The personnel section seemed to slue around. The deck came up under Keth, threw him stumbling half across Furnay. He grasped the technician’s shoulders to right himself.
“Main drive dead!” the intercom bellowed incredulously.
There was the sluing motion again, this time in reversed direction. For a moment, stars reappeared in one corner of the screen, racing through it—as if, Keth thought, the ship were spinning wildly through space. The deck heaved. He staggered, pitched forward, then back, tripped and went down. Something hard slammed the side of his head, and his mind went blank.
“He’s coming around now,” Furnay’s voice was saying. “Hey, Keth, wake up!”
Keth opened his eyes. He was lying in the seat before the screen, tilted backward. Furnay was on one side of him, somebody else stood on the other side. He jerked his head up to look at the screen. It was full of stars.
“What’s happened?” he gasped.
“We’re no longer in danger, Mr. Deboll,” the other man said reassuringly. He was in his shirt sleeves and closing a flat container full of medical instruments. “Exactly what did happen isn’t at all clear, but we should know shortly.”
“Captain Roan,” the intercom said, “please come to Station Three at once!”
The man smiled at Keth, said to Furnay: “He’ll be all right now,” and hurried off with his container.
“That’s the doctor,” Furnay said. “You cut your head pretty bad, but he sealed it.” Furnay looked pale and shaken. “That thing, whatever it was, went back to Space Three. Or at least, it’s gone. I came to in the middle of it all, while it was coming aboard . . . ”
“Coming aboard?” Keth repeated blankly. “You were hallucinating, Furnay. That thing was a hundred times bigger than this ship! I saw part of it close up.”
“Well, something came on board,” Furnay said doggedly. “Ask anybody. First there was an awful banging over the intercom from somewhere else on the ship. Then somebody yelled that all three ship locks were being opened.”
“From outside?”
Furnay looked at him. “Keth, nobody here was opening them, believe me! Then there was more banging here and there for a while. They were trying to find out what was going on out there, of course, but the intership screens were too blurred to make out anything. That went on for a while.” Furnay wet his lips. “Then the lock to the personnel section began to open . . . ”
“Huh?”
“That’s right,” Furnay said. “It came right in here.”
“What came right in here?” Keth demanded savagely.
The technician spread his hands. “Nobody really got a look at it, Keth! The air sort of got thick—not to breathe; it was more like you were trying to look through syrup. Same thing that had been blurring the intership screens apparently. It only lasted about a minute. Then the air turned clear and the lock here closed. Maybe a minute later, the ship screens cleared, and the three big locks all closed together. Nobody had seen anything. Right after that, everything went black again.”
“Marsar Shift black, you mean?”
Furnay nodded. “We were shifting to Space Three. That seems to be why it came in here—to start the shift engine. But somebody reversed the field right away and we came back to normspace. The thing was gone, and the main problem now seems to be that our space drive is almost out. We’re barely able to move. But the transmitters started working again . . . ”
“They were out?” Keth asked.
“They went blank about the time the drive engines stopped,” Furnay said. “Then, as soon as the thing left, they started up again. The communication boys called for help, and there’s a Space Scout squadron four days away headed toward us now . . . ”
“Four days away?”
“Well, we’re way outside of the Hub. That five-minute run on full drive, while the shift engine was warming up, brought on the biggest Space Three jump ever recorded . . . Where are you going?”
Keth was climbing to his feet. “Where do you think? We still have a newscast running. I’m going to get hold of the brass, find out exactly what they know, and get Communication to release a channel so we can start beaming it back. This is the biggest . . . ”
“Wait a minute, Keth!” Furnay looked worried. “This is a Navy ship and we’re operating under emergency regulations at the moment.” He nodded at the open personnel section lock fifty feet away. “The brass is outside in the ship, checking things over. Everyone else has been ordered to remain at their stations. And they figure this is our station.”
Keth grunted irritably, looked around. A gold-braided jacket and cap lay across a chair a few feet away. He went over, glanced around again, put them on.
“They’re the doctor’s,” Furnay said.
“He won’t miss them. Sit tight here.”
Keth walked down the aisle toward a food dispenser fifteen feet from the open lock. The borrowed jacket and cap were decidedly too big for him, and from moment to moment he was in partial view of various groups in the section; but everyone was too involved in discussing recent events to pay him much attention. He paused at the dispenser, punched a button at random and received a tube of liquid vitamins. Half turning, he flicked a glance from under the cap brim about the part of the section he could see, moved on to the lock and stepped quietly through it.
There was no one in sight on the other side. He turned to the right along the passage through which he and Furnay had been conducted to the personnel section a little over an hour ago. The main entrance lock was just beyond its far end, out of sight. He might find something there to tell him how to get to the engine room. Since they were having trouble with the drives, that was presumably where the investigating senior officers would be.
At the end of the passage, he stopped, startled. The lock room was almost entirely filled with an assortment of items he found himself unable to identify. One wall was lined to the ceiling with luminous hexagonal boxes arranged like a honeycomb. Against them leaned bundled extrusions which looked like steel with bubbles of light trickling slowly through it. Completely blocking the lock was a great mass of rainbow-colored globes two feet in diameter, which appeared to be stuck together. The weirdest item was stacked by the hundreds along the left wall . . . transparent plastic blocks, each containing something which looked partly like a long-haired gloomy monkey and partly like a caterpillar.
Keth blinked at the arrangement, mouth open, for a moment, went over and touched a finger gingerly against one of the globes. It felt warm—around a hundred and ten degrees, he decided. Scowling and muttering to himself, he went off down another passage.
He passed a closed door, hesitated, returned and opened it. The area beyond was filled about equally by transparent sacks, bulging with what looked like white diamonds, and large, dark-red cylinders. The cylinders were groaning softly. Keth closed the door, opened another one thirty feet farther on, glanced in and hurriedly slammed it shut. He walked on, shaking his head, his mouth working nervously.
A minute or two later, he saw a sign which said ENGINE ROOM—MAINTENANCE above an opened lock. Keth entered, found himself on the upper level of the engine room with a spider web of catwalks running here and there about the machinery. From below came the sound of voices.
He edged out on one of the catwalks, peered down. Half a dozen men, two of them in uniform, stood about an open hatch from which another uniformed man, the engineering officer, was just emerging. These were the ship’s senior officers, and every one of them, Keth reminded himself, was also one of the Federation Navy’s top scientists. They were too far off to let him understand what they were talking about, but if he got within hearing range without being discovered, he should gather information they wouldn’t volunteer for the purposes of a newscast. He drew back out of sight, located a ladder along the wall and climbed down to the main level.
Guided by their voices, he threaded his way among the machines toward the group. There was a sudden, loud slam—the hatch being closed again. Then the voices were coming toward him on the other side of the massive steel bole along which he had been moving. Keth flattened himself quickly into a shallow niche of the machine, stayed still.
They came out into an intersection of passages on Keth’s left and stopped there. He held his breath. If they looked over at him now, they couldn’t miss seeing him. But the engineering officer was speaking and their attention was on him.