He said softly, “It is not our practice, Rammer, to share the secrets of the Great Current with other races. I hadn’t foreseen that you might become a dangerous nuisance. But now—”
His right hand began to lift, half closed about some small golden instrument. Gefty’s left arm moved back and quickly forwards.
The service knife slid out of its sheath and up from his palm as an arrow of smoky blackness burst from the thing in Maulbow’s hand. The blackness came racing with a thin, snarling noise across the floor towards Gefty’s feet. The knife flashed above it, turning, and stood hilt-deep in Maulbow’s chest.
Gefty returned a few minutes later from the forward cabin which served as the Queen’s sick bay, and said to Kerim, “He’s still alive, though I don’t know why. He may even recover. He’s full of anesthetic, and that should keep him quiet till we’re back in normspace. Then I’ll see what we can do for him.”
Kerim had lost some of her white, shocked look while he was gone. “You knew he would try to kill you?” she asked shakily.
“Suspected he had it in mind—he gave in too quick. But I thought I’d have a chance to take any gadget he was hiding away from him first. I was wrong about that. Now we’d better move fast . . . ”
He switched the emergency check panel back on, glanced over the familiar patterns of lights and numbers. A few minor damage spots were indicated, but the ship was still fully operational. One minor damage spot which did not appear on the panel was now to be found in the instrument room itself, in the corner on which the door of the map room opened. The door, the adjoining bulkheads and section of flooring were scarred, blackened, and as assortedly malodorous as burned things tend to become. That was where Gefty had stood when Maulbow entered the room, and if he had remained there an instant after letting go of the knife, he would have been in very much worse condition than the essentially fireproof furnishings.
Both Maulbow’s weapons—the white rod lying innocently on the wall table and the round, golden device which had dropped from his hand spitting darts of smoking blackness—had blasted unnervingly away into that area for almost thirty seconds after Maulbow was down and twisting about on the floor. Then he went limp and the firing instantly stopped. Apparently, Maulbow’s control of them had ended as he lost consciousness.
It seemed fortunate that the sick bay cabin’s emergency treatment accessories, gentle as their action was, might have been designed for the specific purpose of keeping the most violent of prisoners immobilized—let alone one with a terrible knife wound in him. At the angle along which the knife had driven in and up below the ribs, an ordinary man would have been dead in seconds. But it was very evident now that Maulbow was no ordinary man, and even after the eerie weapons had been pitched out of the ship through the instrument room’s disposal tube, Gefty couldn’t rid himself of an uncomfortable suspicion that he wasn’t done with Maulbow yet—wouldn’t be done with him, in fact, until one or the other of them was dead.
He said to Kerim, “I thought the machine Maulbow set up in the storage vault would turn out to be some drive engine, but apparently it has an entirely different function. He connected it with the instruments he had made in the Hub, and together they form what he calls a control unit. The emergency panel would show if the unit were drawing juice from the ship. It isn’t, and I don’t know what powers it. But we do know now that the control unit is holding us in the time current, and it will go on holding us there as long as it’s in operation.
“If we could shut it off, the Queen would be `rejected’ by the current, like Maulbow’s sailer was. In other words, we’d get knocked back into normspace—which is what we want. And we want it to happen as soon as possible because, if Maulbow was telling the truth on that point, every minute that passes here is taking us farther away from the Hub, and farther from our own time towards his.”
Kerim nodded, eyes intent on his face.
“Now I can’t just go down there and start slapping switches around on the thing,” Gefty went on. “He said it wasn’t working right, and even if it were, I couldn’t tell what would happen. But it doesn’t seem to connect up with any ship systems—it just seems to be holding us in a field of its own. So I should be able to move the whole unit into the cargo lock and eject it from there. If we shift the Queen outside its field, that should have the same effect as shutting the control unit off. It should throw us back into normspace.”
Kerim nodded again. “What about Mr. Maulbow’s janandra animal?”
Gefty shrugged. “Depends on the mood I find it in. He said it wasn’t usually aggressive. Maybe it isn’t. I’ll get into a spacesuit for protection and break out some of the mining equipment to move it along with. If I can maneuver it into an empty compartment where it will be out of the . . . ”
He broke off, expression changing, eyes fastened on the emergency panel. Then he turned hurriedly, reached across the side of the console for the intership airseal controls. Kerim asked apprehensively, “What’s the matter, Gefty?”
“Wish I knew . . . exactly.” Gefty indicated the emergency panel. “Little red light there, on the storage deck section—it wasn’t showing a minute ago. It means that the vault doors have been opened since then.”
He saw the same half-superstitious fear appear in her face that had touched him. “You think he did it?”
“I don’t know.” Maulbow’s control of the guns had seemed uncanny enough. But that was a different matter. The guns were a product of his own time and science. But the vault door mechanisms? There might have been sufficient opportunity for Maulbow to study them and alter them, for some purpose of his own, since he’d come aboard . . .
“I’ve got the ship compartments and decks sealed off from each other now,” Gefty said slowly. “The only connecting points from one to the other are personnel hatches—they’re small air locks. So the janandra’s confined to the storage deck. If it’s come out of the vault, it might be a nuisance until I can get equipment to handle it. But that isn’t too serious. The spacesuits are on the second deck, and I’ll get into one before I go on to the storage. You wait here a moment, I’ll look in on Maulbow again before I start.”
If Maulbow wasn’t still unconscious, he was doing a good job of feigning it. Gefty looked at the pale, lax face, the half-shut eyes, shook his head and left the cabin, locking it behind him. It mightn’t be Maulbow’s doing, but having the big snake loose in the storage could, in fact, make things extremely awkward now. He didn’t think his gun would make much impression on anything of that size, and while several of the ship’s mining tools could be employed as very effective close-range weapons, they happened, unfortunately, to be stored away on the same deck.
He found Kerim standing in the center of the instrument room, waiting for him.
“Gefty,” she said, “do you notice anything? An odd sort of smell . . . ”
Then the odor was in Gefty’s nostrils, too, and the back of his neck turned to ice as he recognized it. He glanced up at the ventilation outlet, looked back at Kerim.
He took her arm, said softly, “Come this way. Keep very quiet! I don’t know how it happened, but the janandra’s on the main deck now. That’s what it smells like. The smell’s coming through the ventilation system, so the thing’s moving around in the port section. We’ll go the other way.”
Kerim whispered, “What will we do?”
“Get ourselves into spacesuits first, and then get Maulbow’s control unit out of the ship. The janandra may be looking around for him. If it is, it won’t bother us.”
He hadn’t wanted to remind Kerim that, from what Maulbow said, there might be more than one reason for getting rid of the control unit as quickly as possible. But it had been constantly in the back of his mind; and twice, in the few minutes that passed after Maulbow’s strange weapons were silenced, he had seen a momentary pale glare appear in the unquiet flow of darkness reflecting in the viewscreens. Gefty had said nothing, because if it was true that hostile forces were alert and searching for them here, it added to their immediate danger but not at all to the absolute need to free themselves from the inexorable rush of the Great Current before they were carried beyond hope of return to their civilization.