Part 6

"Nuts," he snapped. "I'm not asking you for an explanation."

"Then why put it that way?"

"That's the point," he said. "I don't know. Something's all wrong inside."

"How?"

"Napoleon. Andrews. Frankly, I hate his damn guts. I've always hated the guts of that kind of moneybags. He walks all over everybody, buying what he can't control. Darned near theft, if you ask me."

"So?"

"Aw, hell! The little character has got something. I want to know what."

"Now it's him?"

Norton nodded. "Something about Andrews. I don't know. I don't know how or what or why, but there's something about him."

Alice eyed the pilot strangely. "Good or bad?" she asked cautiously.

"Both."

"Jock Norton," she asked quietly, "you've never had to work hard to get what you wanted, have you?"

He stared down at his fingernails. "Maybe that's because I never wanted anything of real value."

"Maybe," she agreed. "But what have you wanted?"

"Damned little out of life," he answered her truthfully. "Fun and games, mostly."

"And I suppose they came easy?"

He nodded. "Being a space pilot has--well, a certain egoboo. You find yourself invited here and there by people who have never been any farther out of New York than Hackensack, or maybe no farther out of Chicago than Evanston." He looked down at his fingernails again. "There's always women happy to claim they've slept with a man who has been to Castor, or Pollux, or Polaris, or even Centauri. A man gets his bed and breakfast and his fun. But--" Abashed, he let it trail off.

"So what about Mr. Andrews?" she prompted.

"He's been there, too. But his--well, somehow I think--"

Alice smiled quietly. "In other words, Mr. Andrews' spacing is only a means to his own advantage instead of being the end itself?"

"I guess that's what I mean. Andrews doesn't use spacing as his business. He uses it to get to his business."

"That's right."

"So where do I go from here?"

"That's your decision."

"I know. And I wish I knew how to make it."

* * * * *

She smiled at him sympathetically. "I wish I could help."

"Maybe you could."

She looked at him cryptically. "Not Alice Hemingway. I've got me a man out there who is combing space for all three of us. You'll have to make your own life and find your own girl."

"Suppose he doesn't find us?" he asked bluntly.

"Then," said Alice soberly, "we have no future to concern us, no decision to make, and no failure to measure up to or to account for to anybody."

"And we'll have died without having really lived?"

"Most everybody does. Few are content to lie down and get it over with. One lifetime is not long enough to content one's self. No alert, willing, intelligent human being can be content with _Thanatopsis_."

"I don't know it."

"I don't know it too well, either. Something about, 'When thy summons comes to join the innumerable caravan that moves, et cetera, like one who wraps the draperies of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant dreams.' Or something like that."

Bluntly he said, "It's nine days."

From the top of the ladder, Charles Andrews repeated his familiar refrain, "Nine days at a hundred per hour."

Norton turned swiftly. "Yeah," he drawled. "But we'll have that argument later, Andrews. Right now it's time to blast out with a distress signal again. They've got to know we're still alive, no matter what else."

"Okay--okay."

"So you fire up the infrawave transmitter and I'll pedal the generator, as before."

Norton disappeared below. Andrews went to the small panel and sat there watching the one meter, his hand resting on the one switch.

"Hell of a note," he grumbled.

Alice asked, "Why?"

"Can't send a damned message on this. Only make an identification call."

"Considering the size of this lifeship, and the fact that an identification call is all that is really necessary, I can't complain too much," she told him seriously. "What could you tell them that they don't know already? Could you urge them to greater haste by the power of your voice?"

Andrews actually had been thinking exactly that. Between the checkbook in his wallet and the pen in his pocket, Andrews had always been able to wield a lot of power. Men had jumped when he spoke, corporations had stopped their own programs at his signature.

His personal account would have covered the purchase of a spacecraft of the type in which they had cracked up. That he did not own his own interstellar runabout was a matter of a different economy. It was cheaper to buy passage as he needed it than it was to own his private spacer and keep it parked at some space port for his convenience.

But as Alice taunted him, Andrews could not say, aloud, that he believed his personal demand would bring help faster than the mere knowledge that human beings were adrift in space. It would sound as though he thought himself more important to the Universe than Alice or Jock Norton. He did think so, of course. But this was no time to insult his lifeship companions by saying so.

He eyed the switch distastefully. The meter was climbing up to the red line that meant that the infrawave transmitter was about ready to be turned on. Then it would hurl out its coded message.

In the back of his mind was a hazy recollection of radio code. He remembered that 'a' was a dot-dash, and that 'n' was a dash-dot. He did not recall whether 'd' was a dash-dot-dot or a dash-dash-dot, 'r' was dot-dash-dot and everybody knew that 'e' was a single dot. The letter 'w' baffled him completely but he was sure that 's' was dot-dot-dot. So the worst he could do would be to flub two of the letters in his name, making it come out A-N-D?-R-E-something-S.

* * * * *

That, he felt, would let the Universe know that he was still out there, drifting. The ragged codes might even cause them to hasten because they might believe him to be alone, or without the help of the pilot who probably knew code well.

The meter hit the red line.

Charles Andrews snapped the goggle switch up and down, then up-pause-down. He waited a second, then made it up-pause-down, then up-down. He started the 'D' but his faltering hand flipped the second dot in a jittery fashion.

Down in the guts of the infrawave transmitter was a code wheel, supposed to turn completely around for one revolution. Along the periphery of the wheel was a series of serrations, which in passing a fast-action switch keyed the output of the simple transmitter, sending the stylized code. The jittery flipping of the main switch coincided with one of the serrations on the code wheel so that Andrews turned off the whole gear just as the transmitter was keyed on. The power normally used for the energizing section, stored in local capacitor banks, discharged through the output section.

It was not spectacular. The meter just flopped back to zero, a fuse blew, and the cabin was filled with the pungent odor of burned insulation.

Below, in the pedal generator saddle, Jock Norton felt the load bucking, then it went off completely and reflex almost threw the pilot out of his seat. The pedals pumped with no resistance. He went aloft.

"What happened?" he asked.

He sniffed at the air as Andrews pointed to the meter.

"It shouldn't happen," said Norton. "What made the thing buck, Andrews?"

Andrews was not the kind of man who hides his errors, at least. He faced Norton and said, "I was keying the transmitter."

Norton growled, "Did it ever occur to you that if this gizmo could be keyed, it would have been made that way in the first place?"

"No. I assumed that the thing was made to be handled by people not familiar with code, and that if one knew code one could key it."

Norton growled again, "Ever think that I know code, and that if it could have been keyed, I'd have done it before this?"

"Now that you say it, I suppose you would have. But what do we do now?"

"We try to repair it," snapped Norton. "Do you want to try it all by yourself, or will you permit me to help?"

Alice got between them once more. "Get it fixed first," she said sensibly. "Then argue about it afterwards."

Norton nodded, but he was not happy about it.

VIII

It was finished.

Commodore Theodore Wilson eyed the stereo grid with distaste. The filmy white haze, marking off the volumes already combed, filled the grid completely and overlapped the enclosing lines.

The pattern search had been most thorough. The random search teams had cut curlicues and looping curves back and forth through the grid. Their coverage had not been perfect, by far, but it was good enough for a random search. The volume covered by the infrawave detector spacer was spotty, but adequate.

The equipment was still breaking down every five or ten minutes, still delivering a horde of spurious responses. Scoutships still were being sent scurrying back and forth to investigate.

He faced the grid unhappily. He was gaunt from lack of sleep, from hastily snatched meals, or meals missed completely, from chain smoking, from watching what had started as a chance to make a good mark turn into drab failure. Worse, a failure that in no man's mind could be blamed upon Ted Wilson. For he had found one lifeship, and the fluke would be forgotten.

So would his failure. By every man but Wilson.

Somewhere back in that vast black volume of nothing, outlined by imperfect mathematical concepts in a larger field of nothing, was a lifeship, lost. A tiny cold mote of iron twenty-odd feet tall and nine feet in diameter across its widest point.

Wilson tried to draw his mind from it, but could not. Hysteria crept in but was quickly subdued.

In his mind he saw her as he had last seen her, pert and happy, with her light spacebag on the floor of the waiting room beside her slender ankles. He saw her before him, taut with thrill and excitement, vibrant and alive. He remembered her parting kiss, and the warmth of her body pressed against him.

Alice had been filled with anticipation, wanting to share her excitement with him, but unable to share what was a brand-new experience to her of going to space with a man who had been a-spacing for years. A man who knew all too well how space could be boring, lonely, and incredibly monotonous.

Not like travel across land, where there is scenery to watch, and although a tree is a tree, no two trees are ever alike, just as no one mountain ever looks the same at two o'clock in the morning as it had four hours earlier at ten in the evening.

Not even like travel on water, across the broad ocean where the scenery is water, whipped into waves of some similarity. For no two waves are ever the same exactly, and there is always the chance of a whitecap or a surfacing fish. The motion of the waves is incessant, at some times as soothing to the nerves as a lullaby.

But space was always the same. Across the galactic reaches covered by Man so far, there is little change in the aspect of the sky. A nearby star here or there is misplaced, but by and large the sky looks the same from Terra as it does from any planet or any star within fifty light years.

Move a man from Sol to Sirius, and Canis Major loses a bright star and changes shape to a degree not noticed by any but a trained uranographer. Ophiuchus gains another unimportant star that no one would care much about.

But then, Alice had been thrilled from the center of her heart to the flush on her skin with the idea of taking to space at last, so that she could at least begin to grasp the immensity and the mystery that he had failed to bring to her through talk.

Well, Alice Hemingway was getting her young tummy full of space!

He was still swearing under his breath when the men came in to ask him what they should do next.

He eyed them sourly. Manning, Edwards and Wainwright of his own ship. Hatch, Weston, Allison; then others Wilson knew only by reputation and name--Morganstern, Cunningham, Wilkes, Thordarson, Moore, Silkowski, Themes, and Calcaterra.

* * * * *

They watched him quietly, knowing what he must be feeling. They wanted orders, either to continue this fruitless search or to abandon it. But not one of them wanted to be the first to speak.

Finally Wilson singled out Toby Manning, the computer.

"Well?" he snapped.

Manning shrugged. "Tell me what to do next and I'll do it," he said defensively.

Wilson exploded, "You know your job! Suppose you tell us all how three hundred ships could comb space and miss anything bigger than a hard-boiled egg."

Toby Manning started to open his mouth to say something. He was not at all sure what he should say, not at all sure what was wise to say, but he knew he was expected to say something. It was as well for Manning that he felt indecision, for if he had uttered a syllable it would have been blasted back down his throat.

"Space search!" roared Wilson angrily. "Integrated maneuvers! We might as well be a bunch of crying children, lost, and scrambling all over a department store trying to get ourselves located. Sure I know there are indeterminates. I know there's always trouble with space coordinates. Sure, it ain't like plowing a farm where you can follow the edge of where you've been last. But you, Manning, are supposed to be a computer, capable of plowing with the Law of Probabilities which, my math prof once told me, should include the probability that human beings will make errors and be generally sloppy. You set up the search grid and proposed the search pattern with what you called a factor of overlap-safety."

Wilson turned on Hugh Weston. "And you are supposed to have a bunch of the finest astrogators in the Universe! You and your collection of schoolboys, confidently walking behind the stereo and drawing pinpoints and hairlines to show where we've been! Nuts. You should have used a ten-inch kalsomine brush."

He paused for breath as he scorned them with his eyes, then picked Allison.

"That fancy doodad of yours, Allison--the famous infrawave detector and ranger! Did you ever get more than ten minutes of constant operation out of it?"

"Once," Allison snapped angrily, his face red and his hands opening and closing.

"Fine," sneered Wilson. "Oh, fine. Oh, hell!"

He looked at them all again. He saw them, this time.

"All right," he said contritely. "I've been off base. I'm wrong. Manning, what are the probabilities for error in the grid itself?"

"Commodore, nothing can be perfect. We had to approximate their position, we had to guess their speed. But we did put our search area out beyond the region where their chances ended. If they do lie outside of the volume of space searched, their position lies under a nine-nines figure against the computation. I may sound like I'm talking gibberish, but that's it. No man can make a perfect sampling cross section unless he samples every item. I would stake my uniform on the probability that the lifeship lies within the volume outlined on our grid."

"Yes." Wilson nodded. "Weston, can you add anything? I chewed you out, too, and now I want to back down and ask your honest opinion."

Hugh Weston shrugged. "We're far from perfect ourselves," he said quietly. "I'll put it this way. I gave strict orders to the men in the marker ships that if there was any remote chance they might drift, they were to overcompensate. In other words, running a channel through space back and forth leaves a man lost himself, as to his exact position. I had men marking the courses. Each run through the grid covered a cylindrical volume. If there were a chance for any cylindrical coverage to miss its neighbor, leaving a hole in the grid, my men were to move in and see to it that these errata were closed. But I repeat, we're not perfect."

* * * * *

Wilson said contritely, "Allison, I owe you the most. You snapped me out of it. Maybe I owe you the least for bringing that damned gizmo out here and tying up Hatch's entire fleet of scout craft. But Hatch would have been sitting quiet anyway, as it turned out. Anything to add?"

"Nope," said Allison, with a shake of his head. "We know the infrawave detector is no polished instrument. We're fumbling in the dark. But there was that possible chance that the detector might have worked in deep space where it hadn't worked in the interference field of a planetary system. We hardly know what makes the infrawaves radiate, let alone how they propagate. But we tried. Just as you tried. We failed."

"Just as I failed," said Wilson bitterly.

"Not completely," said Commander Hatch. "We did catch one of them."

"Batting fifty per cent. One hit and one miss."

"Stop beating yourself, Wilson."

"Beating myself? I--" He stopped, then spoke to Manning. "What are their chances of being in the same general region as that other lifeship?"

Manning said to Weston, "You answer that."

Weston shook his head. "We have no way of knowing whether the rescued ship left the foundered spacecraft before or after the lost one. Nor at what celestial angle. Nor at what speed. Okay?"

Manning nodded, then added to Wilson, "The answer to that, Commodore, is that the position of the rescued lifeship has no bearing on the lost one. Just as the turn of heads in a toss has any effect upon the turn of the next toss."

Wilson nodded unhappily. "And so we sit here and talk it to death."

"What more can we do?"

"We can start over again."

"Is that an order?" asked Hatch.

Manning shook his head almost imperceptibly. Wilson caught the faint objection and said, "Wait a moment. Toby, what have you got in mind?"

"If we start over again," Manning said soberly, "I'll have to reconstruct the grid. Because by the time we've covered the grid, they'll have had time to pass outside of the present realm."

Wilson thought this over. "Why," he asked generally, "don't we start on the outside and close in?"

Manning answered, "Because in starting on the inside we have the best mathematical chance of finding them. By starting on the outside, we must cover a vast cylinder, element by element, working in the direction opposite to theirs. No, that's not the right way to do it, Commodore."

"All right. Reconstruct your new grid, Toby. Hugh, get your gang together and compute the center line of the pattern within a half-inch. Morganstern, you've got a good crew of advanced techs. Turn 'em all over to Allison. Allison, pack enough men aboard that cranky crate of yours so that any part that blows can be replaced within ten seconds. I want uninterrupted operation, even though the thing only hands us spurious responses.

"Hatch, put half of your gang in with the random search team. No use using all of you to run down gas clouds and meteorites and places where there should be something the size of a planet but isn't. Yes, we'll start all over. And this time, Hugh, give us fifty per cent overlap, and get busy with Toby to compute the new grid on that basis. Can we do it?"

They looked at him. Some wearily, who saw him more weary than they. Some angrily, but Wilson was beyond honest anger himself. Some anxiously, who knew that Ted Wilson had lost more out in that black nothingness than a reputation, or a mark on his record. Some looked at him willingly. They were all with him, tired, angry, expectant, but all willing.

Weston growled, "We'll find 'em, damn it."

* * * * *

The room rumbled with growls. They were not schoolboys, thrilled with the adventure or given to demonstration, nor youths driven to the job of combing the unknown for their commodore's lost love. But they felt it inside and stifled it in low-voiced growls because they were not much given to bragging, either.

And Ted Wilson knew that if the lost lifeship was to be found, his command would find it.

Wilson's communications officer came in quietly. He caught his commodore's eye and motioned Wilson aside.

"Commodore," he said, "something I'm not quite sure about."

"Yes?"

"The hourly infrawave distress call?"

"Yes, of course. It's time for it." Wilson looked at the man's face and knew that something was wrong. "It came in, didn't it?" When the communications officer didn't speak, Wilson cried hoarsely, "It came in?"

The com-tech nodded slowly. "It started, but it was sputtering badly. Then it conked out cold, Commodore. Nothing like I've ever heard before."

"Like what?"

"Well, you know the code wheel runs in standard communications code, giving the spacecraft license, the lifeship number, and the general distress call, repeated over and over for three minutes. Well, sir, the license identification came through all right, but after that the code got awful garbled and spotty, and then the whole damned transmission just crapped out, sir. After about a half-minute."

"Fade?" asked Wilson in a strained voice.

"Went out like a blown fuse. Big blast, then silence. Nothing."

Wilson thought for a moment, then looked around. "Anybody have an idea?"

Allison scratched his head. "You say the code was all right, but then got spotty?"

"Yes, sir."

Allison looked at Manning. Both were involved in science to a high degree, Allison as an infrawave researcher; Manning as a computer. Both had studied the mathematics of communication. Manning nodded soberly.

"You don't suppose they foolishly tried to key the automatic transmitter?" he asked. "Superimposing a code upon another code would result in a spotty transmission, since the intermingled transmission bits would obtain only where both codings delivered a positive configuration. It might--"

The communications tech broke in scornfully, "The pilot of the Seventy-nine was aboard. He'd know. Nobody but a complete imbecile would try to key an automatic distress transmitter."

Allison nodded positively. "Can't be it."

Commander Hatch looked down at his feet. "I was in a space can once," he said. "They don't last forever. I--" He let his voice trail away.

Wilson looked into their faces. The cold, bleak fact was so clear in their faces that he could not ignore it. He was forced to recognize the fact that a lifeship is no spacecraft. A lifeship is a flimsy tin can, as spaceworthy as an open raft on the broad ocean, as spaceworthy as an umbrella in a windstorm. A lifeship was not intended for comfort, or for travel, or for use. It was aimed at a hope and a prayer that if the mother spacecraft came a cropper that human lives could be protected for a time, long enough to give hope of rescue.

In the faces of the men had been determination. Now the determination had faded. Left was only sorrow and resignation.

Wilson had lost.

Doggedly he said, "We'll loaf it out for the next hour. We'll go on as though this hadn't happened. We'll prepare for a recoverage of the grid."

They all nodded and left, but the step of each had lost its spring, and voices had lowered to funeral rumbles. Some even whispered.

* * * * *

Commodore Wilson swore at the closed door.

The hour passed with the slow interminable drag of eternity itself. It was the complete uncertainty of the result, the angering fact that not a single thing could be done until that hour had passed, and even then there was a high possibility that nothing could be done at all. So long as the hourly signal came in, there had been solid knowledge of the survival of the lost party.

This had been a sort of haphazard thing. There had been times before when a lifeship party had missed sending the signal because of fatigue, and had finally sent their signal late. Suggestions were always cropping up that the signal be entirely automatic, clock-timed. These ideas were claimed to be impractical since a timed, automatic signal only meant that the lifeship itself was still lost in space, and not that any aboard it were alive.

A full, two-way infrawave system would have been the answer; if a full two-way system could have been installed in a lifeship, still leaving room in the little space can for things essential to the sustenance of human life.