Chapter XXI

Farradyne awoke to the pressure of about one-gravity and began to wonder how far the Lancaster had carried him under its jury-rigged drive. His watch said that fourteen hours had passed since weightlessness had come, but this was no good for an estimate of distance.

The whole thing was incomprehensible to him. Interstellar travel in a matter of hours made his mind reel, and the idea of installing a gadget that made it possible with the ease of installing a radio in an automobile only added to the inconsistencies. All he could grasp of it was that the gadget the alien race had must be some sort of force-field generator that worked independently of the basic reaction motor and therefore could be turned off or on at will. He gave up trying to theorize and began to consider the more personal problem of his location and what he could do.

He cracked the scuttlebutt and found that the ship was a-planet. He listened and heard nothing, not even the familiar sounds of a ship in warm-up. He cracked the hatch of his cubby and looked out. The small corridor was as dark as the grave, and as silent. Boldly he stepped out and looked around under the light of his spacesuit torch.

Bolted to the floor were four rectangular boxes of metal connected together by a heavy cable, and from one a second cable ran to a standard connector set in the wall of the Lancaster.

Like all other Solarian spacecraft, the Lancaster was well-supplied with a network of cables running up and down the length of the ship to serve as test connections and spares for this or that equipment when needed. So the enemy had re-connected their multi-line cable to one of the standard Terran connectors and plugged the cable into the Lancaster's cable-plate.

Farradyne could see nothing about the metal boxes that would tell him anything, so he left them and went aloft, cautiously. He doffed the spacesuit at the next level and hung it neatly in a suit locker, before he continued up the stairways.

Out of one porthole he could see the spaceport. It was broad and dark except for a bouquet of searchlights that drilled into the sky around the rim, a wash of floodlamps that surrounded one of the vast starships a mile or so distant, and the far-off blurs of bright red light that probably read "Spaceman's Bar" in whatever the enemy used for a printed language.

He left the viewport and went higher until he came to the salon. He peered into it from floor level, but it was dark and untenanted. The spacelock was open and Farradyne looked out of the big round opening across the field to another huge starship standing a few hundred yards from the Lancaster. The other ship was as dark as the Lancaster, except for one small porthole that gleamed like a headlight in the darkness.

The problem of where he was sent him to the control room. He looked into the sky, hunting for familiar constellations. The Pleiades were there, but warped, and Farradyne found that while he knew they were distorted as an aggregation of stellar positions, he could not remember their proper relationship. Orion was visible, but the hero had hiked his belt up. The Great Bear was sitting on his haunches, and the Smaller Bear had lost his front feet. Sirius no longer blazed in Canis Major. Procyon had taken off for parts unknown, while several other bright stars dotted the skies in places where no stars had been on Terra.

He tried to recall visits to the big stellatarium in New York where the lecturer displayed the skies as seen from various well-known stars that were within a half-hundred light years of Sol; but he found that he evidently had not been as attentive as he might have been.

* * * * *

Finally he gave up hoping to establish his whereabouts by visual inspection, and took his first look at the control room. He could see nothing changed at first; then he found a small auxiliary panel beside the pilot's seat, which contained a bar-topped toggle switch and three pilot lamps quite different in appearance from the rest of the Lancaster's standard equipment. He felt an urge to try the toggle, but fought it down; it was too much like playing with toy building blocks made of subcritical masses of plutonium, and Farradyne wanted to stay alive long enough to _watch_ the ruin of the enemy, not become a part of it.

He got his 20-power binoculars from the locker and went down to the spacelock. The near-by starship was as abandoned as the Lancaster, except for that one bright porthole. Through it he could see nothing but one corner of wall and ceiling.

A sudden flash of light made Farradyne drop to the floor of the salon and wriggle forward cautiously to the edge of the door.

A vehicle of some sort had turned in at the spaceport from the rim, and its headlights had flashed against his face. He looked at it through the glasses but could not see beyond the glare of the headlights; the car was coming swiftly toward the Lancaster.

Farradyne gathered himself to make a grand rush for his cubby, but stayed to watch because he could make safety after he was certain that the car would stop at the Lancaster. Instead, the vehicle swung around the interstellar ship and stopped by the landing ramp. Three men and a woman got out--

"Norma!" breathed Farradyne.

High in the enemy ship, one porthole winked off and the one beside it winked on, and a few minutes later Farradyne saw the same trio of men escort Clevis from the landing ramp and hand him into the spaceport jeep. The engine roared and they took off for the rim of the port.

Farradyne looked around the spaceport and wondered. It seemed such a cozy place, completely unguarded so far as he could tell. This undoubtedly meant that the port was a restricted zone and anybody permitted inside the boundaries was known and recognized before he got in.

The jeep disappeared, and Farradyne came down his landing ramp and scooted across the flat spaceport to the starship.

Inside the spacelock was a small ante-room with an elevator and some stairs. Farradyne did not trust the elevator; he turned and raced up the stairs, ignoring the warnings of his own mind that this was a completely foolhardy stunt.

Up and up he went, around circular corridors, past dark doorways and sealed hatches, until he was both winded and muscle-weary from climbing. He paused from time to time to orient himself by a quick look out of the nearest porthole that faced the Lancaster, until he found that he was at the right level above the control room of his own ship. The next level above brought him to a door that had a thin line of light along the bottom.

Across the door was a metal bar, but the slide-aside keeper, with a hole in it for a lock, hung open; the enemy had not considered it necessary to lock the door against outside tampering.

Farradyne slipped the keeper aside and lifted the bar.

* * * * *

Norma stood there just inside the door, waiting. Her hands were on her hips and there was a cold glitter in her eye. It flickered and failed as she recognized Farradyne.

"Well!" she snapped. "If it isn't our Boy Scout and Man-about-space who claims he doesn't know where hellflowers come from!"

"I didn't--but I'm learning fast," he told her. "Maybe you can help. Do you know where we are?"

"Your friends asked questions. They didn't tell me anything."

He looked at her sourly. "I wish I'd known the other light in the window was Clevis," he said.

"So you didn't know?" she cried angrily.

Farradyne waved a hand sidewise and it shut her up. "Stop making like a fishwife and think! You have a good mind--for God's sake, use it!"

She looked at him calculatingly. "Just what do you expect me to assume?"

"Let's assume that I'm what I said I was," he said. "And let's assume we're fighting an undeclared war against a powerful enemy. An enemy that is running down the moral fiber of our race so they can walk in and take over without an open battle. Does that make sense?"

Norma considered it a moment. "Of course. Nobody wins a shooting-war. But which side are you on, Farradyne?"

He grunted. "Norma, just who was your brother?"

"Frank was one of Howard's best men," she said simply.

"More of the pattern clearing up," he sighed. "They killed your brother, getting a lot of innocent bystanders in the process. They tried to kill me the same way, although I didn't have anything more than a crude idea to go on."

Norma looked at him soberly. "I hate to admit it, but I've heard this three-tongued language of yours. So that makes you right on one count anyway."

"We're not fighting only a well-integrated mob," he said. "We're fighting a complete stellar culture."

"You say 'we' so blithely. Tell me how you managed to turn up like the proverbial bad penny."

"I outguessed 'em, finally. I was right, for once--" He explained how it had been done in a few rapid sentences.

"We saw them catch the Lancaster, and wondered why you suddenly went dead at the board after dodging them so well. Damn it, Farra--er--Charles, you've done it."

"Done what?"

"Convinced me. You aren't here to play the friend-in-need act to get more information out of me, after loading me to the gills with stuff out of a needle that makes me babble like a marmoset. So you're here for what you say."

"Why did they bring you back here?" he asked. "It seems to me they'd toss you in the locker."

"That's for later. Right now they're comparing my story with Howard's, and after that we'll both be taken to their 'Detention Planet' in some other stellar system and kept as last-ditch hostages in this war. There seem to be a lot of people who got too bright for the enemy and they're all there, too."

Farradyne swore. "The stinking bastards--!"

Norma shook her head coolly. "That's emotion, Charles. I don't know exactly what their purpose is, but I do understand that this is a conflict for eventual survival, and for the rule of an economic empire."

"But--"

Norma shook her head slowly. "Put the shoe on the other foot, Charles. Suppose you and your kind had come upon these people--how would you see them?"

"As possible allies and friends, and--"

"Balderdash. You'd have seen them as possible customers, and people to be exploited, and maybe enemies after you knew their history. Their attitude is as arrogant as ours, and their personal justification is as high. By some lucky break they got to interstellar travel before we did and so they automatically place us in an inferior position; but they know that this doesn't make us a push-over. We are scientifically capable of discovering their interstellar drive at any moment, and why we haven't is probably just a matter of our not combining the right sciences. Our knowledge of medicine is far wider than theirs, for instance."

"How can you know this?" he asked.

* * * * *

Norma slipped open a few buttons at her throat and slipped her dress down from one shoulder. There was a tiny circular white bandage stuck to one spot. "They took a sample of me," she said, "because I seem to be immune to several diseases that should give me trouble. When I asked about this, they told me that they hoped to discover just what cell-change takes place when we take our anti-cancer immunization. That thing they have yet to discover."

"But--"

"Oh, they use our immunization," she said, slipping the dress up. "But they use it as an African witch doctor might use a typhoid serum. The thing you have to remember, Charles, is that if Terrans had gotten there first there would have been the same conflict, but started by the other side."

Farradyne shook his head angrily. "We're not inclined to ruin--"

"Stop sounding like one of King Arthur's knights. Men of sense and good judgment don't request their enemies to meet them on a field of honor. Instead, a state of war is assumed and from that instant on 'A' is looking for a chance to stab 'B' in the back because he knows that 'B' will cut him off at the hips if he turns his back for a moment. So both sides know that open warfare means total destruction and the process is one of boring from within, or gnawing at the foundation. But this is no place to get involved in a discussion of ethics, Charles. Where do we go from here?"

"If I knew how to run that ka-dodie in the Lancaster we'd head for Sol--if I knew where Sol was."

"And how about Howard?"

"I don't know about Clevis," he told her. "The thing to do would be to hike it home as fast as we could and spill our tale to the people who'd know what to do. Let's face it, Norma. They can mingle with Terrans because they can speak our language. But I couldn't mingle with them to locate Howard. I'd be picked up in a minute."

"So how do we get back?"

"Why do you think they brought the Lancaster?"

"Probably to fit her out as a bona-fide hellflower runner."

"Okay, then, we'll hide out in my cubby until they run her back."

"You hide out," said Norma. "If they find me missing from here they'll know that something smells."

Farradyne chuckled. "They're as arrogant as the Gods of Olympus. Part of their gang is still expecting me to turn up near Terra on an escape course, and the only smart thing I've done in this game is to be where they didn't dream I'd be. So we'll be where they don't expect us, and maybe we'll get away with it. Come on, let's hide out."