Space Captain

IV

There were no oxyhydrogen torches to be burned for the refitting of the Hecla for space. There was nothing for incurious stars to see. Mere plastic sealings would have closed the shot-holes in her double hull, but Trent forbade it for the time being. Every other repair went smoothly. There was no reason for spaceboats to stir in the metal blisters which were their proper repositories. There was no particular reason for anything at all, in the way of visible repairwork, to be performed upon the fabric of the Hecla. She lay seemingly motionless in that emptiness and quietude and remoteness which is between-the-stars. That extra air tanks had been taken aboard, and tools, and food and water and certain eccentric equipment designed for planetary police forces; that these things, formerly absent, were now present in the Hecla's hull could not be discovered from outside it. The Hecla lay still, matronly, clumsy, bewilderedly acquiescent in her doom. The stars regarded her without interest or curiosity.

Trent sealed off certain areas inside the ship, filled them with air from the ship's reserves, and put his new recruits to the rewinding of the overdrive coil. He himself made a good repair to an emergency-patched cable in the Lawlor drive casing. Also, with painstaking care he set the tape-recorded log to register such actions as took place after the Hecla's reoccupation.

It wasn't on the whole a very difficult business. Hundreds of ships had blown their overdrive coils and rewound them in space and gone sedately on about their lawful occasions.

Thousands had had trouble with their Lawlor drives, but like all superlatively difficult achievements the design of those useful engines was so blessedly simple that nobody felt incapable of the work that would make them whole and functioning again.

Trent did do a certain amount of stage dressing, though. His crew for the Hecla, recruited on Sira, had cherished very unusual hopes. They expected high excitement out here, and it would have been anticlimactic to set them at a far from routine but by no means hazardous salvage operation. So Trent dressed it up.

He let only the parts of the ship necessary for the repair of the drives and a reasonable living space be refilled with air. Most of the ship remained empty, with shot holes unplugged. He painstakingly led his followers, two by two and in spacesuits, through the less frequently visited and now airless parts of the ship. They came to know their way about the bilges, through all the air-seal doorways, until they were able to move from any part of the ship to any other without appearing in the regularly used areas. And he had them carry small arms on these occasions.

It was largely stage dressing, but not wholly that. Trent still had to think of possibilities. He was not exactly certain that the pirate which had wrecked the Hecla was itself destroyed. He prepared against the possibility that it was not, by charming his crewmen with prospects of lurid action. They learned and rehearsed battle tactics and in so doing prepared to be attacked. If the pirate ship should appear, Trent and his followers were prepared. If it didn't, nevertheless he'd keep up the continual alert until he brought the Hecla to ground again, and then a reasonable bonus for work done and danger undergone would satisfy everybody. He'd be under no obligation to explain his precautions once they'd ended.

There were personal angles to the matter, too. He'd taken Marian Hale out of a very unpleasant situation. But there is something about the relationship between men and women which obligates a man who's done a woman one favor to do her another and another indefinitely. Trent had meant to salvage the Hecla from the moment of the pirate's disappearance in overdrive, when the Hecla was left helpless in space. If Marian had been another man, even the Hecla's owner, Trent could have admitted his intentions frankly or even discussed the method and the practicability of the job. But once he'd taken Marian from the wrecked Hecla, if they advanced to a state of cordial friendship he'd be under an obligation to do her the second favor of doing the salvage for at most the cost of the operation, because it belonged to her father. The fact was illogical but it was still a fact.

One shipday passed. Another, and another. The rewinding of the overdrive coil went along at a steady pace. Partly as stage-dressing, to be sure, but also with sound reason, Trent kept men watching certain dials every minute of every shipday and night. The Hecla's radar remained unoperated. Its pulses could be recognized for what they were. Her overdrive field detector was definitely not in use. It could be detected at many times a radar's effective range. But he did have radar-frequency listening devices turned up to maximum gain. They should give notice instantly if anybody hit the Hecla with even a single radar pulse, such as Trent had used to find it when a derelict.

Stars and nebulae and galaxies shone all about the interior of a seeming hollow sphere whose center was apparently the spaceship. That slightly over-plump vessel showed no faintest sign of life. She floated in emptiness. That was all. If watched from a fixed position—which could not exist where she lay between the stars—her bow might have been seen to wander vaguely to various headings. But that had no significance at all. There was absolutely nothing about the Hecla which could have told another vessel at a hundred yards' distance that she was alive.

But Trent worried about whether or not he ought to worry. There was no way for him to know. If the pirate survived at all, it was either badly damaged or it was not. If badly damaged, he needn't worry. If not, the damage would either make her head for her base, or not. If the pirate headed for her base, he needn't worry. If not, she'd either hunt for a ship she'd already disabled—the Hecla—or not. If she didn't hunt for the Hecla, he needn't disturb himself. If she did, she'd either find the Hecla or not. And if she did she could lie off at a distance and pound that already-battered ship with solid shot until no possible life or chance for life remained. And she would.

So it was with concern that he heard the spaceman on radar watch say uncertainly, "Cap'n sir, it looked to me like a radar pulse hit us just now. But it was only the one."

Trent took a deep breath.

"That's the way it would be. Watch for another." He spoke into the microphone of the all-hands speaker system. "All hands! All hands! We've got company coming. All hands clean ship. Tidy up. Everything from Sira down in the bilges. Suits on."

There began a stirring everywhere; men moved or labored throughout the ship. Some donned spacesuits immediately and then set about an elaborate tidying process. Some swept floors before donning space armor. Others carried small arms and ammunition out of sight. Men struggled with extra air tanks and with food and water containers brought here in the Yarrow. Police equipment Trent had bought on Dorade many weeks ago was hidden. His new crewmen were thoroughly familiar with it.

Trent went to the engine room where the rewinding of the overdrive coil went on. He estimated the amount remaining to be done.

He said wryly, "If they'd only held off for two more hours!"

The man on radar-watch called from the engine room, "Cap'n, another pulse! Somebody's headin' this way!"

"They would be," said Trent distastefully. To the men in the engine room he added, "Keep on winding, but have your suits ready. Make it as quick as you can. This is nasty!"

He made a circuit of the ship, while men watched him expectantly. One man asked hopefully, "D'you know who's coming, sir?"

"It's the pirate, I hope," said Trent peevishly. "The one who's been sniping ships all through the Pleiads. Maybe there's more than one. If so, this is the one that wrecked the Hecla. And it's coming and we're not ready for it!" Then he said sharply, "Look at that! That doesn't look like an empty ship. Get it out of sight!"

Somebody bundled up blankets that had been spread on the floor for dice to be rolled on. It wouldn't have been in use by the crew of a properly operating ship, so they wouldn't have left it behind when they left.

"Open the port lock door," commanded Trent. "That's the way it was left. Nothing untidy, now! Then get all weapons ready, pick your spots, and use gas if you can."

There were scurryings and more scurryings. Men elatedly completed the completely unusual task of making an occupied, worked-in spaceship look like it had been abandoned a long while back and never reoccupied. Much of the ship didn't need attention. Trent had only put air into the compartments necessary for the repair of the Lawlor drive and the overdrive coil, plus a reasonable living space.

Another call from the control room. "Another radar pulse, sir! Pretty strong!"

"All hands in suits," commanded Trent. He'd ordered it before. To the two men still winding the coil he said irritably, "We're going to bleed out all the air. Work in your spacesuits as long as you can. Then get out of sight!"

He checked each spaceman separately, emphasizing that all suit-microphones must be switched to "off." Reception, though, was desirable. Then he went to the control room. There he could watch through the viewports and see what the approaching ship did. The Hecla, of course, was no better armed than she'd been when first halted. Her overdrive was still inoperable until the winding was finished, and if and when it could be used, the pirate should be able to blow it instantly. Trent released all the air from what parts of the ship were air-filled. The ship became airless, like the derelict it represented itself to be.

Then he waited.

There is only one set of circumstances in which a man in the control room of one ship between the stars ever sees another. Normally, ships in deep space are in overdrive and moving too fast to be sighted even if their overdrive fields allowed it. It is not even possible for two ships to rendezvous more than a few hundred million miles from a marker such as a star. Observations taken down to a second of arc are simply not precise enough to bring them within detection range of one another. The only way in which one spaceship can actually sight another is when by assisted chance one ship detects the overdrive of a second and closes in on it instead of the conventional swerving away. If it can get close enough, guided by the overdrive detector, one of the two overdrive coils will blow. Then the unharmed other ship can break out to normal space and join the first one there by tracking it down by radar. But this process happens to be congenial only to pirates and privateers. Honest merchant ships refrain from using it.

But, Trent, in the Hecla's control room in very deep space, saw another ship.

First it was radar pulses coming from nowhere and with decreasing intervals between. Then it was something which made a single star on a vision screen wink out for the fraction of a second, and then another and another and still others. Then it was a glittering. And then it was a shape moving swiftly closer and growing in size as it did so.

The Hecla's communicator-speaker bellowed and Trent's helmet picked it up by induction. There was no air in the control room to carry sound. There was no air anywhere, except in her reserve tanks.

"What ship's that?"

Trent naturally did not reply. The call was repeated.

"What ship's that?" rasped the voice from the other ship. "Answer or take what you'll get! We'll put some shells into you!"

Trent waited. He didn't expect bombardment. It would be rather futile. He felt a certain detached anticipation which, had he known about it, would have been interestingly similar to the reactions of an ancestor of his some centuries before. That other Captain Trent had a half-keg of gunpowder beside him, and when the moment was just right he'd touch a slow-match to its fuse and drop it into the midst of an approaching body of men who'd arrogantly forced their way into a place where they didn't belong. He, also, waited in a peculiarly detached calm.

But the Captain Trent of the Yarrow and the Hecla had longer to wait. The other ship came nearer and Trent saw what only previous victims of this particular ship had ever exactly seen. He saw the pirate in the light of between-the-stars. It had been sleek and somehow it was still deadly to look at.

It circled the Hecla, and he saw welds and patches on its outer bow-plating. It was definitely the ship the Yarrow had rammed, repaired in space by men who deserved credit for that achievement. But they were not otherwise to be admired.

It circled again. It could see the Hecla's port-side airlock door left open. No ship which was occupied would have an airlock open to space. But if a ship was abandoned, the last man to leave it would hardly bother to close such a door behind him.

It was convincing. The pirate came to an apparent stop a half mile off. It appeared to drift backward, and then that drift was over-corrected, and it was a long time before the two ships floated almost exactly still in relation to each other.

Then lifeboat blisters opened their mussel-shell-shaped covers. Two spaceboats came out and moved toward the Hecla. Trent murmured into his phone. It wouldn't go outside the ship.

"Boats approaching," he said curtly. "I won't be able to use this helmet-phone after they board us, or their helmets will pick it up. Stand by to carry out orders when I give the word."

Silence. Then clankings. Trent heard them by solid conduction as he made his way along those un-obvious passages in the bilges which he and all his crewmen had already memorized. He touched his helmet to a metal wall. Yes. A spaceboat had tied up to the open airlock. He heard metal-soled boots on the airlock floor. Men came into the ship. The lock worked again, though there was no air for it to keep imprisoned. More men came in. The second spaceboat was lying a little way off until the first should report all clear.

Trent remained perfectly still, listening. He was in a narrow passageway by which the Hecla's cargo holds could be bypassed. He heard men tramping all over the ship: the control room—airless; the engine room—airless. The men who'd been rewinding the overdrive coil were gone, of course. They'd left the coil looking as if no hand had touched it since it blew—its metal case was still bulged and discolored from heat—but they were only behind the engine room sidewall. The pirate crewmen went into the living quarters. They were airless too, and they'd been swept and garnished so that they looked exactly as the Hecla had looked when it was a full-powered, fully manned and fully loaded ship of space, complacently speeding from one world to another. But then, of course, her hull had been full of air.

There were voices in Trent's helmet-phones. Men reported the ship empty. One man went to the airlock to open its outer door so his spacephone message could be picked up by the nearby pirate ship. Somebody'd tried to use the ship's space-communication equipment to call the pirate, waiting half a mile away. But there was no air to carry sound to its microphone.

"Maybe a shell cut a wire," said an authoritative voice. "No," said another voice. "No air." Yet another voice said, "No passengers either." Then various voices reported, "All clear aft."

"Nobody aboard."

"All set. I think there's a little air aft, but I'm not sure."

The authoritative voice said, "Some air aft? See if you can build up pressure. Maybe there're no shot-holes aft."

Listening tranquilly, Trent found that the interior of the ship sounded like a very busy place. Men moved here and there and everywhere, exchanging comments by space-phone, but there was no cause for suspicion. The comments ceased to be about the condition of the ship and became comments on the apparent luxury and riches of the food supply, and the practically bulging cargo holds, and so on.

The authoritative voice said, "Call in the other boat. Have 'em tell the ship everything's all right except the communicator. That'll work when there's air."

Trent stayed quite still, listening with a fine satisfaction as the second spaceboat made fast outside the airlock. The spacesuit tanks of his followers had a good two hours of air in them. He considered that he and they could remain completely out of sight while the pirate crewmen made free with the Hecla. And if the pirate came alongside to take on cargo, in a fine conviction that it had exclusive possession of the derelict Hecla…

Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. Within minutes of their boarding, the boarding party had proved past question that the Hecla was as empty of occupants as of air. There'd been no doubt about it to begin with. Things had to be that way! The second boatload of spacemen came stamping aboard through the airlock. The pirate crew—this more or less astonishing Trent—set about plugging the shot-holes their ship's gun had made, to restore the hull to air-tightness. It took a considerable time. Then they took air from the reserve tanks and filled the ship with it so the Hecla became re-filled with breathable air, icy, from its expansion from enormously high pressure to fourteen pounds to the square inch, but still very breathable. And then the men who believed that they were the new owners of the Hecla got cheerfully out of their spacesuits and began to examine their prize for objects of value. Some went to the cargo holds and began to smash open crates at random. That wouldn't have been really practical in space armor. Some searched the passenger quarters. They were disappointed in the loot found there, though, because by their own doing traffic in the Pleiads had been cut by ninety per cent, and passenger traffic by more than that. But the authoritative voice growled at them. It named two men and commanded them to the engine room. They were to examine the overdrive coil in detail. Moreover, they were to see what damage had been done to the Lawlor-drive unit.

Waiting and listening, Trent was moved to swear. He'd had high hopes. But anybody who uncovered the overdrive coil could see that it was almost rewound. A glance at the Lawlor engine would show that it had been worked on recently. The order meant that the pirates didn't intend merely to loot and abandon the ship, but to make use of it. Perhaps to change into it!

There was only one thing to be done. He spoke into the helmet-phone. His followers could hear it. The pirates out of space armor wouldn't. He turned on his spacephone and said, "Let's go!"

Then he appeared suddenly in the living quarters, where two of the pirates jumped visibly and plunged away in the panic of men who have put off their weapons with their spacesuits and are faced by a man who hasn't. Trent used a police weapon. It was necessary for him and his followers to be victors in the ambush they'd made. So when Trent pushed down the triggers of the gas-pistols at his belt, they didn't emit flames or thermite bullets. They flung out clouds of thick fog-gas, mixed to exactly the most efficient combination of dense fog laced with sneeze- and tear-gas. Which nobody could defy.

Those two pirates went down and kicked and jerked in convulsive sneezings they had no power to stop. Their eyes streamed tears. Trent felt a queasy disappointment. They were pirates, and they specifically would have murdered Marian as they'd murdered enough others. But instead of being captured in proper battle, he'd trapped them like rats and they were as unharmed and as helpless as petty criminals in the hands of planetary police.

"How's it going?" asked Trent in his space-helmet.

There was a crash, and a grunting voice said with pleasure, "Not bad! That one's out!"

There were other noises, confused ones. Trent, angry to profanity, heard the sound of running feet transmitted by the material of a spacesuit to the microphone inside its helmet. He could tell that the wearer of the spacesuit transmitting was plunging in pursuit. Another voice said zestfully, "He's mine!" Then somewhere else—he could only tell by the different timber of the voices—a man swore and panted, "Y'would, would you!" And there was a harsh noise, and after that only pantings. But somewhere a deadly weapon rasped, and there was roaring, and he knew that a compartment somewhere was flooded with fog-gas, and that a man who tried to kill with an ordinary instrument for murder was now seized by his own body and made to sneeze and sneeze as he tried with tearing eyes to find another target in the vapor all around him. And Trent heard the weapon fall as further monstrous convulsions of sneezing tore at him.

It was a singularly disappointing conflict. Trent's disappointment was marked among his followers, too. They'd trained and practiced and labored to acquire skill in combat in the steel-plate jungle of a spaceship's least-used parts. They could, they believed, fight ten times their number in this special area of battle, and come out victorious. But instead they'd used ground-police fog-gas, designed for the suppression of riots, and they felt no greater triumph than comes of using an exterminator's spray to be rid of unpleasant insects.

They brought the pirate crewmen, still suffering paroxysms of sneezing, and contemptuously piled them in a heap because they'd been so ingloriously subdued. Later they bound them, without even that unwilling respect a man will give to a sneak-thief who fights bitterly when he's seized.

"Now," said Trent precisely, "there's the pirate ship. Keep your suits on. We got these characters because they made themselves comfortable. We don't want that for ourselves. Heave them in some small compartment and weld the door shut on them. We've got to get away from their ship."

He scowled. Things hadn't gone as he planned. He'd hoped to bring his crewmen out of the bilges after the pirate and the Hecla were lashed to each other for the transfer of cargo. He'd looked for a total surprise and the possible capture of the pirate ship by boarding—a boarding-party appearing from nowhere, deadly in the sort of fighting the pirates had never bothered to learn.

One of his crewmen said ruefully by helmet-phone, "It wasn't much of a fuss, Cap'n. Shall we go back to work on the overdrive coil?"

For a long time the two ships lay in space with barely half a mile between them. Nothing visibly happened. The Hecla's nose pointed successively to an eighth-magnitude star and then to a dim red speck of light halfway to the Milky Way, and then to a fairly bright green one. The wanderings of its axis among far-away and unconcerned suns had no significance. The pirate ship accompanied it in its drifting. The men left in it waited impatiently for the prize-crew to report repairs on the way and some idea of what cargo the Hecla carried. Then it would decide whether to send the Hecla to its base with a minimum crew, or take what cargo was worth taking and leave the ship a derelict.

But the information didn't come. The pirate ship called by communicator. There was no answer. It called again. No reply. The boats had reported that all was as anticipated and their crews had entered the Hecla. There'd been a further report or two from them. But now there were no more reports. The pirate waited impatiently.

Stars looked down from overhead, and up from the immeasurable abyss below, and gazed abstractedly from every other direction. The pirate ship called yet again. And again. Two-thirds of what crew it had left was aboard the Hecla. They'd reported all well. The crewmen still aboard the pirate were now merely a skeleton crew, because they'd lost men in the ripped-open compartments from the ramming, and most of the rest had boarded the Hecla. The ship couldn't afford to send more men to find out why they didn't answer its calls. The Hecla was theirs. It was captured and occupied. But it didn't answer calls!

The reaction on the pirate ship wasn't exactly rage. It was mostly pure, stark, superstitious bewilderment. This couldn't happen! Minute after minute, quarter-hour after quarter-hour, the pirate ship called frantically to its boarding-party in the Hecla.

Then, quite suddenly, there were swirlings and clouds and jets and outpourings of vapor from the Hecla. She seemed to become the center of an utterly impossible cloud of vapor. It almost hid her. There were flashes and explosions in this starlit preposterousness.

And then the Hecla vanished.