The old woman bit her lip. “Do I get my usuals?” she said sharply.
“Certainly you get your usuals,” he assured her. “A tithe on every kill till the blades are paid for, and good eating all the time you work.”
She shrugged her misshapen shoulders. “O.K.” She turned, tonged up a long flat fragment of steel with her two left hands and clanged the stock into the furnace. Joe-Jim turned to Forty-one.
“What is it?” Joe asked.
“Boss, Ertz sent me to get Hugh.”
“Well, why didn’t you do it?”
“I don’t find him. Bobo says he’s gone up to no-weight.”
“Well, go get him. No, that won’t do; you wouldn’t know where to find him. I’ll have to do it myself. Go back to Ertz and tell him to wait.”
Forty-one hurried off. The Boss was all right, but it was not good to tarry in his presence.
“Now you’ve got us running errands,” Jim commented sourly. “How do you like being a blood brother, Joe?”
“You got us into this.”
“So? The blood-swearing was your idea.”
“Damn it, you know why I did that. They took it seriously. And we are going to need all the help we can get, if we are to get out of this with a skin that will hold water.”
“Oh? So you didn’t take it seriously?”
“Did you?”
Jim smiled cynically. “Just about as seriously as you do, my dear, deceitful brother. As matters stand now, it is much, much healthier for you and me to keep to the bargain right up to the hilt. ‘All for one and one for all!'”
“You’ve been reading Dumas again.”
“And why not?”
“That’s O.K. But don’t be a damn fool about it.”
“I won’t be. I know which side of the blade is edged.”
Joe-Jim found Squatty and Pig sleeping outside the door which led to the Control Room. He knew then that Hugh must be inside, for he had assigned the two as personal bodyguards to Hugh. It was a foregone conclusion anyhow; if Hugh had gone up to no-weight, he would be heading either for Main Drive, or the Control Room, more probably the Control Room. The place held a tremendous fascination for Hugh. Ever since the earlier time when Joe-Jim had almost literally dragged him into the Control Room and had forced him to see with his own eyes that the Ship was not the whole world but simply a vessel adrift in a much larger world — a vessel that could be driven and moved — ever since that time and throughout the period that followed while he was still a captured slave of Joe-Jim’s, he had been obsessed with the idea of moving the Ship, of sitting at the controls and making it go!
It meant more to him than it could possibly have meant to a space pilot from Earth. From the time that the first rocket made the little jump from Terra to the Moon, the spaceship pilot has been the standard romantic hero whom every boy wished to emulate. But Hugh’s ambition was of no such picayune caliber; he wished to move his world. In Earth standards and concepts it would be less ambitious to dream of equipping the Sun with jets and go gunning it around the Galaxy.
Young Archimedes had his lever; he sought a fulcrum.
Joe-Jim paused at the door of the great silver stellarium globe which constituted the Control Room and peered in. He could not see Hugh, but he knew that he must be at the controls in the chair of the chief astrogator, for the lights were being manipulated. The images of the stars were scattered over the inner surface of the sphere producing a simulacrum of the heavens outside the Ship. The illusion was not fully convincing from the door where Joe-Jim rested; from the center of the sphere it would be complete.
Sector by sector the stars snuffed out, as Hugh manipulated the controls from the center of the sphere. A sector was left shining on the far side forward. It was marked by a large and brilliant orb, many times as bright as its companions. Joe-Jim ceased watching and pulled himself hand over hand up to the control chairs. “Hugh!” Jim called out.