It might have been one hour; it might have been seven. Baldwin appeared, followed by the little self-propelled cart. It began to make its rounds, stopping at each chair long enough for the bottle of water and the dish of soggy cake to be picked off. Stoss, looking perfectly innocent, passed Barker's chair.
Barker got up and went to the pusher. Stoss was looking through the door, and did not wave. The cart clicked and rolled to the next chair.
"Something wrong, Oliver?" Baldwin asked.
"I'm going to kill you, you bastard."
"What?" Baldwin's mouth was open, but he dropped into a fighter's crouch instinctively.
His ankle hooked behind Baldwin's foot. The bullnecked man threw a punch which he ducked, and tried to clinch when he butted him in the chest. Baldwin went sprawling into the tangle of machinery at the same spot where the man from Rupp City had fried. There were sparks and stench. Then it was over.
Baldwin's mouth was still open and his body contorted. Barker could imagine him saying: "You think I'm inhuman? You think I want to drive the units like I do?" And he could also imagine him roaring: "Give, Goddamn you!"
Steadily Barker went back to his seat in time for the cart to click by.
Stoss, his face a perfect blank, padded back from the latrine. A murmur and stir grew louder in the big rectangular room.
CHAPTER VI
LAKHRUT was lying in his hammock in the dark, his fingers idly reading. It should have been a manual; instead it was an historical romance. His fingers skipped a half-page describing an old-style meal and slowed to absorb the description of the fight in which it ended.
"Yar raises his revolver charged with powder and ball. Who is so brave as Yar? He pulls back the trigger and presses the hammer of the death-dealing tube! The flash of flame shows the face of Lurg! But smoke from the tube obscures—"
His fingers jerked from the page as the commander's voice roared through his cubicle: "Lakhrut! Look to your units! We have no steerage way!"
He leaped from the hammock and raced through the vessel cursing Baldwin, the maintenance crew, the units and every soul on board.
He took in the situation at a glance. Baldwin lying spread-eagled and charred against the conversion grids. The units yammering and terrified in their chairs, none of them driving. Into a wall mike he snapped to the bridge: "My driver's dead, commander. He got the charge from the conversion grids—"
"Stop your gabbing and give me power, you fool!"
Deathly pale, Lakhrut turned to the disorganized units and tried to talk to them in remembered scraps of Engish. (He should have worked more with his driver on it. He should have worked more.) They only gawked at him, and he swore in A'rkhov—
But one of the units was doing something that made sense. He was yelling in English, pointing to the chairs. And a dozen of the units resumed their places and began to drive, feebly at first and then better.
That was taken care of. He turned to the machinery and checked rapidly through the stages of amplification. They were clear; the commander, curse him, was getting his power. The fellow who had yelled at the units was standing by him when the inspection was completed. Startlingly, he said in A'rkhov, though with a fearsome accent: "Can I serve Lakhrut-takh?"
With considerable effort, Lakhrut scanned him. Obedience, fear, respect, compliance. All was well. He asked him coldly: "Who are you that you should speak the tongue?"
"Name is Oliver. I studied languages. Baldwin-takh-lyur taught me the tongue." Lakhrut scanned; it all was true.
"How did he die?"
"I did not see. Oliver was not looking. I was in darkness."
Asleep, was he trying clumsily to say? Lakhrut scanned. There was no memory of the death-scene in the scared, compliant mind of this unit.
But something nagged Lakhrut and teased at his mind. "Did you kill him?" he snapped.
The flood of horror and weakness he scanned was indubitable. The unit babbled brokenly: "No, Lakhrut-takh! No! I could not kill! I could not kill!" Well, that was true enough. It had been a silly thing to ask.
"Take me," he said, "to each unit in turn and ask them whether they killed the takh-lyur."
This Oliver did, and reported twenty-two denials while Lakhrut scanned each. Each was true; none of the twenty-two minds into which he peered was shuddering with the aftermath of murder; none seemed to have the killer's coldness and steel.
Lakhrut said to the wall mike: "Power is restored. I have established that my driver's death was accidental. I have selected a new driver from among the units." He turned off the mike after a curt acknowledgment and said to Oliver: "Did you understand? I meant you." At the mike again he called two maintenance men to clear the conversion grid and space the body.
"Establish unit shifts and then come with me," he told Oliver, and waited for the new driver to tell off the gangs. He ceased scanning; his head was aching abominably.
BARKER felt the fingers leave his brain and breathed deeper. Dr. Oliver of Columbia, the whining incubus on him, was bad company. His own memory of the past few minutes was vague and fragmentary. In jittery terror Dr. Oliver had yelled at the units to man their chairs before they all were killed for disobedience. In abject compliance Dr. Oliver had placed himself at Lakhrut's orders. And he had heard that he would be the new slave-driver with almost tearful gratitude. To be shaved and clean again!
To dine again! Barker wanted to spit. Instead he divided the units into new shifts and followed Lakhrut from the oblong room.
He washed and used a depilatory powder that burned horribly as the cyclops monster called Lakhrut silently watched. Somebody brought him shorts that fit. Apparently the concept of a uniform was missing—
so even was style. He saw passing on the upper decks crew "men" in trousers, gowns, kilts and in combinations of these. The only common note was simplicity and a queer, vulgar absence of dash, as if nobody cared what he looked like as long as the clothes didn't get in his way.
"That's enough," Lakhrut said, as Barker was trying to comb his wetted hair with his fingers. "Come with me."
Back between decks they went to a cubicle near the drive room—a combination of kitchen, cramped one-man office and hammock-space.
Lakhrut briskly showed Barker how to draw and prepare the food for the units—it was the first time he suspected that Baldwin had cooked for them—and how to fill in a daily report on the condition of the units.
It was hardly writing; he simply had to check a box in the appropriate column next to the unit's number. His "pen" flowed clear plastic which bonded to the paper in a raised ridge. The "printed" form was embossed with raised lines. Barker could make nothing of the numerals that designated the units or the column-headings; the alphabet rang no bells in his memory or the Oliver-memory. But that would come later.
THE COMMANDER was winding up his critique, and his division officers were perspiring freely.
"As to the recent gun-drill, I have very little to say. What, gentlemen, is there to say about the state of training, the peak of perfection which enabled Gori-takh's crews to unlimber, train and dry-fire their primary and secondary batteries in a mere two hundred and thirty-six and eleven-twelfths vistch? I am sure the significance of this figure will be clear to us all when point out that the average space engagement lasts one hundred and eighteen vistch. Is the significance clear to you, Gori-takh?"
"Yes, Commander," said the division officer, very pale.
"Perfectly clear?"
"Yes, Commander," Gori said, wishing he were dead.
"Good. Then we will go on to pleasanter subjects. Propulsion has been excellent and uninterrupted since our last meeting. Steerage way has been satisfactorily maintained, units are in reasonable health, mechanical equipment checks out between Satisfactory and Excellent.