The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (95 page)

Then, on the icecap, a huge framework began to come up out of what seemed a crevasse in a glacier. It rose and rose and rose. There was a square metal frame. It heaved up smoothly until it reared two hundred feet high in a waste of snow and ice. It was two hundred feet across. It was filled in, absolutely, by a shimmering silvery film which had the curious optical quality of an absolutely perfect reflector.

It waited.

Presently there were humming sounds in the sky. A wire-basket transmitter pointed skyward, sending a guiding beam. A dark shape appeared. It descended swiftly. It moved toward the square frame with the shimmering silvery film. It moved into that film. It vanished.

It did not come out on the far side of the framework. It went into the film and ceased to be. Another dark shape descended, and another, and another, and another…

In a somehow evil procession a space-fleet descended to atmosphere, and projected itself into the appearance of a silver bubble-film—and it was not. There were sixty vessels.

When the last had vanished, the square framework began to descend again. It sank down into what seemed to be a crevasse. Then there was nothing but a small and inconspicuous building on a snowcap, an ice-field, which reached for hundreds and hundreds of miles in every direction.

The space-fleet was not anywhere around. Not anywhere within a thousand light-years of the planet Khem IV…

* * * *

Now there was a vastly different atmosphere in the passengers’ lounge of the
Delilah
. The ship was back in overdrive! With returned spirits, they tried to forget the two dead men in a silent cabin. The passengers were sure that everything would be all right now. The
Delilah
was headed on for port. Oh, undoubtedly she was on her way to Loren II where she had been bound in the first place!

Meanwhile, there were injured to be cared for. There were too many of them. Those who had been only drunk were sleeping heavily. Some wept hysterically, remembering. Some—less self-conscious—turned from maniacal frenzy to a beaming, maudlin affection for all their supposed kind.
Iposap
did not make a man into a beast. It merely helped the beast within express itself. Now, relieved of terror and horror and dread and despair, they were like lambs. But still there were too many wounded men.

Kit looked at Brent with warm, admiring eyes. He had not only accomplished great things, but he was of the Profession. And that was a very great thing. Young Shannon came over to Brent, his wife following timidly behind him.

“There’s been nobody showing up,” he said in a low tone, “to tell us we’re back on overdrive. They should be coming in to explain that now they’ve fixed everything. Why haven’t they?”

Brent said: “They were pretending to be busy. Now they are busy!”

“Doing what?” asked Kit, watching his face.

“Trying to find out what I did to their overdrive—though they don’t know I did it. Also they’re trying to turn it off.”

“Can’t they?”

“Not unless they smash it,” Brent told her in grim amusement. “And I don’t think they’re that desperate yet. But they’re on the dizzy side! The overdrive shouldn’t work, and it does. They didn’t turn it on, but it’s on. And they can’t turn it off. But that’s not the worst of it, from their standpoint.”

He looked at Kit, but he felt a little pang of envy of the young bridegroom, whose wife touched his arm lightly and seemed perfectly confident and content. Brent had never had a girl act that way about him. He hadn’t wanted any to. But, looking at Kit, he knew that it would feel very satisfying.

“The worst of it,” he said drily; “is that it’s a different overdrive altogether. This is an old ship. It had a maximum speed of a light-year of distance in a week of time. But some tricks have been found out since she was built. One is a better set-up for the exciter-coils. It’s beautifully simple if you understand it, but it can’t be fooled with if you don’t. If you change the second-stage exciter just exactly right, the overdrive speed shoots away up. I made that change. The
Delilah
’s traveling a light-year every four hours now. It ought to show up in the control-room, and up there they should be starting to go crazy.”

If he knew spacemen, they would be.

* * * *

Just such inexplicable factors were enough to put the crew into a panic. With the
Delilah
running wild, out of all control and going forty-odd times faster than possible, the crew should be close to gibbering.

But the passengers were beautifully confident. Even Kit said relievedly: “You’ve made the ship go faster? Then we’ll soon be landing on Loren II!”

“We’ve passed it,” said Brent. “Some time ago. I could handle the ship, but the skipper can’t. He’d kill me if I tried to explain. He’ll never be able to land this ship by himself now.”

The last was true. If the skipper of an old-style Diesel ship suddenly found the speed of his craft multiplied by forty-odd—like the
Delilah
’s—and had only the feeblest of crawls—like the
Delilah
’s interplanetary engines—for low, he’d have trouble docking. Either he’d ram the dock before he could stop, or else he’d cut his engines so far offshore that he’d never attain it against wind and tide.

Den Harlow said: “Then where are we going, if not to Loren II?”

“I’ve no idea,” admitted Brent. “But I’m a lot less worried than our skipper. He really has something to worry about!”

In planetary drive, all the stars blazed. From a control-room there was light on every hand. Suns gleamed in a myriad colors. There was no spot where the eye could rest—when a ship was moving on interplanetary drive—where a bright or faint star did not glimmer.

In overdrive of the type built into the
Delilah
, there had always been stars straight ahead, which moved and writhed as the ship drove on. They seemed to streak away from the bow in every direction, moving more and more swiftly as they spread, but suddenly dimming to go out entirely. All about and behind the ship was blackness. It was a horrible, tangible blackness, and from the control room it had always seemed as if the
Delilah
fled madly to escape from a huge bag of pure darkness which forever pursued her.

The new overdrive was worse. There was just one tiny bright spot visible. It was straight ahead. It changed in brightness, and in color. Sometimes it almost went out. Always it flickered toward extinction and brightened again, but always it seemed that next instant it would go out entirely, and then the
Delilah
would be left alone in a monstrous emptiness in which nothing else existed at all—that it would be engulfed in a cosmos in which there was literally nothing but itself, and there could be no destination because nothing else was.

It would not be good for the nerves of an unprepared man to look out the bow-ports of the
Delilah
just now.

Kit continued to smile warmly at Brent. But her father protested: “But we must be going somewhere!”

“The trouble is that we may be headed anywhere,” said Brent. He explained awkwardly, “I thought I’d better install the new drive to jolt the crew a little. I was afraid they’d miss their engineer—and Rudl—and start investigating in the passengers’ quarters. I came to help in case they did. But they’re busy. I’ll go back and finish my job.”

Kit said hopefully: “May I come and help?`

“There may be trouble,” said Brent. “They may be hunting for the engineer.”

“I’ve a blaster now,” she reminded him. “You gave it to me when you disarmed Rudl. I could watch while you work.”

Her father said matter-of-factly: “She’s a very good shot. And as for the danger, if anything happens to you, we’re all dead anyhow.”

“We’ll go through the kitchen,” he told her. “There’s a door to the rest of the ship from there.”

* * * *

There was a woman in the kitchen, though. She was unskilfully preparing food for a child who stayed close to her. The woman said fretfully, “After all the terrible things that have happened, I do think the officers would send the cooks back!”

“They’re probably all working to keep the overdrive going,” said Kit gravely.

The woman sat the child on a stool and began to feed it. They did not want her to see them disappear into the working section of the ship. Kit rummaged for food for the two of them. She brought Brent a half-warm lunch-pack.

“We should talk,” she suggested. “I’d like to know about you.”

“You know everything that’s important,” he said briefly. “You know how I think things tie in?”

She waited, watching him. He felt her admiration and liked it. But he pretended not to notice.

“There’s been theorizing,” he said in a low tone, “that even overdrive isn’t the limit in transportation. On the face of it, it’s happened.
Vistek
fruits can’t be shipped from the planet they grow on, because cosmic rays reduce them to an unpalatable pulp. Nobody’s ever been able to make a
vistek
seed grow away from the planet Malden—and that’s on the other side of the galaxy.”

Kit urged him to continue.

“There’s one way it could have gotten there,” Brent told her quietly. “A transmitter. A transmitter of matter. In theory that would be instantaneous. But so far as the Profession knows it’s never been done. But
vistek
on Khem IV proves it has been done.”

“It follows,” said Kit sagely. “Of course!”

“A transmitter on Malden, and a receiver-transmitter on Khem IV. There’s a tyranny on Khem IV. There’s a barbarous empire out at Malden. There’s an emperor with an aristocracy and torture-chambers and an army and navy. Right?”

“So my father said,” she agreed.

“He’d have delusions of grandeur,” said Brent sourly. “It’s an occupational disease of emperors. He’d have ambitions to make an Empire that would include all humanity. It’s been proved that it won’t work, but he’d think he could work it. And if he got hold of a matter-transmitter, he could shift his space-fleet anywhere he pleased much faster than any fleet could follow it to fight it.”

Kit said matter-of-factly, “My father doesn’t think they would try conquest at first. They’d poison the air of a planet and kill everybody, and then loot it afterward. That would be to reward the army and navy. Then they’d attack key planets. Earth, for one. They’d destroy the strong planets which could make fighting-fleets in days, if they wanted to. They’d raid first—striking, sneaking back home by matter-transmitter, and then striking again. Bit by bit they’d whittle away the strength of civilization. When it was weak enough, they’d take over what was left.”

“And they’ve knocked off four planets right here,” said Brent coldly, “through a matter-transmitter that must be on Khem IV. They can bribe with the loot of worlds—I wonder how many other places they raid from?”

The whole concept was overwhelming in its destructive potentialities.

Brent saw red. But then the woman in the kitchen lifted her child down from its stool. She wiped off its face, saying bitterly: “At least they ought to let the cooks back!” Then she led the child out of the kitchen.

Brent said curtly: “Let’s go!”

* * * *

His personal affairs, and even the situation on the
Delilah
, faded into insignificance beside the situation only the three of them on the
Delilah
fully recognized. If this scheme succeeded, civilization—in terms of freedom for men—would be chipped away and chipped away until only an empire swollen with loot and armed past resistance would be left.

The two of them got into the tiny airlock that was the egress from the kitchen into the crew’s part of the ship. And suddenly Brent’s thoughts drew back from the immensities of galactic dangers, and he was acutely conscious of the fact that Kit was pressing close beside him. He knew that she looked up at his face in the tiny, cubicle. And he realized with unfeigned astonishment that even with so much more important matters in hand, he wanted very badly to kiss her then and there.

But he didn’t. Instead, he opened the airlock’s outer door. Then they were in that unearthly area of metal balloons held in place by spidery girders, and dim lights, and danger.

Brent led the way. Abruptly, he stopped and pointed out the way to climb across the girders. Kit followed him without fear. There were many small sounds here; the dynamo-whine, and the air-plant noises, and now and again faint clickings of relays.

But suddenly there were voices.

Lights among the empty spaces were few and dim. The voices sounded eerily, reflected so many times and so erratically among strange metal shapes. But there was a near riot in being. There were yappings. There were snarlings.

Then a deep voice roared. There was a crackling, rasping sound. Someone screamed. The deep voice roared again.

Brent whispered.

“They’re getting worked up. That sounded like a try at mutiny and a hand heat-beam ending it. The crew probably wanted to smash the overdrive regardless, and somebody had to be shot… I wouldn’t like to be in the skipper’s boots.”