The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (96 page)

The yappings and snarlings ceased. There were whinings instead. The deep voice bellowed. The babbling and whining stopped.

“The skipper’s still in charge,” said Brent. “We’ll soon end that!”

Kit’s shoulder touched his. She clung to a narrow girder in a dimness filled with geometrical shapes. There were humming reechoes of the noises just ended.

“I’ve got my blaster ready if they come this way,” whispered Kit. “If they do smash the overdrive, can you fix it?”

He nodded. She smiled at him. Their faces were very close. It was a ridiculous time and place for such things, but suddenly he found himself kissing her.

She kissed him back. Her eyes were joyous. She had to hold fast with both hands or she would drop from the girder. He stopped in panic. She laughed softly. This was the strangest of possible times and places for a man and a girl to kiss each other.

Then he said feverishly: “Come on! Let’s get to some place where it’s solid!”

CHAPTER VIII

On a great plain outside the capital city of the planet Malden there were gigantic structures showing the silvery films of matter-transmitters. No visitors ever came to this city. It was not allowed. Very, very few visitors indeed ever came to Malden any longer. Travelers were told there was a quarantine, or that spacelines to Malden ran rarely.

If a traveler did reach Malden, he did not leave. Not ever.

But the people of Malden did not mind. From time to time the communicator-systems of the planet gave notice. Then great mobs assembled before the matter-transmitter films. Presently the blunt noses of spaceships appeared, and spaceships came out of the wavering films, in long lines of ugly shapelessness, and they settled on the meadows. Then, the mobs surged toward them.

And the crews of the spaceships threw out treasures to the mobs. Jewels, and gold, and fine fabrics, and all the prizes of a looted galaxy were lavished on the Malden population. And then the Emperor showed himself, strutting, and shouts of adulation filled the air. True, only a fraction of the brigand-ships’ cargoes was distributed, but that was richness. True, the Emperor himself possessed such wealth as had never been dreamed possible, but that was natural.

The Emperor and the people of Malden, alike, believed that they would go on forever like this. That the planet Malden could be a bandit stronghold while it tore down the civilization of the worlds beyond, and then—without changing—be the capital of the empire of all inhabited worlds.

That was foolish. Its downfall had already begun…

* * * *

The man at the controls of the
Delilah
began to scream crazily. The controls did not control anything. The ship sped on through a horrible blackness which had only one tiny point of light in it, and that faint glimmering light blinked and wavered and seemed perpetually about to go out. Nothing changed her motion. Nothing could touch her. Nothing could communicate with her. She was a runaway in a cosmos of nothingness which seemed constantly about to swallow her forever.

The helmsman, whose helm controlled nothing, beat with his fists at the bow ports which opened on blackness: He seized something—he did not know what—and battered blindly at everything and anything about him. And he screamed…

* * * *

Brent finished his work. It was a highly unlikely task he had set himself, and he performed it in a most improbable fashion. He took control of the
Delilah
with a pair of tiny animal-hair brushes and two containers of quick drying fluid, plus two small instrument-cases from his pockets.

He took one of the cases out, wrenched off a magnetic keeper, and put the case against a girder. It clung instantly. It was very near to one of the rods of greenish overdrive-alloy which ran through all the ship in a specific design. He opened a container of liquid and began to paint, very painstakingly, a line of quickly-drying liquid from one point of the box to another spot some little distance away. He painted another line, and another, and another, perhaps a dozen, in all. A little later, he painted narrower lines down the center of each of the original lines, with liquid from the second container, and using the second brush. This was nearly the end of his task.

Kit stayed close to him. As he moved, she kept as close to him as she could. As he worked, Brent thought in astonishment:
So this is how it happens!
He led a tiny line of liquid to the greenish-tinted rod. He moved back to the small box clinging to the steel beam. Kit followed him.

I like it!
Brent thought absorbedly.

He made a final liquid connection to a metal stud on the box. It dried immediately. He stood up in the near-darkness.

“Finished,” he said.

Kit went back into his arms.

The spaceliner
Delilah
sped on. She traveled now at some two thousand times the speed of light. In a day, she covered nearly twice the average distance between solar systems. In a week, she would go from one star-cluster to another. In a month, from one quadrant to another. In a year, she would travel farther than mankind had expanded in the first two thousand years of space-travel.

Presently, almost reluctantly, Brent and Kit moved back toward the passengers’ quarters. In the airlock that led in they were again pressed closely together. But this time Brent bent down hungrily to the face lifted up to him.

* * * *

Later, in Den Harlow’s cabin, Brent closed and locked the door. He took the second of the two essential cases from his pocket.

“This is a microwave relay,” he explained. “I was working on ships out in the Cephis cluster, you remember. This is a gadget used to test circuits when you don’t want to be right on the spot. The relay-box is out near the ship’s skin. This controls it. I’ve got a dozen different circuits lined in to that box, and from here I can work with any one of them. As long as I have this in my hand, I should be able to run the ship from anywhere in it, only since I can’t see outside the ship, it’s no use for navigating.”

He explained the manner of his rewiring job. Of course, the ancient practice of bulky insulation had long been abandoned. Nowadays, dipped in thin lacquer, a wire became insulated by a transparent, almost infinitesimal film which was proof against any voltage.

He recounted the Thommasson Law, which explains the superconductivity of mercury and tin and other metals at four degrees Kelvin. He explained that he had made his connections to his relay-box by first painting a stripe of insulation along the ship’s girders, and then had painted a narrower stripe of dissolved superconductor in the middle. A superconductor has literally no electrical resistance at all. A thread the size of a spider’s web will tarry a hundred thousand amperes without heating. So Brent had very simply and effectively concentrated all the controls of the
Delilah
at his remote-controlled relay by means of strips of practically invisible lacquer. And he should now have the ship entirely obedient to him in his cabin.

“We’ll shake ’em up a bit first,” he said tensely, “and then send some dot-dash stuff on their lighting system.”

Kit watched his face. He opened the relay-control box. He pushed a button. Instantly there was the dizzy spiralling of all space and a feeling of acute nausea. The
Delilah
’s overdrive was off again. He left it off for three seconds. He pressed another button. The spiralling—in reverse—and again the nausea. The ship was again traveling at two thousand times the speed of light. He left it on three seconds, and cut it, and left it off three seconds, and threw it on again. He did it with deliberate rhythm, so there could be no doubt that it was being done by intention.

“The passengers will panic again,” he said, “but I can’t help that!”

He gave them a second series of jolts by flicking the overdrive on and off again.

“Now I’ll talk to them,” said Brent. “This is the ticklish part.”

He began to press and release another button on the relay-box. It was dot-dash communication, utterly primitive in form but still used for emergency communication by space-craft. As Brent pushed and released his button, the lights in the crew’s quarters and all the working part of the ship dimmed and brightened. It would amount to the most self-evident yet untraceable form of signalling.

“I a-m s-t-o-w-a-w-a-y,” he ticked off. “Y-o-u c-a-n-n-o-t f-i-n-d m-e.”

The light in the cabin went out. Brent groped in his bag and a tiny but very fierce bluish-white battery-lamp glowed. It lighted the small room, and Den Harlow watching, and Kit looking warmly at Brent.

“Smart man, the Skipper,” said Brent grimly. “He thinks fast. When I started sending him signals, he turned out our lights. If I demanded to have them back on again he’d know a passenger was responsible.”

He ticked off:

“I w-i-l-l r-e-s-t-o-r-e c-o-n-t-r-o-l t-o y-o-u i-f y-o-u p-r-o-c-e-e-d t-o n-e-a-r-e-s-t h-a-b-i-t-a-b-l-e p-l-a-n-e-t a-n-d l-a-n-d a-n-s-w-e-r v-i-a c-r-e-w l-i-g-h-t-i-n-g s-y-s-t-e-m.”

“What could he do?” asked Kit breathlessly, “if he won’t believe you?”

“He could pump air out of the passengers’ quarters,” said Brent. “But he couldn’t bleed it out into space while we’re in overdrive. Not unless he went crazy!”

He watched a tiny dial on the relay-control box.

A long time later, the dial on his control-box kicked. He watched it.

“He’s agreed,” he said skeptically. “My guess is he’d have to shoot all his crew if he didn’t. But he’s in a bad fix!”

He signalled again for a long time.

“I’ve told him his new speed and given him ten hours to find a planet. I told him how to handle the ship on planetary approach. Now we’ll see what happens.”

He put the case in his pocket. He unlocked the door. He put out the light from his bag before he opened it.

Blackness pervaded the passengers’ lounge. A woman was weeping hysterically. Then someone flicked on a pocket lighter. It was a tiny point of light.

The overdrive went off. It stayed off for minutes.

Brent murmured: “He’s picking a nearby solar system—astrogation.”

The overdrive went on again.

Kit said: “Shouldn’t the—passengers be given some hope?”

“Not yet,” said Brent.

There was a long wait. A tense wait. Then the lights came on.

There were crewmen coming out of the bar and the kitchen and the steward’s airlock. They had blasters bearing on all who stirred. They were frightened as well as desperate. A man in a skipper’s uniform, with dark brows almost meeting over his forehead, glared at the again-terrified passengers.

Brent said sharply to the two beside him: “Get hold of something! Quickly!”

He caught at a chair-rail on the wall with his right hand. His left went swiftly into his pocket.

The skipper said, raging: “Go ahead! Wipe them out!”

He raised his blaster to aim at Den Harlow.

And then all weight vanished. The ship’s artificial gravity went off.

Brent shifted hands, holding himself steady with his left hand. The skipper did not realize, for a moment. He raised his blaster. As his arm and the heavy weapon rose, his body tilted gracefully forward. The blast made a spurt of smoke from the floor.

Then Brent fired with his soundless pocket weapon. There were shrieks of terror from the passengers.

* * * *

They fell. Endlessly. Horribly. Interminably. Their feet did not press upon the floor. They could not flee or dodge. They could not even turn their bodies. If a woman tried to thrust her child behind her, she found herself floating inches from the floor and the child an uncontrollable floating object which moved her as she moved it. A man lifted his hands before his eyes to shut out the sight of doom, and his body rotated grandly so that he floated facedown. There was not a person who could move from the spot where he had been standing—because there was no traction of his feet upon the floor. But there was no movement of a body’s member which did not change the angle of the body to the floor and walls and ceiling. And there was the sensation of ghastly falling toward infinity.

But Brent was anchored. His first shot had killed the skipper as the skipper’s aim was made impossible by his lack of weight. There was bedlam. Crewmen, their faces contorted, tried to shoot, but they could not aim either. To move one’s hand meant that one’s body moved also, in the opposite direction. And the crew was half-mad anyhow.

Holding fast and steadied by his grip, Brent fired with complete ruthlessness. He found himself gripped, and Kit was steadying herself by him and shooting gallantly, too. And Den Harlow had not heard Brent’s command in time to obey. But he floated calmly, and turned his wrist only, and deliberately pulled trigger when and only when his blaster bore upon a crewman trying to use a blaster.

Brent bellowed: “Throw your blasters away or every man dies!”

Six men threw down their blasters and bleated for mercy, in such a state of panic and horror that their cries were unintelligible.

Then Brent put his left hand back in his pocket, and the ship’s artificial gravity came back on. Passengers and crew-members alike toppled to the floor from whatever position they had assumed with relation to it.