Time Travel Omnibus, page 557
Gefty drew a deep breath. “There’s another solution to that problem, Maulbow. Miss Ruse and I prefer it. And if you meant what you said—that you’d see to it we got back eventually—you shouldn’t object either.”
The voice asked sharply, “What do you mean?”
Gefty said, “Shut the control unit off. From what you were saying, that throws us automatically back into normspace, while we’re still close enough to the Hub. You’ll find plenty of people there who’ll stake you to a trip to the future if they can go along and are convinced they’ll return. Miss Ruse and I don’t happen to be that adventurous.”
There was silence from the passage. Gefty added, “Take your time to make up your mind about it, if you want to. I don’t like the idea of those lights hitting us, but neither do you. And I think I can wait this out as well as you can . . .”
The silence stretched out. Presently Gefty said, “If you do accept, slide that fire-shooting device of yours into the room before you show up. We don’t want accidents.”
He paused again. Kerim was chewing her lips, hands clenched into small fists in her lap. Then Maulbow answered, voice flat and expressionless now.
“The worst thing we can do at present,” he said, “is to prolong a dispute about possible courses of action. If I disarm, will you lay aside your gun?”
“Yes.”
“Then I accept your conditions, disappointing as they are.”
He was silent. After a moment, Gefty heard the white rod clatter lightly along the floor of the passage. It struck the passage wall, spun off it, and rolled into the instrument room, coming to rest a few feet away from him. Gefty hesitated, picked it up and laid it on the wall table. He placed his own gun beside it, moved a dozen steps away. Kerim’s eyes followed him anxiously.
“Gefty,” she whispered, “he might . . .”
Gefty looked at her, formed the words “It’s all right” with his mouth and called, “Guns have been put aside, Maulbow. Come on in, and let’s keep it peaceable.”
He waited, arms hanging loosely at his side, heart beating heavily, as quick footsteps came up the passage. Maulbow appeared in the entrance, glanced at Gefty and Kerim, then about the room. His gaze rested for a moment on the wall table, shifted back to Gefty. Maulbow came on into the room, turning towards Gefty, mouth twisting.
He said softly, “It is not our practice, Rammer, to share the secrets of the Great Current with other races. I hadn’t foreseen that you might become a dangerous nuisance. But now—”
His right hand began to lift, half closed about some small golden instrument. Gefty’s left arm moved back and quickly forwards.
The service knife slid out of its sheath and up from his palm as an arrow of smoky blackness burst from the thing in Maulbow’s hand. The blackness came racing with a thin, snarling noise across the floor towards Gefty’s feet. The knife flashed above it, turning, and stood hilt-deep in Maulbow’s chest.
Gefty returned a few minutes later from the forward cabin which served as the Queen’s sick bay, and said to Kerim, “He’s still alive, though I don’t know why. He may even recover. He’s full of anesthetic, and that should keep him quiet till we’re back in normspace. Then I’ll see what we can do for him.”
Kerim had lost some of her white, shocked look while he was gone. “You knew he would try to kill you?” she asked shakily.
“Suspected he had it in mind—he gave in too quick. But I thought I’d have a chance to take any gadget he was hiding away from him first. I was wrong about that. Now we’d better move fast . . .”
He switched the emergency check panel back on, glanced over the familiar patterns of lights and numbers. A few minor damage spots were indicated, but the ship was still fully operational. One minor damage spot which did not appear on the panel was now to be found in the instrument room itself, in the corner on which the door of the map room opened. The door, the adjoining bulkheads and section of flooring were scarred, blackened, and as assortedly malodorous as burned things tend to become. That was where Gefty had stood when Maulbow entered the room, and if he had remained there an instant after letting go of the knife, he would have been in very much worse condition than the essentially fireproof furnishings.
Both Maulbow’s weapons—the white rod lying innocently on the wall table and the round, golden device which had dropped from his hand spitting darts of smoking blackness—had blasted unnervingly away into that area for almost thirty seconds after Maulbow was down and twisting about on the floor. Then he went limp and the firing instantly stopped. Apparently, Maulbow’s control of them had ended as he lost consciousness.
It seemed fortunate that the sick bay cabin’s emergency treatment accessories, gentle as their action was, might have been designed for the specific purpose of keeping the most violent of prisoners immobilized—let alone one with a terrible knife wound in him. At the angle along which the knife had driven in and up below the ribs, an ordinary man would have been dead in seconds. But it was very evident now that Maulbow was no ordinary man, and even after the eerie weapons had been pitched out of the ship through the instrument room’s disposal tube, Gefty couldn’t rid himself of an uncomfortable suspicion that he wasn’t done with Maulbow yet—wouldn’t be done with him, in fact, until one or the other of them was dead.
He said to Kerim, “I thought the machine Maulbow set up in the storage vault would turn out to be some drive engine, but apparently it has an entirely different function. He connected it with the instruments he had made in the Hub, and together they form what he calls a control unit. The emergency panel would show if the unit were drawing juice from the ship. It isn’t, and I don’t know what powers it. But we do know now that the control unit is holding us in the time current, and it will go on holding us there as long as it’s in operation.
“If we could shut it off, the Queen would be ‘rejected’ by the current, like Maulbow’s sailer was. In other words, we’d get knocked back into normspace—which is what we want. And we want it to happen as soon as possible because, if Maulbow was telling the truth on that point, every minute that passes here is taking us farther away from the Hub, and farther from our own time towards his.”
Kerim nodded, eyes intent on his face.
“Now I can’t just go down there and start slapping switches around on the thing,” Gefty went on. “He said it wasn’t working right, and even if it were, I couldn’t tell what would happen. But it doesn’t seem to connect up with any ship systems—it just seems to be holding us in a field of its own. So I should be able to move the whole unit into the cargo lock and eject it from there. If we shift the Queen outside its field, that should have the same effect as shutting the control unit off. It should throw us back into normspace.”
Kerim nodded again. “What about Mr. Maulbow’s janandra animal?”
Gefty shrugged. “Depends on the mood I find it in. He said it wasn’t usually aggressive. Maybe it isn’t. I’ll get into a spacesuit for protection and break out some of the mining equipment to move it along with. If I can maneuver it into an empty compartment where it will be out of the . . .”
He broke off, expression changing, eyes fastened on the emergency panel. Then he turned hurriedly, reached across the side of the console for the intership airseal controls. Kerim asked apprehensively, “What’s the matter, Gefty?”
“Wish I knew . . . exactly.” Gefty indicated the emergency panel. “Little red light there, on the storage deck section—it wasn’t showing a minute ago. It means that the vault doors have been opened since then.”
He saw the same half-superstitious fear appear in her face that had touched him. “You think he did it?”
“I don’t know.” Maulbow’s control of the guns had seemed uncanny enough. But that was a different matter. The guns were a product of his own time and science. But the vault door mechanisms? There might have been sufficient opportunity for Maulbow to study them and alter them, for some purpose of his own, since he’d come aboard . . .
“I’ve got the ship compartments and decks sealed off from each other now,” Gefty said slowly. “The only connecting points from one to the other are personnel hatches—they’re small air locks. So the janandra’s confined to the storage deck. If it’s come out of the vault, it might be a nuisance until I can get equipment to handle it. But that isn’t too serious. The spacesuits are on the second deck, and I’ll get into one before I go on to the storage. You wait here a moment, I’ll look in on Maulbow again before I start.”
If Maulbow wasn’t still unconscious, he was doing a good job of feigning it. Gefty looked at the pale, lax face, the half-shut eyes, shook his head and left the cabin, locking it behind him. It mightn’t be Maulbow’s doing, but having the big snake loose in the storage could, in fact, make things extremely awkward now. He didn’t think his gun would make much impression on anything of that size, and while several of the ship’s mining tools could be employed as very effective close-range weapons, they happened, unfortunately, to be stored away on the same deck.
He found Kerim standing in the center of the instrument room, waiting for him.
“Gefty,” she said, “do you notice anything? An odd sort of smell . . .”
Then the odor was in Gefty’s nostrils, too, and the back of his neck turned to ice as he recognized it. He glanced up at the ventilation outlet, looked back at Kerim.
He took her arm, said softly, “Come this way. Keep very quiet! I don’t know how it happened, but the janandra’s on the main deck now. That’s what it smells like. The smell’s coming through the ventilation system, so the thing’s moving around in the port section. We’ll go the other way.”
Kerim whispered, “What will we do?”
“Get ourselves into spacesuits first, and then get Maulbow’s control unit out of the ship. The janandra may be looking around for him. If it is, it won’t bother us.”
He hadn’t wanted to remind Kerim that, from what Maulbow said, there might be more than one reason for getting rid of the control unit as quickly as possible. But it had been constantly in the back of his mind; and twice, in the few minutes that passed after Maulbow’s strange weapons were silenced, he had seen a momentary pale glare appear in the unquiet flow of darkness reflecting in the viewscreens. Gefty had said nothing, because if it was true that hostile forces were alert and searching for them here, it added to their immediate danger but not at all to the absolute need to free themselves from the inexorable rush of the Great Current before they were carried beyond hope of return to their civilization.
But those brief glimpses did add to the sense of urgency throbbing in Gefty’s nerves, while events, and the equally hard necessity to avoid a fatally mistaken move in this welter of unknown factors, kept blocking him. Now the mysterious manner in which Maulbow’s unpleasant traveling companion had appeared on the main deck made it impossible to do anything but keep Kerim at his side. If Maulbow was still capable of taking a hand in matters, there was no reasonably safe place to leave her aboard the Queen.
And Maulbow might be capable of it. Twice as they hurried up the narrow, angled passages along the Queen’s curving hull towards an airseal leading to the next compartment, Gefty caught a trace of the ammonia-like animal odor coming over the ventilating system. They reached the lock without incident; but then, as they came along the second deck hall to the ship’s magazine, there was a sharp click in the stillness behind them. Its meaning was disconcertingly apparent. Gefty hesitated, turned Kerim into a side passage, guided her along it.
She looked up at his face. “It’s following us?”
“Seems to be.” No time for the spacesuits in the magazine now—something had just emerged from the air lock through which they had entered the second deck not many moments before. He helped the girl quickly down a section of ladderlike stairs to the airseal connecting the second deck with the storage, punched a wall button there. As the lock door opened, there was another noise from the passage they had just left, as if something had thudded briefly and heavily against one of the bulkheads. Kerim uttered a little gasp. Then they were in the lock, and Gefty slapped down two other buttons, stood watching the door behind them snap shut and, a few seconds later, the one on the far side open on the dark storage deck.
They scrambled down another twelve feet of ladder to the floor of a side passage, hearing the lock snap shut behind them. As it closed, they were in complete darkness. Gefty seized Kerim’s arm, ran with her up the passage to the left, guiding himself with his fingertips on the left bulkhead. When they came to a corner, he turned her to the left again. A few seconds later, he pulled open a small door, bundled the girl through, came in himself, and shut the door to a narrow slit behind them.
Kerim whispered shakily, “What will we do now, Gefty?”
“Stay here for the moment. It’ll look for us in the vault first.”
And it should go to the storage vault first where it had been guarding Maulbow’s machine, to hunt for them there. But it might not. Gefty eased the gun from his pocket on the far side of Kerim. Across the dark compartment was another door. They could retreat a little farther here if it became necessary—but not very much farther.
They waited in a silence that was complete except for their unsteady breathing and the distant, deep pulse of the Queen’s throttled-down drives. He felt Kerim trembling against him. How did Maulbow’s creature move through the airseal locks? The operating mechanisms were simple—a dog might have been taught to use them. But a dog had paws . . .
There came the soft hiss of the opening lock, the faintest shimmer of light to the right of the passage mouth he was watching through the door. A heavy thump on the floor below the locks followed, then a hard click as the lock closed and complete darkness returned.
The silence resumed. Seconds dragged on. Gefty’s imagination pictured the thing waiting, its great, wedge-shaped head raised as its senses probed the dark about it for a sign of the two human beings. Then a vague rushing noise began, growing louder as it approached the passage mouth, crossing it, receding rapidly again to the left.
Gefty let his breath out slowly, eased the door open and stood listening again. Abruptly, there was reflected light in the lock passage, coming now from the left. He said in a whisper, “It’s moving around in the main hall, Kerim. We can go on the other way now, but we’ll have to be fast and keep quiet. I’ve thought of how we can get rid of that thing.”
The cargo lock on the storage deck had two inner doors. The one which opened into the side of the vault hall was built to allow passage of the largest chunks of freight the Queen was likely to be burdened with; it was almost thirty feet wide and twenty high. The second door was just large enough to let a man in a spacesuit climb in and out of the side of the lock without using the freight door. It opened on a tiny control cubicle from which the lock’s mechanisms were operated during loading processes.
Gefty let Kerim and himself into the cubicle from one of the passages, steered the girl through the pitch blackness of the little room to the chair before the control panel and told her to sit down. He groped for a moment at the side of the panel, found a knob and twisted it. There was a faint click. A scattering of pale lights appeared suddenly on the panel, a dark viewscreen, set at a tilt above them, reflecting their gleam.
Gefty explained in a low voice, “Left side of that screen covers the lock. Right one covers the big hall outside. No lights in either at the moment, so you don’t see anything. Only way the cargo door to the hall can be opened or closed is with these switches right here. What I want to do is get the janandra into the lock, slam the door on it and lock down the control switches. Then we’ve got it trapped.”
“But how are you going to get it to go in there?”
“No real problem—I’ll be three jumps ahead of it. Then I duck back up into this cubicle, and lock both doors. And it’ll be inside the lock. You have the picture now?”
Kerim said unsteadily, “I do. But it sounds awfully risky, Gefty.”
“Well, I don’t like it either,” Gefty admitted. “So I’ll start right now before I lose my nerve. As soon as I move out into the vault hall, the lighting will go on. That’s automatic. You watch the right side of the screen. If you see the janandra coming before I do, yell as loud as you can.”
He shifted the two inner door switches to the right. A red spark appeared in the dark viewscreen, high up near the center. A second red light showed on the cubicle bulkhead beside Gefty. Beneath it an oblong section of the bulkhead turned silently away on heavy hinges, became a door two feet in thickness, which stood jutting out at a right angle into the darkness of the cargo lock. A wave of cold air moved through it into the control cubicle.
On the screen, another red spark appeared beside the first one.
“Both doors are open now,” Gefty murmured to the girl. “The janandra isn’t in the vault hall or the lighting would have turned on, but it may have heard the door open and be on its way. So keep watching the screen.”
“I certainly will!” she whispered shakily.
Gefty took an oversized wrench from the wall, climbed quickly and quietly down the three ladder steps to the floor of the lock, and walked across it to the sill of the giant freight door, which now had swung out and down into the vault hall, fitting itself into a depression of the flooring. He hesitated an instant on the sill, then stepped out into the big dark hall. Light filled it immediately in both directions.
He stood quiet, intent on the storage vault entrance far up the hall to his left. He could see the vault was open. The janandra might still be inside it. But the seconds passed, and the dark entrance remained silent and there was no suggestion of motion beyond it. Gefty glanced to the right, moved a dozen steps farther out into the hall, hefted the wrench and spun it through the air towards the ventilator frame on the opposite bulkhead.
