Invaders of Space

CHAPTER FOUR

MEN came from beneath the curiously shaped growths that was the Hermas jungle. They raced for the entrance port of the Theban. The mate was among the last to arrive, dragging the weeping engineer. Larsen snarled for haste. Men scrambled aboard the ship.

The mate said contemptuously, "What'll I do with him?" He shook the engineer for emphasis. "Leave him, kill him, or what?"

The distress call boomed over the clearing and went echoing and reechoing among the tall vegetation of Hermas. "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Liner Danae calling for help! Liner Danae calling for help! Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!" Larsen jerked his thumb and the mate heaved the sobbing little man inside. Horn was already aboard. Larsen and the mate crowded into the ship with what crewmen were not already within it, then Larsen closed and dogged the exit port.

"We'll be needing the engines to work right," he growled ominously to Horn. "They'd better!" Then he added to the crew, "Bring up the engineer."

He made for the companion ladder towards the nose of the ship, with Horn close behind. The crewmen scattered to their lift-off stations. In no more than seconds the ship was wholly silent save for the thumping and bumpings as the engineer was pulled up the companionway.

Horn came up and stood by the engines, with cold chills marching up and down his spine. The Danae was in trouble! She was broadcasting what was almost inevitably a futile cry for help. He could still hear the monotonous, staccato SOS, coming now from the communicator in the engineroom. Mayday was the traditional distress call.

Horn raged, but in part it was because he was surprised. He'd believed that Larsen planned to take some action against the Danae, and he'd considered disabling the Theban so it could not carry out any plan, however brilliant, for the commission of piracy. But whatever had happened had been done somewhere else by someone else. The Theban only had to take advantage of whatever had been arranged to happen.

The engines wanted signal lighted in the engineroom. Horn threw the switch. The engines made squawking, protesting noises as the Theban surged upwards. Then Larsen in the control room gave full power to the drive plates, and the Theban went plunging skyward. Outside air shrieked as the tramp ship forced it aside. Undotibtedly the ship's skin heated from the friction. But then the outer noises thinned and grew faint, there was clear space, and the engines made buzzing, moaning sounds, with burblings in between, as the Theban went hurtling away from the planet Hermas.

Horn grimly made an inconspicuous connection he'd contrived. It was a safety device, pure and simple. If anything broke down the engines would cut off before they destroyed themselves. It was a precaution so that he could leave the engineroom. He was of no mind to stay there with no idea of what was happening.

He again touched his stun pistol for assurance, went up to the control room, and looked in the door. The engineer sat weeping on the floor near the wall. Larsen and the red-haired mate stared, fidgeting, at the vision screens.

"She'll be coming from Carola," growled Larsen, "driving blind and howling."

The communicator repeated its call with an unvarying, unwearying urgency that would have been tedious had it told of anything but disaster. The Hermas beacon, of course, could be picked up even by a ship in overdrive. Then an automatic astrogation unit would swing the receiving ship - and the Danae would be receiving the beacon's Wrangel waves - into line straight for the beacon. It would break out of overdrive when within light minutes of the beacon's sun. All this was because a ship's course needed to be exact. Small errors would add up instead of cancelling, if courses were started from the edge of a beacon's signal area instead of as near as possible to the beacon world.

Larsen growled again, indistinguishably, but the sound was one of satisfaction.

"She's out of overdrive," he rumbled a moment later, "just short of Hermas. Just like she should be!"

He crossed to the ship's computer. It was an old one, and Horn would have had trouble using so antiquated a model, but Larsen punched buttons as if he'd looked up the mathematical constants for this particular problem beforehand. The problem was to take a reading of the Danae's position, course, and speed towards Hermas, and to compute a series of courses and speeds for the Theban that would end with the two ships running side by side at the same speed and as close to each other as possible.

The computer clicked off a paper-strip answer - courses, durations, and accelerations - and Larsen began absorbedly to set it up on the Theban's controls.

Horn swore softly and furiously to himself. The Theban had known in advance that the Danae would arrive here emitting distress calls. Larsen had risked his life and that of every man aboard to be here and pick up those distress calls. He'd shanghaied Horn to keep the Theban's engines going because he knew the Danae would be calling for help at just this place and about this time.

But what had happened? Worse, what was meant to happen next?

The Theban drove with the dwindling half-moon of a partly lighted planet behind her. Horn found his throat going dry as he began to imagine things that might have happened. If the Danae needed help, Ginny might be dead! Yet it was desperately necessary to make sure.

He thought he heard a slight eccentricity in the engine noises. Those sounds, if heard by a normal liner spaceman, would have paralysed him with horror. But Horn went down to find out what could be making the new noise. He found that a minor repair was coming unstuck because of the vibration that made the other noises.

He was still working on that when the Theban ceased to accelerate towards the Danae, and he continued to work while changes in power demands told him that the tramp was decelerating, and then driving back to match course and speed. Then he sealed the job and went up to the control room again. Larsen and the mate were excitedly trying to centre a small glitter in the vision screen. It was almost dead ahead, a sliver of reflected brightness that looked nearer than the stars.

The Theban drove on. The speckle of brightness grew in size. It became distinct, a long, sleek, shining shape which was the space liner Danae. It was a needle of polished metal on the screen.

"Try a call," rumbled Larsen. He punched the communicator. The incoming distress call cut off. "Theban calling Danae," he said. "What's your trouble? We see you clearly. We're close by you. What's your trouble?"

He released the call button. The speaker in the control room boomed, "Liner Danae calls for help! Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Liner Danae calls for help!"

It went on senselessly, paying no heed to the reply it asked for. Larsen pressed the call button again.

"We're within a mile of you!" he growled. "What's your trouble? Answer."

He released the button and again the identical, recorded urgent distress call came from the liner as it drove on blindly through the solar system of Hermas. There was no visible damage to its hull. It must have power because it was driving, though out of overdrive, and it was broadcasting its plea for help. Its long axis pointed along its line of travel. Its gyros were working. It looked and acted like a ship perfectly controlled by perfectly functioning automatic astrogation units. But it cried to all the stars that it needed help, it needed help, it needed help.

Larsen tried twice more to get an answer from the driving, howling ship. The Theban was actually within a mile of it. She must show upon its screens, even if by any conceivable chance the Danae's communicator was not working. But it was!

Larsen turned and grinned at the red-headed mate. He stood up from the pilot's chair and jerked his hand in a gesture for the mate to take his place. He looked down at the shrivelled engineer, now not weeping but staring terrifiedly at him. When Larsen's grin widened, he tried to shrink to greater smallness.

"Come along!" said Larsen with sardonic gentleness. "You're no good for anything else, so come along."

But he did not wait for obedience. He picked up the diminutive engineer by his coat collar and dragged him into the air lock opening off the control room. There was a natural need for more than one air lock in a ship, and simple common sense called for them to be well separated. This was the bow air lock. Horn saw the lock's interior. Wrinkled, space suits hung on pegs in that amply large closet. A space suit tends to drape itself in a certain fashion when left to hang undisturbed for a long while. But suits hang differently for days after they've been checked over for air-tank pressure and power storage, and then are worked to pliability in readiness for instant use.

Larsen went in, dragging the engineer. Horn's eyes went desperately back to the image of the Danae. The space tramp, now piloted by the red-headed mate, had swung until the two vessels travelled parallel to each other and the picture of the liner was on a side screen instead of dead ahead. The communicator bleated, "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Liner Danae calls for help! Liner Danae calls -"

There were other sounds from the air lock, picked up by a microphone there. They were not pleasant sounds. Horn gathered that Larsen was donning a space suit himself, and trying to swear the engineer into another. After a moment, roaring, he hit the little man a resounding blow and seemed to be cramming him into it.

Horn heard his own teeth grinding. But he'd had a lesson. Even panic over what might have happened to Ginny couldn't override the need for him to keep his head now. His purpose in life, for the moment, must be solely that of being of use to Ginny. If the Danae was derelict or disabled, the Theban's engines were required to function. He mustn't interfere a moment too soon; he must assure the engines' perfect performance up to the very moment he risked everything to take advantage of it.

The Theban edged closer and closer to the liner which dwarfed it. Details of the Danae's exterior could be seen : Cargo doors, and the curious threadlike lines of outside ladders, each rung a metal bar forming the shallowest of U's and welded to the ship's skin at their ends. By them, every part of the ship's plating could be examined from the outside while she was in port. He could see the minute, projecting tripods which were the ship's eyes, relaying to screens in the control room what they saw so much more clearly than human eyes could do.

There was bedlam in the Theban's control room. The larger ship went on, screaming soundlessly to the stars, its outcry picked up and converted to sound by loudspeakers in the beacon aground and inside the Theban. Other sounds came from the bow air lock microphones. Larsen laced the engineer's space suit on him while the engineer protested hysterically. His space helmet went on, and his suit communicator doubled the volume of his frantic pleas. Then there was Larsen's voice, with the booming quality that told of his own helmet's being sealed and his suit communicator in action.

"All set here," growled Larsen through a loudspeaker. "Get as close as you can."

Doorframe lights came on, showing that the outer lockdoor was open. Now it was impossible to interfere with what went on there. So long as the outer door was open, the inner must remain closed. Every trace of air in the lock had gone out, to be lost between the stars. If the inner door could be opened the Theban would instantly cease to hold living men. She'd become a coffin, senselessly accompanying the larger ship to no purpose and to a destination of nowhere.

The Danae's hull was no more than a hundred yards away. The Theban edged nearer and nearer. The vast hull half-filled the side vision plate - then filled it. It spilled over to adjoining screens, the ones ahead and behind, above and below. The Theban reached a point where to draw closer would mean she must bump the larger ship's hull.

The distress call continued. Between its insanely repeated syllables came screams from the engineer, shrieks of unthinkable horror.

Then Horn saw the engineer on one of the screens. He was a tumbling object in an inflated, clumsy space suit, turning crazily head over heels in the space between the two ships. He floated, nevertheless, towards the Danae.

Above and below him there was an infinity of emptiness. There were stars towards which he could fall screaming for a hundred thousand years and never cease to fall. On two opposite sides of him there were the ships, which seemed to draw nearer to crush him between them. He screamed....

Larsen's voice roared at him. Larsen had thrown the little man out of the air lock towards the Danae. The two ships were almost matched in velocity, but not quite. As the small man went tumbling and shrieking between them, the Danae forged slowly and steadily forward. Larsen bellowed threats; roared fury; dredged the depths of the unspeakable to further terrify the engineer.

The mate veered the Theban away from the larger vessel. With such mass behind it, no great impact would be required to crack a ship's plates. The Theban drove on and on and the small engineer floated on and on, and it seemed that the Danae moved to escape him, and he shrieked and shrieked....

He hit the ship, and did not rebound. Much more terribly, he began to slide astern, touching the plating of the Danae but not able to grasp it. He jerked his arms and legs insanely. That was pure futility. It was unlikely that mere magnetic-soled shoes could have held him against the inexorable motion of the Danae past him.

But then the metal bars of a ladder interrupted his sliding. The screaming man did not see them, though they projected four inches from the ship's outer plates. But then he noticed, and seized them frantically. He held fast with the desperation of a man clinging to a handhold over hell. It seemed that his arms would be pulled from his body as the Danae drew ahead.

Then, suddenly, the straining ceased. He drew himself close to the ladder, seemed to try to embrace it. He clung close, weeping profusely. All of this his suit communicator relayed to the Theban's control room between the syllables of the maddeningly reiterated distress call.

The engineer clung to the rungs of the ladder bar as if he would never leave them. Larsen bellowed at him; roared at him; raged. The Theban drifted away and behind, and there was a hundred yards between the ships, and then two and three and four. Presently the spacecraft were a mile apart and the engineer became aware of it. Even greater panic came to hid. He felt that he was being abandoned. He cried out, pleading as hysterically as before. He clung to half-inch metal rods on the outside of a vast metal object which did not answer calls and must be without life. And around him there were only stars and the Theban going away.

Terrifiedly, babbling, the engineer began to crawl along the separate rungs of the outside ladder. Once his foot slipped and there were only his hands to hold him to the gigantic hull. His legs flailed. He had no grip to bring his body close. His cries became appalling. Then his foot touched solidly and he was able to draw himself back to where he could crawl again, with his feet entangled in each rung as they came to it. And from the open air lock of the Theban Larsen watched him and roared threats.

It seemed an infinitely long time before, in his flylike crawling, the engineer came to a lifeboat blister. It was half open and he crawled inside, whimpering to himself. Minutes later the blister top closed crisply. The little man had found the control that closed it. It was, in a sense, an air lock, as well as the arrangement by which passengers and crew could enter a space lifeboat and launch themselves from a disabled vessel's hull. With the cover closed it would be possible to let air into the blister and, with the pressure equalized, get into the ship proper.

Apparently that was what the engineer had done. He would want frenziedly to get inside the ship to which he'd been thrown. And once inside -

Nothing happened. The urgent distress call voice continued to bellow in the Theban's control room. "Maydah! Mayday! Mayday! Liner Danae calling for help! Liner Danae calling for help!" Larsen closed the outer door and came out of the air lock. He continued to wear his space suit, with only the face plate opened. The two ships continued to separate. He took the controls and brought the Theban up alongside again. The pair of vessels hurtled onward, towards the sun Hermas. And nothing happened. And nothing happened. And nothing happened!

Larsen began to rage incoherently. He cursed the shrivelled engineer as Horn had never heard a man cursed before.

Then, suddenly, the blasting distress call cut off. The change in the Theban's control room was so sudden that it was shocking. For seconds it seemed actually quiet.

There was an appreciable interval before the buzzing, moaning sound of the half-crippled space drive made itself heard again.

Larsen cried out in triumph as great as his anger had been.

"He did it! He got to the control room!"

The red-haired mate muttered. Larsen pushed the communicator call button. "Calling Danae!" he snapped into the microphone. "Calling Danae! Come in! What's the trouble aboard?"

There was a whimpering; then the voice of the engineer came. He caught his breath irregularly as a child does after wild weeping.

'There's - nobody here!"

Horn heard it where he waited desperately outside the control room doorway. The engineer's voice panted, "'The boats are gone. There's nobody here - Nobody! The ship's a derelict! What - what do I do?" The little man's voice cracked. "I don't know how to astrogate a ship! I don't know how! What must I do?"

Horn, hearing, went quietly mad for a moment or two. Ginny should have been aboard the Danae. But if there were nobody aboard, she couldn't be. It was a numbing, blinding, unbelievable shock.

When he was capable of thought again, he heard Larsen saying harshly, "You're at the control board. The gyro repeaters are in front of you. One dial says one-ninety-three degrees. That's your galactic longitude. The other says twenty-four. That's your latitude. Check me on that."

A part of Horns mind listened and heard. A part of it was aware of the appalling sound of the engines, to which he'd almost become accustomed. He heard Larsen barking instructions to adjust such-and-such knobs until this-or-that dial read so-and-so. He heard the engineer's panic-filled responses. But such matters did not count, to Horn. He knew with anguished fury that Ginny wasn't on the Danae. And he knew with a terrible certainty that he was going to find whoever was responsible for what ever had happened to Ginny, and take a full and complete revenge for it. Larsen, yes. But Larsen had not personally turned the Danae into a derelict. There was more to it. And Horn would find every single man who'd had the least, smallest part in the disaster and he would kill -

Larsen was snarling ferociously: "Stay right where you are. Keep reporting. I'll get you down."

Horn could hear and feel and smell and see, but his emotions were paralysed. Ginny was the victim of a monstrous crime. The shock overwhelmed him. He could respond to nothing; he was like an automaton. But he knew that he would not act like one when the time came that he knew what had happened and who had brought it about. Then he'd react! But for now he was numbed. He could be - he would be - cold and cunning and convincing until he knew everything. And then -

"Read me what the engines say," commanded Larsen. Then he swore. "No. Forget that. You haven't got a Riccardo drive there, and you couldn't land on the drive if you wanted to. You've got emergency rockets. When I get you to atmosphere you'll switch in the emergency landing controls and they'll let the ship down. They'll handle the rockets. They'll have radar readings to guide them, and they'll set you down."

Horn knew that it was true. When Riccardo drives were in common use, by a lavish expenditure of fuel, and considerable skill, a ship could take off and land where there was no landing grid. In those days there was much demand for skills. But nowadays ships went only from port to port and from landing grid to landing grid. They carried landing rockets for unthinkable emergencies, but modern ships' officers were not required to know how to handle a ship on rockets. There was a radar for height finding and a computer to give orders based on the radar's findings. Automation would let a ship down on any world, with due allowance for varying gravitational fields. The only human supervision required was the choice of solid ground for a landing spot.

Horn went numbly back to the engines. He nursed them, coddled them. He knew when the Theban drove, and when she went into free fall and her own gravity coils took care of the problem of weight inside. He could hear Larsen bellowing commands to the quaking little engineer aboard the Danae. It was curious that, after being flung through emptiness to the Danae, the engineer most passionately wanted to rejoin the Theban. But he knew only Riccardo engines. Given the most perfectly found ship in the galaxy, and unlimited fuel, he would never be able to find an inhabited planet. He might live on for years, alone, or he might go mad. The little man couldn't face either prospect. He swearingly and terrifiedly obeyed Larsen's orders in the hope of returning to the situation from which he had been flung.

Horn wasn't aware of the passage of time. He was in a totally unnatural state. He was hands and feet and arms and body, doing numbly what was appropriate in order to find out how Ginny had been harmed, and by whom. And when he found out, he knew he would become more deadly than any monster on a swamp world of Altair.

It was almost an anticlimax when there was the slight thump which proved that the Theban had touched ground again.

The red-haired mate and Larsen came clattering down the companion ladder to go aground. Horn painstakingly adjusted one of the multiple repair jobs he'd done so the ship couldn't take off again without him. He followed the others out of the ship, shouldering aside crewmen anxious to find out what criminal enterprise they'd carried through, and what profit they'd make out of it.

The Danae was landed. Having descended by rocket, it stood erect in a brand-new clearing of steam and smoke and charred vegetation. This was not the space beacon, or anywhere near it. It was another part of that quasi-jungle which covered most of this planet. Horn saw one of the sticklike native animals, twenty feet tall, fleeing from the tumult of smoke and steam. It made gigantic leaps above the brown-and-green foliage as it fled.

Horn was close behind Larsen and the mate when they reached the scorched area. He saw the passenger port of the Danae open. The Theban's engineer stood fearfully peering out. When Larsen and the red-haired mate made a dash across the hot ground, he shrank back out of sight. Horn followed the other two. His shoesoles were on fire by the time he made a leap into the entrance port, but he did not stop to stamp out the flames. He heard the clatter of the two ahead of him and raced after them.

Cargo holds. Crew's quarters. Messroom and supplies. More cargo holds. But no crew. Passenger quarters, but no passengers. Here Horn stopped, searching feverishly. He saw Ginny's name on a partly opened door. His heart in his throat, he went in. The cabin, perfectly undisturbed, was empty. The bunk was made. Ginny's ship-bags were in place. It was as if she'd stepped out to have dinner or to chat with other passengers and hadn't come back. Her cabin had not been ransacked. The Danae, then, had not become a derelict by mutiny - which was unthinkable - or piracy - which was inconceivable.

Horn heard his own voice, calling Ginny. He stopped himself, went to another cabin, and another, and another. All were without any faintest sign of violence. In his anguish, his throat seemed to close. He flung himself at the companion ladder and climbed furiously. The passengers' lounge, arranged for dining, was empty. Another level up, the Passengers' stores and galley, was empty. Still another level. This held cargo - high-value freight divided among steel cubbyholes, each separately locked. He heard babblings somewhere on this level. Larsen and the mate were busy at the strongboxes. He heard noises suggesting frantic eagerness and raging anticipation.

Horn reached the control room, where the drive plates were still forward for the easier balancing of the ship around its centre of gravity, so in acceleration it would run true to its aimed course.

The control room was empty. Horn hunted frantically for the logbook. All ships on lawful voyages carried logs. These logs were ultimately turned over to the Space Patrol for analysis. Often they showed minor course deviations which were the first indications that a dark star and its brood of satellites was moving into a previously clear ship lane. The Danae's log would tell what had happened before the passengers and crew left in the lifeboats - if they had.

But the log was gone.

Horn made thick, senseless noises. Then he saw paper on the control room floor, under a chair as if it had fallen there. He snatched it up. He read:

"Liner Danae, last port Wolkim, next port Formalhaut." There followed a galactic date, and a time in hours and minutes. "Our engines blew out at -" again a galactic date and time - "and our auxiliary engines do not respond to controls. We calculate our position to be I.37 light years from the beacon on Carola, which is within competed lifeboat range. Therefore we have taken to the boats and will attempt to make Carola. We are: officers two, crewmen four, passengers seven. We are taking the currency from strongbox IV as a salvage operation, having room for it in the boats. We leave the Danae dead in space, transmitting the standard distress call."

It was signed by the skipper of the liner, and was a perfectly spacemanlike document. The Danae, obviously, would continue to transmit though she was a derelict, because from her captain's viewpoint there was a faint hope that her signal might be picked up by some other ship. This memo was in case such a thing happened. The Danae's captain had evidently not imagined that her supposedly blown engines would begin to work again of their own accord after the ship became a derelict. It was probable that the Theban's engineer, half hysterical with terror when he reached the control room, had knocked the statement to the floor without noticing it.

Horn could make guesses, now, about the Danae and everything that had led to her abandonment. Ginny had taken to the boats with the other passengers and crew, trying to make Carola. Carola was uninhabited, but should have stores and food for just such an emergency as the people of the Danae faced. But nearly one and a half light years in a lifeboat was not good. Ginny in a new and well-found liner was to be worried about. Ginny in a cramped spaceboat, with foul air and none of the protective devices of a full-sized ship - that was really frightening. And her situation wasn't an accident. It was part of a crime.

He descended the companionway, hearing Larsen's strangled curses. Horn threaded his way through the strongboxes for high-value freight and found Larsen stamping in frenzied, uncontrollable fury before an opened and empty box. Horn coldly gave consideration to the idea of killing him now, and abandoned it because he himself was no astrogator. He needed to go at once to Carola to find out if Ginny had got there or had died on the way. The coldblooded and sensible way to get there was to have Larsen take him. He held out the memo he'd picked up.

"I found this," he said. He heard his own voice, thin and drained of all emotion because his emotions were numbed by their own intensity. "The engines cut off and they took to the boats. After they'd gone, the engines evidently cut in again. They're heading for Carola in the boats."

Larsen snatched the paper and read it. His face purpled. "They took the money!" he roared. "Forty million interstellar credits ! We've got to get 'em!"

Everything clicked into place in Horn's mind. For a moment or two Larsen was within a fraction of being killed, but then Horn icily told himself that he had to postpone the satisfaction. First things had to come first. Ginny was a first thing.