Collected Short Fiction, page 242
The report would continue until the end of the emergency, but Kilbourne snapped the set off. He had the data he needed in order to act.
The ship was a wreck; of the thirty-eight men who had been aboard when they left Rigel, possibly ten were still alive. Kilbourne counted up on his fingers: six officers, all dead. Twelve passengers, “generally unharmed.” In the engine-room, “several survivors.” Eight of the twenty crewmen were as good as dead in Sections 8 and 9. The ship was crippled, and the only thing to do was to get off it and strike out for the nearest rescue signal beacon planet.
Kilbourne knew where the lifeships were, but he had two stops to make first. He himself was inconsequential to the voyage, he knew, being merely an engineer transferring from the Rigel yards to do flight research at the artificial satellite in the Capella system. But he was a level-headed, logical man, and he knew the most important action he could ever perform in his life would be to rescue the two valuable things aboard ship: Professor David Loder, Earth’s outstanding gravitonic physicist, and the cargo of antivirotic drugs in Number Six Hold. Both were of vital importance to humanity.
Loder first, Kilbourne thought. The diminutive physicist was in Cabin Fifteen, up the companionway and around. Kilbourne pushed open his cabin door and was promptly greeted by a billowing roll of oily gray smoke. Radon, he thought in sudden alarm, then realized there was little danger from the radioactive gas this far from the drives. It was smoke, pure and simple—and it meant the ship was now on fire, along with its other woes.
CHOKING and gasping, Kilbourne made his way through the smoke to Cabin Fifteen, and banged on the plasteel door. No answer came. He banged again, waited a moment, then shoved the door open.
“Professor Loder!” he called.
Loder was there, all right. Kilbourne saw the small, white-haired man huddled at his desk, a pencil clutched tightly in his dead fingers. He had been at work when the shift out of ultradrive had come. The jarring shock had been too much for the fragile old man.
Damn damn damn, Kilbourne thought. For a moment he felt frustration of a type quite new to him, and he stood there, trying to call the scientist back from the dead. He shook the bony arm, and Loder’s head wobbled grotesquely. Kilbourne let go and glanced at the sheet of paper on the desk, covered with equations. His practiced eye comprehended them in a quick survey; they were, he saw, merely a preliminary restatement of Loder’s 2451 Gravitonic Field theory, no more. There was no point in preserving the sheet; it contained nothing new, and Kilbourne was not a sentimental man. Whatever Loder had planned to add was frozen forever in the dead man’s brain.
“I think he’s dead,” said a quiet voice.
Kilbourne looked up and scowled. “Yes, he’s dead.” For a moment he was tempted to add, “—and you’re still alive, Leswick. There’s no justice in the universe,” but rejected the idea. This was no time for recrimination.
“Most of the others are dead too,” the thin man in the doorway said. “I just looked in all the cabins. It’s a great tragedy, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Kilbourne said tightly. “Get out of my way now—I want to check on the drug cargo.”
HE shouldered his way past and out into the companionway, feeling hollow and angry inside. For Loder to die, and Anthony Leswick to survive—
Leswick had been his pet bugaboo on the voyage up to now. He was a Metaphysical Synthesist, flaunting an impressive but meaningless degree from some Terran university. Kilbourne had only a vague idea of what Metaphysical Synthesis was—a school of philosophy attempting to unify anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, and half a dozen other inexact sciences into one confused totality, he decided—but he had little love for speculative philosophy in any case. It has no rules, his precise engineer’s mind would protest. Anything goes. It’s too damned illogical! He particularly detested Leswick’s kind of “science,” aiming at some foggy-eyed and useless synthesis of art, science, history, and other things to determine the basic forces of society. For Leswick, a mystic masquerading as a man of learning, to survive, and Loder to die—!
Swallowing his anger, Kilbourne made his way handover-hand down to the storage holds. The antivirotics were in Hold Six—one hundred ampoules, worth as many hundred thousand dollars, and each needing a year of hard laboratory work to replace. The drugs were experimental steps toward elimination of the virus diseases that plagued Terran colonists on some outer planets. The cargo was destined for the Orbiter labs for further analysis. If it didn’t arrive—
Kilbourne reached the hold level at last and looked around. Number Six Hold was far down the corridor, near the damaged end of the ship. It was hard to see with all the smoke clogging things, and he knew he didn’t have much time. He broke into a trot.
A massive figure appeared suddenly from the dimness ahead and came awkwardly toward Kilbourne. When the two men approached each other, the newcomer put one ponderous arm forward and held Kilbourne back.
“Where you think you goin’, fella?”
“Get out of my way, will you?” Kilbourne said impatiently. “I’m in a hurry.” The man was a deckhand, apelike in body and in mind—a big, slow-moving, slow-thinking animal of a man who probably performed the most menial tasks in the engine-room. It would be in keeping with the general pattern of things, Kilbourne thought bitterly, if this ape were the only survivor of the engine crew.
The man continued to hold him with a lackadaisical hand against his chest. “I told you I’m in a hurry,” Kilbourne repeated. He grabbed the thick wrist with both hands and wrenched it away, and started to move fast.
“You ain’t in any hurry, Mac,” was the rumbling reply. “You can’t go but twenty feet more thisaway. I just come from there myself.”
“What do you mean?”
The deckhand shrugged. “The red wall’s down thisaway. You can’t get past that nohow.”
The red wall? That was about the topper, Kilbourne thought. The chocolate frosting on the cake. The cybernetic governor had lowered the radiation-shields, blocking the fore part of the ship from the aft. It meant that anything on the other side of the wall—including the drug cargo—was hopelessly hot from a bath of hard radiation. He turned away, shoulders slumping. The accident had worked out devilishly well, and his rescue mission was a total failure.
The deckhand grinned cheerfully. “You look all bushed, Mac. Hey, smile! You ain’t dead, are you?”
Kilbourne shook his head angrily. “I might as well be,” he said. “Might as well.”
“Hey! What kinda talk is that?” The big man pummelled Kilbourne jovially. “Come on, Mac—let’s you and me go find a lifeship and clear outa here. I got a feeling the whole place is goin’ to blow.”
“Yeah. Let’s go find a lifeship,” Kilbourne agreed. “There’s a guy on the passenger level still alive. We might as well go get him too. We might as well.”
CHAPTER II
THE lifeship was hardly more than a bubble of metal, holding three men comfortably, four uncomfortably. A ship the size of the Clyde Bohmer carried ten such boats, the theory being that ten small ships would be more likely to survive an accident to the mother ship than two or three larger ones. Under ultradrive, the extra mass didn’t matter much.
In this case, theory was right. The blowup knocked out three of the lifeships—but there were seven left. On their way back to find Leswick, Kilbourne and the deckhand came across two other passengers still alive, but in bad shape. Cold-bloodedly, Kilbourne decided to leave them. Even if he could get them into one of the lifeships, they’d probably not survive the trip to the planet below’—and if they made it there alive, the wait for rescue would finish them.
“Go on, get in,” Kilbourne said harshly to the feathery-looking man in front of him. “And without the book.”
Anthony Leswick turned in appeal. “But—I need this book, Kilbourne. How else will I pass my time before rescue? Here—look at it!”
Kilbourne took the book, glanced at the title. An application of Matrix Field Theory to the Cultural Units of Eastern New Guinea. For a moment, tempted by the thought that the book might in some way deal with math or physics, he held on to it. Then, realizing that whatever matrix field theory there might be in the volume was probably contorted to fit current Metaphysical Synthesist jargon, he tossed it aside.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll have enough trouble navigating this boat without extra mass.”
Leswick shook his head sadly, swung open the airlock hatch, and stepped in. From somewhere deep in the ship came the rumblings of an approaching explosion, and the computer’s audio offered a confusing burst of helpful suggestions, concluding with the flat statement, “Safest procedure is to abandon ship.”
The deckhand climbed in after Leswick, and Kilbourne followed him, yanking down the cord that sealed the lock. He strapped himself down on the pneumochair before the control panels, while the other two men climbed into waiting acceleration cradles just behind him.
Kilbourne suddenly began to sweat. He had hoped to be piloting David Loder and a cargo of precious drugs; that was down the drain, and instead he was saving a more-or-less worthless metaphysician, a clod of a deckhand, and himself. The other two certainly weren’t as important as Loder and the drugs, and Kilbourne had never evaluated his own importance to the universe as particularly high.
But now it was no longer a matter of utility and importance. Emphasis had shifted, and it was now a much more elemental matter. Three lives—including his own—lay in his hands. And he had never piloted any sort of spaceship before.
Driblets of sweat poured down from his scalp, pasting together the stubby spikes of his close-cropped hair.
“We’d better take off,” Leswick said nervously. “The ship may blow any second. Is there any problem?”
“None at all,” Kilbourne forced himself to say. “I’ve got the thing well under control.”
And to his surprise he realized it was so. Channels of his mind that he had thought long closed by rust suddenly opened brightly. He had never piloted a ship, true enough—but he had basic knowledge, a grasp of theory. He knew how a spaceship worked and why, and he had more than enough math to compute a sort of an orbit. Maybe it wouldn’t be a slick, professional job, but it would get them there. The thing was well under control.
With icy-calm fingers, he reached up and gripped the lever that would expel tire lifeship from the mother vessel.
HE took a fix on the planet and began bringing the lifeship in on manual, feeling like a figure out of the earliest days of space travel, riding one in on her ear. The orbit he had concocted was a patchwork thing, blurred and smeared from repeated erasures, but he knew it was sound and would get them down. They’d land with a bang, perhaps, but they’d land. No one had any right to expect finesse on the first try.
Leswick and Tarzan—that was Kilbourne’s new nickname for the deckhand, King of the Apes—had watched silently, craning to see over Kilbourne’s shoulders, as he had put together the rule-of-thumb orbit. The deckhand had stared with blunt uncomprehension, obviously fascinated by the doodling motions Kilbourne’s pencil made in its rapid flight over the chart paper. As for Leswick, the metaphysician had kept silent out of deference to Kilbourne’s apparent skill in a field in which he himself was totally ignorant, but he was watching with interest.
When Kilbourne was finished, he turned to the controls and set to work, guiding the lifeship in. He swung the small vessel in an ever-narrowing helix around the planet below, moving closer and closer until he could graze it tangentially and bring it to a landing.
The planet was one of a system of three, revolving around a minor unnamed G-type star. According to the charts it was an Earth-type world, habitable and inhabited. It had never been explored, though a survey team had come through the area some fifty years earlier and planted a rescue beacon on it without stopping to explore.
Kilbourne was gambling that the beacon was still there and in working order. The coordinated colonial forces were embarked on a vast program which would eventually see the planting of rescue beacons on every planet in the galaxy for the benefit of shipwrecked travellers; right now, they were about a tenth of the way through the job, after more than a century.
The beacon would be emitting the standard signal modulating a 30-megacycle carrier, and once they had landed it would be readily possible for Kilbourne to rig a detector by cannibalizing some of the lifeship’s works. The problem now was to land the ship—and that wasn’t necessarily so easy.
Kilbourne glanced back at the men in the acceleration cradles. Tarzan was rocking placidly from side to side, probably deriving some sort of sensuous thrill from the motion. Leswick was more nervously alert, peering at the control-board with beady eyes.
Kilbourne smiled tensely. Their lives were in his hands. They were completely unequipped for saving themselves. What did they know of orbits and thrust, of jet compensation and mass ratios? Nothing. They were utterly dependent on whatever booklearning Kilbourne had accumulated, in combination with the applications his mind could devise to make use of it logically. Leswick and the big deckhand were just dead weight on this trip, Kilbourne thought. Just dead weight.
WHEN they were thirty minutes out from the Clyde Bohmer, the air in the cabin grew suddenly warm, and Kilbourne heard the conditioners straining frantically to hold the temperature down. Impelled by a sudden thought, he flicked on the rear viewscreen.
The crude screen lit and wavered crazily for a moment, then focussed. Against the blackness of space there was a sprinkling of tiny bright stars, and in the foreground a blazing new star that was listed in no Ephemeris.
It was the Clyde Bohmer.
“Take a look at the ship,” Kilbourne said. He pointed to the screen.
“Where?”
“It’s the star right in front,” Kilbourne said. “It makes a lovely little nova, doesn’t it?”
“God! What happened to the men aboard it?” Leswick asked.
“It musta been bad,” the deckhand said slowly. “The whole thing blew up.”
Kilbourne nodded. “That’s about the size of it, chum. That’s what these lifeships are for.”
“How much longer before we reach that planet?” Leswick asked.
“We’re halfway there,” said Kilbourne, glancing at the figures in the margin of his chart. “We don’t have anything much to worry about ourselves, now that we’re clear of the ship.”
He returned his attention to the job of navigating. The planet below grew nearer and nearer, and the cold tension in Kilbourne’s stomach was replaced with a sort of quiet joy as he realized that his savvy and his logic were going to get them there.
Who said piloting spaceships is tough? There’s nothing to it. Nothing at all.
The planet was close enough now so lie could see the irregular rounded shape of the continent on which the rescue beacon was planted. The chart gave him the location down to fractions of a second of arc, but that didn’t do him much good; he couldn’t navigate to such fine specifications. He fed the rest of his orbit into the automatic pilot, hoping they’d land reasonably close to the beacon, and unstrapped himself.
“What’s the matter?” Leswick asked.
“We’re about to arrive,” said Kilbourne. “It may be a noisy landing. I want to be in one of those cradles when it happens.”
CHAPTER III
THE three of them stood together unharmed outside the wreckage of the lifeship, and Kilbourne felt a certain satisfaction at having gotten them there safely.
It had been a noisy landing. The lifeship had ploughed into soft loam, smashing up its landing fins and otherwise demolishing itself, without much damage to its passengers except for some incidental jolting.
“It smells pretty good,” the deckhand said. He stood leaning against the ship’s hull, his legs planted firmly in the yielding soil, head thrown back. “Smells just like air—real air. Good place.”
Leswick frowned uneasily. “Isn’t it dangerous, breathing the air of an unknown world without making some tests?”
Kilbourne grinned. “We are making a test. We’re breathing the air, and it isn’t killing us. Risky, but it happens to be the only test, we’re equipped to make. Besides, the chart says the place has breathable air, which means it’s mostly nitrogen and oxygen and no poisonous things like methane thrown in. And besides that, what metaphysical suggestion would you have for going elsewhere if the damned stuff weren’t breathable? The lifeship isn’t ever going to move again, you know.”
It was all a matter of logic—and the metaphysician, curse him, just didn’t like to think logically, which made him a worse handicap right now than the deckhand. The deckhand didn’t like to think at all—but, unlike Leswick, he had a certain amount of brute strength that would no doubt be useful in the long trek to the beacon.
Kilbourne surveyed his team. Leswick was a small, thin man with graying hair and deep-set, apologetic-looking eyes. His blunt stubby fingers indicated a miserable mechanical aptitude, and there was something about tire wavering line of his mouth that seemed to explain why his intellectual interests had not been caught by the rational sciences.
As for Tarzan—Bill Dombey was his real name—he was simply a good-natured animal, topping Kilbourne’s solid five-eleven by nearly six inches. He moved with a gait that was at once shambling and felinely graceful; his face was broad and open, with thick, honest features. Dombey wore the traditional garb of his trade: a black turtleneck sweater, overalls, and a heavy growth of three-day stubble.
“Okay,” Kilbourne said. “I’m going to build a detector out of some of the leftover radar parts from the lifeship. We won’t be needing the ship any more, and we will need the detector. After that we’re going to find out where the rescue beacon is, and we’re going to go there. Got that?”
