But the Spacers’ long familiarity with space, their skill in navigation and their knowledge of interplanetary spaceways were also facts of life—facts that had given them unquestioned superiority beyond the limits of Earth’s gravitational field. Another fact of life was the horror with which Earthmen had always viewed contact with space, the dread of space travel that had always filled their minds. Space had always been the Spacers’ province; if they could not return to Earth, they had always felt themselves impregnable beyond her surface, and that impregnability had been demonstrated time and again when Earth ships had ventured out. It had been argued that nothing short of mass insanity would ever drive Earthmen to try to dislodge them from Space by force.
And now, with the fact of such a war staring them in the face, they were caught without warning. Of course, if it were true, there could be no question about the outcome of such a war, Ben Trefon thought.
No ships from Earth, manned by Earthmen, could really hope to press an invasion of the Spacers’
domain successfully. But cruel and treacherous as Earthmen were, they might certainly wreak havoc before they were driven back to quarters.
Ben turned over these thoughts as he continued plotting the finer details of the ship’s course toward Mars. In a way, it was comforting to believe that Spacers were impregnable, but something in the idea caught in his mind and left him vaguely uneasy. If Earthmen had gone mad in their hatred of Spacers, there was no sign of it in his two Earth captives. Nor did they seem particularly formidable, or even evil, now that they were convinced he meant them no immediate harm. If anything, he reflected, these two seemed more stunned than treacherous, more terrified than cruel.
Yet as far as he could tell, there was nothing about Tom and Joyce Barron that made them different from other Earthmen. As brother and sister who could hardly be more than a year apart in age, they seemed very close; try as he would, Ben could not even imagine what it might be like to have a sister, but it seemed to be a very comfortable relationship. Until they had contacted the command ship they had been talking together quietly just as brothers might talk, and half the time they each seemed to know what the other was thinking.
On questioning them, Ben learned that their father was a colonel in the Earth civil defense garrison, commander of the guard units protecting the southern part of the metropolis of Chicago. Even Tom and Joyce did not know what part he might have in the launching of the Earth armada, although they seemed sure that he had known about it. Although they made no attempt to conceal their anger and frustration at being caught aboard a Spacer ship, neither could they conceal their curiosity when Ben pulled away from the command ship, set the ship moving, and began plotting orbit with the aid of the ship’s computer.
“What are you planning to do?” Tom Barron wanted to know. “What’s going to happen to us?”
“You heard what the man said,” Ben said bluntly. “We’re at war. Your ships are moving out to attack our space outposts. So that makes you enemy aliens aboard this ship, and I’m responsible for you until I can get you interned somewhere.”
“You mean we just have to stay aboard this ship forever?” Joyce Barron asked.
“Believe me, I don’t like it any better than you do,” Ben said. “But for the time being we’re stuck with it whether we like it or not.”
“Well, are you going to lock us up somewhere?”
Ben looked at the girl. “That’s up to you,” he said. “We have to count on this ship to keep us alive and get us where we want to go. But I can’t operate the ship if I have to be watching you two for tricks all the time.”
Tom Barron shrugged. “It seems to me that we don’t have much choice about it,” he said. “You won’t be operating this ship very long anyway, with our fleet in the sky. So we won’t interfere with you.” Ben studied Tom Barron’s face. “I’ve heard that an Earthman’s word isn’t worth much,” he said.
“It’ll stand up to a Spacer’s word any time,” Joyce said hotly.
“Well, it doesn’t really matter. You wouldn’t get far trying to operate this ship, and even if you could you’d be blown out of space before you could land it on Earth, There’s no place out here for you to go without knowing where and how, so I guess I can trust you for the moment.” Joyce Barron’s face flushed. “Maybe you want a written treaty,” she said.
“No, but I want some things understood,” Ben said. “Call them rules of the ship, if you wish.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “First, you keep your hands off the controls. You could kill us all in about ten seconds flat if you happened to pull the wrong switch. Second, you keep away from the radio. This is a Spacer ship, and from what I’ve heard any of your Earth ships we run into are likely to shoot first and ask questions later. So we won’t break radio silence unless we have to. Third, you do what you’re told to do and don’t argue. I’ve got to know where you are and what you’re doing all the time, in case anything were to go wrong with the ship. Okay?”
The Barrons looked at each other, and then nodded. “Okay,” Tom said. “But you might tell us a couple of things. We don’t even know your name.”
“You can call me Ben Trefon,” Ben said.
“And you were—born in space?”
“Of course,” Ben said, puzzled.
“There, I told you,” Tom said to his sister.
“Yes, but you still can’t be sure,” she said. Then she shook her head and whispered something in her brother’s ear.
“Well, there’s one way to find out,” Tom said.
“No, no, not now—”
“Yes, now,” Tom told her. “We might as well know now as later.”
“Whatever are you talking about?” Ben asked.
“Let me feel your hand,” Tom challenged.
“My hand?”
“Hold it out—if you’re not afraid to.”
Ben held out his hand. To his amazement, the Earthman closed his eyes tight, reached out and touched the outstretched hand, felt the fingers and wrist, and patted his arm from wrist to elbow. Then with eyes still closed he reached up and touched Ben’s face. Finally he opened his eyes with a sigh of relief. “It’s just as I told you,” he said to Joyce. “It’s all right.”
The girl looked crestfallen. “And you’re the only one here?” she asked Ben. “I mean, you don’t have any other—crew—aboard?”
“Well, what do you expect? A hold full of monsters?” Ben turned away in disgust. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I for one am getting hungry, and I have course corrections to make. Why don’t you break out some food?”
Following his directions, Joyce found the cupboard panel that opened out into a tiny galley. After experimenting with the heat-pump stove that worked from the ship’s heating system, she got to work heating up some canned stew and some biscuits as Tom followed Ben back to the control panel. A few moments later their mutual uneasiness was momentarily forgotten as they munched hungrily, and Ben began the complex task of plotting the final course adjustments for the run to Mars.
Tom watched him curiously as he took the plotting cards out of the computer slot, made his calculations on the backs of them, taped the new data back into the computer and waited for the revised cards to be returned. Finally curiosity won. “What are you doing with that machine?” Tom asked.
“Correcting our course,” Ben said. “The basic orbit was easy, just a matter of matching fuel against time and pointing the ship in the right direction. But we have to have the fine adjustments before we go into high gear. Once we’re on nuclear drive and really accelerating, even a minor course change might burn out the null-gravs and then we’d really be in the soup.”