Part 2

"Get him!" said the Skipper succinctly. Gunner McCoy lumbered forward, his long, hairy arms encircled Moran's body. The Skipper pawed his graying thatch. "This is no time for reproaches, Mr. Brait. I told you to guard this man; for some reason you failed to do so. But now our problem is to repair the damage he has done. Or else--"

His pause was significant. But Moran's quiet, mocking laughter persisted.

"It is useless, Captain. Not in hours, no, not in weeks, will you repair the damage. Don't you see--" There was a feverish light in his eyes, a shuddering vibrancy in his voice. "Don't you see that I bring you the greatest of all boons known to man?

"Death! Wonderful, blissful death! Death that I have sought so long ... so hopelessly."

Those were the last words I heard for some time. I dashed from the room, Bartlett, Sparks and McCoy at my heels. We picked up the Chief Engineer. We covered the _Antigone_ from stern to stern. And our worst fears were realized. It was no use. The damage Moran had done was irreparable.

Russ Bartlett said, "There's only one way out. We mustn't try to penetrate the Heaviside layer. We must shift trajectory, pass Earth and remain in space until we get the shield generator operating again."

And Chief Lester said somberly, "Have you forgotten the trajectory you planned, Lieutenant Bartlett?"

"The trajectory?"

"I thought it was unusual," rumbled the engineer, "when you called it down to me. It's paper-thin, balanced on a knife-edge between counter-gravitations. If we try to shift course now, we'll tear the ship into shreds!"

I knew, now, why Moran had come up with such a ready answer when the computer failed. He had planned well. He had deliberately forced us into this trajectory from which there was no escape.

* * * * *

Back on the bridge, we found Captain McNeally pacing the deck like a caged cat. Moran was silent, watchful intent, with an unholy gleam of justification lighting his curious eyes. The skipper looked up hopefully as we entered.

"Well, gentlemen?"

Bartlett shook his head.

McNeally was silent for a long moment. His glance roved the smart, glistening interior of the _Antigone's_ control room. I knew exactly what he was thinking. It was too bad that this smooth perfection, this finest ship built by master craftsmen, should become a brief, winking flame in the atmospheric borders of Earth.

And it was tough that we must all go out together like this. Through no fault of our own. Through the machinations of a space-mad castaway. He turned to me. "Lieutenant Brait, you and Sparks will go to the radio turret. Send a complete report to the Earth authorities. Tell them--" He gulped. "Tell them why the--the _Antigone_ will not come in."

I said, "Aye, aye, sir!" mechanically, and started for the door. But Sparks stopped me.

"Ain't you gonna tell 'em what we learned?"

"Eh?"

"About _him_?"

He jerked his head toward 'Moran'.

"It doesn't really make any difference now," I said. "But--" I suppose my voice was scornful. There was scorn and bitterness in my heart. "They might as well know that the man who has condemned us all to death is--or was--one of Earth's greatest scientists. Had he not become a raving lunatic his genius could have stemmed this disaster."

McNeally said, "What's that, Lieutenant? What do you mean?"

"I mean this man's name is not 'Paul Moran'--"

"Names," murmured Moran gently. "What difference does a name make? When one has had thousands of names."

"His name," I continued, "is John Cartaphilus!"

Bartlett said, "Cartaphilus!" In a leap he was at our strange guest's side, his voice eager. "Then he will--he _must_--help us!

"Cartaphilus, listen to me! Of all men, only you have the genius to devise some way of escaping this peril! You've been mad, sir! Insane from your privations! But now I beg that you cast aside this madness, come to our rescue!"

Moran--or Cartaphilus--brushed his hand aside. A dreamy look was in his eyes.

"Death at last!" he whispered. "Oh, sweet boon of mankind--death! I who have suffered so long, waited such a long time--"

"Can't you hear me, man? Snap out of it! Time is growing short. In a half hour, maybe less, we'll nose into the H-layer. And then--Please, sir!"

But there was no reply. Captain McNeally looked at me uncertainly. "Are you sure, Brait?"

"Positive. I forwarded a description to Bender at L.I. He said Cartaphilus has been missing for a year and a half. He fled Earth because of a scandal. It seems--"

"Never mind that now." McNeally confronted the insane scientist. "Mr. Cartaphilus, you must help us out of this jam! We're not thinking only of ourselves, but of the mothers and children waiting for us on Earth. And of the future of space-travel. If the _Antigone_, the finest ship ever built, blows out in the H-layer, it will strike a heavy blow at all astronavigation. Help us, sir! For Heaven's sake--"

Cartaphilus spoke suddenly, sharply.

"Don't say that!"

"Only Heaven can save us now," said McNeally simply, "if you won't. It's our only hope. May the Lord help us if you--"

"Don't!" The strange, thin man screamed the word. Suddenly he buried his face in his hands, and his words were an incoherent babble of torment. "Don't you see what you're doing? Man, have you no pity?"

He raised wide, tortured eyes. "The endlessness of time--" he whispered. "But I thought that, free of Earth, lost in the depths of space, I might at last find peace. But now you call upon me to save you in His name.

"I won't do it! I won't! The power cannot force me, here in the void. Two thousand years.... No! No!"

* * * * *

McNeally stepped back, torn between dread and doubt. He shook his head at us. "It's no use. He's completely mad."

Then Russ Bartlett cried, "Wait! _Listen!_"

For Cartaphilus, his face worn and aged, had bowed his head as though surrendering to forces greater than his will-to-die. And he was droning in a drab, lack-lustre voice, "Tell the engineer to reverse the polarity of the alternate hypatomic motors. Transmit the counter electromotive force helically through the forward coils. Use full power. Keep all motors running at top speed. Cut out the intercommunicating and lighting systems; there must be no D.C. current in operation anywhere on the ship. The cross-currents will--"

Chief Engineer Lester's face was a masque of blank dismay. He husked, "A hysteresis bloc! It might work. Nobody ever thought of it before."

"What do you mean?" That was Cap McNeally.

"His suggestion. Heterodyning the web-coils, so we'll counter the H-layer radiation with an alternating current of our own. It's just about one chance in a million!"

"Then take that chance!" cried the skipper. "Try it! Do as he says. And, for God's sake, man, _hurry_!"

Cartaphilus, his eyes drained of all expression, rose sluggishly. Once more he spoke, faintly. "It will work," he said. "It will work, and I have failed again. And all because I would not let Him rest...."

His voice broke in a great, wrenching sob. Then he lurched from the control room like a broken thing.

* * * * *

I never saw him again. No one aboard the _Antigone_ ever saw him again. For the next hour we were in a turmoil, rearranging the electrical units of the ship as Cartaphilus had told us. We finished our task just in time; scant seconds after we had thrown on the power we nosed into the web-like field of force which is the H-layer.

It was a breathless moment. Despite our efforts, there was not a man of us but expected a brief, brilliant instant of horror--then oblivion. But we were as wrong as Cartaphilus had been right. There was a jolt as our forcefield met that of Earth's shield; the permalloy hull of the ship sang and hummed and glowed cherry-red under the impact of that terrific electromotive strain, but we slipped through the barrier with greater ease than ever had any ship using the old style shield generators.

In our jubilation we quite forgot the mad scientist whose strange, last-minute change of mind had saved our lives. We landed. And sometime between the moment of landing and the moment when we remembered our passenger, he fled. Disappeared completely from the ship and from our lives.

Cap McNeally was nothing if not a square-shooter. He refused to take credit for the invention that had brought us through the H-layer. The patent rights were taken out in the name of our deranged passenger. The "Moran H-penetrant" it is called. All spaceships used it until just recently; until Cap Hawkins of the _Andromeda_ and the Venusian scientist, Jar Farges, discovered Ampies could be used as H-layer shields.

But afterward, Cap McNeally came to me, wondering.

"Why should he have wanted to die, Brait? I can't understand it. A man like John Cartaphilus; wealthy, intelligent, respected--was he really mad, do you think?"

I hesitated. I, too, had been wondering about that. I had gone so far as to look up the life history of the mad scientist. I had found several curious things. No man knew when, or where, John Cartaphilus had been born. All agreed that he was "remarkably youthful" in appearance. It was rumored that he had outlived a wife married in youth; that she had been an elderly woman when she died.

I said, "I told you there had been a scandal in his life, recently, Skipper. It concerned a friend of his, a worker in one of his shops.

"Cartaphilus was, and is, a genius, but he has a reputation for driving his men too hard. They say that on this occasion, seeking the answer to some problem that evaded him, he forced this assistant to labor for weeks, begrudging him even a few hours sleep each night.

"On the eve of the solution of the problem, this worker came to him, nervous, ragged, exhausted, begging for a brief respite. Claiming he was sick with overwork and fatigue. But John Cartaphilus insisted, impatiently, there was no time for rest. He ordered the man to get about his work.

"The job was completed. But the friend died. The doctors said it was a pure case of exhaustion. When he heard this, Cartaphilus' brain snapped. He blamed himself for the man's death, fled Earth. He became--or so we may believe--the wandering spaceman we found in the asteroids."

Cap McNeally frowned.

"Do you believe that story, Brait?"

I started to say no. I started to tell the skipper something else I had discovered while probing into the life history of John Cartaphilus. Something that, to my mind at least, more fully explained the oddness of our erstwhile passenger.

It was an old legend I had run across. The queer story of a man with many names ("I have had so many names," Moran had said) who wandered endlessly about the Earth, perhaps the universe now, simply because he had not let another rest for a moment on his doorsill.

Sometimes this man had been known as Cartaphilus. He had also been known as Juan Espera en Dios, as Ahasverus, and as Butta Deus. The Parisian gazette, "Turkish Spy," had in 1644 A.D. reported his presence in that city traveling under the name of "Paul Marrane." But men in general knew him by a more descriptive name. The Wandering Jew. The Eternal Jew....

But I did not tell Cap McNeally this. After all, it was a fanciful thought. And surely Moran--or Marrane, or Cartaphilus--was mad when he claimed to have met and talked with Simon Magnus twelve hundred years ago?

Anyway, when we saw that ad in the classified columns of this week's _Spaceways Weekly_, and McNeally claimed Moran would return to claim his reward, it raised again the question in my mind.

Will he return? Or will he find, at last, whatever peace awaits him out there? In the vast emptiness of space, where the power cannot--must not--extend? I wonder....