Collected Short Fiction, page 164
Skal Doon! The space pirate! The “terror of the nebula” !
“Calling the eagles, eh?” he demanded of the operator. His voice was thin and shrill. Vance had a vague feeling that he had heard it before, though he knew he had never seen Skal Doon. “Setting the service on Skal Doon, eh?”
His hand tightened on the ionic needle, and it spat blue sparks. The operator threw up his arms and spun around, screaming. The ray had burned away his face, but sickening minutes passed before he collapsed and was dead.
Skal Doon watched him until he was a shuddering heap on the floor. Then he looked into the screen, at Vance. And Vance never forgot his amazing eyes. Large, they were, limpidly brown, soft and gentle as a woman’s.
“So our friend did call you, eh?” his thin voice shrilled. And he kicked the trembling thing at his feet. “And maybe you have seen enough so you can guess what happens to eagles that swoop at Skal Doon!”
Vance’s sickness at the horror he had seen must have been evident enough. The mild brown eyes smiled at him; the high voice made a ribald jest at his condition. Then the ionic needle came up again, spitting blue fire, and the screen went blank.
Only then did Vance recognize that shrill voice. It was the voice of the man with the bandaged head and the invalid’s chair, with whom he had talked on the Bellatrix. Of the man who had talked, ironically, of Skal Doon.
The Bellatrix, of course, was not a fighting ship. Her only weapon was a long rocket-torpedo tube that had been mounted, ironically enough, for protection against the very buccaneer who had seized the vessel.
Though the station’s fighting equipment was obsolete, consisting only of four rocket-torpedo tubes and the Sealby Arc—which hurled a blasting shaft of electricity from the generators—we might easily enough have destroyed the liner. But destruction was not our aim; we had to consider the hundreds of passengers aboard.
“We’ll have to run them down, capture the ship,” Kempton told Hume, on the bridge. “And that torpedo-tube will make them hard to take.”
“Doon knows how to play his cards,” Hume agreed.
Even with the station’s powerful electron-blast motors, installed for her ceaseless battle with the gravitation of the Dead Star, we did not come up quickly with the fleeing liner. It was ten hours before the battle began. After the long tension of suspense, it was a swift and confusing thing.
Gideon Clew came running up hopefully to Kempton, soon after the Bellatrix was sighted—a silvery speck, fleeing between the white curtains of the Great Nebula, the violet, fluorescent trail of her electronic motors streaming out behind her.
“Captain, thir! In the battle—what do you want me to do?”
His round blue eyes were bright with eager determination. But Kempton turned on him impatiently.
“Just keep to your cabin, Clew. The crew is complete without you.”
“But, thir,” he lisped protestingly. “Tonia! I must help save her! She——”
“Go below, Clew.”
Red, wrinkled face suddenly downcast, sober eyes glittering, the old man stumbled out of the room.
As the station came up with him, Doon began to fire. The first rocket we were able to avoid, by an abrupt change of course. The second and the third were detonated at a distance by the searing flame of the Sealby Arc.
But the fourth slipped past the searching finger of the arc, a hurtling mote, a miniature ship, deathladen. It struck amidships. The station lurched sickeningly to its explosion. Fragments of the beryllo-steel hull were driven inward with terrific force. And an instant later our precious air was screaming out through the sudden, ragged opening, chilled by expansion until snow glittered in it.
Colin, the chief engineer, was killed outright by a splinter of the hull. Hale, the second, darted at once with his two helpers to repair the hole, snatching down the metal patches and the thermite welding units that always hung ready on the wall.
The task was not easy. One of the helpers was carried bodily through the opening by the outrushing air to hideous death. Then patches were flung over the ragged orifice, and the major leak soon stopped. But the shock had strained all the seams of the old hull. Though Hale and the remaining assistant found and mended many breaks, the vital air continued to hiss out alarmingly.
Thus, for a time, the generators were deserted by their regular crew, and just at the moment when power was most necessary. The station was swiftly overhauling the Bellatrix. On the bridge, Kempton was screaming a fervid appeal into the speaking tube.
“For life’s sake, Colin, give me power! For the Sealby Arc! Before they can reload that tube!”
But the engineer was dead, and the surviving members of his staff were completely engaged in a desperate battle to preserve the station’s essential atmosphere.
Yet the generators came again to sudden animation, and the blue arm of the electric arc reached out once more. It touched the rocket-torpedo tube in its armored housing above the hull of the Bellatrix. And the tube became fused and crumpled metal.
Skal Doon, though thus robbed of his only offensive weapon, was still not defeated. He displayed again that resource which so often had saved him, an original daring worthy of a greater man. The liner deliberately changed her course, swung about in a long curve, and plunged downward toward the Dead Star.
“Diving for the star!” cried Hume in dismay. “Going to smash, rather than surrender!”
With silent attention, Kempton was studying the motion of the argent ellipsoid through his instruments. He laid them aside at last, and turned suddenly to the mate.
“No. Skal is cleverer than that He is planning to fall around the Dead Star, and back away from it.”
“Around it? How——”
“The Bellatrix is on a parabolic orbit, like a comet’s. It will flash down to the star, curve close around it, and fly off again. Or would—if we weren’t here to stop it.”
“You’re going to follow?”
“Of course. We’ll run them down, fasten the station alongside with the magnetic anchors. The Bellatrix has no weapon. If Skal won’t surrender, we’ll storm a valve, or cut through the hull.”
He looked at the barometers, and his face fell with alarm.
“That last shot finished us, anyhow. We’re gone unless we can get aboard the Bellatrix. The pressure is down two pounds already. Our air won’t last three hours, at this rate.”
The silvery hull of the liner was plunging toward the Dead Star with motors full on. Kempton shouted again and again into the speaking tube for more power. No voice answered, but the generators always responded.
The Bellatrix was now but a few miles ahead. Abruptly she began a confusing series of maneuvers to evade the station, twisting, swerving. But, lighter and more powerful, the station kept close behind her.
The liner turned back at last, plunging directly at the other ship with manifest intent to ram it, to the destruction of both vessels. Kempton shouted a wild command, the generators replied instantly, and the station slipped out of the way.
Another order, and a heavy magnetic anchor leaped from its catapult toward the passing ship, dragging its cable. It struck the liner’s hull, clung fast.
Like a silver fish, the Bellatrix plunged and darted for a time upon the line. But the smaller station held her adroitly, giving her opportunity neither to ram nor to break the cable. And steadily the ships were drawn together as the cable was wound upon its drum.
The purple, fluorescent blast from the liner’s motors was at last shut off. The two ships drifted side by side, at the cable’s ends—hurtling down toward the black, red-flecked disk of the Dead Star.
The station’s air, leaking steadily through opened seams, was swiftly growing unbreathable. Men panted at ordinary tasks; a deadly chill stole through the ship.
Kempton called us all to the upper deck, ordered us to don space suits. He served out ionic needles and other weapons, ordered torches got ready for cutting through the liner’s hull, if that proved necessary.
“Colin,” he called into the speaking tube, “bring your men on deck. We’re going to abandon ship.”
“This ith not Colin,” lisped a voice from the tube.
“Who? Clew? What the——”
“Colin ith dead, thir. I have been running the generators. I was a generator-man forty yearth, you know.”
Kempton’s voice was queer. “All right, Clew. Good work. Come on and get into your space suit.”
Five minutes later, the eleven of us were dragging ourselves across between the ships in clumsy, inflated suits, laden with weapons. As weird a journey as can be imagined, it was. Eleven swollen giants, climbing by their hands along a cable between two vessels in the void. For background, the flaming streamers of the Great Nebula, and the malign black disk of the Dead Star.
Then happened an unexpected thing—a dreadful thing.
The main valve of the Bellatrix flung suddenly wide, and a score of human figures spewed out. We thought at first that the pirates were foolishly leaving the ship to beat off our attack. But these men had no space suits.
In the blast of air they were thrown clear of the ship, to become, in the vacuum of space, queer, swollen monsters. But, horribly, they did not immediately die. Sprawling in the airless void, they tore at their throats, faces contorted with agony unutterable.
An atrocious murder of helpless passengers, most of us thought. We dragged ourselves hastily on, hot with resentment, to seize the valve before it could be closed, to fight our way from it into the ship and avenge this thing.
Strangely—ominously—our entrance was not opposed.
When we opened the inner seal, Skal Doon, alone and apparently unarmed, met us on the deck inside. A curious grim smile was upon his noseless face, and his mild, limpidly brown eyes were mocking.
“Skal Doon,” Kempton barked at him, “you’ll answer for the ruthless murder of those innocent passengers!”
“But, my dear sir,” the buccaneer protested, in his queerly thin voice, “those were my own men! Surely you cannot object!”
“Eh? The passengers——”
“—have not been injured, I assure you. They are safely confined to their quarters. I put my men through the valve as an act of mercy.”
“You might explain.” Kempton menaced him with an ionic needle.
Doon smiled again, twistedly, and shrilled:
“You seem to have understood my plan, captain, to fall in a parabola about the Dead Star.”
“Yes. A simple trick.”
“When I saw you follow, captain, I realized that you understood. And with the ship on your cable, I realized that I had lost the game. I was forced to select another means of escape. Accordingly, some distance back, I changed the course of the Bellatrix.”
“What?” Kempton demanded. “What did you do?”
“You’ll find out, I fancy. And to prevent your undoing my work, I have also wrecked the motors, and short-circuited the generators in such a manner as to burn them out.”
“But—but your escape——”
“You have already witnessed the escape of my men. I am now following them. But my deeds, you will find, are to live after me.”
Doon’s jaws contracted suddenly, and something crushed between his teeth. Still smiling, he spat blood and fragments of glass.
“Farewell, captain. And a safe voyage—to the Dead Star!”
He saluted ironically, and fell heavily upon his face.
IN A FEW mad minutes we verified all he had told us. The passengers were safely locked below. The machinery was wrecked beyond the possibility of repair. Hume and Kempton went to the liner’s bridge.
The Bellatrix, they found, was plunging toward the Dead Star, upon a path that would end in flaming catastrophe. Doon, realizing his defeat, had turned the liner from the parabolic orbit toward that titanic black sun. Truly, his deeds lived after him.
One glance at the graviscope, or gravitational field detector, told Hume that doom was inevitable. Already the needle was pulled to the end of its scale. Even with the full power of her now useless motors, the ship could not have fought free of that relentless drag.
Tonia Andros, unharmed, came running across the deck when the imprisoned passengers were released. She found Gideon Clew and threw her arms around him. The old man bent and caressed her hair and looked into her dark, wistfully happy eyes.
Then Hume came back from the bridge, with the dread news that we were falling toward the Dead Star, helpless, doomed.
Gideon lifted the little girl in his arms and held her tight for a little time, and then set her down.
“Good-by, Tonia,” he whispered. “There is something I forgot. I must go back on the station a little while. Captain Manners will take care of you. Run to him, now.”
He pushed the grave-eyed, bewildered child away, and hurried toward the valve. Hume followed him, asked:
“You aren’t going back on board, Clew? It’s death. No air!”
The old man paused, and his sober blue eyes looked back at the puzzled, solemn child.
“Yeth,” he lisped. “I must go. For her!”
He got back into his space suit, and Hume let him out.
The station’s atmosphere was very thin when Gideon Clew returned—and cold. It glittered in the pale yellow tube-light with a frigid, frosty glint. He could hear the sibilant whisper of it as it hissed out into the frozen void.
He left his space suit in the air lock. Its tube of compressed air would have lasted perhaps an hour longer, but his hands, in its clumsy gloves, could not do the delicate work he had set for them.
Less than an hour, without it, was left him. Already he was breathing hard, as he made his way into the forecastle, gasping painfully from the slight exertion of walking. And there was much to be done—fifty years’ labor to be brought to completion.
Synthetic air was still hissing noisily from the cylinders, perhaps as fast as it was leaking from the hull. But the cylinders, in a few more minutes, would be empty. And the cold due to swift expansion of escaping air filled all the ship; the chill of it seared Gideon’s gasping lungs.
For a little time he stood, panting, shivering, among the complex apparatus in his own tiny cabin, his laboring heart thumping against his throat. He felt tears come into his eyes at sight of these familiar instruments. Offspring of laborious years, they seemed living, intimate. He did not matter. But the Dead Star should not have his invention. Nor Tonia!
With trembling hands, he began the task. He first removed the tall vacuum tube from its mountings, and broke its air seal. When the room’s frigid air had hissed thinly into it, he unscrewed the base, to examine the damage done when the tube had burned out.
The fine wires of the secondary electrode were fused in silvery beads against the cathode grid. He turned the delicate parts in his quivering, gnarled old hands, and studied them, trying to puzzle out the original defect that had caused the disaster. He searched patiently.
Even as he stood still, he had to gasp for breath. His head throbbed. The utter, unthinkable cold of space crept inexorably into the room; frost danced in the air. Gideon Clew shivered and absently drew his thin jacket closer about his erect old shoulders. One old man, he was pitted against the searching cold and the vacuum of elemental space—against the relentless gravitation of the Dead Star. But he took no time for despair.
At length he saw the defect. The filament should have been longer, the grid set back a little, and turned so. A simple change.
He found a coil of tiny wire and delicate tools, and began to make the repair. That was not difficult. The hard part would be to evacuate the tube again. It was useless with air inside, and he had no pump, or time to use it.
The new parts fitted, he screwed the base back into the tube and then attacked the problem of exhausting it. He knew a way, difficult, perilous—but quick.
As rapidly as he could, with numb, aching hands, he sealed a piece of metal tubing into the tube. Then he found his rotary drill, fitted it with his longest point, and attacked the cabin’s outside wall.
That wall was the beryllo-steel hull of the station. Beyond its four obdurate inches was the vacuum he needed. Trembling, he leaned on the handle of the tool. Cold was piercing into him. His head ached; his ears drummed. Blood began to drip from his nose, drop by crimson drop, to freeze on the floor.
He reeled dizzily, but clung to his task. The drill whirred in his hands, quivered, bit slowly into tough metal. Its motor made a little heat, grateful to his stiffened fingers; he tried to hold them closer against it.
At last the point slipped through. He drew it back, and the air whistled shrilly through the hole, out into the void of space. Just as he had planned. He fitted the end of the metal tubing into it, crudely cemented it. Now the vacuum of space would draw the air from the repaired electron tube.
He closed the switches, and started to the generator room.
The hissing in the corridors had ceased. The air-cylinders were empty. Again the pressure in the ship was dropping, and swiftly.
Gideon’s old heart labored so that he held a numb hand against it. He was suffocating; the thin, cold air seemed to be sucked out of his pumping lungs. His head roared and throbbed; his pulse drummed in his ears. Blood was still oozing from his nostrils, cold and sticky on his face.
And his body was wooden. Every movement was a battle against leaden inertia. Every effort burned vital oxygen, increased the strain on heart and lungs. But he must go on—start the generators.
Now on hands and knees, he crawled along the corridor. His hands were stiff, lifeless things. No sensation came from them as they fell upon the metal floor.
No longer could he see. Blackness crowded upon him, lit with strange, lurid flashes of crimson. His head whirled; he felt that the ship was swinging, spinning, under him. A blind automaton, he crawled on. And the face of Tonia Andros danced before him, smooth and childish, dark eyes wistfully solemn.
Every tissue of his leaden, tortured body screamed at him: “Stop! Stop! Rest! Forget!
