Part 11

He heard a howling noise between the clamors of the gongs. It was Bramwell.

"You're making a noise!" wailed Bramwell. "I can't have a noise! I must have quiet...."

McCauley spoke crisply into the transmitter, sending a tight-beam message back to Earth. It would be minutes before it was received, as against the less-than-two-second lag in a message sent from the moon to Earth.

"We were suffering from oxygen starvation," said McCauley briskly. "The plants in the air-system's hydroponic garden absorbed carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen, but not quite cent per cent. There was a steady small loss of oxygen in the ship, caused by the use of oxygen as well as carbon by the growing plants. This small loss should have been made up by the addition of oxygen to keep the volume of the ship's air constant. But it happened that the oxygen flutter valve became jammed...."

He heard an explosive sigh of relief behind him, but he carefully did not look up at Bramwell. Bramwell was very silent these days, and he practiced extreme self-control. He realized now that he'd let too many things bother him. But he was still bothered, and horribly so, by the memory of his inability to make up his mind to face the journey in space, or to arrange for somebody to substitute for him, so he'd had to be shanghaied. He was even more bothered by the memory of his behavior when he found himself in a ship off for a swing in to Venus and out again. McCauley and Randy ignored these past happenings, and Bramwell would never be able to bring himself to mention them. But he was very much ashamed.

The thing that disturbed him most, however--the thing that made him extremely conscientious and extremely self-controlled--was the consequences of not facing things and of trying to cover up his own shortcomings. When he got over his hysterics he wanted to get even with McCauley and Randy by defying them. But he hadn't dared defy them openly. He'd been peevish and ashamed and humiliated. To him the bronx cheer of the oxygen flutter valve had seemed a mockery. But he still felt superior to pieces of machinery. So when the flutter valve went "_Tht-tht-tht-tht!_" at him, he angrily turned it off. And the human race almost had to stay on Earth forever because of it. The three of them came very close to dying.

McCauley continued talking matter-of-factly into the transmitter.

"As a result of the jammed valve, there was a steady lowering of the oxygen content of the air, but the carbon dioxide content did not increase. The air was getting closer and closer to pure nitrogen all the time, but we didn't notice, because a person feels suffocated by an excess of carbon dioxide rather than by a lack of oxygen. We were all dying quite comfortably when the leak alarm went off because the air pressure was dropping as the oxygen left us. When the alarm went off, we found the trouble and brought the oxygen concentration up to what it should be. We think there should be no more trouble. In fact...."

He stood up and handed the microphone to Bramwell. Bramwell hesitated a moment. Then he spoke.

"I have to report that the problem of a stronger Bramwell-Faraday screen field seems to be solved. This particular accident suggested a theory. Quite coincidentally, the theory resembled one aspect of charged-particle theory. It led to an idea. The new screen has a very gratifying reflex action which uses the velocity of the flare particles themselves to increase the screen's resistance. The charged particles are tricked into defeating themselves. I will have a detailed account of the theory and the apparatus shortly."

Mr. Perkins, in its cage against the wall, burst into song. The canary began with a trill and went on to a warble; then Mr. Perkins essayed a glocken. He accomplished it triumphantly. Bramwell scowled at it from habit. But then he carefully smoothed out his forehead as he handed the microphone back to McCauley. He nodded at the tiny cage.

"Not bad," he admitted. "Not bad at all!"

* * * * *

The Venus ship got back to its rendezvous with Earth some four months and eighteen days after take-off. At that time, this was the longest space journey ever made by man. But it was not only the longest trip. As a result of it, the reflex Bramwell screen had been developed along a new principle: The higher the velocity of a charged particle, the firmer the screen's resistance to its passage. Since the screen could stop even the highest-energy cosmic particles, the effect of such particles upon living matter could be determined by comparing exposed organisms--human beings and all other living things on Earth--to other organisms shielded from cosmic radiation. The ship, too, had made some close-range infrared photographs of Venus and prepared a fairly complete map of the planetary features underneath the cloud bank. The length of Venus' day was established. The....

It was a highly successful expedition from all standpoints.

But Randy insisted that the most remarkable result was the change in Bramwell. There was no doubt that Bramwell had one of the best brains in the solar system. Even when they disliked him most, both McCauley and Randy had respected his brains. But after Bramwell found out that they'd never refer to the way he acted before and immediately after he was shanghaied, the fact that he was so ashamed of himself improved him as far as human society was concerned.

He improved so much, in fact, that by the time they got back to Earth, McCauley and Randy were not much more polite to him than they were to each other.

Which was high honor.

_6_

(As a brand-new lieutenant, McCauley had been the first man to ride a rocket out of atmosphere. As a major, he was in the first piloted space craft to achieve an orbit and land again in one piece, and he helped to build the Space Platform. But it seemed likely that after he made colonel he was likely to be stuck with administrative tasks and go on no more trips. There was the affair of the Bramwell-Faraday screen, to be sure, but that was pure luck. He gloomily expected nothing more exciting than desk duty in some deadly tedious minor base upon the moon. But it happened that the asteroid Eros--very small, very irregular in shape, and very, very eccentric in its orbit--was due to pass close to Earth again as it went out from the sun. It had passed within two million miles of Earth in the 1930s, and nothing happened. But now McCauley was looking for an excuse to be more than a desk Colonel. He added up Eros and Mars and drone rockets, and the resources of the Space Service and a certain amount of imagination. He came up with something the Space Service had believed was still twenty years in the future. He'd worked out a way to get back from Mars. So he was assigned to try it.)

The Personnel Ship of the First Martian Expedition was within two million miles of Mars when McCauley missed his watch. Everything had gone along as predicted, up to that moment. The ship had taken off from Earth and headed outward for its rendezvous with the tiny asteroid Eros. It burned rocket fuel lavishly to get the necessary velocity for the journey. Then it floated interminably while Earth grew small and far away behind it, and the sun dwindled and its heat lessened. Then Eros appeared like the tiniest pinpoint of light, and the ship drew up to it and braked--it had very little fuel left for its braking--and touched, and then moored itself to the half acre of previously moored bales and cases and special drones that the asteroid had ferried out from Earth. The ship's crew went outside in space suits, each one separately tethered to the ship by a long cable. They began to check the condition of their waiting supplies. Everything had to be examined because it had lain--hung--rested for two years on Eros' surface in the network of cables and drill rods needed to hold it there. The condition of the stores was satisfactory. So Colonel Ed McCauley took a shower.

In its way, even that was an adventure. The ship, of course, had no gravitational field, and Eros was very small indeed. Of almost solid nickel-iron, it was five miles by two by three; and though it dwarfed the ship, its gravity pull was on the order of one five-millionth that of Earth. So taking a shower in a ship moored to Eros was something special. It meant holding fast to handholds in a furious fan-made gale that blew water against one and then blew it off and to a water collector where it could be filtered and sterilized and pumped around to the showerhead again. It was quite different from a bath on Earth, but McCauley was much refreshed. He toweled himself and put on his ship clothes again--and his watch was gone from the pocket he'd put it in.

It made no sense at all.

He was still looking for the watch in every corner of the compartment outside the shower tank, when Major Randy Hall came in, propelling himself in that extremely unlikely fashion which has to be used in zero gravity.

"Randy," said McCauley vexedly, "I've lost my watch."

"I lost mine a week ago," said Randy. He caught a handhold and pulled himself to a sitting position, resting on nothing whatever. "Hathaway lost his the week we started out. Fallon told me privately that somebody'd swiped his wallet only a day or so after we started out."

McCauley swung around to face him.

"That's nonsense!" he said angrily. "It's lunacy! Who'd want to steal in a space ship?"

"I thought it was lunacy, too," said Randy, "until a few minutes ago. Now I'm more credulous. From checking supplies outside, it appears that some very fancy small instruments are missing. A case was broken open. Since we tied up here."

McCauley stared at him. On the face of it, Randy's statement was flatly impossible. Personal character aside, it was unthinkable that a member of the Expedition should steal from another member or from its stores. Nobody could use a stolen article in a ship containing exactly five other men. Nobody could sell stolen goods to his fellow crewmen. And nobody could hope to take any loot back to Earth. If all went well, the men themselves might hope to get back to Earth at some problematic future time. But every ounce of Earth-bound cargo would be scientific material, mostly microfilm. Stolen goods couldn't be used or sold or taken back to Earth. Money itself wasn't worth stealing. Nothing was. Many millions of dollars' worth of equipment now outside the ship had lain unguarded and untouched for two years in empty space. Nobody had stolen any of it before. There was no sense in stealing it now.

But somebody was.

It was a serious matter because of its implications rather than the facts themselves. The First Martian Expedition needed everything its members could give it for the safety of them all. If somebody considered himself apart from the rest, if one member of the crew was willing to injure the others by stealing from them, the situation was very, very bad. In fact, having a thief among the six was like a serious accident occurring to the Expedition's equipment. It would be comparable to a vital defect in the miniature atom-pile which was to supply energy for them to live by when they reached Mars' surface.

In a sense, though, the Expedition itself was the result of an accident of a different sort. The first part of this coincidence was the fact that some two years earlier the asteroid Eros had passed close to Earth on its elongated elliptical orbit around the sun. Eros is one of those rock and metal fragments which are found most often in orbits between Mars and Jupiter. Some people maintain that they are fragments of a planet which exploded some hundreds of millions of years ago, and there is some evidence to back this view. For one thing, some circle the sun in extremely eccentric paths. Eros swings out at its farthest between Mars and Jupiter, but when nearest the sun it dives in between Earth and Venus. Sometimes--rarely--it comes close to Earth in its passage across Earth's orbit. This had happened two years ago.

The second part of the coincidence was the purely fortuitous fact that only two Earth-years later Eros would pass even closer to the planet Mars. The two accidents added up to an opportunity, when McCauley added rockets and other resources of the Space Service. And the Service seized it.

So two years ago Colonel Ed McCauley had landed a ship on the asteroid, then close to Earth. He'd led a work crew which drove drill holes into the asteroid's solid metal substance. They made anchorages to fasten supplies to, and McCauley'd anchored the supplies. Then he took his ship back to Earth. On the way he'd passed other ships going out to Eros. They also anchored supplies on it. In one hectic month, the Space Service unloaded on the tiny asteroid all the supplies and equipment--some two hundred-odd tons of it--that the First Martian Expedition would need not only on Mars, but in getting back from Mars, which was equally important. Then the Space Service waited.

Nearly two years later, but now some months ago, the ship that was now moored to Eros took off from Earth. Enormous amounts of fuel were required for the journey out to Mars. No ship could carry fuel for the trip and the landing, much less a return trip. But if a ship made a rendezvous with Eros when the asteroid was close to Mars, it could refuel from the stores waiting on Eros. It could guide drone rockets from Eros to landings on Mars, carrying more supplies. The drones would not even need to be ships. They could be mere outlines of ships, with motors and guidance systems, their cargo lashed to their framework. So the asteroid would serve as a cargo carrier for the supplies the Expedition required, and also as the landing craft needed to put them ashore on the red planet.

So far, everything had worked out. Very shortly the first of the drones would be sent off to land the first cargo near an oasis close to the summer pole of Mars. Others would follow till all had been sent out; then the ship, refueled, would leave Eros and overtake the equipment that had preceded it. Its crew would recover the landed rocket cargoes, set up a base, be well equipped and amply supplied for several months of Martian exploration, and then have adequate fuel for the voyage home. More than that, it would leave a base that was ready to function, and fuel for return flights, for a reasonable number of other ships in the future. In fact, the passage of Eros close to Earth and then to Mars had provided a freight service that meant the difference between men going to Mars and staying home.

But there was a thief among the six men making the first trip. There was McCauley and Randy Hall and Fallon and Brett and Soames. Hathaway was the meteorologist who would learn all that was to be known about Mars' atmosphere. Fallon was the atom-power mechanic. Brett and Soames had their specialties, but all had been trained in the remote control of drone rockets with their loads of precious material. All were needed.

"Hmmm," said McCauley, frowning. "You say Hathaway and Fallon lost things, the one a watch and the other a wallet. You and I ... I lost an electric watch. It runs on a battery the size of a pea. I never have to wind it." He looked up. "Are you sure Brett and Soames haven't lost anything?"

Randy looked curiously at McCauley.

"Come to think of it, Brett asked me if I'd seen his fancy gold pen. That was weeks ago. He uses an issue pen now. And I think--I _think_ Soames was turning things upside down once, looking for some sort of gold luck-piece he carries. Yes. He did."

"I'll find the stuff," said McCauley, frowning, "but I'm bothered."

He looked out a port at the crew members on the surface of the asteroid. Randy followed his eyes. The four other members of the Expedition, in bulky space suits, worked busily in a landscape--or an Eros-scape--too fantastic to be real. All of them now accepted the view that Eros was an explosion-created fragment of something much larger, and that that something must have been remarkable. Nine-tenths of the surface of Eros was solid metal such as forms the core of all the heavier planets. Now, metal rods stuck here and there out of drill holes in the raw, glistening crystalline mass. Between the drill rods ran cables holding nets under which objects were tethered. There were drone rockets by the dozen, and bales and boxes and tanks seemingly by the hundred. They would drift away to nowhere but for the nets which held them fast. They'd been held thus during two years of unaccompanied, uneventful cartage from the orbit of Earth out to the orbit of Mars. Most of the stuff needed only to be sorted and loaded on the drones, which would take off under control by the drone-master keyboard on the ship. There was an enormous mass of supplies. There could be a loss of up to fifty per cent in transit without irreparable damage being done to the Expedition's purposes.

When Randy looked back from the laboring, space-suited figures outside, he was alone. McCauley had gone to the ship's small workshop, all of whose tools would be left in the base on Mars. Frowning, he connected a microphone and an audio amplifier and a headset and went back to explain to Randy. But Randy was no longer there. He'd gone outside to carry on as second-in-command. His business was largely finding things to worry about and telling McCauley, who made them turn out all right.

McCauley went purposefully through the ship with his microphone-amplifier unit, touching it here and there against the fabric of the vessel. The idea was perfectly simple. If there was a thief on board, he would certainly not keep his loot on his person or in his locker. He'd have a hiding place for it. The loot included McCauley's watch, which would not run down for months. And solid things conduct sound much better than air does. The ticking of a watch which can't be heard at five feet, in air, can be heard through fifty feet of wood or metal if the watch is in contact with the farther end.

So McCauley methodically listened for the ticking of a watch conducted through the metal of a spaceship. There was no one else on board. There was no operating machinery to make extraneous noises. Presently he heard the five-times-a-second click-click of his watch. He traced it to its loudest, unscrewed a floorplate, and found three watches, a very expensive gold pencil, and a luck-piece that was a gold coin some hundreds of years old. There were also three small and very expensive instruments that came from a smashed case on the asteroid.

McCauley put them in his pocket and went to the compartment that was his sanctum as commander of the ship. He pulled out the personnel report on one member of the crew. It was not believable.... Then he thought of something. He pushed the outside-communicator button.

"Fallon," he said, "report to the ship. A job for you."

He drummed on the desk before him as he waited for Fallon. This was a singularly unpleasant situation.

Fallon came in, still in his space suit. He opened the faceplate and grinned. He was an exuberant personality, this Fallon.

"Reporting in, Colonel."

Without a word, McCauley brought out the three watches, the instruments, the elaborate gold pencil, and the luck-piece. He picked out his own watch and the instruments and waved his hand toward the rest.

"Get these back where they belong," he ordered. "I'll take care of the instruments. Don't let anybody know they're being returned. Let it appear they've been found misplaced."

Fallon stared. Then he went white and licked his lips. But he said nothing.

"I found this stuff," said McCauley, "as soon as I looked for it. I knew you'd hidden it, because you said your wallet was gone and there was no wallet with the other missing stuff. You should have put it in with the rest of the loot, Fallon, if you wanted to be convincing."

Fallon stared.

"It's about as stupid a performance as I've ever heard of," said McCauley. "Why did you do it?"

Fallon swallowed. Then he braced himself and looked defiant. In a moment or two he managed a grin. It was a shaky grin, but he straightened up and then shrugged.

"Why should I tell you?" he said. "What can you do about it, anyway?"

"I can think of a few things," said McCauley.

"Name one!" said Fallon defiantly. "You can't kill me. You can't put me out of the ship, because that'd kill me. You can't lock me up, because you need everybody. You can't do anything! You might as well forget it! This trip was dull. I wanted some excitement. I thought there'd be a big fuss when things started to disappear. There wasn't. All right, I'll put the stuff back. But you might as well forget the whole business because you can't do a thing about it."

McCauley stiffened. Fallon was right. There wasn't anything he could do, in the ordinary sense of the word. He couldn't execute Fallon for theft. He couldn't imprison him. If he punished him in any way that aroused his resentment, Fallon could no longer be trusted, and any of the six men could destroy the other five simply by neglecting some essential duty assigned to him. In space, men have to trust each other and be worthy of trust in return. There is no room in unlimited emptiness for a man who arouses suspicion and antagonism among his shipmates solely for his own amusement. But Fallon had done just that. He was as dangerous as an atom bomb on the expedition to Mars. But whereas an atom bomb can be disarmed, nobody can disarm a man who chooses to play the fool.

Fallon picked up the objects McCauley had given him. He spoke with sudden truculence.

"Well?" he said. "What can you do? Just suppose I don't feel like giving these things back. I'm going to, but if I wouldn't do it, what'd you do?... You won't even tell the rest you caught me! You want the stuff put back without their knowing it was taken!"

"Yes-s-s," McCauley said very slowly. "That's right. I shan't tell the rest. I want things to go along smoothly, without squabbles or suspicions. But you want excitement, more than our job provides. You'll look for it in some other fashion now, won't you?"

Fallon said defiantly:

"I'll do what I feel like doing!"

"Yes," said McCauley, nodding. "You'll get your excitement regardless. You're as independent as a hog on ice, because you think that I can't do anything to stop you. Very well. I'll try to provide you with some excitement. You do what you please. I'll do what I please about it."

Fallon's eyes narrowed.

"You don't care what I do?" he demanded skeptically.

"I do care," McCauley told him. "You're the one who doesn't care. But I'll be able to make use of you somehow. All right; you can go, now."

Fallon hesitated, scowling. Then he went out. He was uneasy. He could have understood had McCauley threatened him, or flown into a rage, or possibly tried to appeal to a nonexistent loyalty to his companions or to the purposes of the Expedition. But McCauley had not reacted in any fashion that Fallon could understand.

Later in the day Randy consulted with McCauley.

"Funny thing happened," he said vexedly. "Fallon went around and gave Brett back his fancy gold pen. He said he'd taken it for a joke. He gave Soames back his luck-piece and Hathaway his watch. He explained that they were jokes, too. He gave me mine.... Did you get yours back?"

McCauley nodded. He explained what had happened. Randy blinked.

"But why didn't he just slip them back like you told him to?"

"He's worried," said McCauley. "I didn't threaten and I didn't reason with him. So he figures that I've something special in mind. So he wants to be on good terms with everybody but me. Now if I accused him of stealing, he could insist that he was joking and that he'd proved it."

"That's crazy!" said Randy.