Horn stood up, the weapon in his hand.
"Back up!" he barked. "I'm talking to your skipper! Move back! Keep ahead of me!"
He marched to the door and through it. The men in the passage had to move fast to keep out of his way. But it was wise to keep them busy thinking about what he might do to them, instead of letting them have time to think of what they could do to him. And besides, there were the engines. No spaceman could ignore the noise they made. It was enough and of just the right kind to provide a full supply of cold chills for the spines of everybody on board the ship.
He swore at the men, crowding them on before him. A steel ladder leading upwards was obviously part of the route to the ship's control room. The retreating, backing men parted and went past it.
"Stay below here!" rasped Horn. "You saw what happened to the mate!"
He went up the ladder with a convincing air of being a man thirsting to get at somebody up above. He went up a level and found himself in the crew's quarters. The next level up would be the galley, the messroom, and the food stores. He saw the galley and the counter where the standard coffee-at-all-hours was served. There was no ship anywhere in the galaxy on which coffee was not available at any time to anybody who wanted it. It was a tradition of space.
The ship's cook was in the galley, gazing at him with open mouth. Horn ignored the man and raced up another companion ladder. Here was the air bank and the air system. The engines' abnormal noise was louder here. The air freshener ran quietly. Horn raced up another ladder still. This was the driveroom, the engineroom of the ship. Horn took a quick, shrewd look about him. The Riccardo drive units were ten times the size of modern engines. They were obviously ancient and remarkably patched.
Horn saw the engineer, a small, scared, wizened man wearing a cap such as liner officers wear. But the gold braid was greenish, and no other part of his attire matched even such shabby elegance. He looked at Horn with a startled air compounded of astonishment and fright. He needed a shave. He looked as if he had long since lost his pride as well as his competence. Horn guessed instantly that he was one of those pathetic survivors of their own usefulness who can be found clinging desperately to jobs they've lost the ability to fill.
Then Horn reached the control room level of the tramp ship. He went briskly in, his weapon out of sight. The skipper of the Theban whirled and stared at him.
Horn said, "I've been trying to figure out how you're going to handle the mess you're in, Captain. It looks like a pretty bad fix. What are your plans for getting out of it?"
The Theban's skipper heaved himself up and out of his chair. He stared almost unbelievingly at Horn, who did not act as a man just awakened from kidnapping should act. He opened his mouth, but Horn forestalled him.
"I passed through the engineroom," said Horn in a matter-of-fact tone, "and it's a sight to make angels weep. This ship needs a new drive entirely. It's likely to blow on you at any instant. What the devil makes you take chances like this?"
"What - what -" The skipper roared. "Who the hell are you? Where'd you come from? If you're a stowaway -"
"Who the hell are you?" asked Horn distastefully. "The skipper of this junkheap, of course. But what else. You know who I am."
The skipper frowned at Horn. It was practically a grimace, and from a man four inches taller and forty pounds heavier it should have been daunting.
"My name's Larsen," he growled. "And if you're a stowaway, you go out an air lock!"
"But I'm not a stowaway," said Horn irritably, "and you know it as well as I do. Talk sense, man! How do you expect to get out of the fix you're in?"
The droning, buzzing noise of engines that should be shut down and overhauled was interrupted. For half a second the noise stopped. It was like a hiccough in the middle of a groan. Then the unpleasant buzzing went on once more. Horn shook his head. He hated to think of engines, even antiquated ones, being worked past the point where they needed attention. It seemed like cruelty.
The Theban's skipper swallowed suddenly. Then he swore. Horn said evenly, "Your engineer's sitting by the engines, waiting for them to crack up. When those little jumps happen, he's been catching the loss-of-cycle hitches. He gets them going again before they can ruin themselves. But he can't keep it up indefinitely!"
Larsen raged, "You go help him! Fix 'em! Get 'em so we can count on 'em!"
"Why?" asked Horn. He made his meaning clear. "What do I get out of it?"
Larsen glowered. He moved slowly and menacingly towards Horn.
"I'm going to knock you around," he announced ferociously, "until you wish you hadn't asked that! And then you'll get at those engines. And you'll fix 'em, because if you don't you go out an air lock. I've put men out of air locks before now. You'll just be the next one!"
Horn looked at him speculatively. He didn't retreat. He didn't cringe. His whole air was that of someone who doesn't exactly grasp what is going on, as Larsen's air was that of a man about to do something he heartily enjoys. He clenched his fists.
Then Horn jumped. He had hit Larsen twice before Larsen realized that anything had begun. He howled with wrath as Horn landed on him a third time; then he charged. His purpose was to get in close, but Horn was already working him over with fists and knees. This was no time for sportsmanship. Larsen was a rough-and-tumble man who outweighed Horn by a good forty pounds. He roared and clinched, and Horn flung the pair of them to the floor and broke the clinch that way. He was up first. This was when he heard the mate dragging himself up the companion ladder, his breathing a discordant honking sound. Horn tried for a knockout on Larsen, who was struggling to rise, but Larsen kicked and Horn's feet went out from under him and he toppled on top of his antagonist.
They were again in a deadly clinch when the mate came staggering and wheezing into the control room. He still gasped and choked, but he saw Horn apparently battling the Theban's skipper to the death and in a position of some advantage. He plucked up the stool beside the ship's computer.
He swung it viciously.
His intentions were of the worst, but only minutes since he'd had a five-pound sapphire-lined bearing hit him in the pit of his stomach. It had had most of the effect of a solar plexus wallop. That effect hadn't worn off. He'd climbed the companion ladders with tremendous effort, gasping futilely for breath. The blow was feeble. Moreover, it was ill directed. And a four- legged stool is not an accurate weapon anyhow.
Horn got a glancing blow alongside his skull. The skipper took the rest. Horn got to his feet, panting, and swung with all the strength he could summon. The red-headed mate went down. He wasn't out completely, but he was no longer a dangerous antagonist.
Horn panted and swallowed, and then he went out of the control room. A moment later he put his head back in.
"You two," he said reasonably, "ought to take time to think things over. If you did manage to kill me, how would you keep your engines running? I'm going down to look at them now."
He went down to the next level. The wizened small engineer looked at him somehow desperately. He sat tensely by the cycle separator, which parted the power going to the Riccardo coils into two direct-current pulsatory signals, pulsing exactly one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with each other. In a brand-new Riccardo drive it was perfectly foolproof and completely dependable. But in use the phasing coils aged, and they did not age exactly alike. There was a point where differential ageing couldn't be compensated for. A ship's engineer wouldn't let them go past that point, in the days when ships carried engineers and Riccardo drives were the best to be had. In those days new coils were put in during overhaul. But there were no longer many places where outmoded drives could be serviced. They were very, very rare indeed.