Fiction Complete, page 74
He saw Kurian look in from the forward exit. After a moment’s hesitation, the pilot came toward him. Lanston stepped over to the door and slid it open far enough to admit the officer’s thick shoulders.
“What’s doing?” he asked.
Kurian examined him searchingly.
“I’m getting up a little group to check some of the emergency jets. Want to go along?”
“Why me?” asked Lanston. “Are volunteers that hard to get?”
“As a matter of fact . . . yes,” growled Kurian. “I’ll say frankly that I don’t especially like the way you got yourself pumped aboard here, and I still owe you for this eye I’m getting, but you at least don’t seem to scare easy.”
“Well . . . since you put it that way,” said Lanston.
One glance over his shoulder assured him that the situation was well under control. He reached a long arm under the counter and stepped back to the wing where Kurian stood.
“Here,” he said, holding up a bottle of Centaurian whiskey that he had marked “down for his own. “A swallow of this will assist the takeoff.”
He expected Kurian to head for the nearby entrance to the second section, but the pilot took him to an upper deck by way of Section Four, which was occupied mainly by fuel and supply compartments.
“We have the airtight doors closed forward of Section Three,” Kurian told him.
“Think it’s dangerous up there?”
Kurian looked over his shoulder to meet Lanston’s eye.
“Don’t spread this around,” he said, “but half of the forward section has broken off. Air is leaking out of Two like money through a drunk’s finders. I’m. afraid even the small rockets may be affected.”
Lanston digested this in silence, wishing he had stayed on Corsha.
Or at least on the Saphire, he told himself.
“Ah, here they are!” exclaimed a voice as Kurian slid aside a door and led Lanston into the anteroom to one of the ship’s airlocks.
Captain Stower looked again, and added, “Is that the only one you could find, Kurian?”
“It seemed like a good idea, sir,” answered the pilot. “Here’s a spacesuit for you, Lanston.”
Lanston discarded Boley’s shoes and pulled on a pair of heavy socks someone offered him. He recognized among, the group the assistant pilot, Monteforte, and the grizzled spaceman who had rescued him from the Saphire. There were four others preparing to go outside, and several assisting them. No one looked particularly happy.
The spacesuited men began to pass through the airlock before Lanston was ready. Monteforte stayed to help, and they were the last ones outside.
The cold beauty of the stars merely accentuated the black emptiness. Despite the heating coils in his suit, Lanston shivered. The grav field was weak out here.
He trailed Monteforte toward the nose, where a group of the others were gathered with lights and cables. Someone thrust the end on one of these into Lanston’s gauntlet and pointed at a ring sunk in the hull. He shrugged to himself and looped the cable through, securing it with a couple of hitches.
What do they think they’re going to do—fly a jet on a half-inch cable like a kite? he wondered.
By the time he had finished, an emergency rocket was being maneuvered out of the space left by a retracting section of the hull. A spacesuited figure that moved like Kurian crawled into the port that had been left open. The end of the cable was passed to him, and then several of the men lifted the small vessel clear of the hull. Monteforte pressed his helmet to Lanston’s.
“I’d like a picture of that,” his voice penetrated the metal. “Even if it isn’t as hard as it looks.”
The emergency rocket slowly drifted a few yards away. Kurian disappeared inside for a few minutes. When he came out to crouch in the exit with one hand on the cable, he seemed to be watching the timer on the chest of his suit.
“What’s he going to do?” Lanston asked, leaning over to touch helmets with Monteforte.
“See if it stands up under the rockets.”
Jets suddenly flared at nose and tail of the small ship. They were obviously minimum strength and matched to neutralize each other.
“How does she look?” Kurian’s voice sounded over the suit radios.
“Not bad,” answered somebody. “Satisfied? Or do you want to try a stronger—Look out!”
The nose of the jet puffed out in a flare of silent brightness. Immediately, the remaining part began to pick up speed forward.
Warned by the shouts, Kurian leaped clear of the exit port where he had waited. He shot over their heads, gripping the end of the cable.
Lanston, watching the pilot, did not see the subsequent explosion that shattered the emergency jet before it had traveled a hundred yards.
What did catch his eye was the anchored end of Kurian’s cable cutting through the ring in the hull like a wire sheer through cheese.
“Hey!” he yelled as he nudged Monteforte. “Get hold of something!”
He snatched up one of the cables lying lightly on the hull and shoved the end at the assistant pilot. Then he leaped after Kurian with the other end clenched in his gauntlet.
The pilot had-been partially halted by the waning resistance of the crumbling metal, but he was drifting away into the void. Lanston shot up alongside him, hoping that something would anchor Monteforte. He grabbed at Kurian’s leg.
Something felt wrong with the contact. The next instant a whining noise filled his ears and the tiny motors of his air circulator began to labor.
“Chee-rist!” he muttered. “I’ve sprung a goddam’ leak!”
Half paralyzed with the horror of it, he had forgotten leaving his radio on. Kurian thrashed about and grabbed the cable from him.
“Haul us in fast!” the pilot roared. “He’s got a leak.”
Lanston felt the acceleration as they were yanked down to the hull. He tried to clamp his gauntlet over the spot on his forearm from which air was escaping, but he could not see the tiny hole. He feared to squeeze, lest the metal of the arm section crumble.
Then they were down, and spacesuited figures rushed him from one handhold to another and into the airlock. One tumbled in with him and tore open the inner door as soon as the closing of the outer permitted the minimum of air pressure to build up. Air puffed into the chamber, and Lanston staggered out into the anteroom where willing hands helped pry him out of the suit.
“What happened out there?” demanded Captain Stower.
Monteforte, who had come through behind the ex-trader from Corsha and opened his helmet, told him while Lanston caught his breath. He saw the crewmen looking at him and wondered if his face were white.
I’m not in the market for another scare like that, he thought.
He weighed the chances of getting anywhere in the emergency rockets, and decided that they were decidedly dim.
“Captain Stower,” he said. “May I make a suggestion.”
“Go ahead,” said Stower heavily. “I’m running out of them myself.”
“Much as I hate to face the fact,” Lanston declared slowly, “I’m afraid this bottle of yours is coming apart at the seams.”
“Also between the seams,” Stower sighed. “Get to it!”
“And trusting the emergency rockets is taking a big chance. But if you could spin the Nova enough to brake with the main drive—”
“Yes?”
“Maybe,” said Lanston, “we could pick up my ship.”
“Oh, nuts!” growled the other with a tone of disgusted finality.
Crewmen nearby who had paused to listen muttered profane disappointment. Lanston held “Stower back by the sleeve.
“Wait a minute!” he insisted. “It’s worth thinking about. You didn’t have interstellar speed yet. We’re not even twenty million miles out from Corsha. The Saphire is good for that far—with a little luck!”
“I thought she was about to blow up when we took you off!”
“Oh . . . that,” mumbled Lanston. “I . . . er . . . might have exaggerated just a little.”
He saw Stower begin to scowl as he figured it out.
“At least, she isn’t crumbling apart!” he added.
“Well . . .” Stower hesitated. “I’ll see what Kurian says about the emergency jets. You have one point—there isn’t anywhere else we can get to in time.”
Lanston found a bench under a rack of spacesuits and kicked some odds and ends off it so he could stretch out. When Monteforte re-entered the airlock, he thought for a few seconds of offering to go along. Then he changed his mind.
I took MY chance for this watch, he thought. Let some of these other heroes take the next.
Twenty minutes later, another man was brought in with a faulty suit. The waiting crewman swarmed over him, peeling off the spacesuit.
“Pass the word for Doc Bergman!” ordered Stower. “And hand me one of those slings for a tourniquet!”
Lanston took one look at the foot between the bodies of two crewmen. It was grotesquely puffed and red with blood from ruptured arteries. Freezing had occurred too late.
He sat up on the bench, but there was nothing for him to do. The injured man was presently carried away, and Stower turned to one of the pair that had brought him inside.
“What’s the story out there?” he demanded.
“Mr. Kurian decided the rockets based in Two and Three aren’t much good. The ones aft, around the rocket room, don’t seem so bad yet.”
Captain Stower glanced thoughtfully at Lanston.
Another half hour passed, and the men outside began to come in by twos and threes. Kurian was last. As he was being helped out of his suit, he confirmed the advance report.
“There are four I’d say were safe, and another pair good in a tight choice,” he said wearily.
Stower beckoned Lanston over.
“Tell him your bright scheme!” he said.
Lanston explained. To his surprise, Kurian raised no objection. Lanston realized that the pilot was worried. He decided that when Kurian was scared, it was time for everyone else to start running.
“I set my course to the same curve you used,” he said to clinch the argument.
Stower darted him a sharp look, and Lanston had to explain that part of his escapade. Kurian, and his superior eyed each other.
“It might be done,” said the pilot.
“We’re doing it!” decided Captain Stower. “It’s the only chance. You get a few minutes’ rest while I talk with McLeod in the rocket room!”
He bustled out of the compartment. Kurian glanced at the crewmen straightening up and turned to Lanston.
“Think there’s any chance of sneaking a bottle or two from the bar?”
“If there’s one left, I’ll sure try,” Lanston replied. “Shall I bring some knockout drops, or do you really think we’ll make it?”
“We have a chance,” said Kurian soberly. “It’s lucky that it seems to be working from the nose aft. I don’t know why . . . the coils extend all the way through the ship. Maybe the field draws more power at a distance from the generators aft, so the effects were noticeable in the control room first.”
Lanston left him slumped on the bench and wound his way back through the next section to the lounge.
He found the latter compartment somewhat cleared by the retirement of those who had become excessively cheered. Julie and Wilson Boley were not to be seen. Lanston frowned.
Of his eager assistants, only the white-mustached gentleman still _stood leaning cheerfully on the bar. He was now slightly rumpled, but greeted Lanston with a wicked wink.
“Come slumming, boy?”
“In among my betters, Pop. Is there anything left?”
He wished he had gone for his jacket while there was time. Or his shoes, for that matter. He examined the pair of untouched bottles held out for his inspection.
“Got anything to wrap them in, Pop?”
The other glanced around vaguely.
“Wouldn’t want to see the last survivors hi-jacked, boy,” he said. “How about this fellow’s jacket?”
Lanston craned his neck to see the floor behind the bar. Two inert bodies, one of them clad in a borrowed white jacket, snored gently beneath empty shelves.
“What size shoes would you say he wears?”
On his return trip, he hurried because announcements of an impending change of course were beginning to flow over the public address system. One of the testing gang intercepted him in an upper corridor before he reached the airlock anteroom.
“Mr. Kurian said to tell you we all moved in here.”
Lanston followed the man into what had evidently been a storage compartment. When he unwrapped the white coat from his burden, his welcome was assured.
“We came back here because the Old Man sent word he’s going to clear Section Three,” explained Kurian. “I don’t know where he’s going to put everybody. I s’pose I’ll have to go help in a minute.”
Captain Stower, however, managed without calling upon his chief pilot. In the uninsulated compartment, they clearly heard the rumble of a steering rocket. For Several minutes, Lanston was confused as to “up” and “down” despite the continued functioning of artificial gravity.
Finally, Kurian said, “They’ve got her around. I’d better go. Lanston, have you got your identification light data for the Saphire?”
“In my jacket,” said the trader glumly. “I left that in the Galactic Suite!”
“Never mind. I’ll have one of the boys climb in a suit and fetch it. You’d better see if you can catch forty winks while we brake and calculate the probable time of interception. We’ll have our work cut out for us, sighting your ship with only the instruments of “the emergency rockets.”
Lanston accepted a place atop a heap of empty plastic bags after Kurian left. For a while, he listened to Monteforte discussing the situation with the crewmen; but the assistant pilot and a couple of the others who were rocketmen were presently summoned away.
Then the deceleration began, causing a general shifting about of the odds and ends the men were using for seats.
“The hell with this,” grunted one of them finally. “I’m gonna look for a better place. Wish I was a rocketman and had a bunk back here instead of in the part that’s fading away.”
In a few minutes, however, he returned to report disgustedly that passengers were clogging the corridors and other storage compartments as Captain Stower enforced his safety measures against the chance of a leak in Section Three. Lanston rolled over and tried to go to sleep.
He wondered briefly if he stood any chance of finding Julie Knapp in the confusion. He decided regretfully that Wilson Boley was doubtless looking out for her. The rumble of the main rockets, now pointed in the direction of flight, continued.
He remembered later waking up when a dozen or so of the passengers were added to the company around him. Then, still later, a hand shook his shoulder roughly.
“Somebody to see ya, Cap,” announced one of the spacemen.
Lanston sat up, rubbing a hand over the sprouting stubble on his chin and shaking his head. The compartment was snugly filled with people who seemed to be doing little but staring at their hands. Julie Knapp stood in the doorway, beckoning.
Lanston rose and stepped cautiously over sundry sleepers. He followed Julie outside. She led him a few yards to a nearly empty side corridor. Lanston thought it must be a runway for inspecting the walls of the fuel tanks.
“Hungry?” asked the girl, holding up a napkin-wrapped package.
“Well . . . now that you mention it—”
“I got Higgins to give me a couple of sandwiches when he was passing out what he called supper. Billyboy . . .?”
“Yunh?” Lanston grunted encouragingly around a mouthful.
“They say you really are a captain with a spaceship, and that we might transfer to her. Is that right?”
“Mostly,” he admitted. “Depends on whether Kurian and the others can spot her in space. We were traveling on the same curve, but . . . there’s a lot of room out there.”
Julie sniffed and dabbed at her eyes with a forefinger.
“I knew you’d save us, ever since you came and got me in my stateroom when the gravity was off! I guess you thought. I was pretty awful.”
“Now, why would I think that?” demanded Lanston.
“Well, I laughed at you when . . . when—”
“Would have laughed myself. It was funny . . . I suppose.”
“And then Willy went and left me because he said he wanted to be in the corridor leading to the escape rockets, and I didn’t know what to do except try to find you.”
Lanston frowned.
“By the way,” he asked as casually as he could manage, “who is Boley? An uncle, or something like that?”
Julie looked at him wide-eyed.
“Oh, no! I never met him till we both got aboard on Klajarrok—that was two planets before Corsha. But he kept following me around . . . and . . . and I guess I just got used to him.”
Lanston grinned to himself. That did not strike him as being much of a habit to break.
Just as he dropped a hand gently upon her shoulder in preparation for ending the lingering pause in the most satisfactory way, he heard his name being called in the outer passage. Julie slipped her arms about his waist.
“Bill-y! I’ll bet they’ve found your ship!”
“Did they have to—! I mean . . . I sure hope so. I have to go see, I’m afraid.”
Julie stood on her toes and kissed him on the mouth. Lanston decided that Kurian could shoot over in a rocket to examine the Saphire, but Julie drew away at last.
“They’ll be looking for you,” she murmured. “But you won’t forget me, will you?”
“Don’t worry about that!” said Lanston, trying to calm his racing pulse. “When we transfer, I’ll see that you and I go together.”
He forced himself to leave her there and elbowed his way along the outer corridor until he caught up with the steward who was paging him. It was Higgins.
“They want to confer with you in the main rocket room, Captain Lanston,” said Higgins, his blue eyes popping with glad cordiality.
Owning a spaceship really gives a man swank, thought the trader smugly. I must try never to be without one.
