Space Captain

I

He came of a long line of ship captains, which probably explains the whole matter. His grandfather was the Captain Trent who found the hole in the Coalsack, that monstrous dust cloud between Syrtis and the whole Galliene region, and thereby cut months from the time formerly needed to go around the Coalsack to the new colonies beyond it. A great-great-great-grandfather was the Captain Trent who charted the interstellar meteoric streams in the Enid group of suns, whereby no less than eight highly desirable planets became available for human occupation, and one was named after him.

Farther back still, a many-more-times-great-grandfather commanded the second colony-ship to reach Delva. He arrived to find the first arrivals hysterical with terror and demanding to be taken off and carried home, which couldn't be done with his ship already loaded to capacity. But that Captain Trent went into the jungles with eight spacemen and found out the activity cycle of the giant saurians who'd appeared to make the colony impossible. Now there was a game refuge for those beasts, carefully watched lest an interesting species be wiped out by hide-hunters.

There were other Captain Trents, all the way back to one who skippered a trading ship in the eighteenth century, when ships sailed oceans of water only, and a coasting-voyage from London to Scotland took as long a time as nowadays from Rigel to Punt, and when a sailing ship took as long to reach the Azores as is now required for the sixty-light-year journey from Deneb to Kildare.

But the similarity between such sailing and modern journeying did not end with the time between ports. In those early days, as now, a ship leaving harbor was strictly on its own until it dropped anchor again. There was, as today, no communication between ports except by ship. Hence a cargo in strong demand in a given port last week might be worthless in an overstocked market this week, because in the interval one ship or two had come in with the same commodity to offer. So in those days, as now, all ship captains were traders. They bought wisely and sold shrewdly, depending on a percentage of the voyage's profits for their reward.

Also, then as now, there were ships which left port and were never heard of more. Some struck reefs and some perished in storms. But other dangers were of human origin, and that Captain Trent of the eighteenth century was not gentle with their originators.

It was related of him that he once sailed into an English port with shot-holes in his sails and patches on his hull and a fished repair to his foremast, and with hanged men swinging at his yardarms. He explained curtly that a pirate had attacked his ship and he couldn't spare hands to guard those who surrendered, so he'd hanged them. At the time he was much admired. But he was forgotten now. Yet a great-great-great-and-so-on-grandson of that Captain Trent was the captain of the space-merchantman Yarrow, who made the most profitable voyage of any ship captain so far recorded.

It didn't look promising at its outset. The Yarrow was an elderly merchant ship of a size becoming unprofitable in modern times. Her record, though, was honorable. She was driven by old and dependable Lawlor engines which faithfully thrust her through emptiness at a good speed in normal space, but a good many times faster than light when an overdrive field surrounded her hull. There had never been any trouble with her air, and she'd been surveyed in her fortieth year and certified for voyages of any length in the galaxy. But her size was against her. A skipper who could make money with her would be better employed in a larger ship. It would require very special conditions to make it profitable to send her to space again.

But those conditions did exist. The owners of the Yarrow explained them to Captain Trent. He listened. They mentioned that space commerce in the Pleiad group was almost at an end. It was bad enough that a privateer had been commissioned by the government of Loren to force trade with that unprosperous planet. That was very bad—legal, perhaps, but undesirable. But out-and-out piracy had been practiced to such a degree that even the pirates of the Pleiads now complained of the poor state of business. Hence the possibility of good profits and the offer of the ship to Captain Trent.

The owners of the Yarrow explained that magnificent profits could be earned even by a ship of the Yarrow's size in a trading voyage to the Pleiads if, first, she had a skipper of Captain Trent's ability to handle her, and, second, if she was equipped with a defense against pirates that had been developed by one of the space-line's ship engineers.

Trent observed that he didn't hold with gadgets. He seemed reluctant. The owners raised their offer. Fifteen percent of the voyage's profits instead of ten to the skipper. An absolutely free hand in the choice of ports to be called at. His own selection of cargo to be put on board. His own crew. A guarantee of so much for making the voyage, whether profitable or not.

These were very unusual concessions. Captain Trent listened, apparently unconvinced. The owners sweated. They explained urgently that the Yarrow was a dead loss while it remained idle. They were anxious to get it out to space. They added as a final lure that they would send McHinny along to be the ship's engineer and operate the pirate-frustrating device. He was its inventor. He'd be the ideal operator. The Yarrow would be safe against danger from pirates, which had practically stopped trade between the solar systems of the Pleiads. What more did he want? Salvage rights? He could have them too.

It was a custom of owners to offer salvage rights when they wanted to convince a skipper of their generosity. Salvage rights amounted to an agreement that if Captain Trent should find an opportunity for salvage, in space or aground, that he could make vise of the Yarrow for the job, provided only that he paid charter-rate for the use of the ship during salvage operations.

Captain Trent smiled politely and, after reflection accepted the proposal. The Yarrow's owners clapped him on the back and congratulated him on their generosity, and then feverishly got the Yarrow ready to lift off. In three days the ship was loaded with cargo Trent had approved. The landing-grid lifted her to space. And then the owners relaxed, gratefully.

Because this was the day before the insurance rates on ships and cargos for the Pleiads were to be raised to twenty-four percent. The Yarrow's owners had wanted to get her off ground before that rise in premiums. As Trent saw it, if he did make the voyage and get home again, there'd be a good profit for the owners. But if he didn't return, they'd collect full-value insurance on the Yarrow and her cargo. Trent was aware that on the whole they'd prefer the insurance.

It didn't bother him. Prices should be high and profits excellent in a sector of space where space commerce had become so hazardous that pirates themselves had run up against the law of diminishing returns.

Trent checked the Yarrow's position by sighting and identifying the planet Gram. But he didn't go aground there.

He went back into overdrive and drove around the Beta Cloud—an isolated space-danger a light-year in extent, the result of a semi-nova outbreak of the sun in its middle—and made his first landing at Dorade. He learned that the situation of piracy and grounding of space craft still existed in the Pleiads. Here, thriftily, he made two deals. One was for the sale of some not particularly desirable cargo, and the other was the purchase of small arms and police equipment manufactured for export to other planets' police departments. It amounted to a swap of this for that. He learned that the state of things in the Pleiads was worse. Most skippers stayed out of the Pleiads altogether. Interstellar trade in general had been cut by ninety per cent among the Pleiad worlds. Some shipowners there had sent their ships far away, with instructions not to return while space travel was so perilous in their home stellar group. Some had grounded all their ships. The only real communication between inhabited planets of the Pleiads was by small space craft not worth a pirate's or a privateer's attention. But there weren't many of them.

Trent judged this to be a promising state of things. He lifted off from Dorade. On the next leg of his journey he instructed his crewmen in the use of the just-acquired weapons. In particular he drilled them in the fine art of combat inside a spaceship's elquences of compartments, tanks, holds, and other places they'd never imagined as combat areas. They found the instructions fascinating. He informed them of practical but unusual methods by which men in spaceboats could board other space craft, using shaped charges against a metal hull to give them entry. These instructions, of course, were to prepare against pirates.

The Yarrow's crewmen were charmed. They formed a zestful conviction that Captain Trent planned some highly profitable piracy himself. They learned their novel lessons with enthusiasm and hope.

The Yarrow went on its way. Trent's several-times-great grandfather would have kept his crew chipping paint or tightening or slacking off stays to adjust to differences of humidity from day to day. If they were merchant seamen, they already knew how to fight. But Trent exercised his crew with weapons.

They anticipated interesting consequences of their new combat efficiency. They looked at Trent with bright eyes, waiting for him to tell them they were about to capture a space liner loaded with treasure and with terrified and hence docile females.

He gave them no such information, but he did keep them busy. Presently the Yarrow landed on Midway. He went aground, alone. He asked questions. He admitted that he planned to go trading in the Pleiads.

Officials on Midway warned him solicitously. Only one ship had left Midway for the Pleiads in months. None at all had come from them. The one ship to risk going in was the Hecla, and she'd lifted off only the day before. Her skipper'd judged from the latest reports of missing ships that the pirates were working on the far side of the Pleiad group. He was making a full-power dash for Loren. Trent had better not imitate him.

But Trent did. He lifted the Yarrow off Midway after only three hours aground. Immediately she was in space again he had the small-arms weapons passed out once more.

For four days out of Midway the Yarrow drove steadily, in overdrive and of course in illimitable isolation. She was surrounded by her overdrive field. Through it no light could pass, nor any message of any kind but one. Every instrument aboard her, made to report on the universe outside, now read zero. It was as if there were no cosmos, no galaxy, no existence beyond the ship's hull plates. The viewports viewed nothing. The communicators received nothing. The Yarrow was isolated as earlier generations could not have imagined. In overdrive a ship is practically in another and an empty universe, in which nothing ever happens.

But on the fourth shipday out from Midway one solitary instrument gave a reading. One dial-needle stirred, in the control room. One detector-needle moved the minutest possible trivial indication. A light glowed. The spaceman on control room watch notified Trent through the loudspeaker in the captain's cabin.

"Captain, sir, the drive-detector's registering."

"I'll be there immediately," said Trent.

He was. It was less than five yards from his cabin to the control room, but he hurried. The broad instrument board faced him as he entered, with all its dials and indicators above the equally broad but less cluttered lower control panel. Underneath every instrument either a green or an amber light told that each unit of the ship's equipment either operated normally, or was ready to do so when the ship broke out of overdrive. But the light under the overdrive detector shone red.

"No change as yet, sir," said the man on watch.

Trent grunted. He sat down in the pilot's chair. Almost immediately he reversed the Yarrow's drive. It began to cut down her speed from unthinkable overdrive-velocity to thousands of miles a minute, then to hundreds, to tens.

The detector reported stronger and stronger indications of another over-drive operating within another ship a—now—relatively trivial number of miles away. It would have to be in a ship, of course. And that ship would be informed by a detector in its control room of the Yarrow's existence and near presence.

Trent threw a switch. A panel of signal-analyzing instruments lit up. He set to work with them.

There was silence save for that small assortment of noises any ship makes while it is driving. It means that the ship is going somewhere, and hence that it will eventually arrive somewhere. A ship in port with all operating devices cut off seems gruesomely dead. Few spacemen will stay aboard ship in a spaceport. The silence is too oppressive.

The signal-analyzer clicked. It had determined the bearing of the other overdrive field. Lighted numerals preserved the information while the analyzers investigated other items. The detected field was very faint. Its bearing was ten-forty to the Yarrow's course. Its own course—

It had no course. If one allowed for the Yarrow's motion, the other ship must be standing still. But this was light-years away from Midway, and Midway was still the nearest world. It was not normal for a ship to lie still in space between the stars. Trent did something more abnormal still. He headed the Yarrow toward the overdrive signal source.

He pushed the all-hands-alert button. Speakers all over the ship emitted the raucous warning of probable emergency. He spoke into a microphone, and the same speakers echoed his words with a peculiar choral effect.

"Load small arms," he ordered curtly. "Take combat posts. Rocket launchers to the airlocks. No launching without orders."

He settled more firmly in the pilot's chair, and the man on watch drew back and began to get out the spacesuits the control-room occupants might need next. Trent continued to watch the dials of the signal-analysis devices. He had only instrument readings to go by now, but in all other respects this development in the journey of the Yarrow was like the sighting of a sail when one of his ancestors captained a trading vessel in the eighteenth century. The report of a reading on the drive detector was equivalent to a bellowed "Sail ho!" from a sailing brig's crosstrees. Trent's painstaking use of signal-analysis instruments was equal to his ancestor's going aloft to use his telescope on a minute speck at the horizon. What might follow could continue to duplicate in utterly changed conditions what had happened in simpler times, in sailing ship days.

The Yarrow's mate came in.

"Spacesuits, sir?" he asked stolidly.

"Better put them on, yes," agreed Trent. He didn't take his eyes from the instruments. The mate gave the order. He put on a spacesuit himself, from the back wall of the control room.

"Any other orders, sir?"

"Eh? Yes. Make sure the engineer's gadget is set for operation. We might as well try it out. But the engineer's the kind of putterer who'll constantly be trying to improve it. If he's done anything, make him stop and get it ready for use."

"Yes, sir," said the mate.

"You'd better know what's going on," added Trent. "There's an overdrive field out there ahead. It's of detection strength only; it isn't strong enough to affect the ship that's emitting it. But it should mean that our drive has been picked up too. Yet we're headed for it and it hasn't moved. You figure that out!"

Ships in overdrive avoid each other carefully, for self-evident reasons. But the Yarrow was driving toward a ship which was not in motion but should have known of the Yarrow's approach. It had a very weak field in existence, so weak that it couldn't possibly do anything but notify the Yarrow's presence and approach. But it hadn't moved!

The mate blinked and struggled with the problem.

"Maybe we'd better keep away, sir," he suggested.

Trent finished sealing his own spacesuit. He put on the helmet and opened the face plate.

"Go see that the engineer's gadget is ready for use," he commanded. "I'll try it first."

The mate went out. Trent shrugged his shoulders. No ship in pirate-infested space should lie still, emitting a weak drive field which was an invitation to pirates to approach. The fact that one did exactly that suggested a very specific event in the course of happening. The mate didn't see it, which was possibly why he was still a mate.

The Yarrow continued to approach the source of a feeble overdrive field, capable at this strength only of operating as a detector of other overdrive fields. But the Yarrow's approach didn't cause it to move, either to avoid the Yarrow or to attack it. Which was also unreasonable. It suggested that the crewmen of the other ship had some enterprise in hand which was too absorbing to let anybody bother about instrument?.

Trent's expression was at once formidable and absorbed. The formidable part was much the stronger. His lips were a firm straight line. From his pilot's chair he surveyed the control board again. The signal-analysis setup continued to work, re-observing the data which was all it could report.

The source of the remarkably weak detector field was a thousand miles away. Five hundred. Two hundred. One. Trent said in a clipped voice, "Engine room! Is that gadget ready for use?"

The mate's voice replied from a speaker.

"Just a minute, sir. The engineer says he was improving it. But he's getting it back together, sir."

Trent swore, in a level voice. He swung the Yarrow a second time in the infinite blackness of overdrive. The other ship would be in normal space. It's drive was turned to detector-strength only, which meant that it couldn't do anything but detect other drives. That other ship would see the Milky Way and a thousand million stars. The Yarrow, approaching it, saw nothing. It was like one of those legendary submarines of the wars on Earth. It was blind and invisible because it was in overdrive, but it came nearer and nearer to its unseen quarry.

Trent said shortly, "All hands close face plates. Use air from your suit tanks. I'm breaking out of overdrive. Engine room, how about that gadget?"

The mate's voice, troubled, "Another minute, sir! Not more than another minute!"

Trent said in the iciest of voices, "I'm breaking out now. Let me know when to start charging it. Rocket launchers, stay ready but wait for orders."

Then he turned the overdrive switch to "off."

He felt, of course, those acutely unpleasant sensations which always accompany entering or leaving the overdrive state. One is acutely dizzy and horribly nauseated for the fraction of a second. One has the helpless feeling of falling through a contracting spiral. Then, suddenly, it is all over.

The Yarrow was back in normal space.

But the nearest-object dial registered something impossibly close. The dead-ahead screen showed what Trent had guessed at. It showed the other ship and why it was still. It even showed why nobody was paying attention to the readings of drive-detector instruments.

Twenty miles away from where the Yarrow had just broken out of overdrive, a bulky merchantman lay dead in space. Two miles from it a smaller, lighter ship stood by. Spaceboats from the smaller vessel were pulling toward the larger ship.

The situation was self-explanatory. A pirate or a privateer had blown the overdrive of a merchantman, most probably the Hecla out of Midway and bound for the Pleiads, for Loren. The merchantman had evidently been crippled so it could not flee. And as it lay helpless, boats from the pirate ship were now moving to board their victim. And the crewmen of the marauder were too busy watching to notice detector dials.