Invaders of Space

CHAPTER THREE

IT was a three days' run from Formalhaut to Hermas. Horn had been unconscious for the first few hours from a stun pistol bolt received at the spaceport gate. But an hour after recovering consciousness he'd become the unofficial but actual engineer of the Theban, and was supposedly considering the former engineer's cut of an undescribed enterprise. It was understood that the small man would go out of an air lock for his incompetence. It was an atmosphere and a set of values Horn wasn't used to. But the Theban wasn't used to his way of thinking, either.

He stood watch over the engines. At appropriate intervals the cook brought him food and coffee. When he asked questions he got noncommittal answers. The Theban sped towards Hermas on an errand about which Horn could get no definite clues. Other members of the crew dropped by occasionally to talk. They were afraid of Larsen, yet they were oddly proud of being members of his crew. They regarded Horn as a permanently enlisted member of their group.

Some considered that, having been chosen by Larsen, Horn should be filled in on the traditions, manners, and customs of the Theban. There was no crime not proudly claimed as part of the legendry of the space tramp, and Horn was expected to admire these practices. But there were one or two crew members who doubted that Horn realized why he must obey Larsen under any imaginable set of circumstances. They explained the monstrous sadistic pleasure Larsen took in brutality. They described in detail the battering any recalcitrant crew member might expect for failure in his duty. None of them quite grasped what Larsen angrily accepted - that the continued running of the Theban's engines depended on Horn's good will. He couldn't be driven.

On the second day of the drive towards Hermas, the engineer reappeared with a ghastly hangover. He jittered over the state of the engines. He was shocked that they were neither better nor worse than they had been. He searched desperately for changes in the multitude of emergency repair jobs by which the drive had been kept running until now. He found some, but they were unimportant. He thought there were others, but he could not be sure.

His eyes red-rimmed and his hands shaking, he said fearfully, "You - you didn't find the engines' trouble, did you?"

"I didn't need to," said Horn. "I knew the trouble before you landed on Formalhaut. Your phase separator is shot."

"But what'll you do?"

"That depends," said Horn. "Larsen's made me an offer of your cut of the job on hand if I keep the engines going through whatever's done and for a month's getaway run afterward."

The engineer had looked frightened before; now he seemed to shrivel. He gazed at Horn in terror. "Wha - what did you tell him?"

"I stalled," said Horn. "I don't know what I'm supposed to help get done. Nobody seems willing to tell me."

The smaller man's face worked. "They can't. Larsen's a - a very smart man. He doesn't let anybody know what's doing until everybody's up to his neck in it and can't back out. Larsen's been running the Theban for a long time. He's done things -"

"So I gather," said Horn dryly. "If a fraction of what I've been told could be proved on him, they'd have to hang him every morning for ten years running to even the account."

"He's - he's a tough man," said the small man, shivering. "I've known him to beat a man to death -"

The engine noise changed subtly. He gasped. Horn made a minute adjustment and the noise went back to its former buzzing, moaning, occasionally bubbling sound. The engineer stared, trying to see what Horn had done.

"These engines," said Horn matter-of-factly, "are a mess of halfway repairing of worn-out parts. I'm going to fix some of them when we get aground. Some, not all! And I'll add a little gimmick or two so that any time I'm absent from the engineroom for a full twenty-four hours the engines will blow permanently. That's for my own safety. If you find something like that," he added pleasantly, "I warn you you'll have to know just the right way to disconnect it. Meddling will make the engines blow immediately."

The engineer licked his lips. "You don't trust me. Or anybody." He paused. Then he said in a trembling voice, "I - I need a drink."

Horn nodded. The engineer went unsteadily away. His whole career was epitomized in the few minutes of talk with Horn. He could be terrified, and he knew it, but he tried to escape the knowledge. He'd escaped temporarily when Horn took over the engines, but by the time he came back Horn had been offered his job on the Theban. Yet he knew too much to be allowed to go ashore. He'd heard his death sentence - not pronounced by Horn, but implied by what had happened. So he'd try to escape that knowledge. But the escape would be temporary too.

Horn clamped his teeth. Other members of the crew would not talk about the purpose of the Theban. If the engineer was right, they couldn't. Only Larsen knew what was happening now. Horn wanted to find out, but he knew only that the Theban would be at Hermas when the Danae passed by.

Ginny was on the Danae. She should be perfectly safe. The Theban's business with the intercluster liner was past imagining. Piracy was too absurd to be credited. The Danae would come out of overdrive near Hermas, to be sure. But "near" was a relative term. Nobody could guess within a million miles where she'd break out into normal space. She'd stray out of overdrive just long enough to verify her course and position. That might take one minute, or two. Then she'd go back into overdrive and hurtle on to Formalhaut.

This was standard astrogation. There could be no trickery involved. In overdrive the liner could not conceivably be attacked. Nothing could be done, either, in the minute or two she'd be out of overdrive for her course-and-position check. If Larsen's plan involved the Danae, emptiness was still so vast that the Theban couldn't hope to get even a glimpse of the liner before it was gone again, in perfect safety.

Horn left the engineroom to drink coffee with the crew. They were not a happy group. Space drives, even outdated Riccardo engines, should be perfectly silent. These engines were noisy, ominously so. They were louder, now, than at the beginning, which indicated that whatever was wrong was getting worse. Also it had changed from the original nagging hum to a buzzing, burbling whine. And since Horn had been aboard a bubbling component had been added.

Every man who drank coffee wanted to ask about the engines. Horn told them, with precision. The phase separator was in bad shape. The Riccardo coils had aged past accurate adjustment. There was corrosion in the drive plates so that they ran hot and produced thermals which ultimately would coincide. He preferred, said Horn, not to think what would happen then. Besides, there were some circuits that simply ought to be replaced. If one knew everything that was wrong, it was possible to humour the engines a little. But there might be deficiencies he hadn't found out yet. The ship's engines needed a complete overhaul.

Each of his statements was strictly accurate, in case one of the crew members had picked up a few shreds of engineroom information. The men he talked to grew fidgety and tense, and listened fearfully to the engines. They imagined changes in the sound. Horn built up their apprehensions to the point where panic was not too far away. But there was no hint of protest by the men to Larsen.

On the second day of the run towards Hermas, the engines stopped abruptly, without warning. There were no lights. There was no gravity. The air-freshening system stopped. The ship lay dead in space - normal space - but it was not even possible to see the stars, because naturally all outside observations were made with scanners.

There was panic. Larsen raged. He was a bellowing voice in blackness, until Horn snapped icily for somebody to bring cargo lights. Men struck lights, and other men cursed them for using up the air with flames. But somebody found a cargo light, used for occasional errands in the holds. Then the cook held the light while Horn adjusted this control and that, appearing to try one expedient after another.

All the crew gathered. Wide, terrified eyes seemed to glitter in the cold white light of the cargo lamp. Larsen bellowed furiously that Horn didn't know what he was doing, and they should bring the engineer.

They brought him - weightless, waving his hands feebly, dead drunk and incapable of any purposeful action.

Larsen would have killed him, except that Horn said in an indifferent tone, "Stand back, now. I'm going to start the engines."

They flapped and pushed and struggled in the total absence of weight. They cast distorted shadows against the engineroom walls and the absurdly huge drive engines of the Theban. When the last of them had a hand hold, Horn threw a switch.

The engines began to run again. The sound which had been nerve-racking and horrifying because it could stop at any instant began again. There was light. There was gravity. There was the sound of the air freshener at work again. And the crew of the Theban could have wept with relief.

When the ship's company had gone away, still shivering because of their taste of doom, Horn surveyed in his own mind the result of turning off the engines. He'd done it deliberately, to impress upon Larsen and the others that their lives depended on him. He'd hoped to gain a certain status by being the ultimate and only hope of the Theban's crew.

He had proved he was necessary, but more - much more - would need to be done before Horn would be obeyed against the orders of Larsen. And he didn't think he'd have time to build up the frantic dependence upon himself that might be needed.

Grimly, he recognized that the best he could do, if there were some extraordinary scheme afoot for the seizure of the Danae, would be to destroy the Theban's engines actually, instead of merely turning them off. Then he'd die with the Theban's crew. But it might be necessary.

The Theban bored on again through space. Larsen stayed in the control room or in his cabin adjoining it. Crewmen, coming apprehensively to ask Horn how the engines seemed to be doing, gave increasing signs of uneasiness about something other than the engines. Larsen sometimes went into black moods when he shut himself up for days on end and then came out halfway a maniac, looking for trouble. He invariably found it. The man on whom he loosed his fury was not to be envied.

The engineer would most likely be the one he'd pick on this time, though. His incompetence was such that, if the Theban had stayed dependent on him, it would now be a dark and helpless derelict, without gravity or lights or even a working air system to prevent the stifling of all on board. They'd have had to take to the lifeboats, if those were in condition to be used. But Horn had his doubts about them.

In the rest of the run to Hermas, the engines themselves made one demonstration of their insufficiency. Quite without any preliminary sign, the buzzing and humming and burbling of the engines gave place to a high pitched, whistling shriek. Horn wasn't in the engineroom at the time, but in seconds he was swarming over the drive, stopping it - except for the auxiliary apparatus - just before a newly formed blister on a main drive condenser plate could short that condenser and set every element in the drive blowing out in sequence.

It took four hours to disassemble the condenser and scrape every plate and get the ship back in overdrive again. Then Larsen came growling to him.

"I don't like you," he said ferociously. "I think you faked that breakdown!"

Horn stared at him. It was ironic; the engines were in bad shape, but this was the only actual breakdown that had happened since he'd been aboard.

"But," growled Larsen savagely, "you do know your stuff. So I'm changing that deal I offered you. I'll make a better one. Plenty better! You're working with me from now on. You don't have to fake any more. I'll tell you presently what the deal is. But no more fakes!"

Horn opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He shrugged his shoulders. Larsen was practically beside himself, and it was no time to make bargains or refuse them. Larsen was obviously in the state of mind which terrified his crewmen. He was ready to do murder, out of some inner need for the monstrous. At such a time he might lose all sanity and kill anybody, including Horn. And Horn needed to stay alive a while yet, until after the Danae had passed Hermas and was on the way to Formalhaut.

But if threats from Larsen resulted in an end of troubles with the engines, Horn would lose what ascendency he had over the rest of the ship's company. It wasn't much, but he might need it. So he made one last demonstration to certify that the engines' failures and eccentricities were not of his devising, but that he could control them as nobody else could.

The Theban came out of overdrive for landing. The sun around which Hermas revolved was within a reasonable distance. Hermas itself was in plain view. And then a gravelly, grumbling, grating sound came from the engines. It sounded as if good-sized pebbles were being ground to powder between toothed rollers.

Crewmen came climbing agitatedly to see if Horn considered their situation hopeless. He sat by the engines, undisturbed. Larsen appeared, ready to rage.

"What the hell's that?" he demanded.

"Nothing to worry about," said Horn, tranquilly. "It'll stop by itself. I know what it is."

He did nothing whatever, and presently the noise did stop. And from that time on the members of the Theban's crew regarded him with an uneasy confidence. The engines still made noises. This was the only ship in all the galaxy in which a space crew accepted alarming noises from the engine room as an almost normal part of their lives. But if anything happened to Horn they'd panic immediately.

The Theban made for Hermas. It was actually Hermas II, but there were no occupied worlds in its solar system. Gradually the inadequate world grew large and its alternating spots of green and brown vegetation organized themselves into continents and islands. Marshy seas could be detected, and the cloud masses took on the look of familiar weather patterns. At the time of the Theban's approach the beacon happened to be near the sunrise line, and by the time they touched ground it was mid-morning.

The ship settled to the wide expanse of cleared soil around the beacon. The beacon itself was a standard, fluorescent-plastic, highly visible cone, fuelled for years to come and safe against all possible varieties of climate and weather. The landing place was large and barren; it had been sprayed to prevent anything growing there. But there were infinitesimal, lacy, red- brown plants that had adapted to the poisonous spray and grew triumphantly to a height of not less than two inches.

There were buildings, too. Hermas had been a manned space station once. It still rated - as did all beacons - as a commerce refuge, and though the structures that once had housed a staff of observers were now battered and crumbling, the cache of stored food and the underground tank of emergency lifeboat fuel were intact and plainly marked. If a ship had to be abandoned and its crew had to take to the lifeboats, and if they could make their way to a beacon planet, they'd find food to sustain them and fuel with which to attempt a further journey.

Horn inspected this part of Hermas from the exit port. Larsen tapped his shoulder. Crew members stood behind him, some carrying tools.

"You!" said Larsen coldly. "The ship's running all right for now. Come ashore and get some fresh air."

Horn had taken certain precautions. He didn't think Larsen would risk a lift-off without him aboard, but he'd taken measures anyhow. The Theban couldn't lift off to carry out any enterprise whatever without Horn's assistance.

"This is a vacation?" asked Horn mildly.

"Call it that!" rasped Larsen. "Sure, call it that. There'll be some fun!"

Larsen's idea of fun might be eccentric, but Horn went outside. The look of this world was unfamiliar. There were, of course, the acres of deliberately barren ground around the beacon. The vegetation beyond that space might be called forest and brushwood. Some of it was green, and some of it the reddish-brown of some ornamental plants on Formalhaut. The crumbling buildings which had housed a lonely crew of Space Patrol personnel now looked utterly bleak and deserted. The lurid, fluorescent-plastic cone of the beacon itself did not look like anything anybody could make use of. Horn saw the beacon's transmitter cage, sending Wrangel waves tirelessly and monotonously to the limit of its range. For probably the millionth time, it sent its identification signal out to space.

"Hermas beacon. Hermas beacon. Co-ordinates -" It gave its own galactic position. "Unmanned refuge. Beacon only. Hermas beacon."

That signal had tripped the relay which brought the Theban out of overdrive, in this particular case for a landing no ship ordinarily passing by would think of. It was not audible except to a Wrangel-wave receiver, of course, and Horn heard no sounds except wind and the rustling of the highly peculiar foliage of the larger plants. They would be called trees only because of their size. Except for their height and grouping, nobody would ever think of them as forests.

Larsen led what appeared to be a working party away from the ship, over to the abandoned structures. Horn had no reason to join them. He sat down and considered his surroundings and his situation. He was grimly apprehensive, but of what he could not imagine. On his own account he had no immediate worries, though later he might have plenty. But he had a stun pistol neither Larsen nor the mate had tried to recover. So long as he kept the engines running, they'd be wary of interfering with him. But he had no illusions of safety.

Larsen, of course, would keep to his offered bargain only so long as he had to. Much was now self-evident about the Theban. The tramp ship could have no legitimate errand in view. She could not land at any official spaceport. No ship with engines sounding like the Theban's would ever be lifted off by a landing grid. Only desperate men would entrust their lives to such a scrap heap anyhow. If the Theban landed anywhere under pretence of normal commerce, the Space Patrol would investigate her. And the Theban couldn't take investigation.

But Horn did not think too much about his own prospects. He was savagely prepared to do any conceivable thing to ensure Ginny's safety. If he could keep the Theban aground until the Danae was safely past this beacon, he could then devote all his thought and energy to arranging his own situation in such a way that he could rejoin Ginny on Formalhaut. But first he must keep the Theban from carrying out her as yet unknown but certainly undesirable intentions, which most likely concerned the Danae.

He heard crashings, and saw the working party from the Theban busy at something. Axes were swinging. Horn stared and then was incredulous. The fluorescent-covered storage pit of supplies for shipwrecked space mariners was being broken open. It didn't have to be smashed; any man could open it. But it was being hacked to bits.

Men jumped down into the underground cache. Axes rose and fell again. They were chopping at the contents of the emergency-stores shelter, ruining the preserved foodstuffs. They were exposing them to the air, to moulds, to putrefactive bacteria, to decay, to spoliation, to destruction. There was no imaginable value in the action. It was pure wanton crime committed against any starving spaceboat fugitives who might come to ground on Hermas to restock their boat for a hazardous attempt to reach Formalhaut in one direction, or the beacon Carola in the other.

There was a whimper behind him. The engineer said, "Are they - looking this way?" The voice was nerve-racked. It showed trembling terror. "Are they - can I - get away?"

Without turning his head, Horn said evenly, "They're destroying the emergency food stores. They seem to be enjoying themselves. I don't see anybody looking this way."

There was a rustling sound. Horn did not turn to look. The rustling went in panicky haste around to the other side of the grounded ship. It went away, racing for the tall vegetation on beyond. Horn heard a faint clanking noise. The engineer was in such terror of Larsen that he'd fled the ship and marooned himself on an uninhabited planet which nobody would have reason to visit except once in a decade or so to refuel its beacon. But the clanking said that he'd carried with him bottles of the stuff he counted on to make life endurable. He hadn't carried food; it was unlikely he'd carried weapons. But he couldn't have carried many bottles, either, knowing the need to run and run until he was past the fear of being overtaken.

Horn stood up and moved away from the ship. It had been accepted by the crew that Larsen would commit enormities upon the engineer, when he came out of his cabin after days of black brooding and in a mood to commit murder. If the engineer preferred flight, it was not Horn's affair. He was coldly determined upon one point only - to defeat whatever might be the enterprise Larsen had in mind against the Danae.

He strolled over to the beacon cone, not wanting to watch the destruction of food put ashore for castaways. There were two men digging, close to the cone. They nodded to him.

"What goes on?" he asked in a carefully unemotional tone.

"The skipper's orders. Here we are!"

A tool had found a tank, buried three feet down. They cleared a space on it, then got out of the hole. The man who had spoken swung an axe and flinched as he struck. There was a loud hissing sound and the intolerable reek of ship fuel. A fluid bubbled up out of the hole the axe had made. Boiling furiously, it filled the air with a whitish vapour. Ship fuel was normally a gas, made liquid by pressure of an atmosphere or two. It dissolved in the fuel cells of a ship or lifeboat and produced electricity by a complicated displacement degradation reaction which yielded energy and ultimately a waxy substance that floated on fuel cell surfaces. The gas enabled a ship to carry more energy than any other non-nuclear system of energy supply, and it could be reconstituted - by surplus electric power drawn down by a landing grid from the sky. It was one of the reasons modern ships did not need to carry engineers to oversee power production as well as space engines.

Horn said nothing. It was too late. The destruction of food left for possible survivors of a shipwreck was an accomplished fact. It was senseless, purposeless crime against total strangers. Now the fuel stored for such survivors was destroyed, too. That made even less sense.

Larsen called. The two crewmen moved towards him, and Horn followed more slowly. He tried to fit this senselessness into some sort of pattern which justified Larsen's risking his own life and that of all his crew in the crazy, battered Theban; which justified the kidnapping of Horn himself; and which involved a rendezvous with the liner Danae.

"Now," said Larsen zestfully, "now we'll have some fun! Go get him!"

Three men made for the ship. They didn't seem eager, but they went. And Horn knew what they went for. Larsen had slipped his belt from about his waist. It had a heavy buckle which he whipped back and forth. Grinning, he turned to Horn, but there was no amusement in his eyes. They were blank and black and expressionless.

"You'll enjoy this!" said Larsen in a tone that was somehow horribly anticipative. "He's supposed to be an engineer, but he let the engines go. He was drunk when they started to blow. We'd all be dead if we had to depend on him!" He grinned again, but it was a grimace. He was deliberately allowing himself to become filled with murderous rage, and the jerking of the heavy belt buckle at the end of its strap grew savage and abrupt. "I don't let men in my crew get slack. When they let their work go, I let them know it! I - let - them - know - it! He'll know, when I'm through with him!"

One of the three men who'd gone to the ship appeared in the entrance port. He called. Horn caught words;

"... not here ... run off..."

Larsen swore. Then he ordered, "Go get him! Track him down! Get him!"

He did not raise his voice, but his tone was deadly. Horn carefully and unobtrusively made sure he had the stun pistol where he could draw it easily. He watched the other crew members move to obey, and considered what might happen next. It was obviously Largen's intention to flog the engineer as ship captains back in the age of sail, half a thousand years ago, used to do. But Larsen didn't look like a man preparing even zestfully to enforce discipline. He looked like a man lustfully anticipating murder.

Horn shook with sudden fury. His overwhelming obligation was to Ginny on the Danae, and he must not do anything that would place her in danger. But there are some things no man can stand by and watch.

He heard shouting behind the screen of tall growths, and wondered sardonically if men who pretended to search were actually warning the fugitive to hide. But the engineer could not have fled very far, especially if he'd burdened himself with too many of the bottles that helped him to forget, temporarily, what he'd become.

Then there were louder shouts. Men appeared at the edge of the semi-jungle. The Theban's red-haired mate called triumphantly. He'd found the engineer, squatted in thick foliage, trying desperately to become unconscious before he was found. His only operating instinct seemed to be flight from the terrors of his situation, rather than from the situation itself.

The mate dragged the small figure towards Larsen. Horn suddenly knew that he couldn't stand by while the little man was killed by Larsen with a buckle-loaded belt. The odds were enormous that he'd be killed if he tried to interfere. But if he were killed, the Theban couldn't lift off Hermas to practice whatever Larsen had in mind against the Danae. At the least, Ginny would reach Formalhaut safely! She'd grieve when she learned that Horn was missing, and she'd hope for a long time that he might somehow return. But at least she'd be safe.

Horn put his hand casually into the pocket where the stun pistol waited. He'd have to be careful to seize the right instant....

All he could do was try to disable the Theban's entire crew and then take off in the ship itself. When that was done, he was finished. He was no astrogator. He knew the galactic poles, and he could recognize galactic longitude. But it was utterly unlikely that he could find his way back to, say, Formalhaut. There were too many stars. He couldn't pick out Formalhaut among myriads of other flaming suns. He didn't know the absolute magnitude of Formalhaut, its distance, or its spectral type, and he'd never used an identification spectroscope. He could aim a ship in the right general direction, but for him to find Formalhaut was as unlikely as finding a specific blade of grass in an acre of lawn. There were that many stars.

There was a clicking sound, loud, enormously magnified. A relay had operated somewhere within the beacon cone. There were scratching noises. Then a voice bellowed out of half a dozen loudspeakers built into the beacon's side walls. "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Liner Danae calls for help! Liner Danae calls for help! Mayday! Maydayl Mayday!" The bellowing voice, endlessly repeating the distress call, could be heard for miles. Larsen roared orders through the din, and began to run towards the Theban.