Chapter XIV

Farradyne watched them carefully as they came aboard and after he had seen them he breathed a sigh of relief. There was something prim and straitlaced about them all, and they would give him no trouble. It was going to be a breeze.

There were a few whose faces and names correlated; the rest became a confusing background of nonentities, uninteresting and bland. Professor Martin was an elderly gentleman who herded them all into place efficiently, and who knew enough about spacing to handle the job. He took over and left only the running of the Lancaster to Farradyne. There was a Miss Otis who giggled like a fifty year old schoolgirl; a Mrs. Logan who probably had all of the boys in her class drooling; a Miss Tilden who was old enough to be Farradyne's mother and a Miss Carewe who was old enough to be Miss Tilden's mother and who also knew her way around space, apparently. Miss Higginbotham was the she-dragon type and Mr. Hughes was the know-it-all type.

He left them alone. They ran the galley and policed the joint and made the beds, and one of them made a small water-color to hang in the empty space over the tiny bar and Miss Carewe requested an oilcan because she hated squeaky doors.

Beyond that, Farradyne saw little of them. He used his spare time tinkering down in the tiny workshop, or demonstrating how the atomic pile was controlled by the damper rods.

He was happy and free from care, even though the bunch of them took over the more comfortable parts of the ship and left him only the control room above and the lower reaches of the ship, below the salon and the passenger's cabins.

He sat for long hours, thinking idly. He was lulled by the noises of the ship itself; the faint sound of metal on metal, an occasional groan of a plate or the creaking of a point. The moaning cry of a motor winding up to take care of some automatic function and the click and clack of relays and circuit breakers and the peculiar hum of the servodynes that maintained the correct level of pile activity. The muted sibilance of the reaction motor created a threshold level of something like a constant heavy exhalation or the sound of seashore from a distance.

And then a few hours before turnover there came another sound that bothered Farradyne. It was a faint ringing in his ears.

He knew that ringing in the ears can come of too much alcohol, a box on the side of the head, certain diseases--or a change in air pressure. He was healthy, had not been drinking, no one had clipped him; but he had spent a number of years in an environment where the air pressure was damned important--

He sneezed and brought forth a tiny trickle of blood!

He couldn't believe it; any such change in air pressure would make alarms ring like the crack of doom all over the ship and there would be a lot of activity from the air-pressure regulators.

He hurried aloft to the control room, pausing briefly to listen to the snoring along the curved corridor of the passenger's section.

* * * * *

Lamps told him the story in a series of quick appraisals, because of some long-forgotten genius who had insisted that, whenever possible, warning devices should not be fused, should not be turn-offable, should not be destructible. The Lancaster was a fine ship, designed well, but a frontal attack on a panel with metal-cutting tools consists of making the exception to the 'wherever possible' part of the design of warning signals. The ship's bell-system had been opened like a tin can.

But there was another warning system: the pilot-lamp system, which was strung here and there behind the panels and it would have needed a major overhaul to be ruined; the saboteur would have spent all night just opening cans instead of doing his dirty work inside them. Farradyne should have been asleep; then he would not have noticed the blazing lamps, which told him exactly what was amiss in the ship, and where.

They told him the tale in a glance:

The low-pressure center of the ship was down in the pile-bay, and the reason was that one of the little scuttle-doors was open. The pressure in the reaction-mass bay was low, and now that Farradyne had come aloft, opening the upper levels, the pressure here was as low as down in the reaction-mass bay.

As he watched, another one of the scuttle ports swung open and its warning lamp flared into life.

Farradyne went into action. He ripped open the cabinet that held his spacesuit and clawed the thing from its hook. He started down the stairway on a stumbling run, getting into the suit by leaps and jumps and pauses. He realized that he could have moved faster if he stopped to do one thing at a time, but his frantic mind would not permit him to make haste slowly. He stumbled and bounced off walls, and the tanks on his back rapped against his shoulder blades and the helmet cut a divot out of the bridge of his nose.

He had zipped up the airtight closures by the time he reached the little workshop, and he ducked in there to get a weapon of some sort. He reached past the hammer, ignored the obvious chisel because it was not heavy, even though it were sharp, and picked up a fourteen-inch half-round rasp. He hefted it in his gloved hand and it felt about right.

The air-break on the topside was still open, and Farradyne closed it. He fretted at the seconds necessary to equalize the pressure, but used them sensibly to check the workings of the space suit. He also located the cause of the air-leakage; normally the air-break doors were airtight. A sliver of wool or cotton string lay in the rubber gasket and produced a channel for the escape of some of the air into the pile-bay. Farradyne stooped, as anyone will, his attention attracted by this trifle. It was neither wool nor cotton, but a match torn from a giveaway book.

He threw it aside and went in, his attention once more on the important business before him. He ran along the curved corridor--

And there, a figure in a spacesuit was quietly levering one of the control rods out of its slot and preparing to hurl it into the void.

* * * * *

Farradyne understood the whole act in one glance; it was the sort of thing that he would do if sabotage had been his intention. The single scuttleport had been opened first by hand. Then the saboteur had scuttled the stock of spare control rods, and since the Lancaster was reasonably new, there had been quite a batch of them. Furthermore they were long, unwieldly, heavy things that took time to handle. Naturally, this was the first act, because the next act would cause the ship's acceleration to rise. The rise in acceleration would make the rods too heavy to carry and would also cause investigation as soon as people became aware of the increasing pressure.

Then the working rods would be hurled out, leaving the ship heading hell-bent out of the galaxy at about eight gravities of acceleration. The passengers and crew would be helpless.

Maybe two or three rods had been scuttled already. The rest, functioning on the automatic, would be shoved in further to compensate; Farradyne could feel no change in the acceleration pressure. But once the working rods were all the way home, the removal of the next would cause the ship to take off, literally, with the throttle tied down. Farradyne was willing to bet the rest of his life that the safety-valve that furnished the water-mass to the pile was either welded open or damaged in such a way that supply could not be stopped.

Then--and Farradyne had to admire his precautions--the vandal would make his way to the escape hatch, hit the void, and let the helpless passengers go on and on and on.

The saboteur was well prepared. His suit was a high-efficiency job capable of maintaining a man alive for a long time in space. It had a little radio and a small and expensive chemical motor for mild maneuvering. The man had friends, obviously, lying in wait out there ahead, who would pick him up.

A passel of ice-cold-blooded murderers.

Farradyne saw the man through a red haze that clouded up over his eyes. His evaluation of the act was made in a glance, in the bare instant that it took for Farradyne to see the man and then get his feet in motion. He plunged forward with a bellow that hurt his own ears.

The airlessness kept the sound in; the killer was not aware of Farradyne until the heavy file crashed down on the top of his helmet, putting a half-inch dent in the steel.