"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. Ŕdams' will do very nicely."

  "I'm going to call you Ůncle 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 nearest one. Point three five, I make it."

  "But what's the chance of its having a Tellus-Type planet?"

  "Oh, that isn't necessary," Adams said. "Any planet will, it is virtually certain, enable us to restore subspace communication.

  "It'll still be a mighty long haul," Deston said. "The shape the engines are in, I doubt if they'll stand up under more than about one gee on a long pull. We can't do much better than that anyway, because we've got no grav-control-the Q-converters are all shot and we can't fix 'em."

  "We'll travel at one gravity," Barbara said. "Babies; remember?"

  "I'll figure it that way," Deston said, and went to work with his slide-rule. A few minutes later he reported, "Neglecting the Einstein Effect, which is altogether too hairy for a slipstick, I make it about fourteen months. But since velocity at turnover will be crowding six tenths of a light, that neglect makes it just a guess."

  "We'll compute it tomorrow morning," Jones said. "For your information, all, we're beading for that star now."

  Chapter 2

  THE ZETA FIELD

  The tremendous Chaytor engines of the Procyon were again putting out their wonted torrents of power. The starship, now a mere spaceship, was on course at one gravity. The lifecraft were in their berths, but the five and the four still lived in them rather than in the vast and oppressive emptiness that the liner then was. And outside of working hours the two groups did not mix.

  In Lifecraft Three, four men sat at two tables. Ferdy Blaine and Moose Mordan were playing cards for small stakes. Ferdy was of medium size, lithe and poised, built of rawhide and spring steel. Moose the Muscle was six feet five and weighed a good two sixty. The two at the other table had been planning for days. They had had many vitriolic arguments, but neither had made any motion toward his weapon.

  "Play it my way and we've got it made, I tell you!" Newman pounded the table with his fist. "Seventy five megabucks if it's a dime! Heavier loot than your second-string syndicate ever even thought of in one haul! I'm almost as good an astrogator as Jones is and a better engineer, and at practical electronics I'm just as good as Pretty Boy Deston is."

  "Oh, yeah?" Lopresto sneered. "How come you're only a crew-chief, then?"

  "Only a crew-chief!" Newman yelled. "D'ya think I'm dumb or something? Or don't know where the big moola is at? Or ain't in exactly the right spot to collect right and left? Or I ain't got exactly the right connections? With Mister Big himself? You ain't that dumb!"

  "Dumb or not, before I make a move I've got to be sure that we can get back without 'em."

  "You can be damn sure. I got to get back myself, don't I? But paste this in your hat-I get the big platinum blonde."

  "You can have her. Too big. The little yellow-head's my dish."

  Newman sneered into Lopresto's hard-held face. "But remember this, you small-time, chiseling punk. Rub me out after we kill them and you get nowhere. You're dead. Chew on that awhile and you'll know who's boss."

  After just the right amount of holding back and objecting, Lopresto agreed. "You win, Newman, the way the cards lay. So all that's left is-when? Tomorrow?"

  "Not quite. Let 'em finish figuring course, time, distance, turnover-all that stuff. They can do it a lot faster and some better than I can. I'll tell you when."

  "Okay, and I'll give the signal. When I yell NOW we give 'em the business."

  Newman went to his cabin and the muscle called Moose said, "I don't like that ape, boss. Before you gun him, let me work him over a little, huh?"

  "We'll let him think he's top dog for a while yet; then you can have him."

  A few evenings later, in Lifecraft Two, Barbara said, "You're worried, Babe, and everything's going so smoothly. Why?"

  "Too smoothly altogether. That's why. Newman ought to be doing a slow burn and goldbricking all he dares, and he isn't. And I wouldn't trust Lopresto as far as I can throw a brick chimney by its smoke. I smell trouble. Shooting trouble."

  "But they couldn't do anything without you two!" Bernice protested. "Could they, Ted, possibly?"

  "They could, and I think they intend to. Being a crew chief, Newman is a jackleg engineer, a good practical 'troncist, and a rule-of-thumb astrogator, and we're computing every element of the flight. And if he's what I think he is..." Jones paused.

  "Could be," Deston said. "One of an organized ring of pirate-smugglers. But there isn't enough plunder that they could get away with to make it pay."

  "No? Think again. Not plunder; salvage. With either of us alive, none. With both of us dead, can you guess within ten megabucks of how much they'll collect?"

  "Blockhead!" Deston slapped himself on the forehead. "And they aren't planning on killing the girls until the last act."

  Both girls shrank visibly and Barbara said, "I see." Deston went on, "They know they'll have to get both of us at once-the survivor would lock the ship in null-G and they'd be sitting ducks... and it won't be until we've finished the computations. We very seldom work together. If we make it a point never to be together on duty..."

  "And be sure to always have our talkies turned on," Jones put in, grimly.

  "Check. They'll have to think up some reason for getting everybody together, which will be the tip-off. Blaine will probably draw on me. .."

  "And he'll kill you," Jones said, flatly. "You're fast, I know, but he's a professional-probably one of the fastest guns in all space."

  "Yes, but... I've got a... I mean I think I can..." Bernice, smiling now, stopped Deston's floundering. "Why don't you fellows tell each other that you're both very strongly psionic? Bobby and I let our back hair down long ago.

  "Oh-so you'll have warning, too, Babe?" Jones asked. "That's right; but the girls can't start packing pistols now."

  Bernice laughed. "I wouldn't know how to shoot one if I did. "I'll throw things-I'm very good at that."

  Jones didn't know his new wife very well yet, either. "What can you throw hard enough and straight enough to do any good?"

  "Anything that weighs less than fifty pounds," she replied, confidently. "In this case... chairs, I think. Flying chairs are really hard to cope with. I'll start wearing a couple of knives in leg-sheaths, but I won't throw 'em unless I absolutely have to. Who will I knock out with the first chair?"

  "I'll answer that," Barbara said. "If it's Blaine against Babe, it'll be Lopresto against Here. So you'll throw your chair at that unspeakable oaf Newman."

  "I'd rather brain him than anyone else I know, but that would leave that gigantic gorilla to ... in that case, Bobby, you'll simply have to go armed."

  Barbara held out her hands. "I always do."

  "Against a man-mountain like him? You're that good? Really?"

  "Especially against a man-mountain like him. I'm that good. Really. And we should have a signal-an unusual word-so the first one of us to sense their intent yells 'BRAHMS!' Okay?"

  That was okay, and the four went to bed.

  Three days later, the intended victims allowed themselves to be inveigled into the lounge. All was peace and friendship-until suddenly a four-fold "BRAHMS!" rang out an instant ahead of Lopresto's stentorian "NOW!"

  It was all a very good thing that Deston had had warning for he was indeed competing out of his class. As it was, his bullet crashed through Blaine's head, while the gunman's went into the carpet. The other pistol duel wasn't even close and Newman didn't get to aim his gun at Adams at all.

  Bernice, even while shrieking the battle-cry, leaped to her feet, hurled her chair, and reached for another; but one chair was enough. It knocked the half-drawn pistol from Newman's hand and sent his body crashing to the floor, where Deston's second bullet made it certain that he would stay there.

  If Moose Mordan had had time to get set, he might have had a chance. His thought processes, however, were lamentably slow; and Barbara Deston was very, very fast. She reached him before he even realized that this pint-sized girl actually intended to hit him; thus his belly- muscles were still completely relaxed when her left fist sank half-forearm-deep into his solar plexus.

  With an agonized "WHOOSH!" he began to double up, but she scarcely allowed him to bend. The fingers of her right hand, tightly bunched, were already boring savagely into a spot at the base of his neck. Then, left hand at his throat and right hand pulling hard at his belt, she put the totalized and concentrated power of her whole body behind the knee she drove into his groin.

  That ended it. To make sure, however-or to keep Barbara from knowing that she had killed a man?-Deston and Jones each put a bullet through the falling head before it struck the floor.

  Both girls flung themselves into their husbands' arms. "Oh, I killed him, Carl!" Barbara sobbed. "And the worst of it is, I really meant to! I never did anything like that before in..."

  "You didn't kill him, Barbara," Adams said.

  "Huh?" She raised her head from Deston's shoulder; the contrast between streaming eyes and dawning relief was almost funny. "Why, I did too! I know I did!"

  "By no means, my dear. Nor did Bernice kill Newman. Fists and knees and chairs do not kill instantly; bullets through the brain do. The autopsies will show, I'm quite certain, that these four men died instantly of gunshot wounds."

  With the gangsters out of the way, life aboardship settled down, but not into a routine. When two spacemen and two grounder girls are trying to do the work of a full crew, no routine is possible. Adams, much older than the others and working even longer hours, became haggard and thin.

  "But this work is necessary, my dear children," he informed the two girls when they remonstrated with him. "This material is all new. There are many extremely difficult problems involved and I have less than a year left to work on them. Less than one year, and it is a task for many men and all the resources of a research center."

  To the officers, however, he went into more detail. "Considering the enormous amounts of supplies carried; the scope, quantity, and quality of the devices employed; it is highly improbable that we are the first survivors of this type of catastrophe to set course for a planet."

  After some discussion, the officers agreed with him. "While I can not as yet analyze or evaluate it, we are carrying an extremely heavy charge of an unknown nature; the residuum of a field of force which is possibly more or less analogous to the electromagnetic field. This residuum either is or is not dischargeable to an object of planetary mass. I am now virtually certain that it is; and I am of the opinion that its discharge is ordinarily of such violence as to destroy the starship carrying it.".

  "Good God!" Deston exclaimed. "Oh-that was what you meant by 'fantastic precautions'?"

  "Precisely."

  "Any idea of what those precautions will have to be?" "No. This is all so new... and I know so little... and am working with pitifully inadequate instrumentation... however, we have months of time yet, and if I an unable to derive a solution before arrival-I don't mean a rigorous analysis, of course; merely a method of discharge having a probability of success of at least point nine-we will remain in orbit around that sun until I do."

 

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