Then the thought was cut short by a squeal from his board; the ship had picked up the pilot beam.
He wheeled her in, cut his last jet as she scraped, and slapped a series of switches; the great cargo ports rumbled open and rain beat in.
Eleanor Johnson huddled into herself, half crouching against the storm, and tried to draw her cloak more tightly about the baby in the crook of her left arm. When the storm had first hit, the child had cried endlessly, stretching her nerves taut. Now it was quiet, but that seemed only new cause for alarm.
She herself had wept, although she had tried not to show it. In all her twenty-seven years she had never been exposed to weather like this; it seemed symbolic of the storm that had overturned her life, swept her away from her cherished first home of her own with its homey oldfashioned fireplace, its shiny service cell, its thermostat which she could set to the temperature she liked without consulting others-a tempest which had swept her away between two grim proctors, arrested like some poor psychotic, and landed her after terrifying indignities here in the cold sticky red clay of this Oklahoma field.
Was it true? Could it possibly be true? Or had she not yet borne her baby at all and this was another of the strange dreams she had while carrying it?
But the rain was too wetly cold, the thunder too loud; she could never have slept through such a dream. Then what the Senior Trustee had told them must be true, too-it had to be true; she had seen the ship ground with her own eyes, its blast bright against the black of the storm. She could no longer see it but the crowd around her moved slowly forward; it must in front of her. She was close to the outskirts of the crowd she would be one of the last to get aboard.
It was very necessary to board the ship-Elder Zaccur Barstow had told them with deep solemnness what lay in store for them if they failed to board. She had believed earnestness; nevertheless she wondered how it could possibly be true-could anyone be so wicked, so deeply and terribly wicked as to want to kill anyone as harmless and helpless as herself and her baby?
She was struck by panic terror-suppose there was no room left by the time she got up to the ship? She clutched her baby more tightly; the child cried again at the pressure.
A woman in the crowd moved closer and spoke to her “You must be tired. May I carry the baby for a while?”
“No. No, thank you. I’m all right.” A flash of lightning showed the woman’s face; Eleanor Johnson recognized her Elder Mary Sperling.
But the kindness of the offer steadied her. She knew now what she must do. If they were filled up and could take no more, she must pass her baby forward, hand to hand over the heads of the crowd. They could not refuse space to anything as little as her baby.
Something brushed her in the dark. The crowd was moving forward again.
When Barstow could see that loading would be finished in a few more minutes he left his post at one of the cargo doors and ran as fast as he could through the splashing sticky mud to the communications shack. Ford had warned him to give notice just before they raised ship; it was necessary to Ford’s plan for diversion. Barstow fumbled with an awkward un-powered door, swung it open and rushed up. He set the private combination which should connect him directly to Ford’s control desk and pushed the key.
He was answered at once but it was not Ford’s face on the screen. Barstow burst out with, “Where is the Administrator? I want to talk with him,” before he recognized the face in front of him.
It was a face well known to all the public-Bork Vanning, Leader of the Minority in the Council. “You’re talking to the Administrator,” Vanning said and grinned coldly. “The new Administrator. Now who the devil are you and why are you calling?”
Barstow thanked all gods, past and present, that recognition was onesided. He cut the connection with one unaimed blow and plunged out of the building.
Two cargo ports were already closed; stragglers were moving through the other two. Barstow hurried the last of them inside with curses and followed them, slammed pell-mell to the control room. “Raise ship!” he shouted to Lazarus. “Fast!”
“What’s all the shoutin’ fer?” asked Lazarus, but he was already closing and sealing the ports. He tripped the acceleration screamer, waited a scant ten seconds … and gave her power.
“Well,” he said conversationally six minutes later, “I hope everybody was lying down. If not, we’ve got some broken bones on our hands. What’s that you were saying?”
Barstow told him about his attempt to report to Ford.
Lazarus blinked and whistled a few bars of Turkey in the Straw. “It looks like we’ve run out of minutes. It does look like it.” He shut up and gave his attention to his instruments, one eye on his ballistic track, one on radar-aft.
Chapter 7
LAZARUS HAD his hands full to jockey the Chili into just the right position against the side of the New Frontiers; the overstrained meters made the smaller craft skittish as a young horse. But he did it. The magnetic anchors clanged home; the gas-tight seals slapped into place; and their ears popped as the pressure in the Chili adjusted to that in the giant ship. Lazarus dived for the drop hole in the deck of the control room, pulled himself rapidly hand over hand to the port of contact, and reached the passenger lock of the New Frontiers to find himself facing the skipper-engineer.
The man looked at him and snorted. “You again, eh? Why the deuce didn’t you answer our challenge? You can’t lock onto us without permission; this is private property. What do you mean by it?”
“It means,” said Lazarus, “that you and your boys are going back to Earth a few days early-in this ship.”
“Why, that’s ridiculous!”
“Brother,” Lazarus said gently, his blaster suddenly growing out his left fist, “I’d sure hate to hurt you after you were so nice to me … but I sure will, unless you knuckle under awful quick.”
The official simply stared unbelievingly. Several of his juniors had gathered behind him; one of them sunfished in the air, started to leave. Lazarus winged him in the leg, at low power; he jerked and clutched at nothing. “Now you’ll have to take care of him,” Lazarus observed.
That settled it. The skipper called together his men from the announcing system microphone at the passenger lock; Lazarus counted them as they arrived-twenty-nine, a figure he had been careful to learn on his first visit. He assigned two men to hold each of them. Then he took a look at the man he had shot.
“You aren’t really hurt, bub,” he decided shortly and turned to the skipper-engineer. “Soon as we transfer you, get some radiation salve on that burn. The Red Cross kit’s on the after bulkhead of the control room.”
“This is piracy! You can’t get away with this.”
“Probably not,” Lazarus agreed thoughtfully. “But I sort of hope we do.” He turned his attention back to his job. “Shake it up there! Don’t take all day.”
The Chili was slowly being emptied. Only the one exit could be used but the pressure of the half hysterical mob behind them forced along those in the bottleneck of the trunk joining the two ships; they came boiling out like bees from a disturbed hive.
Most of them had never been in free fall before this trip; they burst out into the larger space of the giant ship and drifted helplessly, completely disoriented. Lazarus tried to bring order into it by grabbing anyone he could see who seemed to be able to handle himself in zero gravity, ordered him to speed things up by shoving along the helpless ones-shove them anywhere, on back into the big ship, get them out of the way, make room for the thousands more yet to come. When he had conscripted a dozen or so such herdsmen he spotted Barstow in the emerging throng, grabbed him and put him in charge. “Keep ‘em moving, just anyhow. I’ve got to get for’ard to the control room. If you spot Andy Libby, send him after me.”