His eyes red-rimmed and his hands shaking, he said fearfully, "You - you didn't find the engines' trouble, did you?"
"I didn't need to," said Horn. "I knew the trouble before you landed on Formalhaut. Your phase separator is shot."
"But what'll you do?"
"That depends," said Horn. "Larsen's made me an offer of your cut of the job on hand if I keep the engines going through whatever's done and for a month's getaway run afterward."
The engineer had looked frightened before; now he seemed to shrivel. He gazed at Horn in terror. "Wha - what did you tell him?"
"I stalled," said Horn. "I don't know what I'm supposed to help get done. Nobody seems willing to tell me."
The smaller man's face worked. "They can't. Larsen's a - a very smart man. He doesn't let anybody know what's doing until everybody's up to his neck in it and can't back out. Larsen's been running the Theban for a long time. He's done things -"
"So I gather," said Horn dryly. "If a fraction of what I've been told could be proved on him, they'd have to hang him every morning for ten years running to even the account."
"He's - he's a tough man," said the small man, shivering. "I've known him to beat a man to death -"
The engine noise changed subtly. He gasped. Horn made a minute adjustment and the noise went back to its former buzzing, moaning, occasionally bubbling sound. The engineer stared, trying to see what Horn had done.
"These engines," said Horn matter-of-factly, "are a mess of halfway repairing of worn-out parts. I'm going to fix some of them when we get aground. Some, not all! And I'll add a little gimmick or two so that any time I'm absent from the engineroom for a full twenty-four hours the engines will blow permanently. That's for my own safety. If you find something like that," he added pleasantly, "I warn you you'll have to know just the right way to disconnect it. Meddling will make the engines blow immediately."
The engineer licked his lips. "You don't trust me. Or anybody." He paused. Then he said in a trembling voice, "I - I need a drink."
Horn nodded. The engineer went unsteadily away. His whole career was epitomized in the few minutes of talk with Horn. He could be terrified, and he knew it, but he tried to escape the knowledge. He'd escaped temporarily when Horn took over the engines, but by the time he came back Horn had been offered his job on the Theban. Yet he knew too much to be allowed to go ashore. He'd heard his death sentence - not pronounced by Horn, but implied by what had happened. So he'd try to escape that knowledge. But the escape would be temporary too.
Horn clamped his teeth. Other members of the crew would not talk about the purpose of the Theban. If the engineer was right, they couldn't. Only Larsen knew what was happening now. Horn wanted to find out, but he knew only that the Theban would be at Hermas when the Danae passed by.
Ginny was on the Danae. She should be perfectly safe. The Theban's business with the intercluster liner was past imagining. Piracy was too absurd to be credited. The Danae would come out of overdrive near Hermas, to be sure. But "near" was a relative term. Nobody could guess within a million miles where she'd break out into normal space. She'd stray out of overdrive just long enough to verify her course and position. That might take one minute, or two. Then she'd go back into overdrive and hurtle on to Formalhaut.
This was standard astrogation. There could be no trickery involved. In overdrive the liner could not conceivably be attacked. Nothing could be done, either, in the minute or two she'd be out of overdrive for her course-and-position check. If Larsen's plan involved the Danae, emptiness was still so vast that the Theban couldn't hope to get even a glimpse of the liner before it was gone again, in perfect safety.
Horn left the engineroom to drink coffee with the crew. They were not a happy group. Space drives, even outdated Riccardo engines, should be perfectly silent. These engines were noisy, ominously so. They were louder, now, than at the beginning, which indicated that whatever was wrong was getting worse. Also it had changed from the original nagging hum to a buzzing, burbling whine. And since Horn had been aboard a bubbling component had been added.
Every man who drank coffee wanted to ask about the engines. Horn told them, with precision. The phase separator was in bad shape. The Riccardo coils had aged past accurate adjustment. There was corrosion in the drive plates so that they ran hot and produced thermals which ultimately would coincide. He preferred, said Horn, not to think what would happen then. Besides, there were some circuits that simply ought to be replaced. If one knew everything that was wrong, it was possible to humour the engines a little. But there might be deficiencies he hadn't found out yet. The ship's engines needed a complete overhaul.
Each of his statements was strictly accurate, in case one of the crew members had picked up a few shreds of engineroom information. The men he talked to grew fidgety and tense, and listened fearfully to the engines. They imagined changes in the sound. Horn built up their apprehensions to the point where panic was not too far away. But there was no hint of protest by the men to Larsen.
On the second day of the run towards Hermas, the engines stopped abruptly, without warning. There were no lights. There was no gravity. The air-freshening system stopped. The ship lay dead in space - normal space - but it was not even possible to see the stars, because naturally all outside observations were made with scanners.
There was panic. Larsen raged. He was a bellowing voice in blackness, until Horn snapped icily for somebody to bring cargo lights. Men struck lights, and other men cursed them for using up the air with flames. But somebody found a cargo light, used for occasional errands in the holds. Then the cook held the light while Horn adjusted this control and that, appearing to try one expedient after another.
All the crew gathered. Wide, terrified eyes seemed to glitter in the cold white light of the cargo lamp. Larsen bellowed furiously that Horn didn't know what he was doing, and they should bring the engineer.
They brought him - weightless, waving his hands feebly, dead drunk and incapable of any purposeful action.
Larsen would have killed him, except that Horn said in an indifferent tone, "Stand back, now. I'm going to start the engines."
They flapped and pushed and struggled in the total absence of weight. They cast distorted shadows against the engineroom walls and the absurdly huge drive engines of the Theban. When the last of them had a hand hold, Horn threw a switch.
The engines began to run again. The sound which had been nerve-racking and horrifying because it could stop at any instant began again. There was light. There was gravity. There was the sound of the air freshener at work again. And the crew of the Theban could have wept with relief.
When the ship's company had gone away, still shivering because of their taste of doom, Horn surveyed in his own mind the result of turning off the engines. He'd done it deliberately, to impress upon Larsen and the others that their lives depended on him. He'd hoped to gain a certain status by being the ultimate and only hope of the Theban's crew.
He had proved he was necessary, but more - much more - would need to be done before Horn would be obeyed against the orders of Larsen. And he didn't think he'd have time to build up the frantic dependence upon himself that might be needed.
Grimly, he recognized that the best he could do, if there were some extraordinary scheme afoot for the seizure of the Danae, would be to destroy the Theban's engines actually, instead of merely turning them off. Then he'd die with the Theban's crew. But it might be necessary.