Part 9

One of the course plots gave him a full twenty seconds at the lifeship. Anxiously Wilson tried to urge his ship on, even though he knew very well that the equations of time and velocity and distance provided only a single solution that could be considered at all practical.

When he caught visual sight of the lifeship, he estimated it to be no more than three or four miles ahead. His radar confirmed that. It was nerve-killing to wait as he closed down the separation, knowing that the enemy fighter craft were also closing down.

The infrawave chattered, "Wilson? How are we doing?"

Wilson told him what was going on, and Allison urged Wilson to brace himself. Allison talked steadily in a calm voice, knowing just how hard it was for Wilson to sit there, a helpless victim of a pre-set, mechanical program that promised a pre-calculated victory of time and space and velocity.

Wilson's human mind would not really be trusting calculations and split-time electronic measurements. It would demand that he leave his ship and run, that he take the levers and drive, that he do something--anything--except sit there calmly and dog it through.

Wilson saw the drive flares of the enemy, bright and dangerous, closing in from a distance of a good many miles. It was mere miles, out here in deep space where a mile was a meaningless, insignificant quantity. He could almost feel the immensity of space around him in comparison to the awful closeness of danger.

* * * * *

Wilson had expected that at least those aboard the lifeship would be peering out of the observation port. He put himself in their place and knew he would have been scanning the dead and merciless sky for the first sight of a flare. But as his tender crept up alongside the lifeship with maddening slowness, there was no sign of life aboard.

It took whole seconds to match the final few yards per second per second of decelaration against the free-flight velocity of the lifeship. Then it took more dragging seconds to urge the tender in an alongside course that brought lifeship and tender port to port.

They matched, and Wilson hit the lever that powered the annular magnet that snapped the two space-locks together hard enough to compress the bellows into an air-seal.

He was at the space lock before the two ships had really settled together. He was spinning the hand wheel, then clutching at the fast-escape lever of the lifeship.

"Hike!" he bellowed, as the lifeship lock opened. "Hike! We've got twenty seconds before--"

His voice stopped dead, his heart faltered a beat, and his mind rebelled at the shock of what he saw.

Charles Andrews was lying on one bunk, his bleeding hands staining the blanket. His breath was shallow and regular, but he was wheezing with every breath. It was the sound made by someone who has lain far too long in a semi-coma, until nervous system and automatic reactions have become so dulled that phlegm in the throat does not produce a cough.

Jock Norton lay on his back with his eyes not quite closed, but all that was visible was the whites below the iris because his eyes were turned up. His right hand dangled to the floor beside the bunk, his left arm lay limply around the shoulders of the girl.

Alice's face was buried on Norton's shoulder, her left arm flopped loose across Norton's chest. Her right was trapped beneath her.

As Wilson looked, Norton's shallow breath clogged and he began what would have been a wallop of a cough, but his breath did not waver. His clogged windpipe kept making little soggy noises as the wind-stream changed in and out and in and out.

On the floor a few inches away from Jock Norton's hands was a bottle of capsules.

"Hadamite!" breathed Ted Wilson helplessly.

Hadamite, the synthetic drug, at once a curse and a blessing. A blessing to a sufferer, but a curse to one who finds the false world of self-satisfaction more pleasant than the work and worry and alternate periods of happiness and grief of reality.

Under hadamite, the slightest ambition becomes pleasantly real, desire becomes accomplishment, doubts disappear, and fears are overcome. And under hadamite life becomes so desirable that the mind refuses to return to reality. With an overdose, the mind accomplishes its aims, finds full satisfaction, then lies down to that final sleep with the complete knowledge that everything has been done, and that there are no more worlds to conquer.

Wilson rushed to the cabinet and scrabbled among the bottles and boxes there until he found the antidote. He filled the dropper on his way across the cabin and pushed the end into Norton's mouth with one hand while he levered Alice over on her back with the other. He discharged the contents of the dropper into Jock Norton's mouth, refilled it, and squirted another load between Alice's slack lips.

Brutally he pushed down and up, down and up on their chests until he heard the sogginess slurp down their throats.

Then he slugged Charles Andrews in the same way.

"Twenty damned seconds!" he snarled; in bitter realization that it would take him longer than that to carry one of them into his tender, let alone all three.

* * * * *

He was standing there in the middle of the cabin, his mouth set hard and his mind whirling with the futility of it, when Viggon Sarri's one-man fighter group closed down and clamped onto the hull. Wilson was cursing fervently when he felt those forces close down.

The cabin floor surged gently as a sideward vector of acceleration of Viggon Sarri's task force was applied.

Ted Wilson picked up the fallen bottle of hadamite capsules and contemplated them sourly. He might have done better by not bothering with the antidote.

He had failed completely.

He had come aboard, only to find his girl in the arms of the pilot, all of them doped and heading for a painless death. He had prevented them from dying, but had kept them alive only to meet some unknown future at the hands of an unknown enemy.

Wilson hurled the bottle of hadamite capsules against the wall where the first searing circle of a cutter was beginning to come through.

He was shaking his fist defiantly at the wall when Viggon Sarri and his two lieutenants came through to meet their first Earthman face to face....

In the commander's quarters aboard the flagship of the alien task force to which Ted Wilson and the three unconscious occupants of the lifeship had been removed, Viggon Sarri faced the Earthman. He spoke to Wilson directly, but his voice was picked up by a microphone. Each word he spoke went into the monster logic computer in Linus Brein's ship, and returned to a loud-speaker that reduced Viggon Sarri's inflections and tones to a tinny mechanical reproduction in the Terran tongue.

"Please relax," he said, "and understand that we want only information."

Wilson was alone now. The others had been placed under a doctor's care.

"After which we get what?" Wilson demanded belligerently.

Viggon Sarri's voice was harsh, but it came through the loud-speaker in a flat monotone. "Whatever course your race prefers to take!"

"How's that?" asked Wilson.

"Your future is up to you."

"Seems to me you've been calling all the tricks."

Viggon Sarri nodded. "We hold every trump but one," he said. "We could conquer you by force, or we could annex you as a subject race. We could infiltrate you by various economic means. Or we could possibly reduce you by attrition to a chaotic condition. But we probably could never muster enough numerical strength to subdue you completely and make it last."

"Huh?"

Viggon Sarri nodded. "Regin Naylo, here, proposed that we attack and conquer by force, not being experienced enough to realize that such a course breeds everlasting resentment and eternal revolt. You'd fight to the last, and those of you who were not exterminated would hide and plot revolt until one day you'd rise to displace our rule. Faren Twill, over there, suggested a form of benevolent protectorate which would only breed contempt. You'd quietly learn everything you could learn from us, then coldly turn on us and carry battle to us."

"Probably."

Viggon Sarri nodded. "On the other hand, progress across the Galaxy would be halted because we'd both be so busy fighting one another that there would be little effort left over for the vast and endless program of expanding across the countless stars."

"Well?" Wilson shrugged. "It seems to me you're still calling the cards."

"We've called our last card, Commodore Wilson. From here on, as I said, what happens in the future is up to you, and yours. Resent us, and progress will stop. Join us as equals, and we can work together as we spread from star to star--and I daresay there are enough stellar systems to keep us from stepping on one another's toes." Viggon Sarri smiled at his two lieutenants. "We have much to learn from one another, Wilson. We can teach you patience and logic, and from you we can learn tenacity and determination."

* * * * *

A member of Viggon Sarri's crew came into the room and spoke quietly into his commander's ear in his native Bradian. He spoke in too low a voice for it to be picked up by the microphone.

Viggon said, "You'll be glad to know that your friends are all three conscious, Commodore Wilson."

"Alice is all right?" Wilson cried.

"This man will take you to see her," Viggon Sarri smiled.

Wilson headed for the door behind the orderly as fast as he could. By the time the orderly had reached the portal, Wilson was almost on the Bradian's heels.

Viggon Sarri turned to his two lieutenants and said, "We can learn much from these Earthmen. Eagerness, for instance. Eagerness--and emotional love." He looked at his hands, flexing them outward, then inward. He was thoughtful for some time before he said, "Lay a course to Sol, Naylo. We'll take them all home. And you, Twill, see if you can connect with Brade on a person-to-person private channel. I'd like to talk to Valdya. Maybe she's as lonesome as I am now."