was hit, and the bitter knowledge that he had been trapped once again by a cruel and ruthless enemy, or by an enemy so blinded by fear that it fought back with any vicious weapon at its disposal. And now the sheets draping his cot were hanging from familiar overhead wires, and the wall beside his cot was certainly the wall of the S-80’s bunk room.
Suddenly light flooded the cubicle and Joyce Barron was looking in at him, her sandy hair tousled, a tray in one hand. “Well,” she said. “So you finally decided to wake up and take nourishment.” Once again Ben tried to sit up. “Take it easy,” the girl said. “Tom will be here in a minute to help you.”
“But we’ve got to get away from them.”
“Don’t worry, we’re safe now. But you’ll go flat on your face if you try to walk. You did that once already. And try not to move your shoulder. I don’t think anything’s broken, but there’s still a lot of drainage.”
“Drainage!” Ben looked down at the bulky dressing. “What happened to me? Shrapnel? How long have I been out like this?”
“About four days.”
“Four days!!”
“Well, we’re not sure. The silly chronometer hasn’t been working right all the time. But that’s pretty close.”
By gripping the shock bar at the edge of the cot, Ben managed to stagger to his feet. He paused for a wave of dizziness to pass, then tottered out into the cabin against Joyce’s protests, feeling like an old, old man.
He could hardly believe what he saw.
The ship was under power, no doubt about it. The radar scanner was making its monotonous sweep, emitting a cheerful beep at the end of each circuit. The rear bulkhead, torn open from top to bottom, was sealed tight with a sheet of plastic. While he was still staring the rear hatchway banged open and Tom Barron came through from the storeroom, his arms stacked high with provisions and boxes of electrical equipment.
“Well,” the Earthman said, dumping his load on the floor. “So the Sleeping Beauty finally woke up. It took that kiss a long time to work.”
“Never mind the humor,” Joyce said. “Just get him sitting down before he passes out again. Then maybe he can show you how those silly circuits are supposed to work.” Leaning on Tom’s arm, Ben staggered across the cabin and into the seat behind the control panel. The ship was operational, beyond question, even though he knew the blast had come directly through the engine rooms. Tom checked something on a sheaf of papers, and adjusted the controls with the air of a bride making her first cake. The ship jerked roughly as it shifted course.
“You’ve got it running!” Ben said in amazement.
“Oh, it’s running, all right,” Tom said. “But that’s about all. I couldn’t make head nor tail of those null-gravity circuits, and we spent about three hours turning end-over-end until I got us stabilized with the side jets, but we’re on a steady course now even if we can’t develop any power.”
“What kind of a course?”
“I’m not sure,” Tom said dubiously. “Roughly away from the sun, and more or less in the direction of your Asteroid Central. At least I think that’s where we’re headed.” He waved a hand wearily at the ship’s computer. “Your gadget there and I have been going round and round. But once I figured out how to tape information into the miserable thing, I began to get somewhere plotting a course. Trouble is, we keep veering off it all the time. Either I can’t add or the computer can’t.” Ben peered at Tom’s pages of calculations, and began to check the ship’s dials. Tom’s technique was awkward, but his answers were amazingly accurate. Ben looked up at him. “How long did we wander under power before you got your figures straight?”
“Quite some time, maybe seventeen or eighteen hours,” Tom said. “I was pretty slow.”
“Well, that might account for the drift. The computer assumes the ship is in the plane of the ecliptic unless you tape in correction data. We must have drifted about eighty degrees off the ecliptic while you were calculating. But that shouldn’t cause a lot of deviation from course.”
“Then something else is causing it,” Tom said. “I have to correct every ten minutes. It seems as if something is pushing us off course steadily in the same direction.”
“Well, whatever it is, we’ll fix it. You’ve done all right for a city slicker.” It was an understatement, and Ben knew it. What Tom had done was little short of miraculous for one without training or experience.
“But what happened to the Earth ship?”
Tom Barron’s mouth set in a hard line. “We had a couple of shells left. I used them. If I hadn’t been so mad I would have used wasps instead, but I just emptied the tubes at them. So don’t worry, they won’t shoot down anybody else that tries to help them.”
“But your own people!”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t claim them. They knew you were trying to help them. If you’d planned to hurt them you’d never have started to land. They deliberately waited until you couldn’t veer off, and then let you have it.” The Earthman shook his head. “Okay, they made their choice, and I made mine. As it was, they almost succeeded. The shrapnel tore through a corner of the engine room and split open this rear bulkhead. You got hit in the neck and shoulder, and you took a piece in the chest as well. I’m no doctor, but I got two big pieces out of your shoulder, and sealed off the hole in your chest, and spent a few hours picking cinders out of your scalp. Then Joyce took over the nursing care—she was in training back home before this started. And if you try to tell me we did wrong, I’ll gladly blow some shrapnel back into you myself.”
“Okay, okay,” Ben said. “Relax. You’d better show me the damage to the ship.” Inch by inch he went over the ship with Tom. “I’ve been working on it as fast as I could,” Tom said. “I got the holes in the hull patched up, or welded, or both. The jet engines were damaged, but the main jets worked pretty well once I got a crack in the combustion chamber welded shut. The only trouble is that the engine temp starts going up every time I try to throw on any power.” Ben shuddered. Jet combustion chambers were built to critical tolerances; sometimes in testing them the tiniest flaw could blow an engine to fragments. “I’m glad I was unconscious during all this,” he said.
“You must have a guardian angel.”
They went on with the inspection. The more Ben saw, the more difficult it was to believe. It was a miracle that they were alive in the first place, and as much of a miracle that there was anything left at all of the ship’s engine room. But most miraculous of all, it seemed to Ben, was the thing that Tom Barron had left unspoken. With Ben wounded and unconscious on the cabin floor, there was nothing to prevent Tom Barron and his sister from moving the ship out of range of the wounded Earth ship’s missiles and then establishing radio contact with them, identifying themselves as Earthmen and demanding to be taken aboard. Ben struggled with the thought, still searching for hidden motives, but he could find none.
There was only one possible answer. The Barrons had made their decision. Even if they did not say so in so many words, they had unmistakably thrown in their lot with Ben and the Spacers.
And that meant that now they too were outlaws, and for the same reason that the earliest Spacers had become outlaws: because they had been unwilling to take part in an idiotic war, a war that they saw to be pointless and foolish. Somehow the Barrons had realized that the source of their fears had been superstition and ignorance. And once they had realized that the Spacers lived the way they did just to survive, that there were no monster regiments and mutated horrors ready to invade their home planet, they had begun to recognize this war between Earthmen and Spacers for what it really was—a pointless and hysterical reaction to the shadowy fears that had been festering in the minds of Earthmen for centuries.