He went down to the air-lock. Liner crewmen waited to let him out. Merchant ships carried many more men than did comparable Patrol ships. They operated more elaborately. Quite unnecessarily now, they checked the tuning of his suit to communicator-frequency to make sure he’d overhear all talk between the liner and Lambda, and that he could take part in it.
For a long, long time there was nothing. He heard small sounds from someplace where a microphone was open. Then a voice in his helmet-phones said ungraciously, “We’ll receive Lieutenant Scott. Put him in a space suit. We’ll send over a tentacle for him.”
The liner skipper’s voice came through the same headphones in Scott’s helmet.
“He’s on his way to the air-lock.”
Scott watched the small monitor screen in the airlock wall. Its function was to show the immediate outside of the lock, to facilitate emergency operations of any kind. At first Scott could only see a shining field of stars. Then slowly the glittering metal object which was the space buoy seemed to creep past the edge of the screen and into plain view. Its steel hull was coated with that golden plating which old-style overdrive fields required of ships they transported. There were ports along the fish-shaped flanks. There were cargo doors. There were lesser doors which would be personnel air-locks. And there were jungles of antennae for communication and meteor-watch and telemetry at different spots.
Scott’s eyes fixed themselves on an open air-lock door. It could be nothing deadlier than a door already opened for him to enter. But a short-range rocket could issue from it, if any had been shipped to the buoy as freight.
The star-field moved. The liner was shifting position. It changed its angle to the buoy until, if there were a missile in that open lock, it would no longer bear on the liner. It implied an informed uneasiness on the part of the liner’s skipper. Scott took time out to approve of him.
“Here comes our tentacle,” said the grating voice.
Something slender and worm-like came out of an opening. It writhed and straightened, quivered, and continued to extend itself. It came fumbling across the emptiness between the two ships. Scott closed the inner lock door. He felt his formerly flaccid vacuum-suit swell out swiftly. He saw the air pressure gauge needle swing to zero. A flickering yellow light told him that he might open the outer lock-door. He opened it.
It was not a new experience to look out upon infinite nothingness. The liner’s artificial gravity made the bow of the ship seem up and the stern down. But he felt that he stood on an unguarded threshold with pure abyss before him. Some hundreds of yards away the space buoy moved very slowly past. That was stability. The liner was stability. But in between lay such a gulf that all his instincts warned him shrink away.
He grew angry, as he always did when he felt weakness in himself. He watched the wobbling tentacle as it groped toward him. It was not like an inanimate thing at all, but it gave an appalling impression of stupidity and of bumbling ineptitude. It reached the liner’s air-lock.
Scott hooked his belt to it. It began to retract. It pulled him out of the air-lock. He ground his teeth as he felt emptiness below him—when he knew that he could fall for thousands and thousands of years and never reach anything at all.
The harsh voice said, “You can go now. He’s on the way.”
As if in response, the liner surged ahead. At high acceleration it darted away from the space-buoy. It dwindled…
The tentacle ceased to draw Scott toward the buoy. It held him still in the void. Then it stirred as if impatiently. But the liner was still within space-suit communicator range. When it disappeared in overdrive, though, something would happen. The tentacle could thrust Scott away to its own fullest extension with such violence that when it stopped he’d be snapped off its end to go floating away in emptiness forever. Or it could draw back, pulling him toward the buoy’s metal hull with such velocity that he’d crash against the hull-plates, bursting his suit and helmet, turning into a horrible bubbling thing as his blood and tissues changed to steam in emptiness. All things considered, those appeared to be the alternatives as soon as the liner went into overdrive.
Scott inconspicuously unhooked his belt. He held onto the tentacle with a space-gloved hand. He’d made a third alternative possible. The tentacle could extend furiously or retract furiously. But he’d be left floating a few hundred yards from Lambda, with a reaction-jet for propulsion as he tried to fight his way inside.
This last, rather than the others, was what he actually expected.
CHAPTER 2
But the liner checked its motion. It stopped some five miles away, where it was merely a silver splinter in space, far beyond the mile-thick asteroid with the impact-craters on its surface. The skipper’s voice came, dourly, “We’ll watch him over.”
Then Scott said measuredly, “I left orders with the liner’s skipper, you know.”
He held on to the tentacle while his fate was debated. He heard the faintest possible sounds. A microphone was open somewhere. There was argument. He heard voices.
“…crazy fool! He’ll…” “…that liner…” “…told you to take…” “…what’s wrong with…” “…he can’t do anything…” Then a sneering, “…nice company for Janet…” And then an authoritative “…Bring him aboard. Then we’ll decide…”
Scott clung to the end of the tentacle. The liner floated in space, miles away. Her skipper would be watching, of course, and he was showing a sudden perceptiveness. He’d moved the liner. Sound thinking. He wasn’t trying to communicate with Scott. Proper behavior—leaving the conduct of this affair to a Patrol man. With a man ready to throw the liner into overdrive, it was safe from destruction by—say—a rocket missile, if any had been gotten to the buoy in the guise of freight. But anything that looked suspicious or unusual would send the liner away, for the sake of her passengers. Anything causing alarm on the liner would be distinctly unwise. Anything causing the liner to linger near the buoy, on orders from Scott with the authority of the Patrol behind him, could be disastrous to an illegal enterprise, because if the Golconda ship appeared and found itself not alone at the checkpoint, it would be very cagey toward both the buoy and the liner. So nobody on the buoy wanted the liner to be dissatisfied.
Scott held on to the tentacle. It began to retract once more. Now it drew him smoothly and steadily toward Checkpoint Lambda. That golden-colored object grew larger, became huge, turned monstrous. Its welded outer hull-surface was very near …
Scott’s magnetic shoe-soles touched and clung with that peculiar sticky adhesion which never felt really dependable. He released the tentacle, which went into its small hole in the electroplated metal of the buoy’s hull. There was a door there, which did not open. Scott was isolated on the outer skin of what once had been a liner of some thousands of tons capacity. He waited. The scarred and pitted asteroid-fragment seemed overhead. It looked as if it should be falling upon Scott, to crush him. But Scott was accustomed to that sort of illusion. He waited to be admitted. He guessed grimly that either much preparation for his reception was going on, or else that the buoy waited for the liner to go away.
Presently he said in a bored voice, “I’m waiting to come in a lock.”
His tone was the kind that already-disturbed men halfway through a crime would not be ready for. It didn’t match the situation. They should be uneasy, not knowing whether he knew anything or had guessed everything. A bored tone didn’t fit! Criminals in an act of law-breaking could be baffled. They might be uneasy.