He released the call button. The speaker in the control room boomed, "Liner Danae calls for help! Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Liner Danae calls for help!"
It went on senselessly, paying no heed to the reply it asked for. Larsen pressed the call button again.
"We're within a mile of you!" he growled. "What's your trouble? Answer."
He released the button and again the identical, recorded urgent distress call came from the liner as it drove on blindly through the solar system of Hermas. There was no visible damage to its hull. It must have power because it was driving, though out of overdrive, and it was broadcasting its plea for help. Its long axis pointed along its line of travel. Its gyros were working. It looked and acted like a ship perfectly controlled by perfectly functioning automatic astrogation units. But it cried to all the stars that it needed help, it needed help, it needed help.
Larsen tried twice more to get an answer from the driving, howling ship. The Theban was actually within a mile of it. She must show upon its screens, even if by any conceivable chance the Danae's communicator was not working. But it was!
Larsen turned and grinned at the red-headed mate. He stood up from the pilot's chair and jerked his hand in a gesture for the mate to take his place. He looked down at the shrivelled engineer, now not weeping but staring terrifiedly at him. When Larsen's grin widened, he tried to shrink to greater smallness.
"Come along!" said Larsen with sardonic gentleness. "You're no good for anything else, so come along."
But he did not wait for obedience. He picked up the diminutive engineer by his coat collar and dragged him into the air lock opening off the control room. There was a natural need for more than one air lock in a ship, and simple common sense called for them to be well separated. This was the bow air lock. Horn saw the lock's interior. Wrinkled, space suits hung on pegs in that amply large closet. A space suit tends to drape itself in a certain fashion when left to hang undisturbed for a long while. But suits hang differently for days after they've been checked over for air-tank pressure and power storage, and then are worked to pliability in readiness for instant use.
Larsen went in, dragging the engineer. Horn's eyes went desperately back to the image of the Danae. The space tramp, now piloted by the red-headed mate, had swung until the two vessels travelled parallel to each other and the picture of the liner was on a side screen instead of dead ahead. The communicator bleated, "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Liner Danae calls for help! Liner Danae calls -"
There were other sounds from the air lock, picked up by a microphone there. They were not pleasant sounds. Horn gathered that Larsen was donning a space suit himself, and trying to swear the engineer into another. After a moment, roaring, he hit the little man a resounding blow and seemed to be cramming him into it.
Horn heard his own teeth grinding. But he'd had a lesson. Even panic over what might have happened to Ginny couldn't override the need for him to keep his head now. His purpose in life, for the moment, must be solely that of being of use to Ginny. If the Danae was derelict or disabled, the Theban's engines were required to function. He mustn't interfere a moment too soon; he must assure the engines' perfect performance up to the very moment he risked everything to take advantage of it.
The Theban edged closer and closer to the liner which dwarfed it. Details of the Danae's exterior could be seen : Cargo doors, and the curious threadlike lines of outside ladders, each rung a metal bar forming the shallowest of U's and welded to the ship's skin at their ends. By them, every part of the ship's plating could be examined from the outside while she was in port. He could see the minute, projecting tripods which were the ship's eyes, relaying to screens in the control room what they saw so much more clearly than human eyes could do.
There was bedlam in the Theban's control room. The larger ship went on, screaming soundlessly to the stars, its outcry picked up and converted to sound by loudspeakers in the beacon aground and inside the Theban. Other sounds came from the bow air lock microphones. Larsen laced the engineer's space suit on him while the engineer protested hysterically. His space helmet went on, and his suit communicator doubled the volume of his frantic pleas. Then there was Larsen's voice, with the booming quality that told of his own helmet's being sealed and his suit communicator in action.
"All set here," growled Larsen through a loudspeaker. "Get as close as you can."
Doorframe lights came on, showing that the outer lockdoor was open. Now it was impossible to interfere with what went on there. So long as the outer door was open, the inner must remain closed. Every trace of air in the lock had gone out, to be lost between the stars. If the inner door could be opened the Theban would instantly cease to hold living men. She'd become a coffin, senselessly accompanying the larger ship to no purpose and to a destination of nowhere.
The Danae's hull was no more than a hundred yards away. The Theban edged nearer and nearer. The vast hull half-filled the side vision plate - then filled it. It spilled over to adjoining screens, the ones ahead and behind, above and below. The Theban reached a point where to draw closer would mean she must bump the larger ship's hull.
The distress call continued. Between its insanely repeated syllables came screams from the engineer, shrieks of unthinkable horror.
Then Horn saw the engineer on one of the screens. He was a tumbling object in an inflated, clumsy space suit, turning crazily head over heels in the space between the two ships. He floated, nevertheless, towards the Danae.
Above and below him there was an infinity of emptiness. There were stars towards which he could fall screaming for a hundred thousand years and never cease to fall. On two opposite sides of him there were the ships, which seemed to draw nearer to crush him between them. He screamed....
Larsen's voice roared at him. Larsen had thrown the little man out of the air lock towards the Danae. The two ships were almost matched in velocity, but not quite. As the small man went tumbling and shrieking between them, the Danae forged slowly and steadily forward. Larsen bellowed threats; roared fury; dredged the depths of the unspeakable to further terrify the engineer.
The mate veered the Theban away from the larger vessel. With such mass behind it, no great impact would be required to crack a ship's plates. The Theban drove on and on and the small engineer floated on and on, and it seemed that the Danae moved to escape him, and he shrieked and shrieked....
He hit the ship, and did not rebound. Much more terribly, he began to slide astern, touching the plating of the Danae but not able to grasp it. He jerked his arms and legs insanely. That was pure futility. It was unlikely that mere magnetic-soled shoes could have held him against the inexorable motion of the Danae past him.
But then the metal bars of a ladder interrupted his sliding. The screaming man did not see them, though they projected four inches from the ship's outer plates. But then he noticed, and seized them frantically. He held fast with the desperation of a man clinging to a handhold over hell. It seemed that his arms would be pulled from his body as the Danae drew ahead.
Then, suddenly, the straining ceased. He drew himself close to the ladder, seemed to try to embrace it. He clung close, weeping profusely. All of this his suit communicator relayed to the Theban's control room between the syllables of the maddeningly reiterated distress call.
The engineer clung to the rungs of the ladder bar as if he would never leave them. Larsen bellowed at him; roared at him; raged. The Theban drifted away and behind, and there was a hundred yards between the ships, and then two and three and four. Presently the spacecraft were a mile apart and the engineer became aware of it. Even greater panic came to hid. He felt that he was being abandoned. He cried out, pleading as hysterically as before. He clung to half-inch metal rods on the outside of a vast metal object which did not answer calls and must be without life. And around him there were only stars and the Theban going away.