CHAPTER TWO
HE came back to consciousness very gradually. At the beginning it was a dreamy and wholly tranquil sensation. He was aware that he existed, but he had the feeling of a disembodied spirit. His mind worked, but nothing came through his senses for it to work on. He was awake, but without sensory impressions to orient his thoughts. They were confused; not mixed, but dreamlike. He thought with extraordinary vividness but without direction. His mind seemed to go from one thing to another without sequence or purpose. There were flashing pictures, which were memories presenting themselves without arrangement. He smelled things. He saw things. He heard things - all of them totally irrelevant and meaningless. But a part of his mind observed his state. The feeling was like dreaming while knowing that one dreamed.
He vaguely resented the feeling, and he began to oppose it. The ability of his mind to contemplate itself and judge itself - exclusively a talent of the human race - directed the struggle. Horn battled to get his tranquil but kaleidoscopic thoughts under control. He had no distinct purpose, at first. He did not feel that he had a body. He had no immediate experience of possessing arms or legs or eyes or lips. He was a mind in emptiness, and his awareness raced crazily, at first ignoring the struggle of his will to subdue it.
Then he heard something. It was a peculiar jerking pause in a noise he hadn't noticed before. It was as if the noise had almost stopped. But it didn't. It caught and went on again. And then Horn was abruptly and totally awake. He had a body, and cold chills ran down the spine of it. He knew what had happened to him. Part of it he remembered, but the rest he could guess with no trace of uncertainty.
He was in absolute darkness, with the buzzing moan of a failing Riccardo space drive in his ears. He lay upon bales and boxes very indifferently arranged. Something sharp prodded the middle of his back. It would be the corner of a box. There were smells in the air. They were absolutely distinctive. There was the smell of grease and dirt and metal and paint, of shipping cases and wrappings, of things gone putrid and now dried to the point where they were nearly but not quite odourless. And the air had a dead smell. It was tanned air.
The remains of pins-and-needles pricklings were fading away in his legs and arms. He heard, again, the noise whose interruption had wakened him. It was an obsolete space-drive engine in the process of wearing out.
This was the cargo hold of a spaceship. Nowhere else in all the galaxy would there be such abysmal blackness and such a mixture of odours with dead, uncirculated, unfreshened air. He was struggling to rise from among cargo parcels dumped anyhow in the hold. He had been laid on them after being knocked out with a stun pistol in the spaceport gatehouse. The guards there had been either unconscious or dead. He did not remember being brought here, but he knew he'd been abducted, and he knew by what men from what ship. He also knew the ship was in space, with its drive in a condition to make any man's flesh crawl.
No, he hadn't been abducted. He'd been shanghaied. A man has been shanghaied when he's been kidnapped to be made to work, against his will and at tasks he does not choose. He'd been shanghaied to patch the probably unpatchable engines of the space tramp Theban.
And the Theban was in space. It wasn't conceivable that the grid had lifted it off, so the tramp had taken off on emergency lift - possible only to Riccardo engines in spacecraft larger than a spaceboat - and now was somewhere beyond the Formalhaut solar system. The chances of a blown drive had been great. The skipper of the Theban had risked destruction to get off the ground with such engines.
Horn was in a very nasty fix. His captors had broken a whole group of laws; they couldn't put him ashore without exposing themselves to drastic prison terms. In fact, since it was known that the Theban had done what had been done, the ship itself couldn't land anywhere that the news of its irregular behaviour had reached. The patrol was very, very strict about such matters. And besides all that, the ship's engines were in an appalling state. If they blew past cobbling, Horn would die with his abductors when the air gave out.
And Ginny was on the way to Formalhaut to marry him. She'd arrive and find him gone.
He got up, and was dizzy for moments. But then the last prickling traces of the stun pistol's effect went away and he ground his teeth in the blackness. He began to crawl over the bales and boxes of unidentified cargo. The darkness was absolute. The dreary, nerve-racking noise of the wearing-out Riccardo drive came from all sides. Other ship noises came from the fabric of the ship.
Horn crawled, feeling his way, until he came to a metal plate which was the loading hatch in the side of the hold. He began to fumble purposefully to circumnavigate the enclosure which was his prison. He came to a corner and found a door, but it was dogged shut. He pressed his ear against it. It would be impossible to open it from this side, but it opened into the working parts of the ship.
He began to crawl over boxes and bales again, shaking those that could be moved. He found a box in which things shifted with the shaking. He broke the box open. It contained small heavy objects which he identified - guessing - as synthetic-sapphire-lined bearings for some sort of machinery. They'd be worth hundreds of credits apiece because of the beautiful precision of their manufacture. But to Horn they only had the value of being small heavy objects.
He dragged the box to a suitable position, and reassured himself of the position of the door. He sent a small five-pound piece of precision-made equipment crashing against it. It made a most satisfying impact. It echoed and re-echoed through the hold. It would definitely be hearable anywhere on the ship.
A second valuable bearing smashed furiously into the door. Synthetic-sapphire-lined bearings are tough. That, plus their precision, is where their value lies. But to be pitched like a fast baseball into a steel door is an unfair test of toughness. Horn threw another, and another, and another. Each time the noise was like that of an explosion. It was at least as loud as the impact of a sledge-hammer. It would have been noticeable even in a bulk cargo monster of a spaceship. In a ship the size of this, nobody could ignore it.
He had the box practically emptied, so he crawled forward in the blackness and gathered up an armful of the missiles to use over again. He began to throw them once more. Crash! Crash! Crash! Crash!
Someone rapped sharply on the other side of the door. Horn ceased his bombardment. A voice snapped, "What the hell's going on?"
"I want to get out of here," rasped Horn.
A pause; then: "Who the hell are you?" The voice seemed to force a pretence of fury. "A stowaway, eh?"
There was the sound of the door being undogged. The catch loosened. The door opened. The red-headed mate whom Horn had last seen in the spaceport control office appeared. He kicked aside the smashed bearings with a great show of rage.
"Stowaway, eh?" he repeated in a fine tone of menace. "And you want out of here, eh? We'll take care of you!"
Horn had reserved a missile. The light coming through the opened door was not strong, but he could see well enough. There were other figures in the passage outside. He let the five- pound bearing go. If it had hit the mate on the head it would have killed him. If he were hit on the chest, it would have broken his ribs. But it landed in the pit of the mate's stomach, and he folded neatly in the middle and went down, unable even to gasp.
Before the men in the passage could realize what had happened, Horn had pounced on the almost-unconscious mate and found a weapon. It was possibly the same stun pistol that had been used on him. For short ranges, though, a stun pistol is as effective as a blaster, and not nearly as messy.