John Racham Read online

  "Instrumentman Query, sir. You sent for me."

  Eldredge gave him a beaky-nosed glare, a nod, then

  12 wheeled to the man in the chair. "This is your man, Admiral. Do you want me to stay?"

  "That's all right, Eldredge. Go and see about chow. I'll join you later. This won't take long and I would rather do it alone. Oh, and pass the word along to your servicing detail. I want that ship of mine ready to lift in an hour. Not less!"

  Eldredge went away, leaving Query face to face with the one man he liked least in all the world. That well-remembered "rocks in a bucket" voice, the astonishing mane of white hair, the jutting eyebrows and blue cold eyes, the pompous red face and overbearing manner, the dazzle of gold braid on a black suit that betrayed the bulge and sag of a flabby, old man. Admiral Gareth—Gravel Guts-Evans.

  Query stared for one breath, then lifted his eyes to stare ahead, and saw, off to one side, discreetly in the background, the slim and erect figure of an aide, a lieutenant with a loop of braid from one epaulet to belt line. One breath more, to see that "it" was a female, her black uniform skintight, tailored to show off her arrogantly jutting bosom and slim waist, her carved profile and bleak eye disdaining his stare. Then Evans cleared his throat

  II

  "STEPHEN QUERY, Instrumentman, First Class." The old man stated it as if reading from a record. "Posted here to Step Two six months ago. You know who I am, Query?" "Yes, sir."

  "You were charged with insolence and insubordination and other conduct considered to be prejudicial to discipline and good order."

  "None of the charges was substantiated, sir."

  "Silence! Those charges were substantial, Query. Perhaps not in the official jargon, but in fact they were. In the mind of every Service officer present at your court-martial you were guilty as hell!"

  "Of what, sir?" Query demanded, and the red face opposite him grew redder and savage.

  13

  "Of what you are doing right now, damnit!Arguing. Doubting. Violating the spirit of the Service. Perhaps there was no crime, not in black and white rule and regulation, but your attitude, your whole way of thinking is and was offensive to the underlying ethos of the Service. Man, you can't run an efficient Service unless you have instant and unquestioning obedience at all times!"

  "Even when the given order is obviously and destructively wrong, sir?"

  "That has nothing whatever to do with it, Query!" Evans was snorting now, as if trying to breathe fire. "That is somebody else's responsibility, not yours!" Query let it go. This had all been hashed over before, was a dead issue. He wondered what Evans was leading up to, and then it came.

  "However," the old man said, in a slightly milder tone, "it has since come to my attention that the person with whom you had your argument, your superior officer—in name, at least—is, in fact, a stupid, blundering and incompetent fool. He has been stripped, and there are inquiries in hand designed to reveal how he ever got where he was; the fools who put him in that rank will regret it. I considered it my duty to inform you of that, and I have done so. Well?"

  Query frowned at the ruddy face before him. What did the old fool want now, gratitude? "I don't know what to say, sir. I can't see how the action you describe has anything to do with me, sir."

  "Right!Nothing at all to do with you. But it has to do with me. Query, I know something of what the rank and file think of me, and it doesn't bother me in the least. I've never tried to be popular. Not my job. But I do claim, and like to think, that I am a fair man. I made an error. It is human to make errors, Query, and I am human, no matter what you may have heard to the contrary. I made a mistake, and I have admitted it to you. Had I known what a blasted incompetent fool Lieutenant Rostov was, your case would have ended differently. As it is, I am out one technician lieutenant, and one highly competent instru-mentman is wasting his skill here. I have examined your records. You are more than competent. It is in my power, and it is my decision, that you are, as of now, Technical

  Sergeant Query. Understood? I heard your chow bell just now. Go and eat, then pack your kit and be on my ship before I lift off!"

  Query gulped. "Sir? Your ship?"_

  "Not as crew, man! It's not a blasted battleship! It's my staff transport. You'll be a passenger. I'm on my way to the war zone. I only stopped off here for a quick check, to drop off six replacements . . . and to collect you. You'll be posted properly, Sergeant, when I turn you over to Fleet Admiral Nimson's H.Q. Is that clear?"

  It was all too clear, and disastrous. Query gulped. "Sir!" It came out choked and he tried again, desperately. "Sir!"

  "Now what?"

  "Sir, is there any way in which I can request permission to—to refuse the appointment, sir?"

  "Blast my eyes, you're doing it again!" Evans purpled, hit the desk with a fist. "Get out of here. Get your chow. Get your kit. Get yourself aboard my ship. Report yourself to my aide, Lieutenant Evans, here. Do it like that, or God help you! I mean that, Sergeant! Now get!"

  Query got. Shocked into a daze, he found his seat at the meal table and ate mechanically, unaware of the taste, half hearing the chatter about his ears. For once in his life his mind failed to work. Always, until the Service had reached out and captured him, he had been able to think his way over and around anything and anyone, had been able to stay indifferent to the puerile play of other people. Space Service had changed that, had screwed him down into a slot where he couldn't wriggle out, had made him be involved, like it or not, and had hurt him severely many times. "The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" had been hard sometimes, but this dwarfed all the rest. A quiet obscurity, an exciting secret all his own, and it was all to be ripped out of his grasp—and there was nothing he could do!

  "Old Gravel Guts has his nerve, you have to admit!" The nearby speaker caught Query's stunned ear, set him listening.

  "That old adjective doesn't have nerves!" someone else disagreed. "Look at it. Every last man in this dump hates his insides, and he knows it, and yet he jets in here, bold

  15 .

  as brass, and drops off six more men. And you can guess the trip they had. That bucket of his rates four, all told!"

  "And then," somebody else chimed in, "he has the plastic-lined gall to demand a full service check out in an hour! Nerve? He ain't even human!"

  "Me, I'd like to stuff a warhead up his stem tubes. Man, would he ever lift off then!" There came a general chuckle, not mirthful, until one more voice piped up.

  "He's human, all right. You should take a good look at that aide of his and you'd know why he's in such a blazing rush to get on his way. She is built like every dame I ever dreamed of and then some!"

  "She?" there came an unbelieving chorus, and then another voice, slow and cynical, full of conviction.

  "She's a she, all right. I was on the tube when they came inboard. And she has the giant economy size of everything you dream about. And she knows it, too. But you can have my ration of that any time."

  "Fussy in your old age, Ham?"

  "Just careful, Buggsy. She's his daughter. If you want to fool around with a chip off that old block, you can have mine."

  The badinage went away as Query remembered. The old man had said "Lieutenant Evans" sure enough. His pilot-aide. His daughter. It was a safe bet she'd never won her commission the hard way. And the old devil had the nerve to call himself a fair man? Somehow, that touch of cynicism put the capper on Query's helplessness, dropped him to the nadir of despair. He finished eating and went to pack, not a long job at all. And he had no one to call friend, to say good-bye to, no one to give a damn as he made his way through the workshop dome and to the service tube. As he shook his duffel bag onto his shoulder and stooped to enter, there was one who came close to touch his arm. A lean and wild-looking power man he knew only by sight, and the name, Michaels.

  "Instrumentman! You got a job detail on that ship?"

  "Do I look like I'm on a work detail?"

  "No. I guess not. But why else would you be g
oing aboard?"

  Deep down inside, Query had a primitive savagery that he was ashamed of and usually able to control, but it

  16 burst out now. "Would you believe Admiral Evans is giving me a lift out to the war zone, so I can get in the fighting?"

  The reaction that came was not what he expected. Michaels looked suddenly stricken. "You wouldn't fool a guy, would you?"

  "No," Query sighed, his rage going as fast as it had come. "No, I'm not fooling. I got an honorable forgiveness, and I'm on my way to Alkaid in that ship. Why?"

  "Nothing." Michaels grew suddenly furtive. "Forget it. I don't know you. Nothing!" And he went away, leaving Query to frown, shake his head, and then duck into the tube along its concertina length to the air lock. His experience of ships was slight, and he had never seen one this small before. It took him a moment to get his bearings. Probably somebody's private yacht, before the war. People had private lives before the war, too. Like Query, who had been a designer, architect, artist and dreamer, with little success in any but the last. Not now. He shrugged, went up a ladder, then another, and he was in the control room, a small and compact space like an upturned pudding basin. The roof was a dome of glassite with titanium panel shutters. The small space was packed with instruments in panels and boxes, and there were three seats. And one occupant.

  Seen this close, she was definitely female. Her black, one piece suit fitted like paint over a shape that was studied insolence, blatantly exhibitionist, swelling close to him as she turned, but the gold braid on wrist and shoulder put him in his place and her level, brown-eyed stare kept him there coldly. She had to put her head back to look him in the eye, but she still conveyed the impression of looking down her nose at him.

  "Technical Sergeant Query," she acknowledged his presence and her grasp of the situation crisply, "we have a moment or two before lift-off. Stow your duffel in cabin four and then check over the engine space. Make sure none of your repair and maintenance colleagues have left anything undone or bits sculling about. Give a special look at the second stage heat exchangers. They were reading high when we came down. I reported that. It should have been dealt with. Check it!"

  Query attempted a salute, clumsily because of his slung kit bag, and her mouth tightened in scorn.

  "How much ship time have you done, Query?"

  "None, sir . . . ma'am.Except in transit from one base to another."

  "I see!" She clasped her hands at her back and expanded her breasts even fuller as she stared up at him. "Very well. Leam. When speaking to, or being spoken to by an officer, you stand to attention whenever possible. You do not salute. Not inboard. You do not wear a cap except in special circumstances, formal circumstances. You stow your cap, or tuck it under the left arm, peak forward, until such time as you are able to stow it Don't forget it That's all!"

  "Yes, ma'am." Query overrode the twitch in his arm, wheeled and went away, down ladders, past the air lock and on down, to a boxlike cabin-flat where he tossed his bag in the cupboard-sized space numbered Four, and on down again to the cell-sized engine deck. Anger burned dully in him. Snotty female. He would have liked the chance to turn her over his knee and paddle her hard. A chip off the old block, sure enough. But that dull resentment went away as he surveyed the jewellike precision of the machines around him. Strictly, he was seeing only the top ends, the access covers which were spread in a tight circle around the central trunking. The monsters themselves went away down there in a world all their own and did wonderful things. Smooth, precise, functional things. Not like people, who had no regular pattern, who were full of irrelevancies like whims and emotions and opinions.

  He moved admiringly around the narrow catwalk, studying the layout, figuring out each piece of the instruments, which were the parts he really knew well. Lubrication pressures and temperatures; power storage and discharge rates; air plant, humidity, temperature, rate of flow; fuel flow; main drive; heat exchange, first and second stage. He ran his fingers over the quick lock bolts, the flanges, and felt roughened edges, the fresh tackiness of sealing compound. Something had been done, that was all he could be sure of without tools. It wasn't his job anyway. He moved on, making sure that nothing had been left half-done, no

  18 wrenches or scrap lying about, and his eye fell on a curious box, something new in his experience.

  It was tucked away between two breaker boxes, and had a glassite cover, and a brass plate so well worn and polished that it was only because he caught a side light on it that he realized there was print on it. He frowned at it, put his head on one side until the lettering was clear.

  CANOPY EJECT TEST AND RESET.

  Query scowled at it, digging into his memory. Eject? It rang a faint bell. He peered again, seeing more print in lower case.

  "Break switch before testing canopy eject system. Authorized personnel only."

  It took him another minute before he could connect up his memories. And it took him a long way back. This must be a really old ship. Explosive, safety eject systems had long ago been made obsolete. For one thing, it was close to impossible for a modern micropile to blow, and if ever one did, it would be so fast that no possible safety device would be any use. Whoever had reengined this craft for war service had either missed that or had left it in place rather than go to the trouble of ripping out the circuitry. It couldn't possibly work.

  A bell dinged gently, jerking him out of his reverie to see the fuel pump gauges shiver and lift and the drive flux density start to climb from zero. He went up out of there fast, dropping the hatch behind him, and all the way back up to the control room. Lieutenant Evans was in the seat of authority, her slim hands on the levers, her eyes on her panel. Admiral Evans was over to one side at the radio board, slumped in his seat, lifting his head from the microphone as Query entered.

  "Sit!" he snapped. "We're about to lift. D'you want to rupture yourself? Sit!"

  Query dropped into the third seat, opposite the engine complex board, as the weight came on, squashing him down into the foam, making him grant.

  "Engine room checked out, sir." he said, panting. "Looks all in good order to me, sir."

  "Shut up! GOC to Step Two. We have lift-off plus ten. Beacon acquisition affirmative. GOC over and out!"

  Query saved his breath. He needed it. It was effort just

  19 to inflate his chest as the crushing weight grew. Either this ship had a lot more get up and go than anything he had ridden so far, or the pilot was showing off. He suspected the latter. He could see her board over her shoulder. It was a novel experience for him to see instruments actually in action. On the test bench he knew them all, what they did and how, but now the tale they told was real, not just a drill. Rate of climb was trembling into the red. Horizon, horizontal and vertical, steady and solid. Beacon acquisition was a three-point reading that should keep the ship standing straight up inside a triangular grid. That beacon took power, lots of it. Nothing so frail as an ordinary radio signal had a hope of smashing its way through this soupy atmosphere. Nor was it easy for the ship. He saw the thrust in megadynes, shivering well over into the maximum range, and had a mental picture of the bullet-shaped ship boring its way up, squandering power, yet leaning hard on that same thick atmosphere to conduct away the furious heat involved. The atmosphere aided the heat exchangers, making it easier than normal for them. And his attention came alive suddenly and urgently on those dials.

  The needles were galloping up and over far too fast. As he stared in disbelief they hit maximum and shivered against the stops. It was insane! A flicked glance at the screens confirmed what he knew anyway, that they were still in atmosphere. And the drive was hot. Too hot, dangerously too hot! Here came the second stages, cutting in automatically. But uselessly. They were expansion exhaust, designed for the near vacuum of space, and worse than useless here. He squandered breath and effort to shout, "We are overheating! Cut the drive! The drive!"

  "Don't be a fooll" Lieutenant Evans snapped. "I can't cut drive! We are ten miles up!"
/>   "Then ease off!" he shouted, fighting his way out of his seat and to her side, to cling to her seat arm and aim a lead heavy arm at the gauges. The second stage heaters were fairly leaping over the quadrant. "She'll blow any time at those temperatures!"

  "What the hell!" the old man roared, and Query labored around to shout at him, and saw, over his head, on the bulkhead up there, the duplicate of that glassed-in box he

  20 had seen down there in the engine space. Eject switch. He immediately forgot all else, groaned away from her chair, labored over to Evans like a drunken man, and hurled himself up and on top of the roaring admiral, deaf to everything but the urge to get at that box. He reached it, beat at it with crazy fists, and the glassite cover came away and fell to reveal a red handgrip. There was no time to wonder what or how. He grabbed it, tugged at it, tried to twist it one way or the other, heaved madly . . . and it came away in his hand.

  Oh my god! he thought. I've broken it!

  Then the whole control room bucked violently as if battered by a huge hammer. It went instantly and absolutely dark, and from a long way off came the whiplash and echoing boom of an explosion. Then sudden and complete silence. Darkness. Weightlessness. And then the first faint wailing of tortured atmosphere.

  Ill

  WE'VEBLOWN FREE! he thought, pushing his arms out at random in the dark, his right hand still holding the handle. We're free, and falling! Ten miles up!

  A bellow somewhere near told him that Admiral Evans was still functioning after a fashion.