Terrifiedly, babbling, the engineer began to crawl along the separate rungs of the outside ladder. Once his foot slipped and there were only his hands to hold him to the gigantic hull. His legs flailed. He had no grip to bring his body close. His cries became appalling. Then his foot touched solidly and he was able to draw himself back to where he could crawl again, with his feet entangled in each rung as they came to it. And from the open air lock of the Theban Larsen watched him and roared threats.
It seemed an infinitely long time before, in his flylike crawling, the engineer came to a lifeboat blister. It was half open and he crawled inside, whimpering to himself. Minutes later the blister top closed crisply. The little man had found the control that closed it. It was, in a sense, an air lock, as well as the arrangement by which passengers and crew could enter a space lifeboat and launch themselves from a disabled vessel's hull. With the cover closed it would be possible to let air into the blister and, with the pressure equalized, get into the ship proper.
Apparently that was what the engineer had done. He would want frenziedly to get inside the ship to which he'd been thrown. And once inside -
Nothing happened. The urgent distress call voice continued to bellow in the Theban's control room. "Maydah! Mayday! Mayday! Liner Danae calling for help! Liner Danae calling for help!" Larsen closed the outer door and came out of the air lock. He continued to wear his space suit, with only the face plate opened. The two ships continued to separate. He took the controls and brought the Theban up alongside again. The pair of vessels hurtled onward, towards the sun Hermas. And nothing happened. And nothing happened. And nothing happened!
Larsen began to rage incoherently. He cursed the shrivelled engineer as Horn had never heard a man cursed before.
Then, suddenly, the blasting distress call cut off. The change in the Theban's control room was so sudden that it was shocking. For seconds it seemed actually quiet.
There was an appreciable interval before the buzzing, moaning sound of the half-crippled space drive made itself heard again.
Larsen cried out in triumph as great as his anger had been.
"He did it! He got to the control room!"
The red-haired mate muttered. Larsen pushed the communicator call button. "Calling Danae!" he snapped into the microphone. "Calling Danae! Come in! What's the trouble aboard?"
There was a whimpering; then the voice of the engineer came. He caught his breath irregularly as a child does after wild weeping.
'There's - nobody here!"
Horn heard it where he waited desperately outside the control room doorway. The engineer's voice panted, "'The boats are gone. There's nobody here - Nobody! The ship's a derelict! What - what do I do?" The little man's voice cracked. "I don't know how to astrogate a ship! I don't know how! What must I do?"
Horn, hearing, went quietly mad for a moment or two. Ginny should have been aboard the Danae. But if there were nobody aboard, she couldn't be. It was a numbing, blinding, unbelievable shock.
When he was capable of thought again, he heard Larsen saying harshly, "You're at the control board. The gyro repeaters are in front of you. One dial says one-ninety-three degrees. That's your galactic longitude. The other says twenty-four. That's your latitude. Check me on that."
A part of Horns mind listened and heard. A part of it was aware of the appalling sound of the engines, to which he'd almost become accustomed. He heard Larsen barking instructions to adjust such-and-such knobs until this-or-that dial read so-and-so. He heard the engineer's panic-filled responses. But such matters did not count, to Horn. He knew with anguished fury that Ginny wasn't on the Danae. And he knew with a terrible certainty that he was going to find whoever was responsible for what ever had happened to Ginny, and take a full and complete revenge for it. Larsen, yes. But Larsen had not personally turned the Danae into a derelict. There was more to it. And Horn would find every single man who'd had the least, smallest part in the disaster and he would kill -
Larsen was snarling ferociously: "Stay right where you are. Keep reporting. I'll get you down."
Horn could hear and feel and smell and see, but his emotions were paralysed. Ginny was the victim of a monstrous crime. The shock overwhelmed him. He could respond to nothing; he was like an automaton. But he knew that he would not act like one when the time came that he knew what had happened and who had brought it about. Then he'd react! But for now he was numbed. He could be - he would be - cold and cunning and convincing until he knew everything. And then -
"Read me what the engines say," commanded Larsen. Then he swore. "No. Forget that. You haven't got a Riccardo drive there, and you couldn't land on the drive if you wanted to. You've got emergency rockets. When I get you to atmosphere you'll switch in the emergency landing controls and they'll let the ship down. They'll handle the rockets. They'll have radar readings to guide them, and they'll set you down."
Horn knew that it was true. When Riccardo drives were in common use, by a lavish expenditure of fuel, and considerable skill, a ship could take off and land where there was no landing grid. In those days there was much demand for skills. But nowadays ships went only from port to port and from landing grid to landing grid. They carried landing rockets for unthinkable emergencies, but modern ships' officers were not required to know how to handle a ship on rockets. There was a radar for height finding and a computer to give orders based on the radar's findings. Automation would let a ship down on any world, with due allowance for varying gravitational fields. The only human supervision required was the choice of solid ground for a landing spot.
Horn went numbly back to the engines. He nursed them, coddled them. He knew when the Theban drove, and when she went into free fall and her own gravity coils took care of the problem of weight inside. He could hear Larsen bellowing commands to the quaking little engineer aboard the Danae. It was curious that, after being flung through emptiness to the Danae, the engineer most passionately wanted to rejoin the Theban. But he knew only Riccardo engines. Given the most perfectly found ship in the galaxy, and unlimited fuel, he would never be able to find an inhabited planet. He might live on for years, alone, or he might go mad. The little man couldn't face either prospect. He swearingly and terrifiedly obeyed Larsen's orders in the hope of returning to the situation from which he had been flung.
Horn wasn't aware of the passage of time. He was in a totally unnatural state. He was hands and feet and arms and body, doing numbly what was appropriate in order to find out how Ginny had been harmed, and by whom. And when he found out, he knew he would become more deadly than any monster on a swamp world of Altair.
It was almost an anticlimax when there was the slight thump which proved that the Theban had touched ground again.
The red-haired mate and Larsen came clattering down the companion ladder to go aground. Horn painstakingly adjusted one of the multiple repair jobs he'd done so the ship couldn't take off again without him. He followed the others out of the ship, shouldering aside crewmen anxious to find out what criminal enterprise they'd carried through, and what profit they'd make out of it.
The Danae was landed. Having descended by rocket, it stood erect in a brand-new clearing of steam and smoke and charred vegetation. This was not the space beacon, or anywhere near it. It was another part of that quasi-jungle which covered most of this planet. Horn saw one of the sticklike native animals, twenty feet tall, fleeing from the tumult of smoke and steam. It made gigantic leaps above the brown-and-green foliage as it fled.