"What kind of help?" The question was asked with suspicion.
"First off," said Calhoun, "you broke out of overdrive. Have you checked your circuit-breaker?"
"We don't call it that," said the voice. "What is it?"
Calhoun could have sworn. Instead, he closed his eyes. He felt a diminishing of his sense of balance. He was annoyed at the prospective loss of dignity, but he said, "A circuit-breaker . . ." Then with his eyes closed he told what a circuit-breaker was, and where it would be in a power line. There should be an indicator saying, "Off." There had to be a circuit-breaker or the other ship would be full of smoke from burned-out insulation.
It occurred to him how the other ship came to be what it was. It was a salvage job. It had been found somewhere and cobbled back to precarious operation by men who had to guess at the functions of what they repaired. They'd lifted off to space with it, probably by rocket. It was hair-raising to think of!
All he could do was give them advice and possibly a course in drive-time so they wouldn't over-shoot, for now . . .
"When you find the circuit-breaker, turn off the overdrive switch in the control-board," he said. "Then—not before!—throw the circuit-breaker back on. Then you can go into overdrive again. How about your fuel? This is a repaired spaceboat, isn't it?"
A strained silence, and then a suspicious assent.
Calhoun had them report on the fuel, the air-pressure and the air-renewal apparatus. His sense of balance began to come back. He called for more and more instrument readings.
"You haven't too much fuel," he said briefly, "but you can get to a nearby spaceport. That's all! Where do you want to go?"
"That's our business!"
"You've only so many possible destinations," Calhoun told them. "Wait a minute."
He worked the computer and the data-retrieval device. He got courses from here to the nearest inhabited planets. There were four that they could reach handily. Calhoun named them and the time in overdrive required to get reasonably close to them—to a distance the Lawlor drive could traverse in a practicable interval. . . . One of the four was Lanke, and Calhoun frankly advised against taking the agglomeration of patches that was a ship to Lanke. His reason was the considerable likelihood that there was plague on Lanke now.
"I've written down the courses and drive-times," he observed. "Write them down as I dictate."
He dictated them. Murmurings. Discussion in the background of the other spacecraft. The harsh voice said, "Those drive-times are pretty long. There's a yellow sun that looks close."
"It's Delhi," said Calhoun, from memory. "It has an Earth-type planet and there may have been a colony on it once. But there's nothing there now! There's something wrong with it and no ship is known to have gotten back to its home spaceport after landing on it." He added conscientiously, "It's near enough. The drive-time's only—" He gave the drive-time and the course. "But I advise you to go to one of the other nearby worlds, go into orbit around it, and call down. They'll land you somewhere. And when they get you down to ground, stay there!"
His eyes were better. He looked at the screens. The freakish, patched-up boat was very, very close, not more than a score or two of miles away. He opened his mouth to protest indignantly. He was practically a dead man. At the moment, to be sure, he felt only feverish. Otherwise, nothing serious seemed to be wrong. However, he knew that a mirror would show his own self with the plague marks he'd seen on a dead man back on Lanke.
"Meanwhile," he added, "you'd better not come closer to me."
There was no answer. There were, though, murmurings near the microphone in the other ship. Someone protested against something. The rasping voice growled. There was a click, and the murmuring stopped. The other microphone had been cut off.
Calhoun's eyes improved still more. He looked at the electron telescope image of the other ship. It was turning to face him directly, the pipe at its bow bore exactly.
Suddenly, there was a mad, violent swirling of vapor or gases from the tube at the other ship's bow. Emptiness snatched at it, grasped it, separated it to atoms and threw them away.
The Med Ship was alone. Something minute remained where the preposterous other spacecraft had been. It was very, very small. It was only a moving speck of reflected starlight. Then the electron telescope screen showed it clearly. It was bright metal, it was torpedo-shaped, and it moved with a certain high, fixed velocity toward the Aesclipus Twenty.
Calhoun stared at it. He knew at once what it was, of course, but his reaction was modified by the situation he found himself in. Normally, he'd have been angered by the sending of a missile, probably charged with chemical explosive, to destroy the Med Ship after the attacking vessel had vanished in overdrive. He was acutely aware that he happened to be in one of the remission-periods of the plague which undoubtedly would kill him. If he'd thought of the future as one usually does, he'd have been angry that somebody had tried to destroy him. Now he had no future to be robbed of. If this shell shattered the Med Ship, it wouldn't be doing very much. It would deprive him of one—two—maybe three days of vanishing satisfactions, in which he could accomplish nothing whatever.
It didn't seem to matter. He found himself smiling wryly at the thing that came swiftly to destroy him. Suddenly, he changed his mind. He threw the Lawlor-drive switch and the Med Ship moved. When the explosive missile passed through the spot the ship had occupied, and went sturdily on and on to nowhere, he grimaced a little.
"I dodged that on your account," he told Murgatroyd. "But for you, I'd have no reason to bother. I can't live to reach headquarters, though with warning they could receive me without danger and soothe my final hours. I can't land on a nearer, colonized planet without introducing a plague and being a murderer. So I'll compromise and put you down where you just barely may have a sporting chance of surviving—where if you die, it won't be by starving in this ship. I'll do whatever futile things my condition permits."
He began to set up a course and drive-time on the ship's automatic pilot. A little later he said, "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd!"
There came the intolerable accompaniments of going into overdrive. Vertigo and nausea and all the sensations of an unconscionable, spinning plunge toward oblivion. Calhoun endured them doggedly. He was convinced that presently his eyes wouldn't work again and he'd probably have to crawl to move about on the ship. Anticipation of such undignified behavior was much more annoying than a mere attempt to kill him. He didn't bother to be angry about the missile.
While he felt relatively himself, he readied a meal for Murgatroyd and ate what he could, himself. He viewed with a certain detached amusement the idea that since he couldn't live to reach headquarters, and couldn't land anywhere else without introducing the plague, he was using all the splendid technical equipment of a Med Ship, representing tens of millions of credits and the life achievements of many scientists and inventors, to put a small furry creature aground on an uninhabited world rather than leave him alone in an undirected spaceship.
"This," he told Murgatroyd while the little tormal zestfully ate the food he'd set out, "this is ridiculous! You'll be left alone anyhow and I've no idea how you'll make out—but . . ."
He shrugged. It would be absurd to make a dramatic production out of the business of dying.
"I'm going to put you aground and you'll have to fend for yourself. You'll probably think I'm unkind. You can't imagine my being unable to take care of you. But that's the fact. It's typical. I haven't done anything in particular."