Chapter 2

At the time of this chronicle the status of interstellar flight was very similar to that of intercontinental jet-plane flight in the nineteen-sixties. Starships were designed by humanity’s best brains; carried every safety device those brains could devise. They were maintained and serviced by ultra-skilled, ultra-trained, ultra-able crews; they were operated by the creme-de-la-creme of manhood. Only a man with an extremely capable mind in an extremely capable body could become an officer of a subspacer.

Statistically, starships were the safest means of transportation ever used by man; so safe that Very Important Persons used them regularly, unthinkingly, and as a matter of course. Statistically, the starships’ fatality rate per million passenger-light-years was a small fraction of that of the automobiles’ per million passenger-miles. Insurance companies offered odds of tens of thousands to one that any given star-traveler would return unharmed from any given star-trip he cared to make.

Nevertheless, accidents happened. A chillingly large number of lives had, as a total, been lost; and no catastrophe had ever been even partially explained. No message of distress or call for help had ever been received. No single survivor had ever been found; nor any piece of wreckage.

And on the Great Wheel of Fate the Procyon‘s number came up.

In the middle of the night Carlyle Deston came instantaneously awake--feeling with his every muscle and with his every square inch of skin; listening with all the force he could put into his auditory nerves; while deep down in his mind a huge, terribly silent voice continued to yell: “DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!”

In a very small fraction of a second Carlyle Deston moved--and fast. Seizing Barbara by an arm, he leaped out of bed with her.

“We’re abandoning ship--get into this suit--quick!”

“But what ... but I’ve got to dress!”

“No time! Snap it up!” He practically hurled her into her suit; clamped her helmet tight. Then he leaped into his own. “Skipper!” he snapped into the suit’s microphone. “Deston. Emergency! Abandon ship!”

The alarm bells clanged once; the big red lights flashed once; the sirens barely started to growl, then quit. The whole vast fabric of the ship trembled and shuddered and shook as though it were being mauled by a thousand impossibly gigantic hammers. Deston did not know and never did find out whether it was his captain or an automatic that touched off the alarm. Whichever it was, the disaster happened so fast that practically no warning at all was given. And out in the corridor:

“Come on, girl--sprint!” He put his arm under hers and urged her along.

She did her best, but in comparison with his trained performance her best wasn’t good. “I’ve never been checked out on sprinting in spacesuits!” she gasped. “Let go of me and go on ahead. I’ll follow--”

Everything went out. Lights, gravity, air-circulation--everything.

“You haven’t been checked out on free fall, either. Hang onto this tool-hanger here on my belt and we’ll travel.”

“Where to?” she asked, hurtling through the air much faster than she had ever gone on foot.

“Baby Two--that is, Lifecraft Number Two--my crash assignment. Good thing I was down here in the Middle; I’d never have made it from up Top. Next corridor left, I think.” Then, as the light of his headlamp showed numbers on the wall: “Yes. Square left. I’ll swing you.”

He swung her and they shot to the end of the passage. He kicked a lever and the lifecraft’s port swung open--to reveal a blaze of light and a startled, gray-haired man.

“What happened ... What hap... ?” the man began.

“Wrecked. We’ve had it. We’re abandoning ship. Get into that cubby over there, shut the door tight behind you, and stay there!”

“But can’t I do something to help?”

“Without a suit and not knowing how to use one? You’d get burned to a cinder. Get in there--and jump!”

The oldster jumped and Deston turned to his wife. “Stay here at the port, Bobby. Wrap one leg around that lever, to anchor you. What does your telltale read? That gauge there--your radiation meter. It reads twenty, same as mine. Just pink, so we’ve got a minute or so. I’ll roust out some passengers and toss ‘em to you--you toss ‘em along in there. Can do?”

She was white and trembling; she was very evidently on the verge of being violently sick; but she was far from being out of control. “Can do, sir.”

“Good girl, sweetheart. Hang on one minute more and we’ll have gravity and you’ll be O. K.”

The first five doors he tried were locked; and, since they were made of armor plate, there was nothing he could do about them except give each one a resounding kick with a heavy steel boot. The sixth was unlocked, but the passengers--a man and a woman--were very evidently and very gruesomely dead.

So was everyone else he could find until he came to a room in which a man in a spacesuit was floundering helplessly in the air. He glanced at his telltale. Thirty-two. High in the red, almost against the pin.

“Bobby! What do you read?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Good. I’ve found only one, but we’re running out of time. I’m coming in.”

In the lifecraft he closed the port and slammed on full drive away from the ship. Then, wheeling, he shucked Barbara out of her suit like an ear of corn and shed his own. He picked up a fire-extinguisher-like affair and jerked open the door of a room a little larger than a clothes closet. “Jump in here!” He slammed the door shut. “Now strip, quick!” He picked the canister up and twisted four valves.

Before he could get the gun into working position she was out of her pajamas--the fact that she had been wondering visibly what it was all about had done nothing whatever to cut down her speed. A flood of thick, creamy foam almost hid her from sight and Deston began to talk--quietly.

“Thanks, sweetheart, for not slowing us down by arguing and wanting explanations. This stuff is DEKON--short for Decontaminant, Complete; Compound, Adsorbent, and Chelating, Type DCQ-429.’ Used soon enough, it takes care of radiation. Rub it in good, all over you--like this.” He set the foam-gun down on the floor and went vigorously to work. “Yes, hair, too. Every square millimeter of skin and mucous membrane. Yes, into your eyes. It stings ‘em a little, but that’s a lot better than going blind. And your mouth. Swallow six good big mouthfuls--it’s tasteless and goes down easy.

“Now the soles of your feet--O. K. The last will hurt plenty, but we’ve got to get some of it into your lungs and we can’t do it the hospital way. So when I slap a gob of it over your mouth and nose inhale hard and deep. Just once is all anybody can do, but that’s enough. And don’t fight. Any ordinary woman I could handle, but I can’t handle you fast enough. So if you don’t inhale deep I’ll have to knock you cold. Otherwise you die of lung cancer. Will do?”

“Will do, sweetheart. Good and deep. No fight,” and she emptied her lungs.

He slapped it on. She inhaled, good and deep; and went into convulsive paroxysms of coughing. He held her in his arms until the worst of it was over; but she was still coughing hard when she pulled herself away from him.

“But ... how ... about ... you?” She could just barely talk; her voice was distorted, almost inaudible. “Let ... me ... help ... you ... quick!”

“No need, darling. Two other men out there. The old man probably won’t need it--I think I got him into the safe quick enough--the other guy and I will help each other. So lie down there on the bunk and take it easy until I come back here and help you get the gunkum off. So-long for half an hour, pet.”

Forty-five minutes later, while all four were still cleaning up the messes of foam, something began to buzz sharply. Deston stepped over to the board and flipped a switch. The communicator came on. Since everything aboard a starship is designed to fail safe, they were, of course, in normal space. On the visiplates hundreds of stars blazed in vari-colored points of hard, bright light.

“Baby Two acknowledging,” Deston said. “First Officer Deston and three passengers. Deconned to zero. Report, please.”

“Baby Three. Second Officer Jones and four passengers. Deconned to--”

“Thank God, Herc!” Formality vanished. “With you to astrogate us, we may have a chance. But how’d you make it? I’d’ve sworn a flying saucer couldn’t’ve got down from the Top in the time we had.”

“Same thing right back at you, Babe. I didn’t have to come down. We were in Baby Three when it happened.” Full vision was on; a big, square-jawed, lean, tanned face looked out at them from the screen.

“Huh? How come? And who’s ‘we’?”

“My wife and I.” Second Officer Theodore “Hercules” Jones was somewhat embarrassed. “I got married, too, day before yesterday. After the way the old man chewed you out, though, I knew he’d slap irons on me without saying a word, so we kept it dark and hid out in Baby Three. These three are all we could find before our meters went high red. I deconned Bun, then--”

“Bun?” Barbara broke in. “Bernice Burns? How wonderful!”

“Formerly Bernice Burns.” The face of a platinum-blonde beauty appeared on the screen beside Jones’. “And am I glad to see you, Barbara, even if I did just meet you yesterday! I didn’t know whether I’d ever see another girl’s face or not!”

“Let’s cut the chat,” Deston said then. “Herc, give me course, blast, and time for rendezvous ... hey! My watch stopped!”

“So did mine,” Jones said. “So just hold one gravity on eighteen dash forty-seven dash two seventy-one and I’ll correct you as necessary.”

After setting course, and still thinking of his watch, Deston said; “But it’s nonmagnetic. It never stopped before.”

The gray-haired man spoke. “It was never in such a field before. You see, those two observations of fact invalidate twenty-four of the thirty-eight best theories of hyper-space. But tell me--am I correct in saying that none of you were in direct contact with the metal of the ship when it happened?”

“We avoid it in case of trouble. You? Name and job?” Deston jerked his head at the younger stranger.

“I know that much. Henry Newman. Crew-chief, normal space jobs, unlimited.”

“Your passengers, Herc?”

“Vincent Lopresto, financier, and his two bodyguards. They were sleeping in their suits, on air-mattresses. Grounders. Don’t like subspace--or space, either.”

“Just so.” The gray-haired man nodded, almost happily. “We survivors, then, absorbed the charge gradually--”

“But what the--” Deston began.

“One moment, please, young man. You perhaps saw some of the bodies. What were they like?”

“They looked ... well, not exactly as though they had exploded, but--” he paused.

“Precisely.” Gray-Hair beamed. “That eliminates all the others except three--Morton’s, Sebring’s, and Rothstein’s.”

“You’re a specialist in subspace, then?”

“Oh, no, I’m not a specialist at all. I’m a dabbler, really. A specialist, you know, is one who learns more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing at all. I’m just the opposite. I’m learning less and less about more and more; hoping in time to know nothing at all about everything.”

“In other words, a Fellow of the College. I’m glad you’re aboard, sir.”