Barrington Bayley - The Star Virus

Rodrone explained.

Shone looked regretful. “He was a likable lad.”

The epitaph struck Rodrone forcibly. He grunted in disgust. “Have you nothing to say for those murdering bully-boys of yours?”

“Eh? Hah! So you’re complaining.” Shone stuck his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the picture cavity behind him, with its closely-drawn designs of suns. “Remember what you said? You said you liked it like this. Lawlessness. Disorder! Well, this is it!” He peered at Rodrone, leaning forward. “The way things are, anything can happen in this universe. Some good things, some bad, some pretty ghastly. But who are you to set a limit on what should happen in the whole cosmos?”

Rodrone stared sullenly at him for a long moment. He slumped. Then he grunted again, this time with a hint of grudging humor. “Tell me,” he said, “why do you seem a bit more human than the rest—and yet you still stick with them?”

For answer, Shone flicked a switch. On a small vision plate something appeared.

This time it was not the artificially condensed image that glowed behind him. It was a vaster view, more like what the naked eye would see.

“Just look at that.”

Rodrone saw—suns. Billions of suns, congregated in piling clouds and clusters, space edging black between them.

“That’s excuse enough for anything,” Shone said.

“Then we’re brothers under the skin,” Rodrone told him, laughing shortly.

Shone flicked off the vision plate. “Business acquaintances, anyway. The Streall are on to us. I’ve detected them coming up fast—three or four ships. I think we’d better slip out of the way.”

He climbed down from the throne and walked unsteadily to one end of the desk, where he made an adjustment. Then he came back and began to work with the controls.

After a minute or two concern showed on his face. “Something’s wrong.”

He continued working for about another minute, and spoke into a communicator.

“Feeldonet!” he bellowed.

A voice answered. “Yep?”

“The drive’s acting up. It doesn’t work! Fix it will you?”

“Right.”

Shone glanced at Rodrone. “It’ll mean a pitched battle if they catch up with us, but we mount some pretty powerful weapons.”

Half an hour later Feeldonet came up to the control gallery. He was embarrassed. Somewhat diffidently, he explained how fluctuations in the power supply—caused by tampering with the reactor—had disturbed the drive and thrown it out of action. Then he described his efforts to put it right, ending apologetically with a story of failure.

Then he admitted that he knew nothing about the drive in question.

Rodrone was amazed. “Is this your ship’s engineer?” he said to the captain.

Shone sighed. “I took him on a couple of stops back. He seemed good enough, and he certainly put up a good case for himself. You gulled me!” he said accusingly to Feeldonet.

Feeldonet shifted his feet. “All right, it’s true I’d never heard of this system before, but I’m a good technician and I thought there wasn’t anything I couldn’t get the hang of. I won’t be so cocksure again.”

Rodrone questioned him, intrigued. He had traveled under dozens of different space propulsion systems: numberous sophistications of the reaction-mass principle, “space-compression,” and even on the new drover engines. But of them all, the method used by the Stator was the most bizarre. The mathematics that described it made no reference to motion at all—Feeldonet did not think that they made any reference even to the ship. Consideration was given to the surrounding matter in space, viewed from various separated points. Somehow the ship was hauled from one to another of these points, by means of a change of observer, as it were.

It was as close to a practical application of sheer metaphysics as Rodrone was ever likely to see.

“Now you know why the ship was cheap,” the engineer told Shone. “Only three of these units were ever built. Just after you gave me the job, a fellow told me that was because there were only ever three technicians who understood it.”

Shone looked at a suddenly winking screen before him.

“And you thought you could make it four, eh? Well, keep trying. We’ve got trouble on our hands.”

Rodrone peered over his shoulder. On the screen, three long, angular Streall ships flashed into existence.

From the deadliners’ point of view, the Streall had not necessarily come with hostile intentions. But Rodrone urged that they be fought off and the deadliners were quick and eager.

Rodrone retired to one end of the gallery during the battle. An unspeakable weariness had come over him, more profound than anything he had felt before. The death of Clave had shaken him. His failure to act in his defense also bothered him, and he realized that having fallen in with the deadliners, he had taken up their ways with frightening readiness, as if hypnotized.

Men became deadliners because they had been “squeezed out” of normal life because of personality defects or an irremediable need to fail. The long-haul ships swept up a human detritus of psychotics, would-be suicides, and people who were unable for one reason or another to form proper relationships with healthy human beings. They were the desperadoes of the psyche, inviting death, defying life to have any meaning. What stroke of fate was it that had thrown Rodrone in their midst?

Captain Shone stooped intently over the desk console. The sounds of searing shots from the heavy weapons came from the distant parts of the ship. Then there was a shuddering crash as the Streall returned the fire.

The Stator shook and buckled. Captain Shone hung on to his quivering desk with one hand, manipulating controls with the other and giving orders through the intercom at the same time. There came another, heavier crash that caused the control gallery to keel over and almost toppled Shone from his seat. Rodrone glanced up, and even from this distance he knew that Shone was sweating.

The frequency of the Stator ’s firing increased. The flat hoarse sounds of the big guns echoed almost desperately through the metal and air of the ship.

Rodrone began to feel concern. He climbed to his feet, ventured forward. “How’s it going?” he called uncertainly.

The floor vibrated under him as the Streall scored another hit. The magnificent navigation picture behind Shone winked suddenly out.

It was followed by all the lights in the control room, including those on the desk console.

Captain Shone shouted and cursed in the darkness. The noises of battle continued. Rodrone decided to take no further interest until the outcome was known, and he dropped his head and let his mind drift to other thoughts.

He was still in that revery twenty minutes later when the lights came on again. Shone was grinning down at him.

“Come out of your sulk. We’ve won. They were patrol craft—there must be a Streall system nearby. What’s more, we’ve got a prisoner.”

He learned that Jermy, rigging a spaceraft from an emergency rocket motor, had crossed over to the wreck of one of the alien vessels and had brought back a survivor. Rodrone stepped forward as they herded it into the control gallery.

It seemed to be a specimen in good condition. The long armadillo-like body and broad, pointed snout were a healthy blue color. Natural skirts of hide reached from the sides to the ground so that it seemed to glide along, but Rodrone knew that beneath them were six legs and a pair of arms which folded underneath the chest.

Its sapphire eyes regarded Rodrone, then swung to the lens which still lay on the floor of the control gallery.

“So it is true. You have it.”

Rodrone nodded.