He spun around and faced Magda. “We’ll have to search everyplace where he might be.”
“How much time do we have?”
Linc glanced at the computer’s countdown timer. “A little more than two hours until the rockets fire.”
“How can we search…”
But Linc was already at the communications desk. “Everybody. …wake up!” he bellowed into the pin-sized microphone that projected from the desk top. “Slav, Cal, Hollie, get up. and report to the bridge at once. Emergency! We need everybody up here right away.”
In less than five minutes they staggered in, sleepy, puzzled, surprised. Linc quickly told them what had happened.
There were nearly four dozen people standing around as Linc said:
“I don’t think he could get much farther than the second level, upstairs. The computer has shown us where the vital areas are. He must be in one of those places. We’ve got just about two hours to find him. I want you to move in teams of at least six people each. No telling how many of his guards are with him.”
Magda stayed on the bridge with Linc. He checked every circuit, all the controls, using the computer and the ship’s sensing equipment to tell him if Monel had damaged the rocket engines or their control circuits.
Linc showed Magda how to work the communications desk, and she began to keep track of the search parties. They could hear the people shouting to one another, thanks to the ship’s built-in microphones and loudspeakers, as they tracked through the corridors and rooms of the first and second levels.
“Nothing in here.”
“Hey, I thought I saw… naw, just a shadow.”
“Look at this! Does this look like wheel tracks?”
“Where?”
“Right here. See, he must’ve rolled through that oil stain back there—”
Linc wished a thousand times each minute that he had fixed the TV cameras in all the corridors so that he could see what they were doing.
The countdown timer went past the one-hour mark. Forty-five minutes. Thirty.
“Up here, by the deadlock.”
Linc hadn’t moved from the checkout desk. The whole rocket system still seemed to be perfectly intact; no damage.
“Ask them where they are… the ones who’re following those wheel tracks,” he said to Magda, without taking his eyes off the viewscreens.
She said back to him, “The tracks go into the deadlock up on level two.”
You-mean airlock, he corrected silently. Then he realized that Magda was working the communications machinery without arguing or complaining and he was glad that he’d kept his mouth shut. If she’s scared to touch the machines, she’s not showing it.
“WE GOT HIM!” The voice was a triumphant shout.
“He was in the deadlock, hiding. We got him. We’re bringing him back down to the bridge.”
Linc realized that he should feel relieved. There was still more than twenty minutes to go before the rockets would fire. But somehow he still felt anxious. What was he doing in there? He glanced over at Magda. She looked apprehensive, too.
“Still worried?” he asked.
She nodded. “You?”
“I’ll feel better when the engines fire okay.”
Monel was his usual glaring, angry self.
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you? All of you!” he shouted. He sat huddled in his chair, surrounded by the grinning men and women who had ferreted him out of his hiding place. They had also found all of his guards.
All except Rix.
“What were you trying to do?” Linc demanded.
“Stop you.”
“By hiding in an airlock?”
Monel looked disgusted. “By getting your attention away from these damnable machines!”
The answer didn’t satisfy Linc at all. But before he could say anything, Slav shook Monel by the shoulder roughly.
“Why don’t you want us to get to the new world? You want us all to die?”
Monel pulled himself free of the farmer’s heavy hand. “What makes you think that you’ll be able to live on this new world? Because he says so?” He sneered at Linc. “We know we can live on the ship. But this new world of his… who’s ever lived outside the ship?” His thin voice rose to a nerve-racking shrillness. “It’s death to go outside, everyone knows that! The ship is life… everyplace else is death.”
Linc stepped up in front of him; towering over him. “And what happens when the ship plunges into the yellow sun? That’s certain death!”
“Who says we’re going to fall into the yellow sun?”- Monel snapped back. “You do! You claim Jerlet told you. But Jerlet never spoke to us about it.”
Slav frowned down at Monel. “Everybody’s afraid of being eaten by the yellow star. You are, too.”
With an exasperated flap of his hands, Monel answered, “Of course I’m afraid! But I’d rather take my chances with the yellow star than deliberately leave the Living Wheel. We know it’s death to go outside.”
“Linc’s been outside,” said Jayna.
“In his special suit,” Monel countered. “How long could he live out there? Well, Linc—tell them! How long could you live outside in that suit?”
Linc shrugged. “Many hours. A few days, probably.”
“But you want us to live outside forever! Don’t you?”
“Not in space,” Linc said. “Not in outer darkness. On Beryl. On the new world. We’ll live the way our ancestors did on old Earth.”
“They had to leave old Earth, didn’t they?”
“TIMECHECK,” the computer’s tape voice called out. “COUNT DOWN TIMECHECK: T MINUS FIVE MINUTES AND COUNTING.”
Slav turned to Magda. “What do you say, priestess? Is Linc right or is Monel? Should we try to leave the ship and live on the new world, or should we stay here?”
Magda was standing halfway between Linc and Monel. All eyes turned to her.
“I’ve meditated on this for a long time,” she said, her voice low but strong. “I’ve asked Jerlet for guidance, and tried to feel the inner truth of the problem.”
“And…?”
“Linc has shown that our old fears of the machines were probably wrong. He should be allowed to bring us to the new world.”
The crowd sighed. A decision had been reached.
“If we were not meant to live there,” Magda went on, “the machines will fail. Jerlet won’t let us be led toward death. If the machines work as Linc says they will, then we will reach the new world safely and live there in happiness. But if they fail, we’ll stay on the ship. All is Jerlet’s will.”
They seemed satisfied with that. Even Monel appeared to relax. But Linc shook his head. Superstition. Nothing but stupid superstition.
“COUNTDOWN TIMECHECK: T MINUS FOUR MINUTES AND COUNTING.”
Time seemed to stretch out endlessly. Linc sat at the checkout desk, watching the displays on the viewscreens as they flickered past, showing every part of the rocket propulsion system. It all seemed perfectly normal, everything working smoothly.
Three minutes. Two. Sixty seconds… thirty… ten.
Linc suddenly felt as if he were somewhere high above the bridge, looking down on all the people standing there clustered around him, looking down on himself who stared solemn-eyed at the viewscreen displays, hands poised over the cutoff buttons, ready to stop the countdown if anything appeared to be wrong.
“…THREE SECONDS…”
The fuel pump symbol on the viewscreen flashed from green to amber, showing that the pump had turned on exactly on schedule.