"Sheba, why did you stow away on the Erin Kenner?" Angela asked.
"I had no other choice," Sheba said. "I knew that you and Josh were going to look for my family. Our family."
"Did you think that your presence aboard would be an asset, that it would be necessary for us to have you along in order to find your family?"
Sheba was thoughtful. "Something like that," she said.
"Your brother, David, looks somewhat like Josh, but he's more finely drawn, older, more dignified," Angela said.
"Thanks very much," Josh said.
"And he has a small scar over his left eye, high on the forehead."
"You've met David?" Sheba asked.
"Only briefly," Angela said, "and his hair hid the scar completely, yet I'm certain it's there."
"Angela," Josh said, "we've got a small problem on our hands."
"You dream about him," Sheba said.
"And you?"
"Yes, and about Josh, and about Mom and Dad and Ruth. There are times when they seem to be calling out to me, calling for help, and I don't know how to help them."
"How long has this been going on?" Josh asked, suddenly very much interested in what Sheba was saying.
"Off and on for about six months, I'd say."
"Josh?" Angela asked, her lovely eyes wide.
"All right, yes," Josh said, "I dream of them, too."
"You were going to them," Sheba said. "I had to be with you. I had to be aboard this ship regardless of the consequences."
CHAPTER NINE
It didn't seem to matter to the crew members of the Erin Kenner that Captain Joshua Webster was breaking more than one ironclad service regulation by failing to take the ship to the nearest U.P. port to offload a civilian stowaway. At first the young men and women of the ship's complement were a bit awed by their passenger. Each of them had seen at least one holofilm starring Sheba Webster. From their teen years Sheba had been the epitome of feminine beauty and sophistication. When they discovered that the Queen was an outgoing person who laughed easily, who was not pretentious, who was genuinely interested in what they had to say they adopted her as one of their own.
Sheba had discovered when she was quite young that the art of her acting was based on her knowledge of people. Even as a child she had made friends easily and had shown an inordinate curiosity about the intimate feelings and reactions of others. She had learned that it is quite difficult for any human being to dislike someone who is genuinely interested in him and what he has to say. When she listened attentively to one of her new friends, asking suitable questions at just the right time to encourage the speaker to bare his innermost convictions and dreams, she was not being manipulative. She was not seeking gain for herself, although gain accrued in the form of knowledge of the inner workings of the human mind. She was genuinely interested in what others thought and felt.
She worked out in the gym with members of the crew, watched holofilms with them, and answered their questions regarding the techniques of the trade. She joined a group of crewwomen in a literary discussion group, although her knowledge of literature was limited to what she had read in university and those books that had been made into films. The navigation officer gave her informal lessons in star identification. A young crewman allowed her to beat him at handball.
Her presence had ceased to be a matter of discussion when the Erin Kenner blinked away from the sparely starred periphery of the Milky Way into the total void of intergalactic space and rested beside a Rimfire beacon to draw charge into the generator from the entire spread of the majestic, tilted spiral of the galaxy. Now the blinks were long, measured in parsecs. The Rimfire route skirted the outer spiral on the plane of thegalactic disc. Each blink put a larger mass of stars and interstellar matter between the Erin Kenner and the U.P. worlds. The communication link with X&A headquarters on Xanthos became more and more attenuated, for the ship's regular reports of position traveled from blink beacon to blink beacon along the Rimfire route and then zigzagged inward through the scattered star fields toward Xanthos.
No space tugs were stationed along the outer circle. The last major incident requiring tug service for an X&A ship had involved Rimfire, herself, and was now nothing more than a part of history. The general attitude was that accidents didn't happen to a ship being operated under X&A procedures, but every spaceman knew deep in his heart that ships had disappeared and would disappear again. Ships were made of mechanical and electronic things. Mechanical and electronic things failed.
On the traveled space lanes help was always near at hand. Private sector space tugs, eager to claim salvage rights or lifting fees from a ship in trouble, were always within a few blinks. But out there on the rim one saw only gleaming, white masses of stars when one looked back toward home and the nearest private Mule or fleet class tug was back there, hidden somewhere behind that mass of stellar fire.
It was a long way home. Since Rimfire's epic voyage only a few explorers and prospectors had seen the scattered stars that lay before the Erin Kenner as she charged after several long blinks. On the control bridge Josh checked the charts, nodded.
"This is it," he said. "Old Folks left the route here. So did David's ship."
Angela studied the viewscreen. "Rather intimidating, isn't it? Just where do we start?"
"There," Sheba said, pointing to a small grouping of stars.
"Are we having another psychic moment?" Josh asked. He made a wry face, for even as he tried to sound sarcastic he had a feeling that he had lived the moment before, that he had looked into space from that particular beacon.
"Ever go shopping with Mother?" Sheba asked.
Josh nodded. "She always turned right when she entered a shop, even the grocery store."
"She would have been checking the charts and the viewscreen," Sheba said, "just as she did when we were going somewhere in the aircar."
Josh frowned. He'd heard the same words before somewhere, sometime. He turned to the navigator. "Mr. Girard, please take the watch."
"Aye, sir," Girard said.
"You two with me," Josh said gruffly.
"Is that an order?" Sheba teased.
"Yes," he said.
"All right, growly bear," Sheba said.
The expression took him back to his youth, to a time when the Webster house was filled with life and activity. Five of them, David, Ruth, Sarah, himself, Sheba in that order; and his mother and father, always there in time of crisis, always ready with a word of advice or a bandage for a skinned knee, whichever need fit the moment.
"Don't be a growly bear, Josh," his mother would say if he were cranky.
But, damn it, the Erin Kenner was not the old Webster home in T-Town. She was a ship of the fleet. She was Service, X&A, and he was her captain and, by God, if he wanted to be a growly bear he was, after all, in command. In space he had dictatorial powers over every man and woman in the crew, and over his civilian passenger, whose presence aboard he was unable to explain, even to himself.
He led the two women into the captain's lounge, motioned them into leather chairs. "It's time we had a talk," he said gruffly.
"Lovely weather, isn't it?" Sheba said, winking at Angela.
"I'm serious, Queenie," he said.
"All right," Sheba said, putting her hands in her lap demurely.
"From the beginning, then," Josh said. "You said, Sheba, that you had to be aboard this ship. Why did you say that?"
Sheba shrugged eloquently. "I was just worried about Mom and Dad and Ruth and David."
"But you gave me the impression that getting aboard was a compulsion."
"Josh, are you asking if Sheba was experiencing what you, yourself, have called a psychic moment?" Angela asked.
Josh flushed. The study of psychic aberrations was as old as mankind.
There were things that could not be explained easily, but in all of the thousands of years of human history, going all the way back to Old Earth before the Destruction, it had never been proven that there were such things as telepathy or a spirit world or any of the other things propounded by self-styled psychics.