and bow’s your subspace communicator?”
“Baby Two, Deston and three. Mine’s dead, too. Thank God, Here! With you to
astrogate us maybe well make it. But how’d you get away? Not down from the Top,
that’s for sure.”
Vision came on; a big, square-jawed, lean, tanned face appeared upon the screen. “We
were in Baby Three already.”
“Oh.” Deston was quick on the uptake. “You, too?” “That’s right. But the way the old man
chewed you out, I knew he’d slap me in irons, so we hid out. We found three men before
high red. I deconned Bun, then . . .” “Bun?” Barbara exclaimed. “Bernice Burns? How
wonderful!”
“Bobby!” The face of a silver-haired beauty appeared beside Jones’. “Am I glad you got
away too!”
“Just a sec,” Deston said. “Data for rendezvous, Here. . . . Hey! My watch stopped-so
did the chron!”
“Here too,” Jones said. “So I’ll handle it on visual.”
“But it’s non-magnetic-and nothing can stop an atomichron!” Deston protested.
“But something did,” the gray-haired man said. “A priceless datum. Observations of fact
have already invalidated twenty four of the thirty eight best theories of hyperspace. I take
it that none of you were in direct contact with the metal of the ship at the time of
disaster?”
“We weren’t,” Deston said. Then, to the younger stranger, “You? And identity, please.”
“I know that much. Henry Newman, crew chief normal space.”
“Your passengers, Here?”
“Vincent Lopresto, financer, and his two bodyguards. They were sleeping in their suits.
Grounders.”
“Just so,” the old man said. “Insulated, we acquired the charge very gradually. What did
the bodies look like?” Deston thought for a moment. “Almost as if they had exploded.”
“Precisely.” Gray-Hair beamed. “That eliminates all the others except three-Morton’s,
Rothstein’s, and my own.”
“You’re a specialist in subspace, sir?”
“Oh, no, I’m not a specialist at all. I’m a dabbler; a . . .” “In the College?” Deston asked,
and the other nodded. “With doctorates in everything from astronomy to zoology? I’m
mighty glad you were using this lifecraft for an observatory when we got it, Doctor . . . ?”
“Adams. Andrew Adams. But I have only eight at the moment. Earned degrees, that is.”
“And you have a lot of apparatus in the hold?”
“Less than six tons. Just what I must have in order to..
“Babe.” Jones’ voice broke in. “Got you figured. Power two, alpha eighteen, beta forty
three. . . .”
Rendezvous with the Procyon’s hulk was made; both lifecrafts hung motionless relative to
it. No other lifecraft had escaped. A conference was held. Weeks of work would be
necessary to determine the ship’s condition. Hundreds of other tasks would have to be
performed, and there were only nine survivors. Everyone would have to work, and work
hard.
The two girls wanted to be together. So did the two officers; since, as long as they lived
or until the Procyon made port, all responsibility rested: first, upon First Officer Carlyle
Deston; and second, upon Second Officer Theodore Jones. Therefore Jones and
Bernice came aboard Lifecraft Two and Deston asked Newman to go over to Lifecraft
Three.
“Uh-uh, I like the scenery here a lot better.” Newman ‘s eyes raked Bernice’s five feet
nine of scantily-clad sheer beauty from ankles to coiffure.
“As you were, Mister Jones!” Deston rasped, and Jones subsided. Deston went on, very
quietly, As crew chief, Newman, you know the law. I am in command.”
“You ain’t in command of me, pretty boy. Not out here where nobody has ever come
back from. I make my own law-with this.” Newman patted his side pocket.
“Draw it, then, or crawl.” Deston’s face was coldly calm; his right hand still hung
motionless at his side. Newman glanced at the girls, both of whom were frozen; then at
Jones, who smiled at him pityingly. “I . . . my … but yours is right where you can get at
it,” he faltered.
“You should have thought of that sooner. I’m waiting, Newman.”
“Just wing him, Babe,” Jones said then. “He’s strong enough, except in the head. We
may need his back.” “Uh-uh. I’ll have to kill him sometime, so it might as well be now.
Square between the eyes. A hundred bucks I’m two millimeters off dead center?”
Both girls gasped and stared at each other in horror; but Jones said calmly, without
losing any part of his smile, “Not a dime; I’ve lost too much that way already,”-at which
outrageous statement both girls realized what was going on and smiled in relief.
And Newman misinterpreted those smiles completely; especially Bernice’s. The words
came hard, but he said them. “I crawl.”
“Crawl, what?” “I crawl, sir.”
“Your first lob will be to build some kind of a brute force device to act as a clock. One
more break will be your last. Flit.”
Newman flitted-fast-and Barbara, who had opened her mouth to say something, shut it.
No, he would have killed the man; he would have had to. He still might have to. So she
said, instead.
“Why’d you let him keep his pistol? The . . , the slime) And after you saved his life, too!”
“Typical of the type. One gun won’t make any difference.
“But you can lock up all their guns, can’t you?”
“I’m afraid not. Lopresto’s a mobster, isn’t he, Herc?” “If he’s a financier I’m an
angel-complete with wings and halo. They’ll have guns hidden out all over the place.”
“Check. You and I’ll go over and…”
“And I,” Adams said. “I must tri-di everything, and do some autopsies, and . . .”
“Of course,” Deston agreed. “With a Big Brain along -oh, excuse that crack, please,
Doctor Adams. It slipped out on me.”
Adams laughed. “In context, I regard that as the highest compliment I have ever
received. In these circumstances you need not `Doctor’ me. `Adams’ will do very nicely.”
“I’m going to call you `Uncle Andy’,” Barbara said with a grin. “Now, Uncle Andy, in view
of what you said, one of your eight doctorates is in medicine.” “Naturally.”
“Are you any good at obstetrics?”
“In the present instance I feel perfectly safe in saying..”
“Wait a minute!” Deston snapped. “Bobby, you are not…
“I am too! That is, I don’t suppose I am yet, but with him aboard I’m certainly going to. I
want to, and if we don’t get back both Bun and I will have to. Castaways’ Code. So
there!”
Deston started to say something, but Barbara forestalled him. “But for right now, it’s high
time we all got some sleep.”
It was and they did; and next morning the three men wafted themselves across a few
hundred yards of space to the crippled liner. Floodlights were rigged.
“What . . . a . . . mess.” Deston’s voice was low and wondering. “The Top especially . . .
but the Middle and the Tail don’t look too bad.”
Inside, however, devastation had gone deep into the Middle. Walls, floors, and structural
members were sheared and torn and twisted into shapes impossible to understand or
explain. And, even worse, there were absences. In dozens of volumes, of as many sizes
and of shapes incompatible with any three-dimensional geometry, every solid thing had
simply vanished-vanished without leaving any clue whatever as to how or where it could
possibly have gone.
It took four days to clean the ship of Dekon foam and to treat the hot spots that the
automatics had missed. Four long days of heartbreaking labor in weightlessness and four
too-short nights of sleep in the heavenly-to seven of them, at least-artificial gravity of the
lifecraft. With the hulk deconned to zero (all ruptured radiators had of course been blown
automatically at the time of catastrophe) Jones and Deston went over the engine rooms
item by item.
The subspace drives were fused ruins. Enough normal space gear was in working order,
however, so that they could put on one gravity of drive, which was a vast relief to all.
Then Jones began to jury-rig an astrogation set-up and Deston went to help Adams.
A few evenings later Adams said, “Well, that covers all the preliminary observations I am
equipped to make.
Thanks a lot for your help, Babe, I won’t bother you any more for a while.”
Deston grinned ruefully. “You’ll have to, Doc. I don’t mean the routine-clean-up, bodies,
effects, and so on -Lopresto’s handling that. You’ve learned a lot of stuff that none of the
rest of us can make head or tail of. That makes you the director; we’re only the cheap
help.”
“I’ve learned scarcely anything yet; only that when we approach any planet we must do
so with extreme-I might almost say fantastic-precautions.”
“Blasting at normal, it’ll be a mighty long time before we have to worry about that.”
“Not as long as you think, Babe,” Jones said. “We’re in toward the center of the galaxy
somewhere; stars are a lot thicker here. It’s only about a third of a light-year to the