Chapter VI

By the sixth day, Gavin Murdock was no nearer the solution of the little death than he had been at the start.

It was Villanowski's watch below. Gavin sat on the observation deck, watching the three streaks in the void which betrayed their pursuers. They had closed the gap until they were almost on top of them. If the _Nova_ possessed a unique spacedrive, Gavin reflected, she'd better be unlimbering it. The three ships were almost in atomic shell range.

His thoughts wrestled for the hundredth time with the little death. Villanowski had become suspicious and clammed up. The officers frankly didn't like to discuss it. They evaded his questions, insisting he must first experience it.

Suddenly, Gavin started to his feet, his eyes searching the void. In toward the sun he had glimpsed the hair line of a rocket ship's jets. He thought he could distinguish five separate streaks of light, but they were so faint and far away that they blended into one streak. Five trails! That could only mean a flight of patrol spacers blasting after the three pursuers of the _Nova_.

Gavin heard a step behind him and twisted sideways, his hand rising to his shoulder holster.

Nadia Petrovna came out on the observation deck. She caught sight of Gavin and started to withdraw. Then an expression of determination took possession of her features. She flushed and said, "Let's call off the war."

"Sure." Gavin's voice was without mockery, but his hand still hovered close to his chest.

The girl came across the deck, her expression flooded with relief. "I'm glad now I didn't kill you. I--I was frightened. You believe that?"

"Sure."

"I've never dared tell anybody what I was forced to tell you. I've lived for two years in absolute terror. I was desperate."

"Sure."

"You don't believe me?"

"Not altogether," he admitted. His hand didn't leave his chest. "Why should I?"

Nadia bit her lip. Then she slipped her hand in the breast of her coveralls, brought out her diminutive dart-gun. She brought it out very slow and holding it by the barrel because Gavin was covering her with his own automatic.

"Drop it," he commanded. "Push it to me with your foot."

"Now," she said, "can we talk without suspicion? I'm unarmed."

"Are you?"

Her black eyes widened in surprise.

"Yes. Of course. I wouldn't...."

"Wouldn't you?" asked Gavin stonily.

She sighed faintly. "You can search me."

Gavin moved around behind her. He searched her impersonally, but thoroughly. If she'd been concealing so much as a postage stamp he was convinced he would have found it.

"All right," he said with a grin. "Now I trust you."

She dropped to a deck chair. "I've been trying to work up enough courage," she confessed, "to--to talk to you. But you've been so grim you've frightened me off."

"Why? D'you want another try at me?"

"That's not fair." Her eyes sought the deck. "I'm afraid. Cabot has been ... he's ... I think he suspects me of working with X."

"Are you?"

"No." Her voice was shocked.

"But Trev was?"

She nodded.

"And you were working with Trev?"

"I wasn't working with him," she protested. "Only that one time. He offered me five thousand credits to copy the _Saturn's_ loader."

"How did you connect with the _Nova_?"

"Do you mean how did I happen to get the job as third mate? But I told you. I was a cadet aboard the _Saturn_. I simply asked Cabot for the job."

Gavin said, "That lie wouldn't fool a school kid. If you were proscribed by Tri-World you wouldn't have dared approach Cabot in the open. Someone hid you out. Someone with enough influence with Cabot got you aboard the _Nova_--"

The general alarm cut loose with its strident clangor. Gavin sprang to his feet. "What's that for?"

"The little death!" Nadia said with a shudder.

* * * * *

As suddenly as the bell started it was stilled. A harsh voice came through the public address system, "Go to your quarters immediately! All personnel report immediately to your quarters and take to your bunks." The voice brayed forth the commands three more times at short intervals.

Gavin started at a run for the interior of the ship.

"Wait! Wait for me," Nadia cried.

He paused. "You better run for your cabin."

"I'm scared," she confessed in a trembling voice. "Let me come with you."

"I'm going to the engine room."

"But...." Her black eyes opened wide. Then she said defiantly, "I don't care. I--I want to come, too."

The jets fell silent.

"There she goes over to the robot pilot. If you're coming with me you'll have to stretch a leg." Without another word, he plunged off down the corridor.

A peculiar whine began to make itself heard. It was so high it hurt his ears. The atmosphere within the ship was growing foggy. A yellow-tinged mist eddied sluggishly like ink discoloring a glass of water.

He reached the engine room. There he halted so abruptly that Nadia pitched against him.

The engine room was deserted. But the strange door in the aft bulkhead stood open.

"What is it?" Nadia whispered.

"Don't know." He blinked his eyes, trying to pierce the gathering yellow fog. He caught a glimpse of a bank of switches, the base of a spherical tube, big as man. Then Villanowski passed across the opening from left to right.

Gavin began to creep toward the door. Halfway there a blinding flash stabbed at the base of his skull. He swayed dizzily, thought, "Nadia!" Half drawing his dart-gun, he turned laboriously around.

But the girl lay stretched on the deck, her long black lashes fluttering.

Gavin paused, tried to turn back to the door. It was like moving through syrup. A second flash burst in his brain. He pitched to the deck.

* * * * *

"Nine years!" said a man's stifled voice. It reached Gavin, vaguely distorted like an image through wavy glass. "My orbit, it's been nine years!"

Through the open window came a wailing chant of imported black laborers from Terra.

"But I didn't do it. You can't take me back now." The man's face was sweating and yellow-white. His fingers twitched. He spread them nervously on the desk top. "I'm proscribed. Jordon was a stockholder in Amalgamated Plastic. They'll kill me! Even in the Lunar Corrective Colony, they'll kill me."

"Sorry."

The cold unfeeling tone of his own voice shocked Gavin.

"But it's been nine years," the man persisted as if the time meant anything. Gavin had been sent out by the T.I.S. to get him. Twenty years wouldn't have made any difference.

"Even if I was guilty, I've proved I don't need corrective psychiatry. I'm not an incorrigible."

"Look," Gavin interrupted. "I've got a job. I don't know whether you're guilty or not and I don't care. I don't even blame you for killing Jordon, if you did...."

Gavin's sense of strangeness increased. This had all happened once before during his first year in the T.I.S. This man had been accused of murdering a minor official of Amalgamated Plastic and had fled. After nine years the T.I.S. had learned that he was at a remote trading post on Ganymede. Gavin had been sent to fetch him back for trial.

Only Gavin wasn't dreaming all this now. He was _re-living_ it!

He was inside himself, yet outside, judging, appraising his own actions with the detachment of an impersonal observer.

"I can make you rich. Millions of credits." The man's voice became low, wheedling. "There's a deposit of pitchblende back in the hills. It's fabulous...."

"It's no use," said Gavin harshly. "Hell, man, I'd always know that six or seven years from now another T.I.S. agent might tap me on the shoulder like I've done you. Besides, I'm satisfied. I'm a...."

"Manhunter!"

"If you like. I'm a manhunter. You might as well ask a cat to turn loose a mouse. It's against his nature. Come along now."

"Murderer," said the man with disconcerting calmness. "I'm innocent--and you're killing me just as surely as if you shot me with that dart-gun. Do you think Amalgamated Plastic has forgotten? I'm proscribed. Their agents will get me. Why don't you shoot me outright?" His voice ran up the scale, half-hysterical with fright as he read his sentence in Gavin's cold, unblinking eyes. "You're not human. Go ahead. Kill me now. I'm not coming. Do you hear? I'm not coming."

Gavin saw himself reach suddenly across the desk and rap the fugitive on the skull with the butt of his dart-gun.

From its peculiar vantage point, the detached half of Gavin's personality knew the inexorable sequence of events to follow. He would haul the fellow back to Terra, where he would be murdered by agents of Amalgamated Plastic at his trial.

For the first time, Gavin realized, he was seeing himself as he must appear to others. A gaunt, hollow-cheeked, sandy-haired man, with implacable blue eyes, tight-lipped, hard-faced. Manhunter!

* * * * *

He felt the cold deck under his fingers. He opened his eyes. He was still in the _Nova's_ engine room. The yellow mist had dissipated. He saw Villanowski standing over him. The chief's homely features were cold.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

Gavin pulled himself together with an effort and scrambled to his feet.

"Curious," he admitted frankly. From the corner of his eyes, he saw Nadia sit up, holding her temples.

Villanowski's eyes narrowed. "What did you see?"

"Nothing," Gavin said in a disappointed voice. He could feel the perspiration break through his pores. Villanowski was no fool. "The mist caught us at the foot of the ladder." He paused. "Next time we go into the little death, I'd like to be in the control room with you."

"You saw the control room?"

"Oh, the door was open." Gavin summoned all his histrionic ability to sound convincing. "I saw you and started in. Then--then I fainted, I guess."

Indecision was reflected on Villanowski's face. Finally he growled, "Get out, the pair of you. Don't come down here again except on your watch."

* * * * *

Gavin followed the girl up the ladder, his palms slippery with sweat on the cold bars. He wasn't sure whether he'd fooled Villanowski or not. They entered the mess room, helped themselves to coffee. He realized the girl hadn't uttered a word since the little death. He saw she was regarding him with a half-frightened, half-perplexed frown.

"How did the little death affect you?" he asked her.

"I had a dream. At least, I think it was." She bit her lip.

"What was it about?"

"Something in the future." She laughed. "It's silly, isn't it, to be so frightened at a dream. Especially one so fantastic."

"I don't know," Gavin replied dryly. "Mine didn't leave me so comfortable ... but you haven't told me what yours was."

Nadia rubbed her temples. "I dreamed we were all captured on Jupiter and sent to the Penal Colony." She laughed at herself. "It's so silly, because you--you"--again she gave a low laugh--"you were a T.I.S. agent!"

Gavin felt his mouth go dry. He stared at her in consternation. He moistened his lips and started to ask for more particulars, when the chief astrogator entered the messroom.

The _Nova's_ astrogator nodded perfunctorily at them and went across to the solar chart. Very deliberately, he pulled out the pin marking the _Nova's_ position, moved it across the map to within a week's voyage of Jupiter.

Gavin couldn't believe his eyes. "That's impossible! We weren't unconscious but a few seconds during the little death...."

"An hour," Nadia corrected. "The effects last an hour. So Villanowski claims."

"An hour, then. What difference does it make? The _Nova_ couldn't have gone that distance in an hour, nor in a thousand hours! Why man, that's faster than the speed of light!"

The chief astrogator grunted. "Impossible or not, that's our position. If you don't think so, go on out on the observation deck and take a look."

Gavin leaped to his feet and plunged through the door. When he came out on the quartzite enclosed deck, he flung his gaze aloft.

The entire aspect of the heavens had changed. The three streaks denoting the pursuing space craft were absent. The sun had diminished to the size of a lemon. And dead ahead loomed the huge banded disc of Jupiter.

It was true. In the space of a few moments the _Nova_ had traversed the void between Venus and Jupiter. Even though the planets were in a superior conjunction, the feat was unthinkable.

No wonder the big corporations were fighting like wildcats to get hold of the _Nova's_ spacedrive!

Gavin dropped weakly in a deck chair, overawed by the possibilities. A new era of space travel was being inaugurated!