The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (93 page)

There was a fire in the planet metropolis of Sardin VI. It had been a very beautiful city, with wide ways and splendid buildings of the beautiful colored woods native to the planet. Those woods were used for jewel boxes on many distant worlds, because they gleamed like opalescent gems, and most of the buildings of the city were made of them. Even pictures of the city were admired for their subject-matter rather than their painting. It was said to have been the most beautiful place in which human beings ever lived.

But it was burning. It had burned for days. Beginning where a spark jumped because rain beat through a smashed window, it had been a very small fire at first. A child’s foot could have stamped it out. But there was no child to stamp on it. It burned.

The second day of its burning, it could still have been extinguished. Perhaps on the third or even the fourth. But no one tried to save the city. It sent up, clouds of resinous smoke from a wider and ever wider, space.

Now the sun set upon its burning. It blazed from one horizon to the other. When night fell, even the sky above the city did not turn dark, but glowed sullenly from the flames that leaped and danced where the masterpieces of man’s greatest architecture crumbled. From one horizon to the other there was a sheet of fire, in which columns and palaces slowly shriveled to ash. It was undoubtedly one of the most spectacular and tragic sights in history.

There was nobody left to see…

* * * *

The overdrive compartment, like all the others on the
Delilah
, was a great round ball of metal with welded gores. Brent reached it and put his ear cautiously to the rounded wall. He listened for minutes. There were minute ringing noises in the metal, some of which were actually remote echoes of the air-plant’s noises. But any large structure of metal, unless especially muffled, always has such noises. Sometimes they are easily heard, and then spacemen say that it is a singing ship sand the superstition is that it is lucky. The
Delilah
, though, was not musical enough for that.

There was someone in the overdrive room. Brent made sure. So before he swung around and into the entrance, he got something out of his pocket, and he stepped through the door with a small pocket-blaster out and ready.

The engineer was sitting in a folding foam-chair, staring at nothing as if fascinated by his own thoughts. As Brent loomed over him, he licked his lips. Then he jerked his head up, startled. He saw that Brent was not a crew-member, but a stranger. He made a convulsive movement.

“Still!” said Brent warningly. The tiny blaster bore very steadily. “What’s up? Why is the overdrive off?”

The man choked, staring at the blaster’s muzzle. Brent glanced aside for the fraction of a second. The master-switch was open—the engine-room switch. He only needed to look directly at that. Without moving his eyes he could see that the telltale dials that would locate trouble—almost invariably hopeless trouble, if it happened in space—were still hooded over. They were never used except in port to check the circuits—and of course, hopelessly, if something did go wrong in space. Between uses they were covered with plastic hoods to protect them from dust. They hadn’t been unhooded. So there had been no attempt to find trouble. So there wasn’t any trouble. The main switch had been opened on orders.

Brent moved the blaster suggestively.

“I said,” he repeated softly, “what’s the trouble? Why is the drive off? And don’t talk loudly—why are the passengers invited to go mad with fear?”

The
Delilah
’s engineer tried to speak.

“I—I—” Then his throat closed with a click. With a visible effort he tore his eyes from the blaster muzzle and looked up at Brent’s face. His expression was one of sheer terror.

“How about throwing the switch on?” asked Brent.

The engineer moved trembling hands to obey—but Brent saw a gleam of hope in his eyes, or was it a gleam of cunning?

Brent snapped, “Don’t touch it!” Then he said as softly as before. “That was just a checkup. If you threw the switch, it wouldn’t start the engines. It would just light up a ‘ready for operation’ light in the control-room, wouldn’t it? And they’d know there was something wrong here. And they’d come—and maybe you’d live.”

The engineer gasped: “Don’t—don’t kill me!”

“Suppose you tell me how much you know,” said Brent, eyes burning.

The engineer moaned softly.

“So you don’t know,” said Brent, “that the overdrive was to be turned off, the passengers driven mad, and when the right people had been killed the ship was to turn around and head for port. The surviving passengers would be tried for murder, eh? How about the crew?” he asked with sardonic softness. “Did you stop to think that the crew might be executed for not preventing the passengers from murdering each other?”

The engineer babbled. He was a pitiable sight, but Brent was merciless. There were hundreds of thousands of colonized planets, now, with local histories up to two thousand years in length. Earth could not govern them—which was why the Profession was a necessity—and there were nearly as many forms of social organization as there were planets. Khem IV was a totalitarian government quite ruthless enough to do exactly what Brent had just named—and the engineer knew it. He whimpered.

Brent looked at him with scornful pity.

“But what can I do with you?” he demanded. “Apparently I know more than you do about this mess.”

The engineer whimpered again. Then, with the frantic speed of desperation, he sprung from his chair at an alarm-button on the wall.

Brent pulled trigger. There was no sound. The engineer’s body thumped into the rounded hollow wall of the overdrive room and then slumped down on the floorplates in the boneless limpness of a man killed by a blaster.

Brent put the weapon back in his pocket. He now regarded the overdrive with a grim, and knowledgeable attention. But he couldn’t afford to meddle with it just yet. He noted, though, the details of its installation. It was a good fifty years old. It had been installed by someone only half-qualified, by really modern standards.
They haven’t read an engineering journal since this ship was built!
he thought grimly. They’d never heard of the Doorn-Welt equation, for one thing, which showed with such beautiful clarity how and why turning part of the second-stage exciter into a closed circuit gives multiplied space-modification effect. Brent—it was incidental to qualification for the Profession—could work on this drive for a bare few minutes and—

He nodded to himself. But the crew would be armed and desperate, and the passengers were already half-crazed with fear. Alarm the crew further and they might commit a massacre…and to reassure the passengers would alarm the crew. Technically it would be easy, but humanly it was impossible, he thought. Yet the impossible would have to be done.

He moved about the absurdly simple apparatus that was the overdrive itself. It was merely a long bar of brightly-polished metal with a peculiar greenish cast. At its ends it branched into slenderer rods—almost wires—that went through the skin of the overdrive room and spread out and branched again and again until they ended in pointed projections a few inches only beyond the plating of the hull. There were four separate coils of seemingly bare copper wire, placed in particular relationship to the bar. And that was all. Even the copper seemed uninsulated. But Brent knew better than that.

He climbed away from the engine-room with the body of the engineer dangling and jerking as he climbed among the girders in the semi-darkness.

* * * *

It was almost an hour later when he reached the passengers’ lounge again. He’d brushed himself carefully before re-entering. But nobody would have noticed, anyway.

A small group of passengers had gathered together, quietly and grimly waiting for something. The men—there were not too many of them—wore varying expressions of desperation. Behind them there were the women. Behind the women were children. There had been fighting. One man had a crude bandage covering half his face as if someone had clawed at his eyes all too sucessfully. There were some bent and broken chairs.

Kit Harlow and her father were near the group. Kit’s face was shockingly pale. Her dress was torn. Her father’s features were battered. Blood ran down one temple.

A slow, deep rage, deeper than even his fury over what he had discovered, filled Brent to the very brim. He heard a snarling from the bar. “They think they’re too good, for us! They think—” it was the voice of Rudl, the pimply-faced man whom Brent had seen on his journey to the ship’s control room. Brent ground his teeth.

Shannon, the young bridegroom, came suspiciously toward him.

“Where were you?” he demanded coldly. “We could have used you just now.”

Brent said harshly: “There should be knives in the dining-salon. Haven’t you thought of that?”

Shannon started. He beckoned to other men. Brent led the way.

The tables were bare. Brent jerked at drawers. There was the cutlery. There were large carving-knives, which would be deadly. He began to dump it into a tablecloth pulled from a table. Shannon helped.

“Forks too,” said Brent between his teeth. “They can stab.”

They went back with their new arms. Brent also brought table-linen, cloths and the like. He showed a man how to wrap a tablecloth around his left forearm so it would serve as padding against the blow of a club or would ward off a knife. It was a trick out of antiquity, and it was a spaceman’s-dive trick, too.

He began to help pass out knives. He came to Kit, and whispered shortly:

“I saw the overdrive. It’s in perfect working order. We’ve got a chance. Don’t let yourself get killed yet!”

But he raged at the signs that she had been forced to struggle in the riot he had missed. He went back into the dining-salon and burdened himself once more. Then he went to the bar and with brisk, angry motions threw water-pitchers over the wall and onto the heads of the men inside it.

It would have been suicidal with normal men. But the crowd in the bar was already half-crazed by
iposap
—made frantic by a deliberately excessive dosage. Every man clutched some drinkable while Rudl exhorted them. They were drugged and drunken, and he worked them up.

The noise was that of wild beasts turned loose. A man came staggering out of the melee, made suddenly cold sober by blood which jetted from his throat. He looked down at it stupidly, and leaned against the wall mutely imploring help from those he had joined in attacking only a little while ago.

It was too late. His knees sagged and gave way under him.

But Brent did not see that. He’d made a diversion. He had the pack fighting blindly. He dived into the fray.

There are tricks of fighting among rioters and drunken men. They are not pretty tricks, but they are effective. Brent used them—sparingly.

Brent got through. Crouched below visibility and fighting his way savagely, he reached Rudl. And the pimply man did not know he was endangered until a fist sank deep into his belly, and he collapsed—and a fist connected scientifically with his jaw.

Then Brent crouched over him, searching him swiftly. He found a flat case. He reached up and put it in the pocket of one of the surging mob, about and above him. Then he dragged the pimply man to the wall and, crouched low with his head protected by his hunched shoulders, he worked his way out again.

He was not unscathed. His clothes were ripped and he was bleeding when he dragged Rudl out of the door. He was staggering and panting alike from the beating and the exertion, when he blindly essayed to open a cabin door and drag Rudl inside. Two figures followed—Kit and her father.

“Close the door!” Brent panted.

Instantly he began to tear strips from the bedclothes to bind his victim. His hands. His feet. Finally Brent disarmed and gagged the pimply Rudl.

“I should—kill him,” he said, breathing hard when it was done. “He was an agent provocateur assigned to stir those drugged fools to murder one another—and you. He had a communicator on him. It carried every sound he heard and every word he spoke to the control-room. One of those drunks in the bar has it on him now. It’s still keeping the listeners in the control-room entertained. But I haven’t got much time—”

Kit said quietly, “It’s no use. This is arranged. My father and I are to be killed. If we locked ourselves in our cabins and used the blasters on ourselves, it would save other lives.”

Brent stood, still panting.

“I’ve killed the overdrive engineer. Now I’ve manhandled this man and planted his communicator on someone else. When the skipper finds his engineer missing, it won’t take him long to figure that somebody knows what’s up. When he finds that Rudl’s out of circulation and his communicator’s in another man’s pocket, he’ll know somebody understands the whole game. And will he dare leave any passenger alive if one of them knows what he’s up to?”

Kit had been pale enough. Now she went even paler.

“I think,” she said with difficulty, “that you have doomed everyone.”

“Maybe I have,” growled Brent. “Your murder has been effectively bungled now. And I rather think that the government that ordered this won’t be too merciful to bunglers.”