“We?” asked Janet.
“The buoy,” Scott agreed. “You and I and our prospects are something else entirely. I think you’d better stay with me. I’ve something to do. Chenery isn’t what you’d call a strong character, and I think he’s going to get weaker. Yes. Come along!”
He led the way. His air was purposeful, though there was no apparent utility in anything he might do. If the buoy wasn’t somehow moved to safety, it would be smashed by the swarms of stones and metal masses which constituted the real substance of the comets. If it was moved away, the Golconda Ship might not find it, and Scott and Janet would be marooned in space with the buoy’s present company. If the Golconda Ship made contact and was captured, the men who’d captured the buoy before would feel it necessary to kill them. They’d know too much. Because every man aboard the buoy had earned a seat in a gas-chamber by the murder of the Lambda’s original crew and passengers.
Scott went along a corridor and opened a door with the confidence of a man who, having been appointed to the command of a space station, has carefully studied the hull-plans and deck-plans and installation diagrams. Such a study would not be enough for a thorough acquaintance, of course. But it was likely to be useful.
The door closed behind them. There was a peculiar singing stillness. This was a service area, so arranged that stewards and chambermaids on a luxury liner could give good service. There was no particular secret about it, any more than there was about the kitchen of the restaurant of a hotel. But passengers didn’t see or use such places. Nor would men waiting for the Golconda Ship bother with them.
Scott led the way down a circular iron staircase.
Janet said uneasily, “Where are we going? What do you have to do?”
“I’ve already done some of it,” Scott told her, “under Chenery’s guidance. But I’m supposed, technically, to be in command here. As commanding officer, I naturally want to make an inspection of what I command. Without knowing it, Chenery showed me some things I want to know more about.”
“But do you really expect—”
“Expect, no,” he admitted. “But I think things will eventually be fairly well in hand. That is, if I don’t happen to get killed first.”
He went on down the stairs. Then he said vexedly, “That’s the ticklish part—not getting killed. The odds against that aren’t too good.”
CHAPTER 4
The Golconda Ship remained out of overdrive in space between the stars—which was an oddity. Men, as a rule, have a need for the presence of substance nearby. The most nightmarish of all terrors is that experienced in failing, which is simply the feel of nothingness all around. Weightlessness does not cause such terror; for example, in swimming one has no sensation of weight. Being firmly enclosed, even with artificial gravity as in a space ship, will not prevent the terror in the absence of a firm belief that there is something huge and solid and comforting near, which can be reached and at least emotionally embraced. It is irrational, but nobody likes to break out of overdrive unless they arrive where there is at the least a shining sun, recognizable as such, to promise solidity and not less than one planet available to land on. But the Golconda Ship broke out where there was no solar system, and it stayed there.
It was not an ordinary ship. Cargo craft were never graceful. They should have been globes, for efficiency, if landing grid fields could have handled spheres and landed them right-side-up on spaceport tarmacs. But they couldn’t. So cargo ships were built in various bulbous, unpleasing forms, to get the maximum of volume with the minimum of hull-material and still be of shapes that landing grid forcefields could juggle deftly and bring to ground upright. Passenger ships were another matter. They traditionally followed the forms of fish—not for speed, because in space there was no resistance, but so they could be touched to ground with exit ports aligned with landing ramps and cargo doors with warehouses.
The Golconda Ship was peculiar in design. It had a shape that landing grids could handle easily, but there were unseemly masses of machinery built out from its hull. The ship itself was a machine for a particular purpose—probably excavation—and every four years there was a new one or a modification of an earlier one. It went out to space. It vanished. Eventually it returned. And then its crew—invariably the same—unloaded treasure past belief. Each crew member was a multi-millionaire, even to the oilers in the engine room. Each was close-mouthed. Save for the voyages every four years, they lived in grandeur while every human around them tried to cajole from them some clue about where they found their riches. And all of them remembered, from time to time, the original Golconda Ship on which there had been killings to weed out any of their number who might be talkative.
Where the Golconda Ship had appeared, there was no sun. There were only myriads of unwinking specks of light of every possible tint and brightness. The nearest would be light-decades away. This was the loneliness, the emptiness, the utter desolation of between-the-stars. It was this gigantic void which made the lifeboats of interstellar ships so nearly useless. Survivors of catastrophes in ship lanes have made port in lifeboats, to be sure. But not many. And those survivors were never quite normal afterward, and never quite unterrified.
But the Golconda Ship stayed in this abomination of desolation for a long tune. Its pilot had to make very many observations. But now he had luck. A very short-period Cepheit identified itself. The information checked with other data. The Golconda Ship was here! So, very deliberately, it turned. It aimed in a new direction. It adjusted its pointing with microscopic precision. If another ship had looked on, it couldn’t have noted the new bearing within a degree of arc. The time it would be in overdrive couldn’t be known. The nearest of companions couldn’t have duplicated its aim, much less the distance it would run before it broke out of overdrive again.
But there wasn’t any other ship. This one carried more wealth than any single planet’s treasury contained. Therefore it traveled secretly and untraceably, and there was nobody who knew where it was, and very few who knew where it was bound.
On Checkpoint Lambda, Scott thought very little about it as a ship. To him it was part of a problem. If he solved it, he would live for a while longer. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t.
Janet asked hesitantly, “Is it all right to talk?”
“Why not,” asked Scott, “if it makes you feel better?”
She descended the circling stairway behind him. So far, this area behind the walls was a service area. But below the cabin levels it would become something else. It carried cables to and from the control room. There were cables which had controlled the now-removed overdrive unit, and the solar-system drive, and waste pipes, and controls for the eight small steering-drives that pushed the ship’s bow right or left and up or down, and the stern hi appropriate opposite directions, in the only way a ship could be steered.
These lower, between-hull bilges, served yet another purpose. They were divided into tunnels leading down all the buoy’s length. Through them there could be communication between any two decks. It was a provision for safety. No disaster which let out air from any one level could separate the still-intact portions of the ship from each other. Unless the buoy broke literally in two, there would always be a passageway from bow to stern. One or more tunnels might be broken, and would automatically seal themselves off, but others would remain. Scott went on.
“We’re down past the cabins,” he observed, when passenger-service equipment disappeared.
Janet shivered. It occurred to him that the cabin where murder had been done probably hadn’t been tidied since. Janet would have thought of that. To change the direction of her thoughts, he said, “What did you want to talk about?”