Checkpoint Lambda

CHAPTER 4

The Golconda Ship remained out of overdrive in space between the stars—which was an oddity. Men, as a rule, have a need for the presence of substance nearby. The most nightmarish of all terrors is that experienced in failing, which is simply the feel of nothingness all around. Weightlessness does not cause such terror; for example, in swimming one has no sensation of weight. Being firmly enclosed, even with artificial gravity as in a space ship, will not prevent the terror in the absence of a firm belief that there is something huge and solid and comforting near, which can be reached and at least emotionally embraced. It is irrational, but nobody likes to break out of overdrive unless they arrive where there is at the least a shining sun, recognizable as such, to promise solidity and not less than one planet available to land on. But the Golconda Ship broke out where there was no solar system, and it stayed there.

It was not an ordinary ship. Cargo craft were never graceful. They should have been globes, for efficiency, if landing grid fields could have handled spheres and landed them right-side-up on spaceport tarmacs. But they couldn’t. So cargo ships were built in various bulbous, unpleasing forms, to get the maximum of volume with the minimum of hull-material and still be of shapes that landing grid forcefields could juggle deftly and bring to ground upright. Passenger ships were another matter. They traditionally followed the forms of fish—not for speed, because in space there was no resistance, but so they could be touched to ground with exit ports aligned with landing ramps and cargo doors with warehouses.

The Golconda Ship was peculiar in design. It had a shape that landing grids could handle easily, but there were unseemly masses of machinery built out from its hull. The ship itself was a machine for a particular purpose—probably excavation—and every four years there was a new one or a modification of an earlier one. It went out to space. It vanished. Eventually it returned. And then its crew—invariably the same—unloaded treasure past belief. Each crew member was a multi-millionaire, even to the oilers in the engine room. Each was close-mouthed. Save for the voyages every four years, they lived in grandeur while every human around them tried to cajole from them some clue about where they found their riches. And all of them remembered, from time to time, the original Golconda Ship on which there had been killings to weed out any of their number who might be talkative.

Where the Golconda Ship had appeared, there was no sun. There were only myriads of unwinking specks of light of every possible tint and brightness. The nearest would be light-decades away. This was the loneliness, the emptiness, the utter desolation of between-the-stars. It was this gigantic void which made the lifeboats of interstellar ships so nearly useless. Survivors of catastrophes in ship lanes have made port in lifeboats, to be sure. But not many. And those survivors were never quite normal afterward, and never quite unterrified.

But the Golconda Ship stayed in this abomination of desolation for a long tune. Its pilot had to make very many observations. But now he had luck. A very short-period Cepheit identified itself. The information checked with other data. The Golconda Ship was here! So, very deliberately, it turned. It aimed in a new direction. It adjusted its pointing with microscopic precision. If another ship had looked on, it couldn’t have noted the new bearing within a degree of arc. The time it would be in overdrive couldn’t be known. The nearest of companions couldn’t have duplicated its aim, much less the distance it would run before it broke out of overdrive again.

But there wasn’t any other ship. This one carried more wealth than any single planet’s treasury contained. Therefore it traveled secretly and untraceably, and there was nobody who knew where it was, and very few who knew where it was bound.

On Checkpoint Lambda, Scott thought very little about it as a ship. To him it was part of a problem. If he solved it, he would live for a while longer. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t.

Janet asked hesitantly, “Is it all right to talk?”

“Why not,” asked Scott, “if it makes you feel better?”

She descended the circling stairway behind him. So far, this area behind the walls was a service area. But below the cabin levels it would become something else. It carried cables to and from the control room. There were cables which had controlled the now-removed overdrive unit, and the solar-system drive, and waste pipes, and controls for the eight small steering-drives that pushed the ship’s bow right or left and up or down, and the stern hi appropriate opposite directions, in the only way a ship could be steered.

These lower, between-hull bilges, served yet another purpose. They were divided into tunnels leading down all the buoy’s length. Through them there could be communication between any two decks. It was a provision for safety. No disaster which let out air from any one level could separate the still-intact portions of the ship from each other. Unless the buoy broke literally in two, there would always be a passageway from bow to stern. One or more tunnels might be broken, and would automatically seal themselves off, but others would remain. Scott went on.

“We’re down past the cabins,” he observed, when passenger-service equipment disappeared.

Janet shivered. It occurred to him that the cabin where murder had been done probably hadn’t been tidied since. Janet would have thought of that. To change the direction of her thoughts, he said, “What did you want to talk about?”

He went on down and down the metal stair-way.

“I’m—thinking of Bugsy. He—would have killed you!”

“Surprised?” asked Scott ironically, “after what’s happened already? I’ll give him credit for one thing, though. If a man’s bloodthirsty—and Bugsy is—I like him to want to do his killings in person, rather than hire somebody else to do it. And Bugsy did intend to do just that.”

“But you—let him go free…”

“I could have killed him,” agreed Scott. “But I certainly couldn’t have jailed him. What else could I do?”

He stopped. Here was another level, with a door in the side-wall—it was metal, here—and two other doors forming the usual emergency air-lock. If the air in any part of the tunnel was lost, the two doors would close. If disaster was foreseen, every tunnel could be closed from the control room until the danger was past.

“Here’s the baggage room,” he said. “I want to inspect this. No more talk for the moment.”

He made sure the compartment was empty. He entered from the tunnel. Janet stood still, listening. The buoy was intensely silent, save for the almost inaudible sound of Scott’s shoe-soles a little distance away. It was a peculiar singing silence. There was something like the just-ended ringing of a bell in the air. Once Janet heard a clicking noise, and then the ringing sensation increased for a little while. It could have been a micrometeorite’s impact on the buoy’s hull. It was a tiny and infinitely fragile particle, no more massive than so much foam. But its velocity was enormous. It clicked when it struck, and there was a tiny speck of blue-white flame where it turned to rocky or metallic vapor, with a microscopic quantity of plating from the buoy’s hull vaporizing with it. There was no real harm in such things.

A long time later Scott came back. He looked disturbed.

“Hand-grenades,” he said distastefully, “in the baggage. Some of them have been taken out. I brought along a few for samples.”

He showed them to her. They were flat, rounded objects which looked rather harmless. He slipped them into his pockets. He led the way down again. He peered out into the hydroponic-garden level, where the air of all the ship was processed by plants growing lushly in blazing artificial light. Curious, he plucked some leaves.

Back in the tunnel he said, “Odd. They burn.”

But he immediately began to descend again. The circling of the stairway became tedious. Scott said, “I’ve got two errands. One’s in the engine room. I doubt that the man who posed as an engineer is still there. He was there for my benefit. The other thing is, I want to know where Bugsy’s men are gathered. He wouldn’t let them use the hotel deck. If somebody from the Golconda ship were to come aboard to check things, their piggishness would raise a question. They’ll have some place to be drunk in. This should be the engine room deck.”

He listened. He applied his eye to the crack to which he opened the door. He nodded to Janet and went in. He seemed confident that no one else was going to enter. She thought she heard a faint murmur somewhere and grew frightened.

He seemed to be gone a long time and she was trembling when he returned.

“I—thought I heard—voices,” she whispered. “I—thought someone was coming down the stairs!”

“When you were a passenger you didn’t think about such things,” he told her drily. “A wall was a wall was a wall. I don’t think any of Bugsy’s men—or Chenery’s—are curious about the holes and corners of Lambda. It’s more likely you heard the sounds of a poker or a crap-game. Which is what I want to locate.”

Then a door slammed somewhere. The sound carried through metal which would hardly carry voices, but Scott stopped absolutely still for long seconds. Then he beckoned to Janet and made a last descent. At the bottom he opened the door with very great care. Janet was right. She had heard a faint murmur. This was louder. In fact, there was an argument going on.

Bugsy’s voice, muffled, rose above the rest.

“But I tell you, that comet stuff is crazy! It’s all lies! The Golconda Ship men had him watchin’! He got aboard an’ Chenery knew him! So he knew Chenery an’ filled him fulla lies! The Golconda Ship’s comin’ here! We’re gonna take it when it comes—here! An’ we’re gonna be rich! What it’s bringin’ ain’t worth a million credits apiece! Not ten million! After we take the Golconda ships you can warm y’self with thousand-credit notes in a bonfire! Y’can throw it away.”

Scott listened. Bugsy was having trouble with his men. They were uneasy. Chenery’s voice came, perhaps more high-pitched than usual. He was scared. But he was placating. He was anxiously soothing.

“But look, Bugsy! The comets are there! You can see ‘em in the vision-screens! They’re gettin’ bigger! We’re runnin’ into ‘em! If we don’t move the ship like Scott says—”

Scott was amused. Janet watched his face. She was frightened.

“Forget the comets!” rasped Bugsy’s voice. “A scientist fella said you could gather up a whole comet an’ put it in your hat! That Golconda Ship’s comin’. It expects to find us close to the big rock that’s a marker for it. If we’re anywheres else it might get cagey and not land. D’you want it to figure out something’s wrong and go away, leavin’ us to get away from here by walkin’?”

There were rumblings. Someone said querulously: “We shoulda had our own ship to make sure if anything went wrong!”

Bugsy was having trouble with his men. Scott had accomplished that much, anyhow. Chenery was genuinely scared. He had no solution for the predicament Scott told him he was in, but he didn’t want to be killed by the Five Comets. If his terror became contagious, Bugsy’s men might insist on not being killed by the Five Comets. If they escaped that, they might insist on not having the Golconda Ship see through their pretense of normality. Bugsy hadn’t handled that properly—Scott’s immediate suspicion proved it. Scott would be the only man capable of luring the Golconda Ship to a mooring. At that point Scott stopped trying to work out details in his own mind. Bugsy’s men would begin shortly to insist that they didn’t want to go into gas-chambers. They hadn’t anticipated any danger at all in that line. Bugsy’d be on a spot.

But it was Scott’s present problem to arrange for the survival of the buoy, because it was his first command and he wouldn’t face the idea of losing it. Also he had to prevent the capture of the Golconda Ship, because that was his duty as a Patrol officer. Then he had to see that Janet wasn’t murdered or injured under his protection. And after that, he would deliver Chenery and Bugsy and all their followers as nearly unharmed as possible to a Patrol ship which wouldn’t arrive for weeks, so that they might keep overdue appointments with gas-chambers.

He rather wryly doubted whether Bugsy’s or his problems were less likely to be solved.

But Janet was looking fearfully up into his face. He whispered, “They’re in the crew’s quarters, I think. Not bad! But I’ll make sure.”

He went down the few steps remaining beyond the door and arrived at the bottom level. She listened. He moved a little distance from the door. She followed. Now he could definitely hear the murmuring of voices. Nearly every man aboard would be there. They’d have been forbidden the hotel area by Bugsy and Chenery, and they’d have gathered here to pass the time until the purpose of the whole enterprise was to be accomplished. They’d been gambling—for cash only, because the treasure they hoped for was still imaginary. Now, though, they’d stopped their crap-game to argue.

Scott regretfully touched one of the grenades he’d acquired. If Bugsy were in his shoes, he’d have opened the crew’s quarters door and tossed in a couple of grenades. Prompt action with a blaster could then have settled the whole affair. To Bugsy, that would have been congenially violent and very likely effective. But Scott couldn’t do it. He simply, flatly, couldn’t do it. If orders had been necessary, they’d have been issued to forbid it.

He shook his head. Bugsy’s voice rose again, “All right! I’ll ask him! Chenery an’ me, we’ll ask him!”

A door-catch stirred. On the instant Scott had seized Janet’s hand. He drew her swiftly away. Past the hospital space. Past the barred door where two wounded men had been put hastily to make window-dressing for a test of the look of things. Around a corner in the corridor. There he stopped and whispered close to Janet’s ear.

“This, I didn’t intend! But we’re all right!”

The door-catch stirred again and the sound of voices rose in volume. The door closed, and the murmur diminished.

Chenery’s voice came fearfully: “I’m not sayin’ anything but we oughta make sure, Bugsy! It’s your life as much as mine! I’m not tryin’ to put anything over! But those comets are there! They’re showin’ bigger on the screens! We oughta make sure!”

Chenery’s voice seemed to be approaching. Bugsy rasped something unintelligible.

“We can ask him!” protested Chenery. “He’s your man, not mine! You picked him! An’ now he’s hurt, but he can tell if the lieutenant’s lyin’ about those comets!”

Scott murmured under his breath, “They’re going to talk to one of the men in hospital. Their astrogator’s hurt. Not a bad break!”

He heard curious rustling sounds which were footfalls on a soundless floor. Then he frowned. Bugsy and Chenery were between them and not only the tube-stair they’d come by, but the normal stairway to the upper levels. Lifts and elevators hadn’t been built into the buoy when it was a ship, because emergency locks couldn’t be put into an elevator shaft. It couldn’t be divided into airtight sections. But there were the two men moving to cut them off, if there should be an alarm.

He got out his blaster. If anything happened to him, it would be the same as if it had happened to Janet. He said reluctantly, “If it comes to shooting, I think you’d better join in. This is no time to be a lady. They aren’t gentlemen.”

She caught her breath. He didn’t look to see if she’d brought out the weapon he’d given her. He watched.

He didn’t actually see either Bugsy or Chenery. He heard their almost inaudible footsteps on the supposedly noiseless flooring. He saw shadows moving on a wall. They vanished. Chenery and Bugsy had gone into the barred hospital room where the two patients were.

Bugsy rasped, “Halley!”

No stir or answer. Then a movement in the other hospital bed. A voice spoke weakly. The words were slurred.

“Keep outa this!” snapped Bugsy. “Halley, wake up! What’s a comet made of? Gas or what?”

Bugsy angrily shook the injured man and demanded information. It could have been brutal; it could have been agonizing. But the man did not respond at all.

“Wake up, damnit!” snarled Bugsy. “What’s a comet made of?”

The faint voice spoke again, more distinctly.

“Keep out—” Then Bugsy’s voice stopped. “What? Dead?” Movements in the room. Then Bugsy again. “Yeah!” His tone was pure sarcasm. “Okay, Chenery! you ask him!”

Then the faint voice spoke for the third time. And Scott moved faster than he’d ever moved in his life. He was standing in the doorway, blaster out, before Bugsy grasped what the remaining injured man had said.

“Th’ lieutenant went past—”

“That’s right, Bugsy,” said Scott. “Please don’t reach for a blaster! If you do I’ll have to kill you!”

Bugsy whirled, but he’d had his lesson. He did not reach for a weapon. Chenery raised his hands without orders. His throat worked. Then he managed to protest, “I been arguin’ with him, Lieutenant! Tryin’ to work out a deal—”

Scott beckoned with his blaster. The sound of voices was only a murmur as the captors of the buoy argued with each other. But the raising of a voice here would bring them all out—not alarmed, but ending all hope.

But no voice was raised. Scott took Bugsy’s blaster as he came out, grinding his teeth. Scott touched Chenery’s, and left it in place. Chenery caught his breath.

“We go back to the control room,” said Scott in a low tone. “I’ve got to put it into Bugsy’s thick skull what the situation is. There’s just been a development you don’t seem to realize yet.”

He gestured to point out the way they were to go. It was the regular route upward. There was no point in giving out useful information. As they ascended, they could distinctly hear the voices in the crew’s quarters. It was not a murmur now. It was a dispute. Once, men shouted at each other. Bugsy cursed. He knew they should have had a leader suppressing argument and giving orders.

“I was looking into something important,” said Scott quietly, “when you came along. When we get to the control room I’ll tell you what you don’t seem to realize, and maybe you’ll act sensibly!”

He was acutely aware of the irony in that statement. There was nothing for his captives to do but die in white-hot meteoric flames, if they could come to no understanding with him, or surrender meekly, with dying a matter of weeks off instead of hours. They might not think it sensible to accept either alternative. But it wasn’t easy to think of a third.

“You should,” he observed while they were climbing the stairway from the engine room, “you should have had a getaway ship, just in case. You could have made a deal with somebody to come by and take all the freight aboard here as a gift. Space freight is usually pretty valuable stuff.”

Bugsy spat. Chenery said unhappily, though he was bewildered by having his blaster left to him, “You’d have to tell ‘em what the job was. And they might take it over.”

It was true enough. Scott made no comment. They went through the heavy-freight level. There was no one there. The men who followed Bugsy and Chenery wouldn’t like to be alone at any time. They would be men who needed constant reassurance of their own importance. They’d be infinitely dependent; they could not satisfy their needs for themselves. And they would constantly need to be with other people. So the big hulk which was the space buoy was empty except in one crowded, smoke-filled place. There, men gambled exactly as they would on any planet between jobs. If there’d been women present, their enjoyment would have been completed. If they captured the Golconda Ship and escaped with its riches, they would crowd together in other places and continue similar diversions. The only real change would be that they’d gamble for higher stakes and the women would be fancier. And for this they committed multiple murder and ultimately faced execution.

Scott drove his captives up the three levels of hydroponic gardens. The middle one was in darkness now. They came out to the lowest of the three levels of passenger cabins. There was snoring somewhere and a faint stale alcoholic smell.

“Who’s that?” asked Scott.

“Our engineer,” said Chenery helpfully. “He’s stayed that way ever since—”

He stopped. They went on. The hotel restaurant level. All was silence. All was stillness. Doggedly, Scott shepherded the others up to the control room.

“I didn’t expect this,” he said politely. “I don’t think you’ve realized it. Bugsy, that man you found dead in the hospital. What was his specialty? What did he do? On the way up here it occurred to me that it might be important.”

Bugsy rasped, “He was a astrogator. He was—”

His throat clicked shut. He stared at Scott. The blood went slowly out of his cheeks and lips until the stubble of blue beard around his jaws looked unclean. It looked like soot. His mouth opened and closed. Then he stared blankly at the wall and tried to swallow—and failed.

“You needed him,” said Scott, “to astrogate the Golconda Ship when you took it. Now you haven’t anybody who can set a course—or know where to drive—and nobody who can time an overdrive jump, or get a ship to ground if you found a planet. But it’s not likely you can even approach a sun. It’s certain you can’t find the place you planned to ground the Golconda Ship. My guess would be that without an astrogator you couldn’t do more than drive blindly around the galaxy until all of you would go mad—or die.”

Bugsy began to swear. Horrible, unbelievable words rose to his lips and came bubbling out. Scott slapped him sharply across the mouth.

“Stop it, you idiot! Stop it!”

Bugsy stopped, numbly. That particular kind of violence wasn’t in his experience. To him, violence was blaster-bolts or on occasion admirably-engineered weapons for breaking skulls. But he’d never been slapped before.

“Whatever you believe or don’t believe about comets,” said Scott coldly, “you know you’ve got to have an astrogator. You can’t find a sun, or a planet circling it, and you couldn’t get to ground if you did.”

Chenery was clenching his fists. Janet sat quietly near the instrument board. The blaster she’d held ready during the climb from the buoy’s stern now lay in her lap. She was unnaturally composed. Now and then she glanced at Scott, looking somehow confident. But her eyes stayed mostly on the two men Scott had brought here.

He went to the vision-screens. The image of the glittering marker-asteroid had moved little; yards or fathoms only. There were many stars, except in the forward screens. There, huge luminous mists seemed to have leaped toward Lambda since he last looked at them.

“There,” said Scott briskly, “are the Five Comets. We’re headed straight for their heads. I can get the buoy through them. You can’t. I have to be obeyed if we’re to make it. And I can astrogate any ship to anywhere it needs to go. But I’ve no mind to save the lives of a pack of killers only to be killed for it afterward!”

Chenery said pitifully, “Listen, Lieutenant! I’ll do anything! What you want? What you want done?”

Bugsy said harshly, “Y’say you can astrogate us?”

“Yes,” said Scott. “Anywhere.”

“Maybe y’can roll the Golconda Ship alongside—”

“I’m Lieutenant Scott, Space Patrol,” said Scott. “I’ve been given the recognition-signal for the Golconda Ship—which you didn’t think of. There’s a password to give to assure that ship that everything’s all right and it can safely come alongside and make fast”

“What’s th’ deal?” demanded Bugsy fiercely. “What do you want?”

“I don’t know yet,” Scott told him. “It just occurred to me that you might have some ideas. I don’t trust you the length of a gnat’s whisker. That makes it difficult to bargain. You figure out a guarantee that we can believe in for our own safety. If you do, I’ll listen. But it had better be good! And there isn’t much time. On our present course we’ll hit the first mass of meteors in under three hours. There’ll be a good many strays barging around before then, too,—strays big enough to wreck us.”

Bugsy said harshly, “I don’t buy that comet stuff! All I want—”

“If I’m astrogating, it’s bought,” said Scott grimly. “It’s like two cars racing for an intersection, if neither one can stop, they’re going to hit! That’s no lie. If I don’t attend to that, there’s no use making a deal.”

“Okay,” said Bugsy hoarsely. “That’s okay with me. The Golconda Ship comes after. You’re in. You’re safe and she’s safe, too, if you want it that way. We cut the take three ways.”

Scott grinned at him without mirth.

“That’s something I don’t buy! I don’t buy trusting you for half a second. Think, Bugsy! Use your brains! Figure out something better than your word. And for now, get out! This is my control room!”

He pushed Bugsy outside. Chenery said desperately, “But Lieutenant—what kind of a deal?”

“It’s up to you, Chenery,” said Scott. “I’d rather deal with you.”

He closed the control room door with Chenery outside. He turned to Janet.

“It’s the devil to have a conscience,” he said sourly. “Bugsy isn’t armed and Chenery is. I left him his blaster. I’ve told him I’d rather make a deal with him. But my conscience wouldn’t let me mention that things would be better all around if Bugsy dropped dead. I hope the idea occurs to Chenery!” Janet moistened her lips. “But you offered—you proposed—?” “I pointed out that they’ve got to have an astrogator. They do. I pointed out that I was one. I am. I said I wanted you safe. I do. I said if they contrived a deal, I’d listen. I will. But I didn’t say I’d make a bargain with them. I won’t.” She stared at him.

“They need to be kept doing something useless.” said Scott impatiently. “Such as thinking of ways to outsmart me. But the comets are coming closer. I’m stalling until they’re really close—until Bugsy and Chenery have to let me save the buoy in my own way and on my own terms.”

“But then—”

“This is my first real command,” said Scott vexedly. “Do you think I want to lose it in my first twelve hours aboard? I’ve got to take the buoy through the comets! I can do it. Bugsy and Chenery can’t. But lifter it’s through they’ll feel cocky. They’ll consider they own me. And they’ve got my ship! I have to get it back!”

Janet was bewildered. Scott seemed to be talking nonsense. There were at least twenty men aboard with blasters they’d used to murder. They expected to do more. Up to now, they’d tranquilly let Bugsy and Chenery do the worrying. But if they began to suspect or to believe the danger from the comets Scott insisted on—

“Can’t you tell them how you’ll do it?” she asked uncertainly. “You’re asking them to trust you—and they could—but they’ll judge you as being like themselves…”

“I can’t tell them how I’ll do it,” said Scott drily. “The mere idea would scare them to death!”