The Hub: Dangerous Territory by James H. Schmitz

“Up to a point,” he was saying, “the matter is now clear. It removed our fuel plates and replaced them with its own . . . ”

Keth’s ears seemed to flick forwards. What was that? His thoughts began to race.

“Those plates,” the man went on, “are producing energy. In fact, they have a really monstrous output. But the energy doesn’t do much for our drives. In some way, almost all of it is being diverted, dissipated, shunted off somewhere else.”

“There’s no immediate explanation for that, but it isn’t a practical problem. We’ll simply shut off the drives, pull out the plates and put our own back again. We’ll be docking at the station in a week. If we had to use this stuff, it would take us half a dozen years to crawl back to the Hub under our own power.”

“In normspace,” another man said.

“Yes, in normspace. In pseudo, naturally, it would be a very different matter.”

The ship captain scratched his chin, remarked, “In pseudo, if your figures on the output are correct, those plates might have carried us out of the galaxy in a matter of hours.”

“Depending on the course we took,” the engineering officer agreed.

There was a pause. Then somebody said, “When we were maneuvering to get the siege boat in range, we may have been moving along, or nearly along, one of the scheduled courses. That and our slow speed would have been the signal . . . ”

“It seems to explain it,” the engineering officer said. He added, “A point I still don’t understand is why we didn’t lose our atmosphere in the process! We’re agreed that the fact we were aboard would have had no meaning for the thing—it was a detail it simply wouldn’t register. Yet there has been no drop in pressure.”

Another man said dryly, “But it isn’t quite the same atmosphere! I’ve found a substantially higher oxygen reading. I think it will be discovered that some of the objects it left on board—I suspect those in the lock room in particular—contain life in one form or another, and that it’s oxygen-breathing life.”

“That may have been a very fortunate circumstance for us,” the captain said. “And . . . ” His eyes had shifted along the passage, stopped now on Keth. He paused. “Well,” he said mildly, “it seems we have company! It’s the gentleman from the newscast system.”

The others looked around in surprise.

“Mr. Deboll,” the captain went on thoughtfully, “I take it you overheard our discussion just now.”

Keth cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. He took off the medical officer’s cap.

“You came down here by way of the main lock passage?”

“Yes.”

There was silence for a moment. Then the engineering officer said, “As I see it, no harm has been done.” He looked rather pleased.

“Quite the contrary, in my opinion!” said the captain. He smiled at Keth. “Mr. Deboll please join our group. In observing you during yesterday’s briefing, I was struck by your quickness in grasping the essentials of a situation. No doubt, you already have realized what the explanation for this extraordinary series of events must be.”

“Yes, I have,” Keth said hoarsely.

“Excellent. Our instructions are that we must not interfere in any way with your report to the public. Now I have a feeling that what you will have to say may be a definite upset to those who have maintained the exploratory Space Three projects should be limited or abandoned because of their expense, and because no information of practical value could possibly be gained from them.”

“My guess is you’ll get anything you want for them now,” Keth told him.

The captain grinned. “Then let’s return to the personnel section and get that newscast going!”

They started back to the engine room entrance Keth mentally phrasing the manner in which he would explain to Adacee’s waiting billions of viewers that the pseudospace ship—one of Man’s great achievements—had been halted, engulfed, checked, fueled, loaded up and released by somebody else’s automatic depot and service station for intergalactic robot cargo carriers.

The Winds of Time

Gefty Rammer came along the narrow passages between the Silver Queen’s control compartment and the staterooms, trying to exchange the haggard look on his face for one of competent self-assurance. There was nothing to gain by letting his two passengers suspect that during the past few minutes their pilot, the owner of Rammer Spacelines, had been a bare step away from plain and fancy gibbering.

He opened the door to Mr. Maulbow’s stateroom and went inside. Mr. Maulbow, face very pale, eyes closed, lay on his back on the couch, still unconscious. He’d been knocked out when some unknown forces suddenly started batting the Silver Queen’s turnip shape around as the Queen had never been batted before in her eighteen years of spacefaring. Kerim Ruse, Maulbow’s secretary, knelt beside her employer, checking his pulse. She looked anxiously up at Gefty.

“What did you find out?” she asked in a voice that was not very steady.

Gefty shrugged. “Nothing definite as yet. The ship hasn’t been damaged—she’s a tough tub. That’s one good point. Otherwise . . . well, I climbed into a suit and took a look out the escape hatch. And I saw the same thing there that the screens show. Whatever that is.”

“You’ve no idea then of what’s happened to us, or where we are?” Miss Ruse persisted. She was a rather small girl with large, beautiful gray eyes and thick blue-black hair. At the moment, she was barefoot and in a sleeping outfit which consisted of something soft wrapped around her top, soft and floppy trousers below. The black hair was tousled and she looked around fifteen. She’d been asleep in her stateroom when something smacked the Queen, and she was sensible enough then not to climb out of the bunk’s safety field until the ship finally stopped shuddering and bucking about. That made her the only one of the three persons aboard who had collected no bruises. She was scared, of course, but taking the situation very well.

Gefty said carefully, “There’re a number of possibilities. It’s obvious that the Queen has been knocked out of normspace, and it may take some time to find out how to get her back there. But the main thing is that the ship’s intact. So far, it doesn’t look too bad.”

Miss Ruse seemed somewhat reassured. Gefty could hardly have said the same for himself. He was a qualified normspace and subspace pilot. He had put in a hitch with the Federation Navy, and for the past eight years he’d been ferrying his own two ships about the Hub and not infrequently beyond the Federation’s space territories, but he had never heard of a situation like this. What he saw in the viewscreens when the ship steadied enough to let him pick himself off the instrument room floor, and again, a few minutes later and with much more immediacy, from the escape hatch, made no sense—seemed simply to have no meaning. The pressure meters said there was a vacuum outside the Queen’s skin. That vacuum was dark, even pitch-black but here and there came momentary suggestions of vague light and color. Occasional pinpricks of brightness showed and were gone. And there had been one startling phenomenon like a distant, giant explosion, a sudden pallid glare in the dark, which appeared far ahead of the Queen and, for the instant it remained in sight, seemed to be rushing directly towards them. It had given Gefty the feeling that the ship itself was plowing at high speed through this eerie medium. But he had cut the Queen’s drives to the merest idling pulse as soon as he staggered back to the control console and got his first look at the screens, so it must have been the light that had moved.

But such details were best not discussed with a passenger. Kerim Ruse would be arriving at enough disquieting speculations on her own; the less he told her, the better. There was the matter of the ship’s location instruments. The only set Gefty had been able to obtain any reading on were the direction indicators. And what they appeared to indicate was that the Silver Queen was turning on a new heading something like twenty times a second.

Gefty asked, “Has Mr. Maulbow shown any signs of waking up?”

Kerim shook her head. “His breathing and pulse seem all right, and that bump on his head doesn’t look really bad, but he hasn’t moved at all. Can you think of anything else we might do for him, Gefty?”

“Not at the moment,” Gefty said. “He hasn’t broken any bones. We’ll see how he feels when he comes out of it.” He was wondering about Mr. Maulbow and the fact that this charter had showed some unusual features from the beginning.

Kerim was a friendly sort of girl; they’d got to calling each other by their first names within a day or two after the trip started. But after that, she seemed to be avoiding him; and Gefty guessed that Maulbow had spoken to her, probably to make sure that Kerim didn’t let any of her employer’s secrets slip out.

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