away. I’ve got a bad habit of using archaisms. Now, jump!”
The Engineer went quickly down the hall. Banning lounged back, twirling the gun by its trigger guard, and watched him go.
Where had he seen the fellow before?
He searched a cluttered memory for a tall blond man who was athlete, technician, Shakespearean enthusiast, and amateur painter in oils. Perhaps it was only someone he had read about, with a portrait; there was so much history— Wait. The Rostomily brotherhood. Of course. But that was three centuries ago!
Presumably someone, somewhere, had kept a few cells in storage, after that corps of exogenetic twins had finally made their secret open, disbanded, and mingled their superior genes in the common human lifestream. And then, perhaps thirty years ago, the Engineers had quietly grown such a child in a tank. Maybe a lot of them. Also anything could happen in that secret castle on the rim of Archimedes Crater, and the Solar System none the wiser till the project exploded in man’s collective face.
The brotherhood had been a trump card of the early Un-men, in the days when world government was frail and embattled. A revived brotherhood must be of comparable importance to the Order. But for what purpose? The Engineers, quasi-military, almost religious, were supposed to be above politics; they were supposed to serve all men, an independent force whose only war was against the inanimate cosmos.
Banning felt a chill. With the civilization-splitting tension that existed on Earth and was daily wrung one notch higher, he could imagine what hidden struggles took place between the many factions. It wasn’t all psychodynamics, telecampaigning or parliamentary maneuver: the Humanist episode had scarred Earth’s soul, and now there were sometimes knives in the night.
Somehow an aspect of those battles had focused on his ship.
He took out his pipe, rekindled it, and puffed hard. Andreyev stirred, with a retch and a rattle in his throat.
There was a light football in the corridor. Banning looked up. He would have cursed the interruption had anyone but Cleonie Rogers appeared. As it was, he made the forgotten gesture of raising his cap.
“Oh!” Her hand went to her mouth. For an instant she looked frightened, then came forward in a way he liked: the more so as she had been consistently annoyed by Andreyev’s loud attempts to flirt. “Oh, is he hurt? Can I help?”
“Better stand back, m’lady,” advised Banning. She saw the stunner in his hand and the automatic in his waistband. Her lips parted in the large-eyed, snub-nosed face. With the yellow hair that fell softly down to bare shoulders, with a wholly feminine topless shimmergown and a whisper of cosmetics, she was a small walking anachronism.
“What happened?” A shaken courage rallied in her. It was well done, thought the man, considering that she was a child of wealth, never done a day’s work in her life, bound for the Jovian Republic as an actual live tourist.
“That’s what I’d kind of like to know,” he told her. “This character here pulled an equalizer—a gun, I mean—on Engineer Devon. Then I came along and sapped him.”
He saw her stiffen. Even aboard the Thunderbolt, which was not one of the inner-planet luxury liners but a freighter whose few passengers—except her—were bound for Ganymede on business . . . even here there were dimly lit corners and piped music and the majesty of the stars. Banning had noticed how much she and Devon had been together. Therefore he said kindly: “Oh, Luke wasn’t hurt. I sent him for help. Must say it’s taking him one hell of a time, too. Did the stewards crawl into the fire chamber for a nap?”
She smiled uncertainly. “What do you think the trouble is, Captain? Did Mr. Andreyev, ah—”
“Slip a cog?” Banning scowled. In his preoccupation he forgot that the rising incidence of nonsanity on Earth made the subject unfit for general conversation. “I doubt it. He came aboard with these toys, remember. I wonder, though. Now that the topic has come up, we do have a rum lot of passengers.”
Devon was legitimate enough, his mind continued: a genuine Engineer, nursemaiding the terraforming equipment which was the Thunderbolt’s prime cargo, the great machines which the Order would use to make Europa habitable.
And Cleonie must be an authentic tourist. (Since he regarded her as a woman, which he did not the crop-headed, tight-lipped, sad-clad creature that was today’s typical Western Terrestrial female, Banning thought of her by her first name.) On the other, hand—
Andreyev was not a simple Union bureaucrat, sent to negotiate a trade agreement; or, if he was, he was also much more. And how about the big fellow, Robert Falken, allegedly a nucleonic technie offered a job on Callisto? He didn’t say much at table, kept to himself, but Banning knew a hard, tough man when he saw one. And Morgan Gentry, astronaut, who said the Republic had hired him to pilot inter-satellite shuttles—undoubtedly a trained spaceman, but what was he besides that? And the exchange professor of advanced symbolics, dome-healed little Gómez, was he really bound for a position at the new University of x?
The girl’s voice interrupted his reverie: “Captain Banning . . . what could be the matter with the passengers? They’re all Westerners, aren’t they?”
He could still be shocked, just a little bit every now and then. He hesitated a second before realizing that she had spoken not in ill will but from blank naivete. “What has that got to do with it?” he said. “You don’t really think, do you, Miss, that the conflict on Earth is a simple question of Oriental Kali worshipers versus a puritanical protechnological Occident?” He paused for breath, then plowed on: “Why, the Kali people are only one branch of the Ramakrishian Eclectics, and there are plenty of Asians who stand by population control and Technic civilization—I have a couple in my own crew—and there are Americans who worship the Destroyer as fervently as any Ganges River farmer—and the Husseinite Moslems are closer to you, Miss Rogers, than you are to the New Christendom—”
He broke off, shaking his head. It was too big to be neatly summarized, the schism which threatened to rip Earth apart. He might have said it boiled down to the fact that technology had failed to solve problems which must be solved; but he didn’t want to phrase it thus, because it would sound antiscientific, and he wasn’t.
Thank all kindly gods that there were men on other planets now! The harvest of all the patient centuries since Galileo would not be entirely lost, whatever happened to Earth.
Andreyev pulled himself up till he rested on his hands, head dangling between his shoulders. He groaned.
“I wonder how much of that is put on,” mused Banning. “I did a well-caliberated job of slugging him. He shouldn’t be too badly concussed.” He gave Cleonie a beady look. “Maybe we ought to haul him into a cabin at that. Don’t want to rattle any other cash customers, do we? Where are they all, anyway?”
“I’m not sure. I just left my cabin—” She stopped.
Someone came running from aft. The curvature of the hall, which was wrapped around the inner skin of the ship, made it impossible to see more than about forty meters. Banning shifted his gun, warily.
It was the large square-faced man, Falken, who burst into view. “Captain!” he shouted. The metal that enclosed all of them gave his tone a faint, unhuman resonance. “Captain, what happened?”
“How do you know about it, son?”
“A . . . eh . . . Engineer Devon—” Falken jogged to a halt; a meter away. “He told me—”
“Told you? Well, did he now?” Banning’s gray gaze narrowed. Suddenly the needler in his hand leaped up and found an aim. “Hold it. Hold it there, pardner, and reach.”
Falken flushed red. “What the ruination do you mean?”
“I mean that if you even look like you’re going after a gun, I’ll put you to sleep,” said Banning. “Then if it turns out you only intended to offer me a peanut butter sandwich, I’ll beg your humble pardon. But something sure smells here.”
Falken backed away. “All right, all right, I’ll go,” he snarled. “I just wanted to help.” Cleonie screamed.
As Andreyev’s burly form tackled him by the ankles and he went down, Banning knew a moment of rage at himself. He had been civilized too long . . . inexcusably careless of him—‘Sbones and teeth!
He hit the deck with the other man on top. The red face glared murder. Andreyev yanked at the gun in Banning’s kilt with one hand, his other grabbed the arm holding the stun pistol.
Banning brought his hard forehead up, into Andreyev’s mouth. The fellow screamed. His fingers released the stunner. At that moment Falken joined the fight, snatching the sleep weapon before Banning could get it into action.
The skipper reached up with an efficiently unsportsmanlike thumb. He had not quite gouged out Andreyev’s eye when the man bellowed and tried to scramble free. Banning rolled away. Falken fired at him. An anesthetic dart broke near Banning’s nose, and he caught a whiff of vapor.
For a moment, while the universe waltzed around him, Banning accomplished nothing more than to reel to his feet. Falken sidestepped the weeping Andreyev, shoved the captain back against the wall, and yanked the automatic from his waistband.
Cleonie came from behind and threw her arms around Falken’s neck.
He shouted, bent his back, and tossed her from him. But it had been enough of a distraction. Banning aimed a kick for the solar plexus. Both guns went on a spin from Falken’s hands.
Banning’s sole had encountered hard muscle. Falken recovered fast enough to make a jump for the nearest weapon. Banning put a large foot on it. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he growled.
Falken sprang at him. It was not the first time Banning had been in a party which got rough, and he did not waste energy on fisticuffs. His hand snapped forward, open, the edge of a horny palm driving into Falken’s larynx. There was a snapping noise.
Falken fell backward, over Andreyev, who still whimpered and dabbed at his injured eye. Banning stooped for the gun.
A bullet smashed down the corridor, ricocheted, and whined around his ears. Gentry came into view, with the drop on him.
“Oh, oh,” said Banning. “School’s out.” He scooped up Cleonie and scampered back into the companionway.
Up the stairwell! His weight lessened with every jump as he got closer to the ship’s axis of spin.
Passing c-deck, he collided with Charles Wayne. The young second mate had obviously been yanked from sleep by the racket. He was pulling on his gold-collared blue uniform jacket as he entered the companionway. “Follow me!” puffed Banning.
Gentry appeared at the foot of the stairs. The automatic in his grasp found an aim on the captain’s stomach. “Stay there!” he rapped. “Raise your hands!”
Banning threw himself and Cleonie backward, into c-deck corridor. The bullet snapped viciously past Wayne’s head. “Come on, I told you!” gasped Banning. “Get her to the bridge!”
Wayne looked altogether bewildered, but any spaceman learns to react fast. He slung the girl over his shoulder and dashed down the hall toward an alternate stairwell.
Banning followed. He heard Gentry’s shoes clang on metal, up the steps after him. As he ran, he groped after his pipe lighter, got it out, and thumbed the switch.
There were rails and stanchions along the wall, for use in null-gravity. Aided by his lessened weight, Banning swarmed ape fashion up the nearest and waved his flame beneath a small circle in the ceiling.
Then down again, toward the stair! Gentry burst into the hall and fired. Coriolis force deflected the bullet, it fanned the captain’s cheek. The next one would be more carefully aimed.
The ceiling thermocouple reacted to heat, flashed a signal, and put the c-deck fire extinguisher system into action with a lather of plastifoam. Gentry’s second shot flew off to nowhere. Thereafter he struggled with the stuff while Banning scampered up the stairs.
The bridge was a bubble in the ship’s nose, precisely centered on the axis of rotation. There was virtually no weight, only a wilderness of gleaming consoles and the great view-screen ablaze with its simulacrum of the sky.
Cleonie hung on to a stanchion, torn and shaken by the wretchedness of sudden, unaccustomed free fall. Tetsuo Tokugawa, the first mate, whose watch this was, floated next to her, offering an antidizzy pill. Wayne crouched by the door, wild-eyed. “What’s going on, sir?” he croaked.
“I’m curious to know myself,” panted Banning. “But it’s all hell let out for noon.”
Tokugawa gave him a despairing look. “Can you stuff this pill down her throat, skipper?” he begged. “I’ve seen people toss their dinner in null-gee.”
“Uh, yeah, it is rather urgent.” Banning hooked a knee around a stanchion, took the girl’s head in one hand, and administered the medicine veterinary fashion. Meanwhile he clipped forth his story.
Tokugawa whistled. “What the destruction is this?” he said. “Mutiny?”
“If passengers can mutiny . . . neat point of law, that. Be quiet.” Banning cocked his head and listened. There was no sound from the passages beyond the open door. He closed and bolted it.
Wayne looked sick. He wasn’t a bad young fellow, thought the captain, but he was brought up in the puritan reaction of today’s Western peoples. He was less afraid of danger, now, than stunned by a kick to his sense of propriety. Tokugawa was more reliable, being Lunar City bred, with all the Lunar colonist’s cat-footed cosmopolitanism.
“What are we going to do?” rasped the second mate.
“Find out things,” grunted Banning. He soared across to the intercom cabinet, entered it, and flicked switches. The first thing he wanted was information about the ship. If that failed them, it would be a long walk home.
The Thunderbolt was a steelloy spheroid, flattened along the axis of the drive-tubes whose skeletal structure jutted like an ancient oil derrick from the stern. She was a big ship: her major diameter more than three hundred meters; she was a powerful ship: not required to drift along a Hohmann ellipse, but moving at a speed which took her on a hyperbolic orbit—from Earth Station Prime to the Jovian System in less than a month! But she had her limitations.
She was not intended to enter an atmosphere, but orbited and let shuttleboats bring or remove her cargo. This was less because of the great mass of her double hull—that wasn’t too important, when you put atomic nuclei to work for you—than because of the design itself. To build up her fantastic velocities, she must spurt out ions at nearly the speed of light: which required immensely long accelerating tubes, open to the vacuum of space. They would arc over and burn out if air surrounded the charged rings.
She carried no lifeboat. If you abandon ship at hyperbolic speeds, a small craft doesn’t have engine enough to decelerate you before running out of reaction mass. Here, in the big cold darkness beyond Mars, there was no escaping this vessel.
Banning tuned in the screen before him. It gave two-way visual contact between a few key points, in case of emergency. “And if this ain’t an emergency,” he muttered, “it’ll do till one comes along.”
First, the biotic plant, armored at the heart of the ship. He breathed a gusty sigh. No one had tampered with that—air and water were still being renewed.
Next, the control gyros. The screen showed him their housing, like the pillars of some heathen temple. In the free fall at the ship’s axis, a dead man drifted past them. The slow air currents turned him over and over. When his gaping face nudged the screen pickup, Banning recognized Tietjens, one of the two stewards. He had been shot through the head, and there was a grisly little cloud of red and gray floating around him.
Banning’s lips grew thin. “I was supposed to look after you,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry, Joppe.”
He switched to the engine room. His view was directed toward the main control board, also in the axial null-gee state. The face that looked back at him, framed by the tall machines, belonged to Professor Gómez.
Banning sucked in a breath. “What are you doing there?” he said.
“Oh . . . it’s you, Captain. I rather expected you to peer in.” The little man shoved himself forward with a groundlubber’s awkwardness, but he was calm, not spacesick at all. “Quite a job you did on Falken. He’s dead.”
“Too bad you weren’t in on that party,” said Banning. “How are the other boys? Mine, I mean.”
“The red-haired man—he was on watch here when I came—I am afraid I found it necessary to terminate him.”
“Tietjens and O’Farrell,” said Banning, very slowly. “Just shot down, huh? Who else?”
“No one, yet. It’s your fault, Captain. You precipitated this affair before we were ready; we had to act in haste. Our original plan did not involve harming any person.” The shriveled face grew thoughtful. “We have them all prisoners, except for you there on the bridge. I advise you to surrender peacefully.”
“What’s the big idea?” growled Banning. “What do you want?”
“We are taking over this ship.”
“Are you crazy? Do you know what sort of job it is to handle her—do you know how much kinetic energy she’s got, right now?”
“It is unfortunate that Falken died,” said Gómez tonelessly. “He was to have been our engineer. But I daresay Andreyev can take his place, with some help from me—I know a bit about nucleonic controls. Gentry, of course, is a trained astrogator.”
“But who are you?” shouted Banning. He had the eerie feeling that the whole world had gone gibbering insane around him. “What are you doing this for?”
“It is not essential for you to know that,” said Gómez. “If you surrender now, you will receive good treatment and be released as soon as possible. Otherwise we shall probably have to shoot you. Remember, we have all the guns.”
Banning told him what he could do with the guns and cut the circuit. Switching on the public-address mike, he barked a summary of the situation for the benefit of any crewmen who might be at liberty. Then, spinning out of the booth, he told the others in a few harsh words how it stood.
Cleonie’s face had gotten back a little color. Now, between the floating gold locks of hair, it was again drained of blood. But he admired the game way she asked him: “What can we do?”
“Depends on the situation, m’lady,” he replied. “We don’t know for sure . . . let’s see, another steward, two engineers, and a deckhand . . . we don’t know if all four of the crewmen still alive are prisoners or not. I’m afraid, though, that they really are.”
“Luke,” she whispered. “You sent him off—”
Banning nodded. Even in this moment, he read an anguish in her eyes and knew pity for her. “I’m afraid Luke has been clobbered,” he said. “Not permanently, though, I hope.”
Wayne’s gaze was blank and lost. “But what are they doing?” he stammered. “Are they . . . ps-ps-psy-chotic?”
“No such luck,” said Banning. “This was a pretty well-laid plan. At the proper time, they’d have pulled guns on us and locked us away—or maybe shot us. Luke happened to . . . I don’t know what, but it alarmed Andreyev, who stuck him up. Then I horned in. I sent Luke after help. Not suspecting the other passengers, he must have told Tietjens in the presence of another member of this gang. So poor old Joppe got shot, but apparently Luke was just herded off. Then the whole gang was alerted, and Gómez went to take over the engine room while Falken and Gentry came after me.” He nodded heavily. “A fast, smooth, operation, in spite of our having thrown ’em off balance. No, they’re sane, for all practical purposes.”
He waited a moment, gathering his thoughts, then:
“The remaining four crewmen would all have been in their quarters, off duty. The situation as she now stands depends on whether Gentry broke off from chasing me in time to surprise them in that one place. I wish I’d gotten on the mike faster.”
Suddenly he grinned. “Tetsuo,” he rapped, “stop the ship’s rotation. Pronto!”
The mate blinked, then laughed—a short rough bark in his gullet—and leaped for the controls. “Hang on!” said Banning.
“What . . . what do you plan to do, sir?” asked Wayne.
“Put this whole tub into null-gee. It’ll equalize matters a bit.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, you’ve never seen a weightless free-for-all, have you? Too bad. There’s an art to it. A trained man with his hands can make a monkey of a groundlubber with a gun.”
It was hard to tell whether Wayne was more deeply shocked at the mutiny or at learning that his captain had actually been in vulgar brawls. “Cheer up, son,” said Banning. “You, too Cleonie. You both look like vulcanized oatmeal.”
There was a brief thrumming. The tangential jets blew a puff of chemical vapor and brought the spin of the ship to a halt. For a moment, the astro screen went crazy, still compensating for a rotation which had ceased, then the cold image of the constellations steadied.
“o.k.,” said Banning. “We’ve got to move fast. Tetsuo, come with me. Charlie, Cleonie, guard the bridge. Lock the door behind us, and don’t open it for anyone whose voice you find unmusical. If our boys do show up, tell ’em to wait here.”
“Where are you going?” breathed the girl shakenly.
“Out to kill a few people,” said Banning with undiminished good cheer.
He led the way, in a long soaring glide through the door. “Up” and “down” had become meaningless; there was only this maze of halls, rooms, and stairwells. His skin prickled with the thought that an armed man might be waiting in any cross-corridor. The silence of the ship drew his nerves taut as wires. He pulled himself along by the rails, hand over hand, accelerating till the doorways blurred past him.
The galley was on b-deck, just “above” passenger country. When Banning opened the door, an unfastened kettle drifted out and bonged on his head. A rack held the usual kitchen assortment of knives. He stuck a few in his waistband, giving the two longest to himself and Tokugawa. “Now I don’t feel so nude,” he remarked.
“What’s next?” whispered the mate.
“If our lads are being kept prisoner, it’s probably in crew territory. Let’s try—”
The spacemen’s own cabins were on this level; they did not require the full Earth-value of spin-gravity given the passengers on a-deck. Banning slipped with a caution that rose exponentially toward the area he always thought of as the forecastle.
He need not have been quite so careful. Andreyev waited with a pistol outside a cabin door. Andreyev had been unprepared for a sudden change to no-weight. His misery was not active, but it showed.
Banning launched himself.
Andreyev’s abused senses reacted slowly. He looked around, saw the hurtling form, and yelled. Almost instinctively, he whipped his gun about and fired. It was nearly pointblank, but he missed. He could not help missing when the recoil sent him flying backward with plenty of English.
He struck the farther wall, scrabbled wildly, bounced off it, and pinwheeled to the ceiling. Banning grinned, changed course with a thrust of leg against floor, and closed in. Andreyev fired again. It was a bomb-burst roar in the narrow space. The bullet tore Banning’s sleeve. Recoil jammed Andreyev against the ceiling. As he rebounded, it was onto his enemy’s knife.
The captain smiled sleepily, grabbed Andreyev’s tunic with his free hand, and completed the job.
Tokugawa dodged a rush of blood. He looked sick. “What did you do that for?” he choked.
“Tietjens and O’Farrell,” said Banning. The archaic greenish light faded from his eyes, and he added in a flat tone: “Let’s get that door open.”
Fists were hammering on it. The thin metal dented beneath the blows but held firm. “Stand aside!” yelled Tokugawa. “I’m going to shoot the lock off—can’t find the key, no time—” He picked Andreyev’s gun from the air, put the muzzle to the barrier, and fired. He was also thrown back by reaction but knew how to control such forces.
Luke Devon flung the door open. The Engineer looked as bleak as Banning had ever known a man to be. Behind him crowded the others, Nielsen, Bahadur, Castro, Vladimirovitch. Packing five men into a cubbyhole meant for one had in itself been a pretty good way to immobilize them.
Their voices surfed around the captain. “Shut up!” he bawled. “We got work to do!”
“Who else is involved in this?” demanded Devon. “Gentry killed Tietjens and took me prisoner . . . herded all of us in here, with Andreyev to help . . . but who else is there to fight?”
“Gentry and Gómez,” said Banning. “Falken is dog’s meat. We still hold the bridge and we outnumber ’em now—but they’ve got the engine room and all the guns but one.” He passed out knives. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve made enough racket to wake the Old Martians. I don’t want Gentry to come pot-hunting.”
The men streamed behind him as he dove along another stairwell, toward the bowels of the ship. He wanted to post a guard over the gyros and biotics. But he had not gotten to them when the spiteful crack of an automatic toned between metal walls.
His hands closed on the rail, slamming him to a halt that skinned his palms. “Hold it,” he said, very softly. “That could only have come from the bridge.”
If we can shoot a door open, I reckon Gentry can, too.
There was only one approach to the bridge, a short passageway on which several companionways converged. To either side of this corridor were the captain’s and mate’s cabins; at the far end was the bridge entrance.
Banning came whizzing out of a stairwell. He didn’t stop, but glided on into the one opposite. A bullet smashed where he had been.
His brain held the glimpsed image: the door open, Gentry braced in it with his feet on one jamb and his back against the door. That way, he could cover Wayne and Cleonie—if they were still alive—and the approach as well. The recoil of his fire wouldn’t bother him at all.
Banning’s followers milled about like the debris of a ship burst open. He waited till Gentry’s voice reached out:
“So you have all your men back, Captain . . . and therefore a gun, I presume? Nice work. But stay where you are. I’ll shoot the first head that pokes around a corner. I know how to use a gun in null-gee, and I’ve got Wayne and Rogers for hostages. Want to parley?”
Banning stole a glimpse at Devon. The Engineer’s nostrils were pinched and bloodless. It was he who answered:
“What are you after?”
“I think you know, Luke,” said Gentry.
“Yes,” said Devon. “I believe I do.”
“Then you’re also aware that anything goes. I won’t hesitate to shoot Rogers—or dive the ship into the sun before the Guard gets its claws on us! It would be better if you gave up.”
There was another stillness. The breathing of his men, of himself, sounded hoarse in Banning’s ears. Little drops of sweat pearled off their skin, glistened in the fluorotube light, and danced away on air currents.
He cocked a brow at Devon. The Engineer nodded. “It’s correct enough, skipper,” he said. “We’re up against fanatics.”
“We could rush him,” hissed Banning. “Lose a man or two, maybe, but—”
“No,” said Devon. “There’s Cleonie to think about.” A curious mask of peace dropped over his bony face. “Let me talk to him. Maybe we can arrange something. You be ready to act as . . . as indicated.”
He said, aloud, that he would parley. “Good,” grunted Gentry. “Come out slow, and hang on to the rail with both your hands where I can see them.” Devon’s long legs moved out of Banning’s view. “That’s close enough. Stop.” He must still be three or four meters from the door, thought the captain, and moved up to the corner of the stairwell.
It came to him, with a sudden chill, what Devon must be planning. The Rostomily clan had always been that sort. His scalp prickled, but he dared not speak. All he could do was take a few knives from the nearest men.
“Luke.” That was Cleonie’s voice, a whisper from the bridge. “Luke, be careful.”
“Oh, yes.” The Engineer laughed. It had an oddly tender note.
“Just what happened to kick off this landslide, anyway?” asked Gentry.
“ ‘Thou hast the most unsavory similes’,” said Devon.
“What?”
The roar which followed must have jerked all of Gentry’s remaining attention to him as Devon launched himself into space.
The gun crashed. Banning heard the bullet smack home. Devon’s body turned end over end, tumbling backward down the hall.
Banning was already around the corner. He did not fire at Gentry; it would have taken a whole fatal second to brace himself properly against a wall.
He threw knives.
The recoil was almost negligible; his body twisted back and forth as his arms moved, but he was used to that. It took only a wink to stick four blades in Gentry.
The spaceman screamed, hawked blood, and scrabbled after the gun that had slipped from his fingers. Tokugawa came flying, hit him with one shoulder. They thudded to the floor. The mate wrapped his legs about Gentry’s and administered an expert foul blow to the neck.
Cleonie struggled from the bridge toward Devon. Banning was already there, holding the gray form between his knees while he examined the wound. The girl bumped into them. “How is he?” Banning had heard that raw tone, half shriek, often and often before this day—when women saw the blood of their men.
He nodded. “Could be worse, I reckon. The slug seems to’ve hit a rib and stopped. Shock knocked him out, but well, a bullet never does as much harm in free fall, the target bounces away from it easier.” He swatted at the little red globules in the air. “Damn!’
Wayne emerged, green-faced. “This man . . . shot the door open when we wouldn’t let him in,” he rattled. “We hadn’t any weapon . . . he threatened Miss Rogers—”
“o.k., never mind the breast-beating. Next time remember to stand beside the door and grab when the enemy comes through. Now, I assume you have the medical skills required for your certificate. Get Luke to sick bay and patch him up. Nielsen, help Mr. Wayne. Gentry still alive?”
“He won’t be if he doesn’t get some first aid quick,” said Tokugawa. “You gashed him good.” He whistled in awe. “Don’t you ever simply stun your enemies, boss?”
“Take him along too, Mr. Wayne, but Devon gets priority. Bahadur, break out the vacuum sweeper and get this blood sucked up before it fouls everything. Tetsuo . . . uh, Mr. Tokugawa, go watch the after bulkhead in case Gómez tries to break out. Vladimirovitch, tag along with him. Castro, stick around here.”
“Can I help?” asked Cleonie. Her lips struggled for firmness.
“Go to sick bay,” nodded Banning. “Maybe they can use you.”
He darted into the bridge and checked controls. Everything was still off—good. Gómez couldn’t start the engines without rigging a bypass circuit. However, he had plenty of ancillary machines, generators and pumps and whatnot, at his disposal down there. The captain entered the intercom cabinet and switched on the engine room screen.
Gómez’s pinched face had taken on a stiffened wildness. “For your information, friend,” said Banning, “we just mopped up Andreyev and Gentry. That leaves you alone. Come on out of there, the show’s over.”
“No,” said Gómez. His voice was dull, abnormally calm. It gave Banning a creepy sensation.
“Don’t you believe me? I can haul the bodies here if you want.”
“Oh, yes, I will take your word.” Gómez’s mouth twisted. “Then perhaps you will do me the same honor. It is still you who must surrender to me.”
Banning waited for a long few seconds.
“I am here in the engine room,” said Gómez. “I am alone. I have locked the outer doors: emergency seal, you’ll have to burn your way through, and that takes hours. There will be plenty of time for me to disable the propulsion system.”
Banning was not a timid man, but his palms were suddenly wet, and he fumbled a thick dry tongue before he could shape words:
“You’d die, too.”
“I am quite prepared for that.”
“But you wouldn’t have accomplished anything! You’d just have wrecked the ship and killed several people.”
“I would have kept this affair from being reported to the Union,” said Gómez. “The very fact of our attempt is more of a hint than we can afford to let the Guard have.”
“What are you doing all this for?” howled the captain.
The face in the screen grew altogether unhuman. It was a face Banning knew—millennia of slaughterhouse history knew it—the face of embodied Purpose.
“It is not necessary for you to be told the details,” clipped Gómez. “However, perhaps you will understand that the present government’s spineless toleration of the Kali menace in the East and the moral decay in the West has to be ended if civilization is to survive.”
“I see,” said Banning, as gently as if he spoke in the presence of a ticking bomb. “And since toleration is built into Union law—”
“Exactly. I do not say anything against the Uniters. But times have changed. If Fourre were alive today, he would agree that action is necessary.”
“It’s always convenient to use a dead man for a character witness, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Banning nodded to himself. “Don’t do anything radical yet, Gómez. I’ll have to think about this.”
“I shall give you exactly one hour,” said the desiccated voice. “Thereafter I shall begin work. I am not an engineer myself, but I think I can disable something—I have studied a trifle about nucleonics. You may call me when you are ready to surrender. . . . At the first suspicion of misbehavior, I will, of course, wreck the propulsion system immediately.”
Gómez turned away.
Banning sat for a while, his mind curiously empty. Then he shoved across to the control board, alerted the crew and started the rotation again. You might as well have some weight.
“Keep an eye on the screen,” he said as, he left the main pilot chair. “Call me on the intercom if anything develops. I’ll be in sick bay.”
“Sir?” Castro gaped at him.
“Appropriate spot,” said Banning. “Velocity is equivalent to temperature, isn’t it? If so, then we all have a fever which is quite likely to kill us?”
Devon lay stretched and stripped on the operating table. Wayne had just removed the bullet with surgical pincers. Now he clamped the wound and began stitching. Nielsen was controlling the sterilizers, both uv and sonic, while Cleonie stood by with bowl and sponges. They all looked up, as if from a dream, when Banning entered. The tools of surgery might be developed today to a point where this was an operation simple enough for a spaceman’s meditechnic training; but there was a man on the table who might have died, and only slowly did their minds break away from his heartbeat.
“How is he?” asked the captain.
“Not too bad, sir, considering.” Given this job, urgent and specific, Wayne was competent enough; he spoke steadily. “I daresay he presented his chest on purpose when he attacked, knowing the bones had a good chance of acting as armor. There’s a broken rib and some torn muscle, of course, but nothing that won’t heal.”
“Gentry?”
“Conked out five minutes ago, sir,” said Nielsen. “I stuck him in the icebox. Maybe they’ve got revivification equipment on Ganymede.”
“Wouldn’t make much difference,” said Banning. “The forebrain would be too ‘far gone by the time we arrived—no personality survival to speak of.” He shuddered a little. Clean death was one thing; this was another matter, one which he had never quite gotten used to. “Luke, though,” he went on quickly, “can he stand being brought to consciousness? Right away?”
“No!” Almost, Cleonie lifted her basin to brain him.
“Shut up.” He turned his back on her. “It’d be a poor kindness to let him sleep comfy now and starve to death later, maybe, out beyond Pluto. Well, Mr. Wayne?”
“Hm-m-m. . . . I don’t like it, sir. But if you say so, I guess I can manage it. Local anesthesia for the wound and a shot of mild stimulant; oxygen and neoplasma, just in case— Yes, I don’t imagine a few minutes’ conversation would hurt him permanently.”
“Good. Carry on.” Banning fumbled after his pipe, remembered that he had dropped it somewhere in all the hallabaloo, and swore.
“What did you say?” asked Nielsen.
“Never mind,” said Banning. True, women were supposed to be treated like men these days, but he had old-fashioned ideas. It was useful to know a few earthy languages unfamiliar to anyone else.
Cleonie laid a hand on his arm. “Captain,” she said. Her eyes were shadowed, with weariness and with—compassion? “Captain, is it necessary to wake him? He’s been hurt so much—for our sakes.”
“He may have the only information to save our lives,” answered Banning patiently.
The intercom cleared its throat: “Sir . . . Castro on bridge—he’s unbolting the main mass-tank access port.”
Wayne turned white as he labored. He understood.
Banning nodded. “I thought so. Did you ask him what he was up to? He promised us an hour.”
“Yes, sir. He said we’d get it, too, but . . . but he wanted to be ready, in case—”
“Smart boy. It’ll take him awhile to get to the flush valves; they’re quite well locked away and shielded. Then the pump has to have time. We might have burned our way in to him by then.”
“Maybe we should do it, sir. Now!”
“Maybe. It’d be a race between his wrenches and our torches. I’ll let you know. Stand by.”
Banning turned back to Devon, gnawing his lip. The Engineer was stirring to wakefulness.
As he watched, the captain saw the eyes blink palely open, saw color creep into the face and the mouth tighten behind the transparent oxygen mask.
Cleonie moved toward the table. “Luke—”
Devon smiled at her, a sudden human warmth in this cold room of machines. Gently, Banning shoved her aside. “You’ll get your innings later, girl,” he said. Bending over the Engineer: “Hello, buster. You’re going to be o.k. Can you tell me some things in a hell of a hurry?”
“I can try—” It was the merest flutter of air.
Banning began to talk. Devon lay back, breathing deeply and making some curious gestures with his hands. He’d had Tighe System training, then—total integration—good! He would be able to hang on to his consciousness, even call up new strength from hidden cellular reserves.
“We clobbered all the gang except Gómez, who seems to be the kingpin. He’s holed up in the engine room, threatens to wreck us all unless we surrender to him inside an hour. Does he mean it?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.” Devon nodded faintly.
“Who is this outfit? What do they want?”
“Fanatic group . . . quasi-religious . . . powerful, large membership furnishes plenty of money . . . but the real operations are secret, a few men—”
“I think I know who you mean. The Western Reformists, huh?”
Devon nodded again. The pulse that flickered in his throat seemed to strengthen.
Banning spent a bleak moment of review. In recent years, he had stayed off Earth as much as possible; when there, he had not troubled himself with political details, for he recognized all the signs of a civilization going under. It had seemed more worthwhile to give his attention to the Venusian ranch he had bought, against the day of genocide and the night of ignorance and tyranny to follow. However, he did understand that the antitechnic Oriental cult of Kali had created its own opposite pole in the West. And the prim grim Reformists might well try to forestall their enemies by a coup.
“Sort of like the Nazis versus the Communists, back in Germany in the 1920s,” he muttered.
“The who?” said Nielsen.
“No matter. It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. Let me see, Luke.” Banning took a turn around the room. “In order to overthrow constitutional government and impose their will on Earth, the Reformists would have to kill quite a few hundred millions of people, especially in Asia. That means nuclear bombardment, preferably from space. Am I right?”
“Yes—” said Devon. His voice gained resonance as he went on. “They have a base, somewhere in the asteroid belt. They hope to build it up to a fortress, with a fleet of ships, arsenal, military corps . . . the works. It’s a very long-range thing, of course, but the public aspect of their party is going to need lots of time anyway, to condition enough citizens toward the idea of— Well. At present their base doesn’t amount to much. They can’t just buy ships, the registry would give them away . . . they have to build . . . they need at least one supply ship, secretly owned and operated, before they can start serious work at all.”
“And we’re elected,” said Devon. “Yeah. I can even see why. Not only is this a fast ship with a large capacity, but our present cargo, the terraforming stuff, would be vaulable to them in itself. . . . Uh-huh. Their idea was to take over this clunk, bring her in to their base—and the Thunderbolt becomes another ship which just plain vanished mysteriously.”
Devon nodded.
“I scarcely imagine they’d have kept us alive, under the circumstances,” went on Banning.
“No.”
“How do you know all this?”
“The Order. . . . We stay out of politics . . . officially . . . but we have our Intelligence arm and use it quietly.” So that was why he’d been reluctant to explain Andreyev’s actions! “We knew, in a general way, what the situation was. Of course, we didn’t know this ship, on this particular voyage, was slated for capture.”
“That’s fairly obvious. You recognized Andreyev.”
“Yes. Former Engineer, under another name—expelled for . . . good reasons. Surgical changes made, but the overall gestalt bothered me. All of a sudden, I thought I knew who he was. Like a meddling fool, I tried a key word on him. Yes, he reacted, by pulling a gun on me! Later on—again, like an idiot—I didn’t think Gentry might be his partner, so I told Tietjens what had happened while Gentry was there.” Devon sighed. “Old Rostomily would disown me.”
“You weren’t trained for secret service work, yourself,” said Banning. “All right, Luke. One more question. Gómez wants us to surrender to him. I presume this means we’ll let ourselves be locked away except for one or two who slow down the ship while he holds a gun on ’em. After we’ve decelerated to a point where a boat from the Reformist asteroid can match velocities, he’ll radio and— Hell! What I’m getting at is, would our lives be spared afterward?”
“I doubt it,” said the Engineer.
“Oh my darling—” As he closed his eyes, Cleonie came to his side. Their hands groped together.
Banning swung away. “Thanks, Luke,” he said. “I didn’t know if I had the right to risk lives for the sake of this ship, but now I see there’s no risk at all. We haven’t got a thing to lose. Cleonie, can you take care of our boy here?”
“Yes,” she whispered, enormous-eyed. “If there’s no emergency.”
“There shouldn’t be. They fabricated him out of teflon and rattlesnake leather. o.k., then, you be his nurse. You might also whomp up some coffee and sandwiches. The rest of the crew meet me at the repair equipment lockers, aft section . . . no, you stay put, Castro. We’re going to burn our way in to friend Gómez.”
“But he . . . he’ll dump the reaction mass!” gasped Wayne.
“Maybe we can get at him before he gets at the tanks,” said Banning. “A man might try.”
“No—look, sir. I know how long it takes to operate the main flush system. Even allowing for Gómez being alone and untrained, he can do it before we can get through the after bulkhead. We haven’t a chance that way!”
“What do you recommend, Mr. Wayne?” asked Banning slowly.
“That we give in to him, sir.”
“And be shot down out of hand when his pals board the ship?”
“No, sir. There’ll be seven of us, one of Gómez before that happens. We have a faint hope of being able to jump him—”
“A very faint hope indeed,” said Banning. “He’s no amateur. And if we don’t succeed, not only will we die, but that gang of hellhounds will have gotten the start it wants. Whereas, if we burn through to Gómez but fail to stop him disabling the ship . . . well, it’ll only be us who die, now. Not a hundred million people twenty or thirty years from now.”
Is this the truth? Do you really believe one man can delay the Norns? What is your choice, Captain? By legal definition, you are omnipotent and omniscient while the ship is under way. What shall be done, Oh god of the ship?
Banning groaned. Per Jovem, it was too much to ask of a man!
And then he stiffened.
“What is it, sir?” Nielsen looked alarmed.
“By Jupiter,” said Banning. “Well, by Jupiter!”
“What?”
“Never mind. Come on. We’re going to smoke Gómez out of there!”
The last, stubborn metal glared white, ran molten down the gouge already carved, and froze in gobbets. Bahadur shut off the electric torch, shoved the mask away from his dark turbanned face, and said: “All right, sir.”
Banning stepped carefully over the heavy torch cables. His gang had attacked the bulkhead from a point near the skin of the ship, for the sake of both surprise and weight. “How’s the situation inside?” he asked the air.
The intercom replied from the bridge, where Castro huddled over the telescreen that sowed him Gómez at work. “Pump still going, sir. I guess he really means business.”
“We’ve got this much luck,” said Banning, “that he isn’t an engineer himself. You’d have those tanks flushed out half an hour ago.”
He stood for another instant, gathering strength and will. His mind pawed over the facts again.
The outer plates of the ship would stop a fair-sized meteor, even at hyperbolic relative velocity: it would explode into vapor, leaving a miniature Moon crater. Anything which might happen to break through that would lose energy to the self-sealer between the hulls; at last it would encounter the inner skin, which could stand well over a hundred atmospheres of pressure by itself. It was not a common accident for a modern spaceship to be punctured.
But the after bulkhead was meant to contain stray radiation, or even a minor explosion, if the nuclear energies which drove the ship should get out of hand. It was scarcely weaker than the double hull. The torches had required hours to carve a hole in it. There would have been little or no saving of time by cutting through the great double door at the axis of the ship, which Gómez had locked; nor did Banning want to injure massive pieces of precision machinery. The mere bulkhead would be a lot easier to repair afterward—if there was an afterward.
Darkness yawned before him. He hefted the gun in his hand. “All right, Vladimirovitch, let’s go,” he said. “If we’re not back in ten minutes, remember, let Wayne and Bahadur follow.”
He had overruled Tokugawa’s anguished protests and ordered the first mate to stay behind under all circumstances. The Lunarite alone had the piloting skill to pull off the crazy stunt which was their final hope. He and Nielsen were making a racket at the other end of the bulkhead, a diversion for Gómez’s benefit.
Banning slipped through the hole. It was pitchy beyond, a small outer room where no one had turned on the lights. He wondered if Gómez waited just beyond the door with a bullet for the first belly to come through.
He’d find out pretty quick.
The door, which led into the main control chamber, was a thin piece of metal. Rotation made it lie above Banning’s head. He scampered up the ladder. His hand closed on the catch, he turned it with an enormous caution—flung the door open and jumped through.
The fluoros made a relentless blaze of light. Near the middle of that steel cave, floating before an opened panel, he saw Gómez. So the hell-bound Roundhead hadn’t heard them breaking in!
He did now. He whirled, clumsily, and scrabbled for the gun in his belt. Banning fired. His bullet missed, wailed and gonged around the great chamber. Gómez shot back. Recoil tore him from the stanchion he held, sent him drifting toward the wall.
Banning scrambled in pursuit, over the spidery network of ladders and handholds. His weight dropped with each leap closer to the axis; he fought down the characteristic Coriolis vertigo. Gómez spiraled away from him, struck a control chair, clawed himself to a stop, and crouched in it.
Banning grew aware of the emergency pump. It throbbed and sang in the metal stillness around him, and every surge meant lost mass . . . like the red spurting from the slashed artery. The flush system was rarely used—only if the reaction mass got contaminated, or for some such reason. Gómez had found a new reason, thought Banning grimly. To lose a ship and murder a crew.
“Turn that thing off, Vlad,” he said between his teeth.
“Stay where you are!” screamed Gómez. “I’ll shoot! I will!”
“Get going!” roared the captain.
Vladimirovitch hauled himself toward the cutoff switch. Gómez flipped his pistol to full automatic and began firing.
He didn’t hit anything of value in the few seconds granted him. In a ship rotating in free fall, the pattern of forces operating on a bullet is so complicated that practical ballistics must be learned all over again. But that hose of lead was bound to kill someone, by sheer chance and ricochet, unless Banning clutched himself to a rod, aimed, and fired.
On the second shot, Gómez jerked. The pistol jarred from his hand, he slumped back into the chair and lay still.
Banning hurried toward him. It would be worthwhile taking Gómez alive, to interrogate and— No. As he reached the man, he saw the life draining out of him. A shot through the heart is not invariably fatal, but this time it was.
The pump clashed to silence.
Banning whirled about. “Well?” His shout was raw. “How much did we lose?”
“Quite a bit, sir.” Vladimirovitch squinted at the gauges. His words came out jerkily. “Too much, I’m afraid.”
Banning went to join him, leaving Gómez to die alone.
They met in the dining saloon: seven hale men, an invalid, and a woman. For a moment they could only stare at the death in each other’s eyes.
“Break out the Scotch, Nielsen,” said Banning at last. He took forth his pipe and began loading it. A grin creased his mouth. “If your faces get any longer, people, you’ll be tripping over your own jawbones.”
Cleonie, seated at the head of the couch on which Devon lay, ruffled the Engineer’s hair. Her gaze was blind with sorrow. “Do you expect us to be happy, after all that killing?” she asked.
“We were lucky,” shrugged Banning. “We lost two good men, yes. But all the ungodly are dead.”
“That’s not so good a thing,” said Devon. “I’d like to have them narcoed, find out where their asteroid is and—” He paused. “Wait. Gentry’s still in the freeze, isn’t he? If he was revived at Ganymede, maybe his brain wouldn’t be too deteriorated for a deep-memory probe; at least.”
“Nix,” said Banning. “The stiffs are all to be jettisoned. We’ve got to lighten ship. If your Order’s Intelligence men—or the Guard’s, for that matter—are any good, they’ll be able to trace back people like our late playfellows and rope in their buddies.”
Cleonie shivered. “Please!”
“Sorry.” Banning lit his pipe and took a long drag. “It is kind of morbid, isn’t it? o.k. then, let’s concentrate on the problem of survival. The question is how to use the inadequate amount of reaction mass left in the tanks.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” said the girl.
She looked more puzzled than frightened. Banning liked her all the more for that. Devon was a lucky thus-and-so, if they lived . . . though she deserved better than an Engineer, always skitting through space and pledged to contract no formal marriage till he retired from field service.
“It’s simple enough,” he told her. “We’re on a hyperbolic orbit. That means we’re moving with a speed greater than escape velocity for the Solar System. If we don’t slow down quite a bit, we’ll just keep on going; and no matter how we ration it, there’s only a few weeks’ worth of food aboard and no suspended-animation stuff.”
“Can’t we radio for help?”
“We’re out of our own radio range to anywhere.”
“But won’t they miss us—send high-acceleration ships after us? They can compute our orbit, can’t they?”
“Not that closely. Too much error creeps in when the path gets as monstrous long as ours would be before we could possibly be overhauled. It’d be remarkable if the Guard ship came as close to us as five million kilometers, which is no use at all.” Banning wagged his pipestem at her “It’s up to us alone. We have a velocity of some hundreds of kilometers per second to kill. We don’t have reaction mass enough to do it.”
Nielsen came in with bottles and glasses. He went around doing the honors while Devon said: “Excuse me, Captain, I assume this has occurred to you, but after all, it’s momentum which is the significant quantity, not speed per se. If we jettison everything which isn’t absolutely essential, cargo, furnishings, even the inner walls and floors—”
“Tet and I figured on that,” answered Banning. “You remember just now I said we had to lighten ship. We even assumed stripping off the outer hull and taking a chance on meteors. It’s quite feasible, you know. Spacehips are designed to come apart fairly easily under the right tools, for replacement work, so if we all sweat at it, I think we can finish peeling her down by the time we have to start decelerating.”
Wayne looked at the whiskey bottle. He didn’t drink; it wasn’t considered quite the thing in today’s West. But his face grew tighter and tighter, till suddenly he reached out and grabbed the bottle and tilted it to his mouth.
When he was through choking, he said hoarsely: “All right, sir. Why don’t you tell them? We still can’t lose enough speed.”
“I was coming to that,” said Banning.
Devon’s hand closed on the girl’s. “What are the figures?” he asked in a level tone.
“Well,” said Banning, “we can enter the Jovian System if we like, but then we’ll find ourselves fuelless with a velocity of about fifty kilometers per second relative to the planet.”
The Engineer whistled.
“Must we do that, though?” inquired Bahadur. “I mean, sir, well, if we can decelerate that much, can’t we get into an elliptic orbit about the sun?”
“‘Fraid not. Fifty k.p.s. is still a lot more than solar escape velocity for that region of space.”
“But look, sir. If I remember rightly, Jupiter’s own escape velocity is well over fifty k.p.s. That means the planet itself will be giving us all that speed. If we didn’t come near it, we should have mass enough left to throw ourselves into a cometary—”
“Smart boy,” said Banning. He blew smoke in the air and hoisted his glass. “We computed that one, too. You’re quite right, we can get into a cometary. The very best cometary we can manage will take a few years to bring us back into radio-range of anyone—and of course space is so big we’d never be found on such an unpredictable orbit, unless we hollered for help and were heard.”
“Years,” whispered Cleonie.
The terror which rose in her, then, was not the simple fear of death. It was the sudden understanding of just how big and old this universe which she had so blithely inhabited really was. Banning, who had seen it before, waited sympathetically.
After a minute she straightened herself and met his eyes. “All right, Captain,” she said. “Continue the arithmetic lesson. Why can’t we simply ask the Jovians to pick us up as we approach their system?”
“You knew there was a catch, eh?” murmured Banning. “It’s elementary. The Republic is poor and backward. Their only spacecraft are obsolete intersatellite shuttles, which can’t come anywhere near a fifty k.p.s. velocity.”
“And we’ve no means of losing speed, down to something they can match.” Wayne dropped his face into his hands.
“I didn’t call you here for a weeping contest,” said Banning. “We do have one means. It might or might not work—it’s never been tried—but Tetsuo here is one hell of a good pilot. He’s done some of the cutest braking ellipses you ever saw in your life.”
That made them sit up. But Devon shook his head, wryly. “It won’t work,” he said. “Even after the alleged terraforming, Ganymede hasn’t enough atmosphere to—”
“Jupiter has all kinds of atmosphere,” said Banning.
The silence that fell was thunderous.
“No,” said Wayne at last. He spoke quickly, out of bloodless lips. “It could only work by a fluke. We would lose speed, yes, if friction didn’t burn us up . . . finally, on one of those passes, we’d emerge with a sensible linear velocity. But a broken shell like this ship will be after we lighten her—an atmosphere as thick and turbulent as Jupiter’s—there wouldn’t be enough control. We’d never know precisely what orbit we were going to have on emergence. By the time we’d computed what path it really was and let the Jovians know and their antiquated boats had reached it . . . we’d be back in Jupiter’s air on the next spiral!”
“And the upshot would be to crash,” said Devon. “Hydrogen and helium at one hundred and forty degrees Absolute. Not very breathable.”
“Oh, we’d have spattered on the surface before we had to try breathing that stuff,” said Vladimirovitch sarcastically.
“No, we wouldn’t either,” said Bahadur. “Our inner hull can stand perhaps two hundred atmospheres’ pressure. But Jupiter goes up to the tens of thousands. We would be squashed flat long before we reached the surface.”
Banning lifted his brows. “You know a better ’ole?” he challenged.
“What?” Wayne blinked at him.
“Know anything which gives us a better chance?”
“Yes, I do.” The young face stiffened. “Let’s get into that cometary about the sun. When we don’t report in, there’ll be Guard ships hunting for us. We have a very small chance of being found. But the chance of being picked up by the Jovians, while doing those crazy dives, is infinitesimal!”
“It doesn’t look good either way, does it?” said Cleonie. A sad little smile crossed her lips. “But I’d rather be killed at once, crushed in a single blow, than . . . watch all of us shrivel and die, one by one—or draw lots for who’s to be eaten next. I’d rather go out like a human being.”
“Same here,” nodded Devon.
“Not I!” Wayne stood up. “Captain, I won’t have it. You’ve no right to . . . to take the smaller chance, the greater hazard, deliberately, just because it offers a quicker death. No!”
Banning slapped the table with a cannon-crack noise. “Congratulations on getting your master’s certificate, Mr. Wayne,” he growled. “Now sit down.”
“No, by the Eternal! I demand—”
“Sit down!”
Wayne sat.
“As a matter of fact,” continued Banning mildly, “I agree that the chance of the Jovians rescuing us is negligible. But I think we have a chance to help ourselves.
“I think maybe we can do what nobody has ever tried before—enter Jovian sky and live to brag about it.”
From afar, as they rushed to their destiny, Jupiter had a splendor which no other planet, perhaps not the sun itself, could match. From a cold great star to an amber disk to a swollen shield with storm—the sight caught your heart.
But then you fought it. You got so close that the shield became a cauldron and ate you down.
The figures spoke a bleak word: the escape velocity of Jupiter is about fifty-nine kilometers per second. The Thunderbolt had about fifty-two, relative. If she had simply whizzed by the planet, its gravitation would have slowed her again, and eventually she would have fallen back into it with a speed that would vaporize her. There was no possibility of the creaking old boats of the satellite colonists getting close to her at any point of such an orbit; they would have needed far more advance warning than a short-range radio could give them.
Instead, Tokugawa used the last reaction mass to aim at the outer fringes of atmosphere.
The first pass was almost soundless. Only a thin screaming noise, a sense of heat radiated in human faces, a weak tug of deceleration, told how the ship clove air. Then she was out into vacuum again, curving on a long narrow ellipse.
Banning worked his radio, swearing at the Doppler effect. He got the band of Ganymede at last. Beside him, Tokugawa and Wayne peered into the viewscreen, reading stars and moons, while the computer jabbered out an orbit.
“Hello. Hello. Are you there?”
The voice hissed weakly from x Spaceport: “Heh, ‘Thun’erbolt.’ Central Astro Control, Ganymede. Harris speakin’. Got y’r path?”
“To a rough approximation,” said Banning. “We’d need several more readings to get it exactly, of course. Stand by to record.” He took the tape from the computer and read off the figures.
“We’ve three boats in y’area,” said Harris. “They’ll try t’ find y’. G’luck.”
“Thanks,” said Banning. “We could use some.”
Tokugawa’s small deft fingers completed another calculation. “We’ll strike atmosphere again in about fifty hours, skipper,” he reported. “That gives the demolition gang plenty of time to work.”
Banning twisted his head around. There was no rear wall now to stop his eyes. Except for the central section, with its vital equipment, little enough remained between the bridge and the after bulkhead. Torches had slashed, wrenches had turned, air locks had spewed out jagged temporary moons for days. The ship had become a hollow shell and a web of bracing.
He felt like a murderer.
Across the diameter of the great spheroid, he saw Devon floating free, ordering the crew into spacesuits. As long as they were in null-gee, the Engineer made an excellent foreman, broken rib and all.
His party was going out to cut loose reactor, fire chamber, ion tubes, everything aft. Now that the last mass was expended and nothing remained to drive the ship but the impersonal forces of celestial mechanics, the engines were so much junk whose weight could kill them. Never mind the generators—there was enough energy stored in the capacitor bank to keep the shell lighted and warmed for weeks. If the Jovians didn’t catch them in space, they might need those weeks, too.
Banning sighed. Since men first steered a scraped-out log or a wicker basket to sea, it has been an agony for a captain to lose his ship.
He remembered a submarine once, long ago—it still hurt him to recall, though it hadn’t been his fault. Of course, he’d gotten the idea which might save all their lives now because he knew a trifle about submarines . . . or should the Montgolfiers get the credit, or Archimedes?
Cleonie floated toward him. She had gotten quite deft in free fall during the time before deceleration in which they orbited toward Jupiter, when spin had been canceled to speed the work of jettisoning. “May I bother you?” she asked.
“Of course.” Banning took out his pipe. She cheered him up. “Though the presence of a beautiful girl is not a bother. By definition.”
She smiled, wearily, and brushed a strand of loose hair from her eyes. It made a halo about her worn face. “I feel so useless,” she said.
“Nonsense. Keep the meals coming, and you’re plenty of use. Tietjens and Nielsen were awful belly robbers.”
“I wondered—” A flush crossed her cheeks. “I do so want to understand Luke’s work.”
“Sure.” Banning opened his tobacco pouch and began stuffing the pipe, not an easy thing to do in free fall. “What’s the question ?”
“Only . . . we hit the air going so fast—faster than meteors usually hit Earth, wasn’t it? Why didn’t we burn up?”
“Meteors don’t exactly burn. They volatilize. All we did was skim some very thin air. We didn’t convert enough velocity into heat to worry about. A lot of what we did convert was carried away by the air itself.”
“But still—I’ve never heard of braking ellipses being used when the speed is as high as ours.”
Banning clicked his lighter, held it “above” the bowl, and drew hard. “In actual fact,” he said, “I don’t think it could be done in Earth or Venus atmosphere. But Jupiter has about ten times the gravitational potential, therefore the air thins out with height correspondingly more slowly. In other words, we’ve got a deeper layer of thin air to brake us. It’s all right. We’ll have to make quite a few passes—we’ll be at this for days, if we aren’t rescued—but it can be done.”
He got his pipe started. There was a trick to smoking in free fall. The air-circulating blowers, which kept you from smothering in your own breath, didn’t much help as small an object as a pipe. But he needed this comfort. Badly.
Many hours later, using orbital figures modified by further observation, a shuttle-boat from Ganymede came near enough to locate the Thunderbolt on radar. After maneuvering around so much, it didn’t have reaction mass enough to match velocities. For about a second it passed so close that Devon’s crew, working out on the hull, could see it—as if they were the damned in hell watching one of the elect fly past.
The shuttleboat radioed for a vessel with fuller tanks. One came. It zeroed in—and decelerated like a startled mustang. The Thunderbolt had already fallen deeper into the enormous Jovian gravity field than the boat’s engines could rise.
The drifting ship vanished from sight, into the great face of the planet. High clouds veiled it from telescopes—clouds of free radicals, such as could not have existed for a moment under humanly endurable conditions. Jupiter is more alien than men can really imagine.
Her orbit on reemergence was not so very much different. But the boats which had almost reached her had been forced to move elsewhere; they could not simply hang there, in that intense a field. So the Thunderbolt made another long, lonesome pass. By the time it was over, Ganymede was in the unfavorable position, and Callisto had never been in a good one. Therefore the ship entered Jupiter’s atmosphere for a third time, unattended.
On the next emergence into vacuum, her orbit had shortened and skewed considerably. The rate at which air drag operated was increasing; each plunge went deeper beneath the poison clouds, each swung through clear space took less time. However, there was hope. The Ganymedeans were finally organizing themselves. They computed an excellent estimate of what the fourth free orbit would be and planted well-fueled boats strategically close at the right times.
Only—the Thunderbolt did not come anywhere near the predicted path.
It was pure bad luck. Devon’s crew, working whenever the ship was in a vacuum, had almost cut away the after section. This last plunge into stiffening air resistance finished the job. Forces of drag and reaction, a shape suddenly altered, whipped the Thunderbolt wildly through the stratosphere. She broke free at last, on a drastically different orbit.
But then, it had been unusual good luck which brought the Jovians so close to her in the first place. Probabilities were merely reasserting themselves.
The radio said in a weak, fading voice: “Missed y’ ’gain. Do’ know ‘f we c’n come near, nex’ time. Y’r period’s gettin’ very short.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t risk it.” Banning sighed. He had hoped for more, but if the gods had decided his ship was to plunge irretrievably into Jupiter, he had to accept the fact. “We’ll be all right, I reckon.”
Outside, the air roared hollowly. Pressures incomparably greater than those in Earth’s deepest oceans waited below.
On his final pass into any approximation of clear space—the stars were already hazed—Banning radioed: “This will be the last message, except for a ten-minute signal on the same band when we come to rest. Assuming we’re alive! We’ve got to save capacitors. It’ll be some time before help arrives. When it does, call me. I’ll respond if we’ve survived, and thereafter emit a steady tone by which we can be located. Is that clear?”
“Clear. I read y’. Luck, spaceman . . . over an’ out.”
Watching the mists thicken in the view-screen, Banning added figures in his head for the hundredth time.
His schedule called for him to report at Phobos in fifteen days. When he didn’t, the Guard would send a high-acceleration ship to find out what had gone wrong. Allow a few days for that. Another week for it to return to Mars with a report of the facts. Mars would call Luna on the radio beam—that, at least, would be quick—and the Guard, or possibly the Engineers, would go to work at once.
The Engineers had ships meant to enter atmosphere: powerful, but slow. Such a vessel could be carried piggyback by a fast ion-drive craft of the Guard. Modifiecations could be made en route. But the trip would still require a couple of weeks, pessimistically reckoned.
Say, then, six weeks maximum until help arrived. Certainly no less than four, no matter what speeds could be developed by these latest models.
Well, the Thunderbolt had supplies and energy for more than six weeks. That long a time under two-plus gees was not going to be fun, though gravanol injections would prevent physiological damage. And the winds were going to buffet them around. That should be endurable, though; they’d be above the region of vertical currents, in what you might call the Jovian stratosphere.
A red fog passed before the screen.
Luke Devon, strapped into a chair like everyone else, called across the empty, ship: “If I’d only known this was going to happen—what a chance for research! I do have a few instruments, but it’ll be crude as hell.”
“Personally,” said Banning, “I saved out a deck of cards and some poker chips. But I hardly think you’ll have much time for research—in Jovian atmospherics, anyway.”
He could imagine Cleonie blushing. He was sorry to embarrass her, he really did like that girl, but the ragged laugh he got from the others was worth it. While men could laugh, especially at jokes as bad as his, they could endure.
Down and down the ship went. Once, caught in a savage gust, she turned over. If everything hadn’t been fastened down, there could have been an awful mess. The distribution of mass was such that the hulk would always right itself, but . . . yes, reflected Banning, they’d all have to wear some kind of harness attached to the interior braces. It could be improvised.
The wind that boomed beyond the hull faded its organ note, just a trifle.
“We’re slowing down,” said Tokugawa. And later, looking up from the radaltimeter: “We’ve stopped.”
“End of the line.” Banning stretched. He felt bone-crushingly tired. “Nothing much we can do now. Let’s all strap into our bunks and sleep for a week.”
His Jovian weight dragged at him. But they were all alive. And the ship might be hollowed out, but she still held food and drink, tools and materials, games and, books—what was needed to keep them sane as well as breathing in the time they must wait.
His calculations were verified. A hollow steelloy shell, three hundred odd meters in diameter, could carry more than a hundred thousand tons, besides its own mass, and still have a net specific gravity of less than 0.03. Now the Jovian air has an average molecular weight of about 3.3, so after due allowance for temperature and a few other items, the result was derived that at such a thickness its pressure is an endurable one hundred atmospheres.
Like an old drop in a densitometer, like a free balloon over eighteenth-century France, like a small defiant bubble in the sky, the Thunderbolt floated.
Psychodynamics survived; the Psychotechnic Institute perished. “Hubris, nemesis, fate,” wrote one observer. “The tragic flaw in the character of Institute personnel was only that they were human.” Civilization outgrew the constrictive matrix that had shaped it, yet it emerged better equipped than ever to cope with the beckoning universe beyond.
As our species moved out among the stars, would we finally learn to master ourselves? Or would all our future victories be cold?
— from Cold Victory
(I’m skipping The Snows of Ganymede, “Gypsy,” “Star Ship,” “The Acolytes,” and “The Green Thumb” since I don’t have those stories yet.)