Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

“He’s undoubtedly a suspect,” Noel went on. “We don’t know the exact time the attack on Colonel Cragg took place, except that it had to be after 1800. Captain Spear relieved him at the command post at 1800.”

“He couldn’t get more than a few yards away from the spacecraft without the beacon and the lookout picking him up, Lieutenant McDonald objected. “He must be hiding on board. It’s as light as day when that thing sweeps over you.”

Yudin thought how Dane had made a point of distracting the airman from the searchlight to witness the signals. The time could have been prearranged and Pembroke could have made it away then. Something was very definitely peculiar about those signals. Maybe a plot to take over the Far Venture. Dane and Pembroke and the civilians. Why? What could they get out of it? Unless they had found something out on the face of the planet. Precious metal? Gold? Diamonds? That could explain why they wanted to delay the return. While they found some more and brought them inside without anybody knowing it. When Colonel Cragg refused to stay, they tried to kill him. Maybe he found out how they had jammed the drive. And why. Yet they couldn’t really want to take over the ship. They had to have the crew to get them back to Earth. They could only have wanted to delay the return. Noel was a fool. An officious little fool. He’d better be careful or he’d have a knife sticking in his own back.

“Let’s find him first and talk about it later. Alert all crew on the search,” Major Noel ordered. “Let’s go. I want Pembroke in fifteen minutes, or I want to know he’s outside.”

Yudin hesitated after the others had gone. Major Noel had pulled out the swinging stool and sat at the bank of command instruments, drumming his fingers against the writing desk. He was given to quick, bitter sarcasm, as Yudin well knew. Still, later would be too late. He had better tell him now.

“Sir, I have a report to make,” he essayed. He told about the signals. He decided he had better work in some detail about his own thorough check for hocus-pocus with the equipment.

Noel heard him without interruption, waiting perceptibly after he had finished. Then he looked at him as if he were something crawling into sight. “Thanks for the information.” He stressed the last word unpleasantly. “Captain Spear reported Dane’s actions to me the minute he learned about them.” He pointed at the watch on his wrist. “That was shortly after 1830. It is now almost 2300. Promptness is one of the elementary military virtues. How do you think I happened to find Colonel Cragg unconscious? I went to report to him that Dane was active again. Now go on about your duties.”

The dogmatic fool! Yudin went up the ladders to the observation deck. He ran over his sure knowledge of every item of communications equipment in the whole damned Air Force. Ten years a first lieutenant, yet whom did they tap when they wanted a real specialist for a tough assignment? Like this Mars flight. Men like Noel could bluster commands over an intercom. They got all the promotions, the few there were after Congress slashed the appropriations, but the specialists did the work. Not that Noel wasn’t a technical man himself, but he had convinced the powers that he was also the command type. So he played soldier worse than an Air Academy colonel.

Dr. Pembroke wasn’t hiding on the observation deck. Who would expect him to be? Where? Under the radar stool? He went down to 3-high deck and peeked into his own parts lockers. Three-high deck in the collision area near the top of the big sphere was principally a ring of food storage bins. Under the secondary meteor shield the bins were individually sealed off by airtight doors for tertiary protection. He plodded methodically out and back the five passages radiating from the central core that held the ladder wells. Most of the lockers were packed tight, a solid mass of cartons flush against the bin doors. Just as certainly Dr. Pembroke was not in any of the others. Yudin called Major Noel and gave his negative report, learning that he was to stand by for the 2400 watch, which would be doubled. Noel wasn’t taking any chances.

Less than an hour left before his duty. He decided to go down and see how the engineers were making out. The drive would not start tonight. You could bet on that. Nor any time until Vining was ready for it to start. Vining and Dane and Pembroke. They were in it together.

He went down through the high decks, past the main deck to 2-low deck, where the great truncated sphere of the space-craft’s body sat on the squat truncated cone of its base. Most of the 2200-odd feet of 2-low deck was occupied by the square bulk of the nuclear drive that rose from the base deck below and thrust on up against the floor of 1-low deck. Nesting over the 41 take-off blast tubes that thrust down in the base cone like a bundle of giant dynamite sticks, the monster battery of generators was more like a windowless blockhouse than the live thing in a moving vehicle. For all its unfunctional design and the knowledge that it was dead, Yudin shuddered when he stepped into its opened passages and sought out its internal chambers.

It way something of a bank vault and something of a rectangular labyrinth. Narrow passages branched off at right angles. Lighted here and there, they plunged darkly into non-human bylands. Open manholes went down into pitch black, and ladders climbed into obscured recesses overhead.

The central chamber was deserted. Yudin strained quietly to hear. If anyone was working, it was a cerebral labor. His watch’s ticking made him think of a Geiger counter. He turned around and hastened out of the thing.

Vining was just coming up from the tube deck. He glanced curiously at Yudin. “They have down here already searched.”

Yudin nodded at the big generator housing. “Gives me the creeps. You making any headway with it?”

Vining swept his hand torch at the blind, black wall. “Here is nothing wrong, but the power. The power is weak. The power will to the take-off ratio not develop.”

“That’s what Major Beloit said yesterday,” Yudin told him.

“It is also the truth tonight.” Vining thrust up closer. “You think I do this?” he shouted.

Yudin saw the fatigue lines and the bloodshot eyes. “Take it easy. Your job is to tend to this baby. You built it. Why can’t you fix it?”

Vining grabbed the lapel of his uniform and shook him.

“Take it easy, I said.” He pushed away the man’s hand. “I just asked you what’s the matter you can’t fix it.”

“ Ja, ja. So you do.” Vining kicked a bench around and sat down heavily. “All you want is me the drive to fix. So I build it. So I know to fix it. Here are all the parts. Here are all the quantities and correct. But here is not the power. Here is fission. Ten per cent critical we get. Sometimes twenty per cent. That is all. Here is no take-off power.”

“But why?”

“Why! You ask me why! Why grows all at once the healthy body cancer? My drive has cancer. But to cut the cancer away, the surgeon must first find the cancer.”

He got up. “Now I sleep. Tomorrow I recalculate the quantities, but it is no good. You want to know what I think?” The words came hoarsely, like a loud rough whisper. “I tell your colonel, but he swears and orders me to get the power. He orders me to fix my drive that he says I have destroyed. Then I work more hours and I tell him again. We are in some force field caught. An unknown force field. It has to be. A force field that destroys the balance of the drive!” He was shouting again now. “A force field, I tell you. It has to be. So he laughs at me and says, ‘Who is the fool, you think?’”

Yudin said, “He’s just about dead now, you know.”

“ Ja , I know. A force field. Does Major Noel believe? Nein! Major Beloit? Nein! Ich? Ja! I must believe it. Here we die. On Mars we die. I must have years to solve new quantities for the unknown force. Else it gives one big explosion. Today I come maybe many times close to one big end for us all. Who knows it, the unknown force?”