Chapter III

_Shahrazad_ drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its banked dials, watching their steady needles.

Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities--and Ryd had lost every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under the towship's keel.

A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the engines.

Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right. "You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd," he said dryly. "That doesn't mean you," to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.

Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He ventured shakily, "Where are we?"

Mury smiled slightly. "Only our astrogator," he indicated Arliess, still masked and fettered, "can tell you that with precision. I understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?"

The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous tracks.

Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly, he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of light.

"What's that, Arliess?"

The astrogator broke his silence. "A ship."

"I know that well enough. What ship?"

"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that that's the liner _Alborak_, out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission for Mars."

Mury shook his head regretfully. "That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that drive."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Arliess. But his voice was raw and unsteady.

"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for us--will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!"

* * * * *

Arliess turned his head at last, slowly, as if the movement were painful. His dispassionate goggles regarded the telltale needles that had come quiveringly alive on the radiodetector box between them, bluntly giving the lie to the automatic chart. "You know more than I supposed," he said, and laughed unpleasantly. "But it won't do you any good now. We're to be inspected in space--a surprise of which we weren't informed until a few minutes before you came sneaking into the ship."

"That's too bad," said Mury. He sounded as if he thought it was too bad. As he spoke, he leaned sidewise, to the left this time, and closed a switch, lighting a darkened panel on the board; his long forefinger selected and pressed two studs. "_Too bad_," he repeated, and picked up the flame pistol. Young Arliess exploded in another furious surge against the binding clamps, clawing with clumsy gloved hands for the release; then he quieted, and stared at the small black bore trained on him.

He was trembling a little with fury. "You damned louse. Why don't you make it a clean job by giving it to me, now?"

"I'll need you, now if not before," said the Panclast softly. "Your friends would have stayed alive if that warship hadn't showed its nose. You must understand that. I was forced into counter-measures."

Then Ryd, squirming sidewise in his seat, understood. Those studs had controlled the outer airlocks. And now the men who had been in those locks, the young guardsman and the _Shahrazad's_ pilot and engineer--were no longer there.

"You--need _me_?" Arliess was briefly incredulous. "Oh--I get it. There have to be three in the crew." Then he sprang like a tiger.

But the moment in which he had thumbed the release and wrenched free of the padded clamps had been too long. Ryd flinched away--but there was no roar, no flame stabbed blue. They grappled an instant, swaying on the tilted floor--and then the pistol, reversed in Mury's hand, chopped down on Arliess' temple, a glancing blow, but fiercely struck.

The astrogator let go, staggering; and the gun swung up again and felled him.

Mury let the pistol drop into his own crew-seat, and, lugging Arliess under the arms, got him into his seat with a grunting heave. He said breathlessly, regretfully, "It was the only way...." The mask came off at once; the shock-pale face that emerged was even more youthful than Ryd had thought. The red trickle across the forehead was startling against its pallor.

Ryd sat staring--unshaken by the thought of yet another murder, but with a knot of fear tightening in his stomach as he thought of the warship somewhere out of their vision, questing nearer with every racing second--while the motors throbbed, the airvalves sang softly, and the gyroscopes whined somewhere.

And Mury's long, brown fingers explored rapidly through the stunned man's blond thatch; he nodded with satisfaction, and then with sure motions secured Arliess in his place. Ryd, on peremptory gesture, did for himself the same, with fingers that were oddly numb and jointless.

Then Mury was back in the pilot's chair. For a moment he sat as if poised, staring into starry space with knitted brows; then he reached far over, in front of the sagging astrogator, and with a decisive flick of the wrist switched on the ship's magnets to their full power.

"What's that for?" stammered Ryd, bewildered and more than a little scared. "Why--"

Mury made no answer. Instead, he had fixed once more on the detector box, watching it intently as the minutes crawled. The movements by which he secured his own anticlamps were automatonlike.

* * * * *

Twice the needles jumped briefly. Mury did not stir. But when they began to swing slowly over the scale, his hands leaped at the control studs; in the next instant _Shahrazad_ leaped and shivered, and a powerful acceleration fought to lever them out of their seats. The noise was deafening; one thin layer of sound proofing was between the cabin and the one-inch tubes of the overdrive.

Ryd's eyes rolled up in his head and grew filmed; the control room for him a blur of dizzy flame. He almost blacked out again; he seemed to see the face of the white Moon, leprously diseased, float like a runaway balloon past the curved nose window and disappear below his topsy-turvy field of vision; but he couldn't be sure it wasn't his own head spiraling away from its moorings. And then it was over and the ship bored steadily along her new tangent through space.

But now she vibrated yet more deeply to the great thrust of the afterdrive, and the light blurred more and grew dim. _Shahrazad_ raced into darkness, and the needles that told of a magnetic mass somewhere not far ahead, cutting swiftly through her far-flung field, swung steadily over.

Then _bang!_ in one unreverberating explosion, and the ship bucked hard and the blurred lights came down in a rain of fiery pinwheels. The motor died with a snap. Silence rang and Ryd's stomach boiled with weightlessness; slowly his eyes could see again. _Shahrazad_ held straight on her course toward some unknown target star; the gyroscopes still whined.

"Seven thousand feet a second," came Mury's voice from nowhere. "That's the speed at which we overran the meteoroid. It wouldn't have been nice if it had come through here; the armor before the control panel would have stopped it if it didn't strike higher...."

Ryd fell to shuddering. He mouthed with difficulty, "My God, you don't hit meteors on purpose!"

"You damned well do," said Mury crisply, "if you have to." His manner brought a sort of frightened admiration into Ryd's dark, unsteady eyes. Mury added, with apparent lack of connectedness, "Astrogators' heads don't just crack themselves on switch handles." The underdrive, roaring alive as he pressed the bottom stud on the control circle, caught Ryd's breath against his diaphragm and left him none to answer with if he had wished to.

She leveled out on course with short jerky bursts from the various banks of tubes. Mury was doing all his own course-plotting now, and his teeth were sunk in his lower lip as he frowned at the charts and at the rows of figures that spun into view on the calculator. He was still correcting feverishly when the stars dimmed and space throbbed like a tympanum.

A voice clanged through the strobophones. "_Shahrazad! Algol_ calling _Shahrazad_! Cut your drive to one vertical gravity. We will parallel and send a boat across. That is all."

Mury's right hand moved slightly on the sloping ledge and closed the throttle. The forward thrust again collapsed into weightlessness, and the _Shahrazad_ seemed to hang motionless for a moment before the underdrive took up the load. And meanwhile the meters told their tale of the swift onrush of the great battle cruiser in whose forward sphere of exhaust gases they already flew. Across the starry sky ahead crept a vast belt of hazy light like a zodiacal glow.

"The _Algol_," said Mury musingly. "A stellar dreadnaught. They aren't sparing precautions...." Abruptly he dropped his right hand from the dashboard, grasped a sheathed wire that curved away beneath the radiodetector box, and detached it with a brisk jerk. The needles dropped instantly to a uniform zero. The chain of causation was complete.

* * * * *

So there was no warning of the approach of the spaceboat. It bumped alongside and grappled to the towship's starboard airlock a couple of minutes later; Ryd stiffened, drew a long breath, and held it as if he would hold it forever. Mury, hand steady, depressed the studs that opened the lock ... for the second time since the ship had lifted.

The man who came aboard, from the warship hanging somewhere out there among the stars, was the very avatar of the Fleet in that second decade of the ninth century. Incarnate in space-blue and silver stars, with smoothly smiling face, shaven with a more than military meticulousness, that radiated power and the confidence of power. Power flanked and overshadowed his medium-tall figure, in the shape of two armed robot marines. The eyes of the Panclast masked their smoldering lights as they met those beneath the winged officer's cap; but the latter, aristocratically bored, noticed little or nothing.

"You appear to have had an accident, Captain Yaher," said the lieutenant with unblinking calm. "We noticed from a distance that your undershell was badly scored as if by collision with some solid body. Unfortunately ... and remarkably. Is any of your equipment out of order?"

Mury shrugged without effort, jerked a gloved thumb at the dangling wire. The lieutenant raised narrow eyebrows.

"Damaged before you lifted?"

"We were inspected thoroughly on the runway. It must have happened during initial acceleration."

The other frowned, fine vertical lines creasing his smooth forehead. "Odd."

Mury smiled a thin, crooked smile. "You military men don't know what can happen aboard a run-down towship. Anything, literally. The merchant fleet isn't at its best since the embargo."

"I know," said the officer curtly. "Even in the Fleet--" He stopped short, and his eyes, shifting, found a new subject ready-made in the slumped figure of Arliess. "Was this man seriously injured, Captain?"

"Just stunned, I think. He's an astrogator, and astrogators are tough."

* * * * *

The officer laughed perfunctorily. He moved forward and made a brief, distasteful examination of Arliess' tousled head, then stepped back, rubbing his fingers together.

"There's no fracture. But if he's concussed, he's in no shape to stand heavy acceleration."

Mury said smoothly, "We're not going to be using any. We're up to speed and our orders are to handle that power cylinder like a soap bubble."

The young lieutenant stroked his smooth chin, standing with feet braced against the tilt of the floor beneath which the rockets rumbled steadily, holding him erect as if under Earth gravity. The two men at the control board watched him with stares equally unblinkingly but far different in sentiment. Mury's was inscrutable; it might have veiled anything. Ryd's was all sick fear and certainty that something would betray them before the nerve-racking scene was played out.

"I think," said the blue-clad officer, "that if it won't incommode you too much to hold this acceleration a bit longer--"

"Not at all," said Mury, and Ryd silently but no less hysterically cursed his facile confidence.

"... I'll cross over again and send a ship's doctor to attend to your astrogator. A shot in the arm should bring him around."

Mury nodded placidly. The officer turned casually, spoke to the two blue-chromiumed robots, who faced about smartly; then, snapping his fingers, their master wheeled once more. "Just a moment. I almost forgot this.... Strangely enough, one of my men stumbled over it in your starboard lock." He fumbled inside his tunic a moment, displayed in his hand a heavy .20 service flame gun.

A flat and terrible silence lay in the control room. Then Mury broke it, as it had to be broken quickly:

"We weren't supposed to have any arms aboard. I can't say where that came from."

"Can't say, eh?" said the other musingly. Ryd, cold sweat on his forehead, stared in horrid fascination, first at the man and then at the fighter robots. He tensed himself to fight back, now, at the last, like a cornered rat--he hardly knew how or why.

With a shrug, the officer dropped the weapon into his pocket. "Ah, well--so many of these little mysteries remain just that. We mustn't hold up Terra's power supply." He turned once more to go. "I'll have the medico here in a flicker."

The trio passed out through the whispering locks, out to the waiting spaceboat. Ryd found that his mouth was parchment-dry; he stared at the apparently unshaken Mury, and drew a shuddering breath.

"I guess," he said jerkily, "we fooled them."

Mury smiled. "Yes," he agreed. "We fooled them this time."

Then a thought jolted Ryd; he gasped, "Listen! Did you think about--That battleship might have picked up those guys you dropped out of the locks! They've got us right here--we can't get away--maybe they're just--"

"Why would they?" Mury shrugged again. "But that chance had to be taken. Space is rather big, you know."