Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

“Well, Rip,” Doc Renn was saying, “It’s all over now—the preliminaries, I mean. We’re going ahead with the big job.”

“Preliminaries?” I goggled. “You mean to tell me that what I’ve been through for the last three years was all preliminaries?”

Renn nodded, watching me carefully. “You’re going on a little trip. It may not be fun, but it’ll be interesting.”

“Trip? Where to?” This was good news; the repeated drills on spaceship techniques, the refresher courses on astrogation, had given me a good-sized itch to get out into the black again.

“Sealed orders,” said Renn, rather sharply. “You’ll find out. The important thing for you to remember is that you have a very important role to play.” He paused. I could see him grimly ironing the snappiness out of his tone. Why in Canaan did he have to be so careful with me ? “You will be put aboard a Forfield Super—the latest and best equipped that the league can furnish. Your job is to tend the control machinery, and to act as assistant astrogator no matter what happens. Without doubt, you will find your position difficult at times. You are to obey your orders as given, without question, and without the use of force where possible.”

This sounded screwy to me. “That’s all written up, just about word for word, in the ‘Naval Manual,’” I reminded him gently, “under ‘Duties of Crew.’ I’ve had to do all you said every time I took a ship out. Is there anything special about this one, that it calls for all this underlining?”

He was annoyed, and the board shuffled twenty-two pairs of feet. But his tone was still friendly, half-persuasive when he spoke. “There is definitely something special about this ship, and—its crew. Rip, you’ve come through everything we could hand you, with flying colors. Frankly, you were subgjected to psychic forces that were enough to drive a normal man quite mad. The rest of the crew—it is only fair to tell you—are insane. The nature of this expedition necessitates our manning the ship that way. Your place on the ship is a key position. Your responsibility is a great one.”

“Now—hold on, sir,” I said. “I’m not questioning your orders, sir, and I consider myself under your disposition. May I ask a few questions?”

He nodded.

“You say the crew is insane. Isn’t that a broad way of putting it—” I couldn’t help needling him; he was trying so hard to keep calm— “for a psychologist?”

He actually grinned. “It is. To be more specific, they’re schizoids—dual personalitites. Their primary egos are paranoiac. They’re perfectly rational except on the subject of their particular phobia—or mania as the case may be. The recessive personality is a manic depressive.”

Now, as I remembered it, most paranoiacs have delusions of grandeur coupled with a persecution mania. And a manic depressive is the “Yes master” type. They just didn’t mix. I took the liberty of saying as much to one of Earth’s foremost psychoscientists.

“Of course they don’t mix,” snapped Renn. “I didn’t say they did. There’s no interflowing egos in these cases. They are schizoids. The cleavage is perfect.”

I have a mole under my arm that I scratch when I’m thinking hard. I scratched it. “I didn’t know anything like that existed,” I said. Renn seemed bent on keeping this informal, and I was playing it to the limit. I sensed that this was the last chance I’d have to get any information about the expedition.

“There never were any cases like that until recently,” said Renn patiently. “Those men came out of our laboratories.”

“Oh. Sort of made-to-order insanity?”

He nodded.

“What on earth for, sir?”

“Sealed orders,” he said immediately. His manner became abrupt again. “You take off tomorrow. You’ll be put aboard tonight. Your commanding officer is Captain William Parks.” I grinned delightedly at this. Parks—the horny old fireater! They used to say of him that he could create sunspots by spitting straight up. But he was a real spaceman—through and through. “And don’t forget, Rip,” Renn finished. “There is only one sane man aboard that ship. That is all.”

I saluted and left.

A Forfield Super is as sweet a ship as anything ever launched. There’s none of your great noisy bulk pushed through the ether by a cityful of men, nor is it your completely automatic “Eyehope”—so called because after you slipped your master control tape into the automatic pilot you always said, “you’re on your way, you little hunk of tinfoil—I hope!”

With an eight-man crew, a Forfield can outrun and outride anything else in space. No rockets—no celestial helices—no other such clumsy nonsense drives it. It doesn’t go places by going—it gets there by standing still. By which I mean that the ship achieves what laymen call “Universal stasis.”

The Galaxy is traveling in an orbit about the mythical Dead Center at an almost incredible velocity. A Forfield, with momentum nullified, just stops dead while the Galaxy streams by. When the objective approaches, momentum is resumed, and the ship appears in normal space with only a couple of thousand miles to go. That is possible because the lack of motion builds up a potential in motion; motion, being a relative thing, produces a set of relative values.

Instead of using the terms “action” and “reaction” in speaking of the Forfield drive, we speak of “stasis” and “re-stasis.” I’d explain further but I left my spherical slide rule home. Let me add only that a Forfield can achieve stasis in regard to planetary, solar, galactic, or universal orbits. Mix ’em in the right proportions, and you get resultants that will take you anywhere, fast.

I was so busy from the instant I hit the deck that I didn’t have time to think of all the angles of this more-than-peculiar trip. I had to check and double-check every control and instrument from the milliammeter to the huge compound integrators, and with a twenty-four-hour deadline that was no small task. I also had to take a little instruction from a league master mechanic who had installed a couple of gadgets which had been designed and tested at the last minute expressly for this trip. I paid little attention to what went on round me. I didn’t even know the skipper was aboard until I rose from my knew before the integrators, swiveled around on my way to the control board, and all but knocked the old war horse off his feet.

“Rip! I’ll be damned!” he howled. “Don’t tell me—you’re not signed on here?”

“Yup,” I said. “Let go my hand, skipper—I got to be able to hold a pair of needle noses for another hour or so. Yeah, I heard you were going to captain this barrel. How do you like it?”

“Smooth,” he said, looking around, then bringing his grin back to me. He only grinned twice a year because it hurt his face; but when he did, he did it all over. “What do you know about the trip?”

“Nothing except that we have sealed orders.”

“Well, I’ll bet there’s some kind of a honkatonk at the end of the road,” said Parks. “You and I’ve been on . . . how many is it? Six? Eight . . . anyway, we’ve been on plenty of ships together, and we managed to throw a whingding ashore every trip. I hope we can get out Aldebaran way. I hear Susie’s place is under new management again. Heh! Remember the time we—”

I laughed. “Let’s save it, skipper. I’ve got to finish this check-up, and fast. But, man, it’s good to see you again.” We stood looking at each other, and then something popped into my head and I felt my smile washing off. What was it that Dr. Renn had said—“Remember there’s only one sane man aboard!” Oh, no—they hadn’t put Captain Parks through that! Why—