Chapter X

Vacantly the three survivors of spacewreck, in the lost lifeship, stared at the grille of the infrawave receiver in the deadly silence that followed Admiral Stone's last transmission. This was the end of message, end of hope, end of them.

Jock Norton's toneless voice gritted, "That about rips it wide, doesn't it?"

Alice Hemingway's voice came out, weak and thin. "Ted--you tried. Now you'll--"

Andrews stood up quickly, and strode across the floor shakily. He faced the infrawave receiver with a mad glitter in his eye, and he roared:

"Damn you, come back! Damn you, come back!"

Over and over he roared the inane words, and as he roared, his anger and madness increased until he was beating a fist on the cabinet in a violent rage.

The infrawave said crisply, "Flight Squadron Nineteen in flight pattern for Procyon Four."

"No!" screamed Andrews.

"--time," continued the infrawave.

"No!" screamed Andrews again, beating the cabinet with both fists now.

"Ten!" said the infrawave, and Andrews came down on the cabinet with all of his wiry strength.

"Nine!" The beat became a rhythm with the call.

"Eight!" Another hard slam left blood marks on the metal.

"Seven!" The cabinet bent inward. A shower of glass fell from the tuning indicator.

"Six! Almost lost in a solid thunk.

"Five!" And after the blow something spluttered in the speaker's throat.

"Four!" Knobs bent, and Andrews' blood drooled along the cabinet front toward the deck.

"Three--" With a fizzling sound the infrawave died, and said no more.

Insanely the man beat upon the bent cabinet in the same rhythm although the sound had died. He beat and he beat until the stun and shock had been wiped out of Jock Norton's face. He came over and hauled Andrews from the cabinet. The financier struggled, but it was futile against Jock's size and strength and youth and stamina.

The pilot trapped Andrews' flailing arms and held him immobile until rage, madness and hysteria had passed. Andrews lay silent, his face blank, his breathing shallow.

Norton looked at Alice. "Stroke?" he asked worriedly. "Has he got a bad heart?"

Alice looked up, the semi-blankness fading from her face. "I--don't know. Is he--"

"He's passed out or burned out, or worked himself into a faint."

Alice brought a blanket as Norton lifted Andrews to one of the bunks. "Jock?" she asked.

"Yes?"

"What does this mean? Enemy ships and all that?"

"It ain't good, baby. From somewhere has come the inevitable transgalactic culture, only with guns instead of gifts."

"But it isn't like us to run."

He nodded soberly. "Yes, it is," he told her positively. "The first man lived to start the human race by knowing when to run like hell. He ran until he could pick up a handy rock to throw. That's what our men have done. Run home to get our rocks."

Alice looked wistful. "And Ted?"

Jock shrugged. "I wouldn't know," he said. "He'll probably get busted a few grades for insubordination. They took his command away. That's one way of preventing full insubordination from an officer who might have a lot of public sentiment on his side, or good high-rank material in him. They take away his command _before_ he disobeys, slap him down a few steps for trying, and let him sweat it out."

"I'm glad," she said simply and her voice was calm.

* * * * *

Norton looked at her strangely.

She caught his look and smiled, almost serenely.

"It would be a shame," she said, "for Ted to have to lose his rank and his prestige and his honor, and maybe his life and the lives of all his men, by doggedly staying out here in the face of an enemy fleet, against orders."

Norton nodded dubiously. "I suppose so," he said. "But do you know where that leaves _us_?"

"Yes," she said, "I know."

Tears welled up in her eyes, and she leaned forward to find strength in his arms, and a rest for her weary head on his shoulder. He held her, gently stroking her hair with one hand and pressing her against him.

She stopped sobbing after awhile, and looked up at him. Murmuring softly, he leaned down and kissed her eyes. She clutched at him and swayed in his arms. He found her lips then, but there was no fire in them.

Nor was he surprised. For there was no fire in his own, either....

Viggon Sarri gloated, "Ver-ry interesting. Ver-ry."

Faren Twill shrugged. "Just what else did you expect?"

Regin Naylo scowled. "We had 'em in your lap," he complained. "And nobody gave the order to fire. We could have chased 'em inch by inch, but all we did was to hang here in space and scare the hull plates off of them and let 'em run like rabbits."

Viggon smiled. "Exactly. I expected one of two things. They could have swarmed into us senselessly, suicidally, to take whatever toll they could take before they lost. That's why we had the projectors alerted and the fighters hot. I don't even open an ant hill without protection, gentlemen. So they did the other thing."

"Sure," growled Regin Naylo. "They could either stay or run. Since they didn't stay, they--"

"Stop being smart," snapped Viggon Sarri. "Or weren't you listening?"

"Yes, I was."

"Then you should realize that what they were doing was behaving sensibly. Just what would you do, Naylo, if you were wandering through a woods unarmed and a large, unknown, and completely unexpected beast leaped out on your path?"

Naylo sneered. "I'd run."

"Then what?"

Naylo's eyes widened. He said at last, "I'd run until I got where I could get armed, then I'd probably go back hunting the beast."

"Exactly. But not too good an analogy, which is my fault. They did not run in abject terror. They sent scouts to spy us and report our strength as best they could. Then they retreated. There's a difference. They _reported_ home, but _retreated_ to their base or bases, because they knew that they could do no good by hurling themselves on us."

"They want to arm themselves?"

"Precisely."

"And what do we do now?"

"I think we had best question the one we picked up."

Linus Brein shook his head. "Not that one," he said.

"Why not?"

"When we pried open his scoutcraft, he came out a-fighting and he fought until we had to take him over. He clipped several of our boys, and I'm afraid we got a little rough. Our fighting men can get hard, you know."

"Dead?" demanded Viggon.

"No. But he'll be in no condition for an extensive questioning for some time."

"Damn! Well, the next best thing to do is to collect the lifeship. We know what we wanted to know about their mass reaction. Now we must learn about their individual reaction to an awkward and dangerous situation."

Faren Twill picked up the microphone and ordered a flight of light destroyers into action....

* * * * *

Wilson sat in the dome room of the detector ship and cursed. The lights were still flickering across the presentation surface, flecks and streaks of spurious response. But with space cleared of the horde of searching spacecraft, the flickings and the streakings had diminished, although that cluster of spots still held its position.

Wilson said to Allison, "Seems to me we could have volunteered to stay out here and keep watch."

Allison was shaking his head when the dome went black again. "They wouldn't believe you," he said.

One of the techs readjusted something and the presentation returned.

"It's a damned funny business, this Space Service," said Wilson. "Any service, I guess."

"How so?" asked Manning.

"If I give a wrong order and you disobey, to keep from piling up, you get clipped for it. If you don't refuse to carry out the order and we pile up, I get busted--if any of us come back whole."

"I wonder if _they_ have that trouble, too," Wainright said musingly, looking up at the cluster of dots that represented the enemy fleet.

"Probably. I hope so."

Edwards shook his head. "I'd rather fight an enemy that had no iron-bound discipline. Let 'em run wild, taking their own ideas as they come. Let 'em argue with the skipper. Let 'em quit if their commander doesn't play their way. That's the difference between a mob and a service, Ted."

Wilson grinned. "Call it confusion then!" he said, with a wave at the dome. "And I hope they have it!"

As they watched, a group of dots moved from the group and started away, slowly, at an angle. They watched until the dots had progressed a few feet from the main cluster.

Ted Wilson eyed them intently. "There must be some reason.... Allison!"

"Yes?"

"See if you can project an imaginary line across that damn dome! I'll bet that our lifecraft lies somewhere along the course!"

Allison yelled, "Jones! Halligan!"

The dome blacked out with a puff of smoke from one bay. A tech groped deep in one of the open panels and went to work with long-handled tools. Someone called above the hubbub that they'd have it back in shape in a minute.

Wilson mumbled, "Sixteen thousand delicate infrawave parts, and a half-million electronics components, all balanced on the pinpoint of a page of equations rolled into a dunce's cap! And I have to live with it!"

Allison grumbled, "Hell, nothing is perfect the first time."

"All right, forget it." Wilson shrugged, as the dome flickered on again.

It made a flowing, over-and-over turn. Then the presentation spun around some one of its personal axes of no particular coordinate, like a planetarium being operated by a putterer who wants to see what happens when he pushes any button at random.

It settled down.

Jones and Halligan set up their sighting devices in the center of the big floor and began to project their line across the dome.

One of the techs came running up to Allison. "If we change the driver response threshold by seven ultrachronic levels--"

"Go away, Magill. Maybe tomorrow."

"But look--"

"You look. I said--"

A white-yellow circle appeared on the dome with a red line cross on it like a telescope reticule. Halligan was aiming a flashlight pointer at the dome and talking into the floor mike at the same time.

"Hey, Allison! Maybe that's it?"

* * * * *

In the circle was a pinpoint that came and went. It danced now and then, and it sloughed into flowing shapes as it merged with the rest of the flickering on the dome. It would have been lost in the ever-changing light pattern of the dome if there had been no reason to suspect it. The spot lay on a dead line across the dome from the course of the other spots.

"All right," Wilson said grimly. "We've got no more scouts to go look. Turn this crate head-on for that trace and we'll barrel!"

Slowly the presentation in the dome shifted. The almost lost spot rose until it was dead above.

"Pour on the coal!" yelled Wilson. "We've got to get there first!" He grabbed for the infrawave phone and cried, "Hello, out there! Lifeship Three, we've sighted you! We'll be with you in--" He glanced at Allison. "How far are they?"

Allison shook his head. "That's one of the limitations. We can detect, and display in solid angle azimuth, but we haven't got to the ranging yet."

Wilson said a few words that should never have gone out over the infrawave. Then he said into the phone, "Well, we've sighted you, anyway, and we'll be with you soon." And to Manning he said, "I hope to God they've got their receiver on...."

Linus Brein said, "I didn't catch part of that. New words for the files, I guess."

Viggon Sarri said, "Probably a few words of condemnation over the fact that their detector doesn't range."

"I'll catalogue them so."

"Do that. Maybe we can ask their specific meaning at some later date. But I'd not be inclined to bark those words at one of them to see what happens. It might happen. Linus, how do we stand with them?"

Linus consulted a chart. "They're a little closer to the life ship than we are. But we're faster."

"Faren, can't we get any more speed?"

Faren Twill shrugged. "We've a destroyer escort," he said. "If we don't mind leaving the destroyers behind."

"Pour it on," said Viggon Sarri sharply. "Then have the destroyers fan out in an intercept pattern just in case...."

"Cold," said Alice in a thin voice.

But it was not really cold; it was the giving up of all hope, the turning off of all will to live, that made her cold.

Norton cradled her in his arms and thought of how this would have been if they had been snug and warm a-planet, instead of lost and alone in space. Her slender body against him did not bring passion, but compassion. He stroked her head and tried to warm her shivering body.

Andrews still lay in a coma.

Jock Norton looked over Alice's shoulder at a wall cabinet. In that cabinet were some capsules that would bring a merciful end before the real suffering began. Andrews probably wouldn't need one. But maybe--maybe--

Slowly, as if doing something against his will, Norton disentangled Alice's arms. Gently, lest she stir and cry out in fear, he broke her hold on him and stroked her arms for a moment. He slipped his own arm out from beneath her neck and held her with his other arm for a second or two.

She was moaning faintly, staring at the ceiling and not really aware of what he was doing. He slipped off the bunk and walked across the room unsteadily.

Slowly he went, for the idea in his mind was against his determination. He cursed the ruined transmitter, and snarled under his breath at the broken receiver. Then he fiddled with the catch of the cabinet, his fingers obeying his subconscious, instead of his not too firm will.

* * * * *

He took two capsules from the bottle and went back to Alice with them in his hand. He had reached, was standing beside her, when he looked at his closed fist and decided to wait it out one more minute before he popped one into her mouth and took the other one himself.

For life, as poor and precarious as it was at this moment, and as likely as it was to get worse, was still better than taking that long, unknown and unpredictable step into the Long Dark.

His minute passed all too quickly.

Alice shuddered and pressed against him. "Ted," she pleaded weakly. "Ted--hold me."

"Yes, darling," he said softly. There was no point in hurting her any more. Let her think he was Ted, if that was the way she wanted it.

Andrews stirred, and groaned.

Norton looked at him, frowning thoughtfully. Maybe Andrews should have his easy out, too. It would be tough on the guy to come to, and find himself the only live one in the ship, and of course not know where to find the remedy.

The pilot decided to stall for another minute. He'd get another capsule and slip it to Andrews. Then he would hold Alice once more and keep her happy, thinking he was Ted.

"One moment more, honey," he breathed into her ear, then kissed it gently. "I've got to get you something."

"Hurry," she murmured.

Hurry? Yeah! Get it over with!

The trip across to the cabinet was longer this time, for the idea was still rubbing him the wrong way.

"Aw, hell!" he grunted, as he reached for the bottle again.