The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 23
"No!" he replied sharply. That would be suicide with the other ship so close behind them. Then: "All right, but hurry it up." He cut acceleration to a little over one G.
As Evelyn measured out the shot he watched the pursuing ship grow on the rear-view screen. So long as he kept it directly behind him—where his radio-active exhaust gases interfered with the guided missiles sent after him—he was relatively safe. But if it drew level ... He called to Evelyn to hurry. That ship was coming up fast.
Suddenly they were on him. Evelyn was still standing beside Carlsen—he couldn't accelerate or she'd have been smashed against the floor.
There was only one thing to do. He cut the drive completely and switched on the force screen.
He was just in time. Decelerating furiously, the other ship drew level. Angry blotches on Carmicheal's force screen told where heat beams were being brought to bear. Instinctively he darkened the viewer, but the flash still nearly blinded him. A fission bomb, and the screen had handled it. They wouldn't dare try a fusion warhead at this range, Carmicheal knew; not unless they were anxious to die in the same explosion.
The ship passed. Carmicheal cut the force-screen and re-started the drive, keeping the exhaust aimed in the direction of the other ship. The screen was good, but it operated on a similar principle to the warp-drive and was also extremely wasteful of fuel. If he kept it on for too long he wouldn't have the fuel to go anywhere at all.
Carlsen was still out. Evelyn now knew, of course, that he intended stealing the ship; her active hostility was averted only by the fact that he'd promised to help Carlsen. Carmicheal fumed; the atmosphere in the control room was so highly charged he could almost see the sparks, and it wasn't conducive to the solving of his problem.
There must be something he could do. He shut his eyes tightly and tried to force himself to think, but it was no good. He opened them again, and saw where the ship's present course was taking it. Remembrance came flooding back, and with it, a possible solution.
He'd only been a year on the Starling at the time, when they'd been approached by a ship refusing to give the proper recognition signals. Obviously it was up to no good. The Starling had been unarmed, and its Captain had known that the other ship could follow him into sub-space and out again if he tried to evade contact that way. Starling had been inside a solar system at the time—just leaving one of the innermost planets. It had given the Captain an idea.
The risks had been tremendous, Carmicheal remembered. But then, as now, the situation had called for desperate measures. He began adjusting the course.
"What the blazes do you think you're doing?" It was Carlsen, awake again.
Carmicheal resented the tone, though he had expected the other's surprise. In a surly voice he explained that the other ship was hanging onto them so tightly that it could chase them in and out of sub-space, and continue the battle anywhere they went. The only solution was to give them the slip by entering sub-space where the others wouldn't be able to trace their direction of flight, in a spot where there were so many space-strains that the pursuing ship would be unable to analyse theirs. He told Carlsen where that was.
He also implied that he'd done the trick himself, instead of only watching the Starling's Captain do it. He didn't want Evelyn to be as worried as he was.
HOURS PASSED. Several times the ship following them almost caught up, but they were able to force it back by taking the offensive. It had been Carlsen's idea. Just like the other ship, they couldn't send guided missiles through their own exhaust with any accuracy. But they could short out the guiding circuits and just shoot them straight back and hope for the best. The probability of scoring a hit was extremely slight, and they were using up their store of missiles at a shockingly wasteful rate, but several times they scared the other ship into cutting its drive to switch on its force-screen. They made it keep its distance.
Days passed, and still they made it keep its distance.
It grew hotter, and hotter.
Carmicheal would have given everything he had—including the ship and its cargo—to be able to throw off his coveralls. But the other ship was close behind, and getting out of anything while under four G acceleration was an impossibility. There was water, of course, but it seemed just to run out of his pores as he drank it. He suffered, but not in silence. None of them did.
Carlsen, after one particularly long and bitter diatribe said: "Aren't we close enough yet? By now they must be sure we're out of control, or all trying to commit suicide."
Evelyn, her face shiny yellow and distorted by acceleration and heat, gasped: "Them and me both. Fancy accelerating straight into the Sun ..."
"Not close enough yet," Carmicheal said curtly. "In a couple of hours, maybe." He tried to blink sweat out of his eyes so as to see the control panel clearly. There was no automatic machinery that could do this job for him—it called for pure intuition as much as for manual dexterity.
To keep the other ship from tracking them through sub-space, he had to wait until he was far enough into the area of strain surrounding the sun for their analysing instruments to be useless; then he could warp out. But at his present velocity, the time between reaching that area and approaching the sun so closely that the ship would burn like an over-eager moth was very short indeed. It was approximately two seconds.
It became too hot to bear, and then got hotter.
Carmicheal tried desperately to get rid of the sweat that acceleration pressure kept collecting in his eye sockets. He had to watch everything—strain analysers, hull temperature, missile launchers, the lot—and the moisture streaming from his face was making those dials shimmer and dance like pebbles under running water. Several times the ship following almost overtook them, but when all their missiles were exhausted, Carlsen came up with the idea of throwing out any loose machinery that wasn't immediately essential. By remote control Carmicheal jettisoned everything he could jettison. The exhaust fanning out behind them partly fused and made radioactive all the miscellaneous junk, and the pursuing ship, thinking they were more atomic missiles, hurriedly switched on its force-screen and dropped behind. But not far enough behind to allow them to warp out in safety.
And that ship could make a closer approach to the Sun than he could, Carmicheal knew. Their refrigeration units were also more up-to-date.
It was shortly after the dumping of the loose machinery that Carlsen observed that if and when Carmicheal got out of this, his ship would be a near wreck. Carlsen deliberately stressed the fact that it was Carmicheal's ship, and the sarcasm in his tone bit like acid. If Carmicheal could have moved he would have wrung Carlsen's neck.
It got hotter.
Evelyn had passed out. Carmicheal was horribly afraid that he was going to do the same any minute; he'd been a lot younger the last time he'd gone through this. He was sure he was being boiled in his own body juices. While he could still see the navigation panel clearly, he decided to pre-set a course through sub-space to their destination. He hadn't thought about that much up to now.
To Carlsen he croaked, "Where do you want to go?"—Not, he added under his breath, that I'm going to take you there, you smooth-talking, dirty son of a ...
Carlsen said, "Illensa."
The shock was like a blow. But strangely, when it began to pass it left not pain, but an overwhelming relief and a feeling almost of exhilaration. Consciously he made the decision that his sub-conscious had been trying to force on him since he'd first thought about stealing this ship.
Always said you'd never make a crook, said the little voice in his head happily. Carmicheal laughed at it, and agreed.
Beneath the name and space-warp co-ordinates of Illensa in the Almanac was a little paragraph that Carmicheal could quote almost by heart. It stated that Illensa was the Sorting Office for the Sector Twelve Postal District, and that more than two hundred Couriers were based there.
Carlsen really was a C-man.
Half an hour later, in the gravityless condition of sub-space, Carmicheal floated above the main control panel, thinking and remembering. The ship was comfortably cool again, and they would warp into the Illensa system in two days. Idly, he watched Evelyn give Carlsen his shot.
For the first time the sight did not anger him, or knot his insides with frustrated jealousy. He didn't mind it at all, and he suddenly knew why.
"Son," one of the psychologists at Advanced Space Training had once told him, "what we're doing to you is a sin and a shame. You'll be conditioned to live in and love a vacuum—the interstellar vacuum. If you try to live with or love anything or anybody else, you're going to be desperately unhappy. Unless, of course, you marry a lady Engineer ..." Carmicheal smiled at the memory. He'd been desperately unhappy on Helena, though he'd tried to make the best of it. He wasn't any more.
Courier Carlsen, he knew, would keep his word about giving him the ship and its cargo; C-men were like that. But Carlsen was going to be very surprised when they got to Illensa and Carmicheal told him that he didn't want the ship or its cargo—that all he wanted was a chance to get his old job back. There would be a lot of pilots needed when the new and cheaper warp-drive went into use.
The C-man looked up suddenly and met his eyes. Carlsen, Carmicheal realised, knew him much better than he knew himself. Carlsen wouldn't be surprised at all.
The End
Outrider
New Worlds – May 1955
Following closely after his novelette The Star Walk in No. 33 Mr. White presents another intriguing idea—that of landing a damaged spaceship whose navigational instruments have been destroyed. It would be impossible, of course, but it presents a neat drama.
IN A GLIDE that was only a few degrees off level flight the ship slid into the tenuous upper reaches of the atmosphere. The thin, practically non-existent air, made an almost solid thing by its tremendous speed of passage, tore at the gaping holes and ragged-edged projections in the once-streamlined hull, shaking the whole ship with a continuous, bone-jarring vibration. Rapidly the dull red glow of air friction grew along the leading edges of its gliding wings, on its blunted nose, and patchily about the torn and buckled plates that had once concealed the ship's radio, radar, and direct vision periscopic installations. Fearfully, like a great silver fish forced into exploring the depths of some strange and deadly ocean, it lowered itself cautiously into the Earth's atmosphere.
It had to land, and quickly. But its fear and hesitancy was understandable—the ship was deaf, dumb, and blind ...
GREGG AWOKE with the dying echoes of one mighty gong-like note ringing in his ears, and to the sight of the ceiling rushing at him. The ceiling, after approaching to within six inches of his face, receded just as quickly, and the echo was abruptly drowned by sharp, urgent blasts of the Multiple Puncture signal. For an instant he lay too shocked to move, while the spring cables of his acceleration hammock—super efficient in the absence of gravity—flung him back and forwards across the compartment with a violence that made him sick and dizzy.
This, he thought crazily, is what the business end of a yo-yo feels like. Then the meaning of the signal registered.
Spacesuit!
Frantically he unzipped himself from the madly-oscillating hammock and kicked free. He skidded off one wall and stopped—violently—against another. The compartment's entrance where the spacesuit hung seemed to be miles away.
Five seconds later, as he was struggling with the top half of his suit and sweating because of the time it was taking, the alarm siren changed to the long-short-long pattern that meant No Immediate Danger. An indicator light above the door—placed there in case there should be no air to carry the sound of the hooter—flickered out the same information. Infinitely relieved, Gregg did the suiting-up operation with less haste, biting his lip several times at the pain shooting through his arm and shoulder.
Good thing the ship wasn't losing air fast, Gregg thought, or he'd be a very dead duck by this time. When his hammock had catapulted him against the wall he'd taken a bad crack on the elbow. It had slowed him down at a time when every second might have counted.
Only when he was encased in the suit and at least temporarily safe did he begin to wonder what exactly had happened to the ship. Gregg had an overwhelming urge to head for the control room and find out the worst direct from Captain Ferguson. But doing that, he knew, wouldn't be very bright. In an emergency like this ship's personnel were required to remain at their posts, and report conditions in their vicinity so that the Captain could get the over-all picture. If Gregg went barging into the control room now, asking questions and offering assistance when the duty officers were up to their ears checking damage reports, he'd no doubt be told where to go—his assistance and himself both. He'd better obey the rules.
Carefully avoiding the still-vibrating hammock, Gregg kicked himself towards the intercom set on the wall. He plugged in his helmet lead and tried to keep his voice steady as he said: "This is Gregg, in Storage Compartment 2, to Control ..."
He stopped then, aware by the absence of crackle in his headphones that the set was dead.
Gregg forced down the surge of panic which rose in him. A dead communications set, he told himself reassuringly, didn't necessarily mean that the control room was wrecked; the collision may merely have loosened an already faulty connection in the wiring somewhere, or some other simple explanation like that ... With an effort Gregg made himself stop his wild and senseless speculations, and tried to take stock.
HE WAS travelling on the express passenger liner Wallaby enroute from Mars to Earth. But not for him was the Main Saloon with its tasteful decor, its soft music, and its almost-constant film shows. As a company employee travelling at a fraction of the fare payed by ordinary passengers, an acceleration hammock rigged in an empty storage compartment was good enough for him. He'd been left to the contemplation of the beautiful symmetry of a rivet-studded bulkhead, and to try, if the constant two and a half G's acceleration would allow him, to sleep.
But there was no acceleration now. The ship was in free fall, weightless, its drive having cut off automatically in the instant of the collision. That was one of the many safety devices built into the ship, Gregg knew; the Wallaby was so crammed with automatic controls and safety devices that one of the station officials had told him that her crew were taking money under false pretences by claiming to operate her. The ship ran herself, he'd been told almost seriously, and the only difference between crewmen and passengers was that the latter were heavily charged for the ride. Gregg, floating beside the dead intercom set, thought that servo-mechanisms were all very well until something unforeseen happened; then, of course, it was the fragile and inefficient thinking machines of flesh and blood who had to solve the problem.
But where were the crew anyway? Surely one of them should have come around to inspect this section by now? For all Gregg knew they might be dead. Everybody might be dead, but him. He shivered involuntarily; that was very unlikely. He'd better look around and keep his mind busy or he'd scare himself to death with thoughts like that.
The corridor outside was deserted but well lit. As Gregg pulled himself along the ladder and net arrangement covering one of its walls in the direction of the nearest cabin, the alarm siren shut off suddenly. Small scraping sounds—made probably by men moving about—grew out of the ensuing silence, and from somewhere came a continuous, insistent clicking noise. Gregg pushed open a door lettered "Engineer—A-drive" and floated inside. A gauge on the wall had already told him that air-pressure was normal so he opened his face-plate to make talking easier.
Peterson, the Wallaby's Second Engineer, was still wrestling with the bottom half of his spacesuit. There was a large bump growing on his forehead, a lot of blood on his right temple and jaw, and he was muttering steadily to himself. The things he was repeating weren't nursery rhymes. From the way he kept blinking and shaking his head Gregg suspected a touch of concussion.
"Er, Mr. Peterson," Gregg said. "What happened?"
"How the ..." Peterson didn't know what had happened—his language while telling Gregg so was vivid. Gregg, who tried to keep a one-track mind in important matters, disregarded him as he caught sight of the compartment's intercom. He pushed himself over to it and plugged in.
"Peterson!" a voice crackled at him before he could get out two words. "I thought you were dead or something. Give me the picture down there man, quick!"
Stammering a little, Gregg told the voice that there was light and air, and no outward sign of damage. He added, "... But this isn't Peterson, Captain. Peterson is hurt, though not badly, I think. This is Gregg. Is there anything I can do?"
"Gregg?" There was silence for a moment, then: "Oh yes, the passenger in Storage Two." The voice became hurried. "You can give Mr. Peterson whatever first aid you can, then tell him to report on the condition of the Drive to me as soon as possible. After that you'd better just stay out of the way for a while. We appreciate your offer of help, Mr. Gregg, but you must realise that we require skilled, technical assistance. Anyone without a thorough knowledge of ship operation and construction would only get in the way. Sorry, but thanks anyway."
"Captain," Gregg said quickly. "I've some experience of mining and construction in weightless conditions. I could help patch the hull for you maybe. And ..." He caught himself just in time. He'd a most told the other that he'd once served on a ship as well—which would, of course, lead to him naming the ship. He didn't want that. He was trying desperately to forget that he'd once been Gregg of the Allendyne.
The set made a hissing sound that might have been a great sigh of relief, then: "In that case we can certainly use your help, Mr. Gregg. Can you put on Mr. Peterson now—and Gregg," the voice added, "you can stop calling me Captain. This is Second Pilot Allerton speaking. The Captain is ... ill."
The engineer had joined Gregg and had already plugged in while Allerton was talking. He said: "Peterson here. What happened, or can't you tell yet?
