For a moment, questions raced in disorder through his mind. What was it? Why had it been on that moon? Part of another ship, wrecked now . . . a ship that had been at home here? Was it some sort of drive?
Maulbow must know. He’d known enough to design the instruments required to bring the battered monster back to life. On the other hand, he had not foreseen in all detail what could happen once the thing was in operation, because the Queen’s sudden buck-jumping act had surprised him and knocked him out.
The first step, in any event, was to get Maulbow awake now. To tamper with a device like this, before learning as much as one could about it, would be lunatic foolhardiness. It looked like too good a bet that the next serious mistake made by anybody would finish them all—
Perhaps it was only because Gefty’s nerves were on edge that he grew aware at that point in his reflections of two minor signals from his senses. One was that the smell of ammonia, which he had almost stopped noticing, was becoming appreciably stronger. The other was the faintest of sounds—a whispering suggestion of motion somewhere behind him. But here in the storage vault nothing should have moved, and Gefty’s muscles were tensing as his head came around. Almost in the same instant, he flung himself wildly to one side, stumbling and regaining his balance as something big and dark slapped heavily down on the floor at the point where he had stood. Then he was darting up through the entrance passage, turning, and knocking down the lock switches on the outside door panel.
It came flowing around the corner of the passage behind him as the vault doors began to slide together. He was aware mainly of swift, smooth, oiling motion like that of a big snake; then, for a fraction of a second, a strip of brighter light from the outside passage showed a long, heavy wedge of a head, a green metal-glint of staring eyes.
The doors closed silently into their frames and locked. The thing was inside. But it was almost a minute then before Gefty could control his shaking legs enough to start moving back towards the main deck. In the half-dark of the vault, it had looked like a big coiled cable lying next to the packing cases. Like Maulbow, it might have been battered around and knocked out during the recent disturbance; and when it recovered, it had found Gefty in the vault with it. But it might also have been awake all the while, waiting cunningly until Gefty’s attention seemed fixed elsewhere before launching its attack. It was big enough to have flattened him and smashed every bone in his body if the stroke had landed.
Some kind of guard animal—a snakelike watchdog? What other connection could it have with the mystery machine? Perhaps Maulbow had intended to leave it confined in one of the cases, and it had broken loose.
Too many questions by now, Gefty thought. But Maulbow had the answers.
He was hurrying up the main deck’s central passage when Maulbow’s voice addressed him sharply from a door he’d just passed.
“Stop right there, Rammer! Don’t dare to move! I—”
The voice ended on a note of surprise. Gefty’s reaction had not been too rational, but it was prompt. Maulbow’s tone and phrasing implied he was armed. Gefty wasn’t, but he kept a gun in the instrument room for emergencies. He’d been through a whole series of unnerving experiences, winding up with being shagged out of his storage vault by something that stank of ammonia and looked like a giant snake. To have one of the Queen’s passengers order him to stand where he was topped it off. Every other consideration was swept aside by a great urge to get his hands on his gun.
He glanced back, saw Maulbow coming out of the half-opened door, something like a twenty-inch, thin white rod in one hand. Then Gefty went bounding on along the passage, hunched forward and zigzagging from wall to wall to give Maulbow—if the thing he held was a weapon and he actually intended to use it—as small and erratic a target as possible. Maulbow shouted angrily behind him. Then, as Gefty came up to the next cross-passage, a line of white fire seared through the air across his shoulders and smashed off the passage wall.
With that, he was around the corner, and boiling mad. He had no great liking for gunfire, but it didn’t shake him like the silently attacking beast in the dark storage had done. He reached the deserted instrument room not many seconds later, had his gun out and cocked, and was faced back towards the passage by which he had entered. Maulbow, if he had pursued without hesitation, should be arriving by now. But the passage stayed quiet. Gefty couldn’t see into it from where he stood. He waited, trying to steady his breathing, wondering where Kerim Ruse was and what had got into Maulbow. After a moment, without taking his eyes from the passage entrance, he reached into the wall closet from which he had taken the gun and fished out another souvenir of his active service days, a thin-bladed knife in a slip-sheath. Gefty worked the fastenings of the sheath over his left wrist and up his forearm under his coat, tested the release to make sure it was functioning, and shook his coat sleeve back into place.
The passage was still quiet. Gefty moved softly over to one of the chairs, took a small cushion from it and pitched it out in front of the entrance.
There was a hiss. The cushion turned in midair into a puff of bright white fire. Gefty aimed his gun high at the far passage wall just beyond the entrance and pulled the trigger. It was a projectile gun. He heard the slug screech off the slick bulkhead and go slamming down the passage. Somebody out there made a startled, incoherent noise. But not the kind of a noise a man makes when he’s just been hit.
“If you come in here armed,” Gefty called, “I’ll blow your head off. Want to stop this nonsense now?”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Maulbow’s voice replied shakily from the passage. He seemed to be standing about twenty feet back from the room.
“If you’ll end your thoughtless attempts at interference, Rammer,” he said, “there will be no trouble.” He was speaking with the restraint of a man who is in a state of cold fury. “You’re endangering us all. You must realize that you have no understanding of what you are doing.”
Well, the last could be true enough. “We’ll talk about it,” Gefty said without friendliness. “I haven’t done anything yet, but I’m not just handing the ship over to you. And what have you done with Miss Ruse?”
Maulbow hesitated again. “She’s in the map room,” he said then. “I . . . it was necessary to restrict her movements for a while. But you might as well let her out now. We must reach an agreement without loss of time.”
Gefty glanced over his shoulder at the small closed door of the map room. There was no lock on the door, and he had heard no sound from inside; this might be some trick. But it wouldn’t take long to find out. He backed up to the wall, pushed the door open and looked inside.
Kerim was there, sitting on a chair in one corner of the tiny room. The reason she hadn’t made any noise became clear. She and the chair were covered by a rather closely fitting sack of transparent, glistening fabric. She stared out through it despairingly at Gefty, her lips moving urgently, But no sound came from the sack.
Gefty called angrily, “Maulbow—”
“Don’t excite yourself, Rammer.” There was a suggestion of what might be contempt in Maulbow’s tone now. “The girl hasn’t been harmed. She can breathe easily through the restrainer. And you can remove it by pulling at the material from outside.”
Gefty’s mouth tightened. “I’ll keep my gun on the passage while I do it—”
Maulbow didn’t answer. Gefty edged back into the map room, tentatively grasped the transparent stuff above Kerim’s shoulder. To his surprise, it parted like wet tissue. He pulled sharply, and in a moment Kerim came peeling herself out of it, her face tear-stained, working desperately with hands, elbows and shoulders.
“Gefty,” she gasped, “he . . . Mr. Maulbow—”
“He’s out in the passage there,” Gefty said. “He can hear you.” His glance shifted for an instant to the wall where a second of the shroud-like transparencies was hanging. And who could that have been intended for, he thought, but Gefty Rammer? He added, “We’ve had a little trouble.”
“Oh!” She looked out of the room towards the passage, then at the gun in Gefty’s hand, then up at his face.