Part 9

Farradyne awoke to the pressure of about one-gravity and began to wonder how far the Lancaster had carried him under its jury-rigged drive. His watch said that fourteen hours had passed since weightlessness had come, but this was no good for an estimate of distance.

The whole thing was incomprehensible to him. Interstellar travel in a matter of hours made his mind reel, and the idea of installing a gadget that made it possible with the ease of installing a radio in an automobile only added to the inconsistencies. All he could grasp of it was that the gadget the alien race had must be some sort of force-field generator that worked independently of the basic reaction motor and therefore could be turned off or on at will. He gave up trying to theorize and began to consider the more personal problem of his location and what he could do.

He cracked the scuttlebutt and found that the ship was a-planet. He listened and heard nothing, not even the familiar sounds of a ship in warm-up. He cracked the hatch of his cubby and looked out. The small corridor was as dark as the grave, and as silent. Boldly he stepped out and looked around under the light of his spacesuit torch.

Bolted to the floor were four rectangular boxes of metal connected together by a heavy cable, and from one a second cable ran to a standard connector set in the wall of the Lancaster.

Like all other Solarian spacecraft, the Lancaster was well-supplied with a network of cables running up and down the length of the ship to serve as test connections and spares for this or that equipment when needed. So the enemy had re-connected their multi-line cable to one of the standard Terran connectors and plugged the cable into the Lancaster's cable-plate.

Farradyne could see nothing about the metal boxes that would tell him anything, so he left them and went aloft, cautiously. He doffed the spacesuit at the next level and hung it neatly in a suit locker, before he continued up the stairways.

Out of one porthole he could see the spaceport. It was broad and dark except for a bouquet of searchlights that drilled into the sky around the rim, a wash of floodlamps that surrounded one of the vast starships a mile or so distant, and the far-off blurs of bright red light that probably read "Spaceman's Bar" in whatever the enemy used for a printed language.

He left the viewport and went higher until he came to the salon. He peered into it from floor level, but it was dark and untenanted. The spacelock was open and Farradyne looked out of the big round opening across the field to another huge starship standing a few hundred yards from the Lancaster. The other ship was as dark as the Lancaster, except for one small porthole that gleamed like a headlight in the darkness.

The problem of where he was sent him to the control room. He looked into the sky, hunting for familiar constellations. The Pleiades were there, but warped, and Farradyne found that while he knew they were distorted as an aggregation of stellar positions, he could not remember their proper relationship. Orion was visible, but the hero had hiked his belt up. The Great Bear was sitting on his haunches, and the Smaller Bear had lost his front feet. Sirius no longer blazed in Canis Major. Procyon had taken off for parts unknown, while several other bright stars dotted the skies in places where no stars had been on Terra.

He tried to recall visits to the big stellatarium in New York where the lecturer displayed the skies as seen from various well-known stars that were within a half-hundred light years of Sol; but he found that he evidently had not been as attentive as he might have been.

* * * * *

Finally he gave up hoping to establish his whereabouts by visual inspection, and took his first look at the control room. He could see nothing changed at first; then he found a small auxiliary panel beside the pilot's seat, which contained a bar-topped toggle switch and three pilot lamps quite different in appearance from the rest of the Lancaster's standard equipment. He felt an urge to try the toggle, but fought it down; it was too much like playing with toy building blocks made of subcritical masses of plutonium, and Farradyne wanted to stay alive long enough to _watch_ the ruin of the enemy, not become a part of it.

He got his 20-power binoculars from the locker and went down to the spacelock. The near-by starship was as abandoned as the Lancaster, except for that one bright porthole. Through it he could see nothing but one corner of wall and ceiling.

A sudden flash of light made Farradyne drop to the floor of the salon and wriggle forward cautiously to the edge of the door.

A vehicle of some sort had turned in at the spaceport from the rim, and its headlights had flashed against his face. He looked at it through the glasses but could not see beyond the glare of the headlights; the car was coming swiftly toward the Lancaster.

Farradyne gathered himself to make a grand rush for his cubby, but stayed to watch because he could make safety after he was certain that the car would stop at the Lancaster. Instead, the vehicle swung around the interstellar ship and stopped by the landing ramp. Three men and a woman got out--

"Norma!" breathed Farradyne.

High in the enemy ship, one porthole winked off and the one beside it winked on, and a few minutes later Farradyne saw the same trio of men escort Clevis from the landing ramp and hand him into the spaceport jeep. The engine roared and they took off for the rim of the port.

Farradyne looked around the spaceport and wondered. It seemed such a cozy place, completely unguarded so far as he could tell. This undoubtedly meant that the port was a restricted zone and anybody permitted inside the boundaries was known and recognized before he got in.

The jeep disappeared, and Farradyne came down his landing ramp and scooted across the flat spaceport to the starship.

Inside the spacelock was a small ante-room with an elevator and some stairs. Farradyne did not trust the elevator; he turned and raced up the stairs, ignoring the warnings of his own mind that this was a completely foolhardy stunt.

Up and up he went, around circular corridors, past dark doorways and sealed hatches, until he was both winded and muscle-weary from climbing. He paused from time to time to orient himself by a quick look out of the nearest porthole that faced the Lancaster, until he found that he was at the right level above the control room of his own ship. The next level above brought him to a door that had a thin line of light along the bottom.

Across the door was a metal bar, but the slide-aside keeper, with a hole in it for a lock, hung open; the enemy had not considered it necessary to lock the door against outside tampering.

Farradyne slipped the keeper aside and lifted the bar.

* * * * *

Norma stood there just inside the door, waiting. Her hands were on her hips and there was a cold glitter in her eye. It flickered and failed as she recognized Farradyne.

"Well!" she snapped. "If it isn't our Boy Scout and Man-about-space who claims he doesn't know where hellflowers come from!"

"I didn't--but I'm learning fast," he told her. "Maybe you can help. Do you know where we are?"

"Your friends asked questions. They didn't tell me anything."

He looked at her sourly. "I wish I'd known the other light in the window was Clevis," he said.

"So you didn't know?" she cried angrily.

Farradyne waved a hand sidewise and it shut her up. "Stop making like a fishwife and think! You have a good mind--for God's sake, use it!"

She looked at him calculatingly. "Just what do you expect me to assume?"

"Let's assume that I'm what I said I was," he said. "And let's assume we're fighting an undeclared war against a powerful enemy. An enemy that is running down the moral fiber of our race so they can walk in and take over without an open battle. Does that make sense?"

Norma considered it a moment. "Of course. Nobody wins a shooting-war. But which side are you on, Farradyne?"

He grunted. "Norma, just who was your brother?"

"Frank was one of Howard's best men," she said simply.

"More of the pattern clearing up," he sighed. "They killed your brother, getting a lot of innocent bystanders in the process. They tried to kill me the same way, although I didn't have anything more than a crude idea to go on."

Norma looked at him soberly. "I hate to admit it, but I've heard this three-tongued language of yours. So that makes you right on one count anyway."

"We're not fighting only a well-integrated mob," he said. "We're fighting a complete stellar culture."

"You say 'we' so blithely. Tell me how you managed to turn up like the proverbial bad penny."

"I outguessed 'em, finally. I was right, for once--" He explained how it had been done in a few rapid sentences.

"We saw them catch the Lancaster, and wondered why you suddenly went dead at the board after dodging them so well. Damn it, Farra--er--Charles, you've done it."

"Done what?"

"Convinced me. You aren't here to play the friend-in-need act to get more information out of me, after loading me to the gills with stuff out of a needle that makes me babble like a marmoset. So you're here for what you say."

"Why did they bring you back here?" he asked. "It seems to me they'd toss you in the locker."

"That's for later. Right now they're comparing my story with Howard's, and after that we'll both be taken to their 'Detention Planet' in some other stellar system and kept as last-ditch hostages in this war. There seem to be a lot of people who got too bright for the enemy and they're all there, too."

Farradyne swore. "The stinking bastards--!"

Norma shook her head coolly. "That's emotion, Charles. I don't know exactly what their purpose is, but I do understand that this is a conflict for eventual survival, and for the rule of an economic empire."

"But--"

Norma shook her head slowly. "Put the shoe on the other foot, Charles. Suppose you and your kind had come upon these people--how would you see them?"

"As possible allies and friends, and--"

"Balderdash. You'd have seen them as possible customers, and people to be exploited, and maybe enemies after you knew their history. Their attitude is as arrogant as ours, and their personal justification is as high. By some lucky break they got to interstellar travel before we did and so they automatically place us in an inferior position; but they know that this doesn't make us a push-over. We are scientifically capable of discovering their interstellar drive at any moment, and why we haven't is probably just a matter of our not combining the right sciences. Our knowledge of medicine is far wider than theirs, for instance."

"How can you know this?" he asked.

* * * * *

Norma slipped open a few buttons at her throat and slipped her dress down from one shoulder. There was a tiny circular white bandage stuck to one spot. "They took a sample of me," she said, "because I seem to be immune to several diseases that should give me trouble. When I asked about this, they told me that they hoped to discover just what cell-change takes place when we take our anti-cancer immunization. That thing they have yet to discover."

"But--"

"Oh, they use our immunization," she said, slipping the dress up. "But they use it as an African witch doctor might use a typhoid serum. The thing you have to remember, Charles, is that if Terrans had gotten there first there would have been the same conflict, but started by the other side."

Farradyne shook his head angrily. "We're not inclined to ruin--"

"Stop sounding like one of King Arthur's knights. Men of sense and good judgment don't request their enemies to meet them on a field of honor. Instead, a state of war is assumed and from that instant on 'A' is looking for a chance to stab 'B' in the back because he knows that 'B' will cut him off at the hips if he turns his back for a moment. So both sides know that open warfare means total destruction and the process is one of boring from within, or gnawing at the foundation. But this is no place to get involved in a discussion of ethics, Charles. Where do we go from here?"

"If I knew how to run that ka-dodie in the Lancaster we'd head for Sol--if I knew where Sol was."

"And how about Howard?"

"I don't know about Clevis," he told her. "The thing to do would be to hike it home as fast as we could and spill our tale to the people who'd know what to do. Let's face it, Norma. They can mingle with Terrans because they can speak our language. But I couldn't mingle with them to locate Howard. I'd be picked up in a minute."

"So how do we get back?"

"Why do you think they brought the Lancaster?"

"Probably to fit her out as a bona-fide hellflower runner."

"Okay, then, we'll hide out in my cubby until they run her back."

"You hide out," said Norma. "If they find me missing from here they'll know that something smells."

Farradyne chuckled. "They're as arrogant as the Gods of Olympus. Part of their gang is still expecting me to turn up near Terra on an escape course, and the only smart thing I've done in this game is to be where they didn't dream I'd be. So we'll be where they don't expect us, and maybe we'll get away with it. Come on, let's hide out."

XXII

Halfway down the stairs in the Lancaster, Farradyne put out a hand and whispered, "Trouble."

"I don't hear anything."

"Someone's tinkering with something down below. See the dim light?"

"Oh," she nodded. Farradyne waved her back, and stole down the stairs and peeked cautiously around the corner. A man sat on the floor with his back to Farradyne, probing into one of the mysterious boxes with a long-handled tool.

He went back to Norma. "They're tuning up the drive."

"What do we do now?" she asked.

"Hide somewhere until that guy is finished."

"We can wait it out," said Norma thoughtfully. "Then if trouble comes at the last moment, I can slide out of here like a startled rabbit and draw the chase away from you."

"But I'm--"

"Stop being noble. You're not known to be here--you might get away with it. Besides--"

The sound of an engine cut them off. From not too far away came the rapid sing-song of triple voices, and, following the chant, the irritated voice of Carolyn Niles: "Stop that, you imbeciles. Speak Terran!"

"Why?" came the insolent reply.

"Because I don't want to get into the habit of speaking out of turn. I did it once and you know what happened."

"I merely asked when we were taking off."

"As soon as we get aboard."

"Okay. Okay."

Farradyne nudged Norma with his elbow and whispered, "The cargo hold. We're pincered!"

He led her to the cargo hold and helped her down the service ladder. He followed, closing the door behind him; then, before he snapped out the dim lights, he reached up and removed one of them, saying, "I don't think we'll have an inspection, but if we do, one lamp missing will make a shadow that might help."

Huddled down in the corner of wall and floor, they sat with their feet pulled up beneath them, not daring to say a word. They waited in the dark silence, listening, and occasionally tensing when someone clumped past the wall outside or near the cargo hatch above their heads. There were voices and calls and running feet from time to time, and then the humming sound of the belt-conveyor.

The hatch above was opened wide but the lights were not snapped on.

From the end of the loose-cargo conveyor came tumbling a shower of love lotus blossoms. They landed on the floor in a conical pile and kept on coming until both Farradyne and Norma were sitting shoulder deep in the flowers. The air filled with the thick, syrupy perfume. Farradyne felt a dizziness from the heady odor and wondered with horrified interest just what effect this completely unpredictable overdose of dope would have on Norma.

The shower of hellflowers came on and on, and Farradyne was forced to stand up because of their depth. Still they came, and he found himself swimming in them; it reminded him of treading in a haymow. The rain of blossoms ceased as the hold filled, and the lights went on briefly for an inspection.

Farradyne was propped neck deep, his head barely below the ceiling, and he felt quite safe from detection unless the inspectors put their heads down into the hatch to peer around the edges of the cylindrical cargo hold. He looked at Norma. She had scrabbled up a-top of the pile and was lying on her back with her arms thrown up over her head. Her eyes were closed, but as she drew in a deep breath, the lids went half-up and she looked over at Farradyne and smiled.

The hatch slammed down, and she said, huskily, "Such nice friends you have, Charles. This is--" Her voice trailed away.

* * * * *

Pressure came upsurging and Farradyne knew that the Lancaster was on its way to space and perhaps back home. In the midst of the take-off pressure she found his hand and drew it towards her, snuggled her face against his palm. Her free hand came over and touched his cheek, then ran back around his head. She pulled him forward until she could rest her head against his shoulder.

She kissed his cheek, a brief invitation; then he could feel the soft breath from her lips, parted an inch or so from his, waiting.

His voice was harsh, "Invite me to make love to you after we get this affair settled and find you a cure."

Her lips cut off his voice, soft and warm and vibrant. Her fingers ran through his hair and pressed his face to her. He struggled a bit; his hands closed on either side of her waist but instead of moving away, her body came forward against his.

Then, abruptly, the pressure of the drive went off and they floated free.

Their weight upon the cushion of flowers was released and the springiness of the hellblossoms thrust them up, hard, hurling them at the ceiling.

Norma's hands were dragged free of his head and, in clutching at him frantically, her fingernails raked his cheek slightly. The pressure he held against her waist thrust her away as soon as she lost her leverage. Her head hit the ceiling with a dull thunk. A sigh came from her lips--the sigh of an unconscious person.

The hold was filled with love lotus, floating free and spread apart by the tiny pressure of the ends of their leaves and petals; Farradyne fought them away frantically but only succeeded in digging himself deeper in the room.

Eventually he found the service ladder and clung to it, waving himself a breathing-space by pushing the floating blossoms back.

Norma's inert hand touched him limply.

Farradyne toyed with the idea of reviving her but gave it up instantly; let her sleep it off. He gave the hand a push and she floated from him in the dark.

The exertion had called upon his reserves and he drank in lungfuls of air that was sticky and cloying. It made him dizzy again. He scrabbled up the ladder and found the hatch, and opened it cautiously. It was as dark outside as it was inside. Farradyne pushed the hatch up more and put his face in the clean air and took a deep breath. Then, because he felt better, he climbed out of the hold and floated free in the air above the hatch. He grabbed a handrail and closed the hatch carefully with a breathed, "You like 'em, Baby, you breathe 'em until I get back!"

* * * * *

He sat in midair with one hand hooked around the rail and tried to think of what to do next.

After a while he prowled the cargo-hold level, floating along the circular corridor, knowing that it was not the safest thing to do, but preferring almost anything to a return to the hold.

An hour passed, and Farradyne was growing bolder by the moment. He had covered the entire lower level of his Lancaster and had stopped above his former hiding place, speculating.

He decided, and went floating upward through the ship until he came to the stateroom level. He floated around the corridor, noticing that the little flags that indicated that the door was locked from the inside were all down except one. One of his 'guests' did not trust his fellow-travellers. He wondered how many rooms, and which ones, contained the rest of the enemy gang.

He floated on upstairs to the salon and almost ruined his silent flight by trying to put on the brakes. On the divan lay a man, restrained by the hold-down safety-strap, sound asleep.

Farradyne floated over, and taking hold of the strap to keep himself from flying free with the motion, he deepened the man's slumber with a vicious chop of his hand.

He floated into the control room, where the silent and distant stars watched. Some of them were moving down, while the rest stood as immobile as he had always known them. He would have liked to stay and watch the effects of traveling faster than light, for the sky directly above was very strange in color and in constellation, but he had a job to finish.

He took a roll of two inch adhesive tape from the medical supplies and taped the unconscious man's wrists and ankles, and slapped on a length that covered the mouth. Then he went down to his own quarters and opened the door slowly.

A second man slept there; Farradyne slugged him and applied tape effectively and quickly.

That made two.

* * * * *

He considered the situation carefully. So long as his batting average stayed at one thousand percent he was in fine shape. The ship ran itself; there was nothing to watch; and so the crew did what all spacemen do: sleep. If he could catch them one by one--

He opened Stateroom One. It was empty.

That put a different light on things. Maybe this was not a fully-loaded transport. Maybe it was just like the average cargo-haul with only a couple of passengers.

He opened Stateroom Two and found it empty.

That sort of proved it. He opened Stateroom Three and found a man asleep in the bunk. He was stirring as Farradyne scanned the room, and he moved just as Farradyne launched himself across the cabin. Haste ruined his aim and his down-slashing hand clipped the enemy on the skull instead of hitting him alongside the ear. The man grunted and swung out blindly, hitting Farradyne and moving him up and away. Farradyne caught the upright of the bunk and stayed his free flight, levered himself around and swung again.

The enemy parried the blow and then let out a triple-tone roar. Farradyne pulled himself down and around, then kicked out with both feet, catching the enemy in the face and chest. The force drove the enemy deep into the mattress, from which he rebounded to fold up over the hold-down strap and flop up and down, limp, an inert mass caught between two springs. The same force drove Farradyne toward the open door.

His aim was still bad; his outsweeping hand caught the leading edge of the door and he and it swung on the hinges until he came flat against the wall behind the door. Then he fought his body around and came out of the stateroom feet first.

He caught at the handrail and stabilized his flight, then took notice of his surroundings.

A door down the hall opened and a man came sailing out. He caught sight of Farradyne and launched himself down the hall at the spaceman. Farradyne met him with a slash, which was parried by a block of the man's forearm against Farradyne's wrist. It stopped the enemy's flight, and tore Farradyne's hold loose.

Farradyne let the enemy peer down the barrel of his gun. "Hold it," he snapped.

The enemy, about to kick himself forward, took a firm hold on the handrail behind him and retracted his feet from against the wall.

"You can't get away with it, Farradyne."

Farradyne smiled grimly. "I can try, Brenner. So happy to meet you again."

XXIII