Part of Nicklin’s mind which still dealt in logic told him there should be a body close by. On the perimeter of his vision there was something which just might have qualified as a body, but he was unable to direct his gaze on to it. Groaning with each breath, he backed out of the emission chamber and went to the nearest commset. He spoke the pilot’s number and her face immediately appeared on the screen.
“This is Jim Nicklin,” he said.
“I can see that,” Fleischer replied drily. “Well?”
“Is Doctor Harding up there?”
“Yes, he’s looking at Corey. Why?”
“Scott is dead. Somebody has to… gather him up-and I can’t do it.” Nicklin took a deep, steadying breath. “Ask Doctor Harding if he would come down to 14 Deck right away. Tell him his professional services are required.”
In times of crisis—Nicklin had discovered—small, familiar comforts assume an inestimable degree of importance. There was no potable alcohol in the ship’s medical supplies, thanks to Montane’s prohibition, but it had turned out that Jon Harding had a bottle of brandy in his personal kit. Harding was not the Tara’s official medic—he was a paid-up pilgrim, accompanied by his wife and two children—who happened to be a general practitioner, and was standing in for the appointee, who had been a casualty of the sudden departure from Beachhead. He had prescribed and dispensed a large measure of brandy for Nicklin’s condition of shock. Nicklin had almost wept with gratitude on being handed the well-filled bulb, and now he treasured it more than an orb of gold.
It was “night” time and, although the clamour of the previous hours had subsided, the ensuing silence was far from being restful. Too much had happened in too short a time. The passengers had been alarmed and confused by the news of Orbitsville’s transformation—as was evidenced by the crowds which had formed around the television monitors on several decks. And then, in close succession, had come the cut in acceleration, Hepworth’s sensational death, and the announcement that the Tara was turning back.
Voorsanger and Fleischer had gone on the general audio system to say that the ship was returning to investigate the world cloud at close range—which was a diplomatic understatement rather than an outright lie. They had emphasised that the return was a minor event and should be viewed in the context of what was scheduled to be a months-long voyage, but too many doubts and fears had been aroused in the passengers’ collective consciousness. Danea Farthing, and a few others of the mission’s long-term staff who were fully acquainted with the situation, had spent hours in counselling anxious parents—with only qualified success.
Nicklin could sense the icy apprehension which was abroad in the ship’s lower decks. The chill of it was deep within him, and slow to disperse. He had never really enjoyed brandy in the past, but as he sat with Voorsanger and Fleischer in the control room each sip he took yielded nostalgic pleasure beyond description. He could imagine himself, were the right circumstances ever to return, devoting the rest of his life to the worship of the fiery spirit. That possibility, however, had begun to seem more remote than the stars.
Harding had done heroic work in removing Hepworth’s remains from the emission chamber without help. The Tara, as a ship of the Explorer class, was capable of being flown by one person if necessary. Its designers had done their best to anticipate every adverse situation a small crew might have to face, but they had overlooked the possibility that, occasionally, the crew might become even smaller. There was no suitable storage space for dead bodies. The oversight had created problems for Harding, and he had solved them by sealing Hepworth’s corpse in wrappings of plastic and transferring it to a free corner of the ship’s deep freeze facility, thus enabling Nicklin to enter the emission chamber and prepare a damage report.
Nicklin had found that one of the gate positioning rods had failed, just as Hepworth had diagnosed. The broken rod had jumped its bearings, displaced other rods and damaged two servomotors—something Hepworth had not thought of and which had cost him his life. But the root cause of the trouble had been more fundamental.
The sequence of disaster had been triggered by flux pump coils burning out. Automatic cut-outs had been slow coming into action—another fault—with the result that for a split-second the left intake field had been wildly misshapen. And it had been the system’s attempt at correcting the field distortion that had made impossible demands on the output gate controls.
Enter Nicklin and the doomed Hepworth from stage left…
Nicklin squirmed in his seat as he wondered how badly the drive complex in the right-hand cylinder might be affected by the gangrene of Hepworth’s incompetence.
The ship as a whole was in good condition. The thermonuclear power unit could be trusted, because it was self-contained and designed to run for centuries. Much the same could be said for the short-range ion drivers, and Nicklin also had faith in anything for which he had been responsible. So there would be no structural failures and the Tara’s passengers were assured of regenerated oxygen, ventilation, light, heat and water.
All of which meant that, should the ship fail to reach a safe haven, they would be reasonably comfortable while they starved to death.
Their lives depended on the trouble-free functioning of everything in the right-hand drive cylinder. And Nicklin could visualise the ghost of Hepworth down there at that very minute—bragging, boozing, issuing worthless guarantees, threatening violence to anyone who questioned his ability…
“I’ve just come from Corey’s room,” Voorsanger said. “He is still asleep and Jon says he’ll probably stay that way for the next six or seven hours. I think that could be something of a blessing for all of us, don’t you?”
“It’s probably a blessing for him,” Fleischer replied in a tired voice. “I don’t see what difference it makes to the rest of us.”
“Well… He’s less likely to… ah… object too strenuously to our going back if he finds we’re already well on the way.”
“He can object all he wants,” Fleischer said firmly. “I’m the commander of this vessel. I made the decision to return, and nothing will make me alter it.”
Good for you! Nicklin thought, sympathising in full with the pilot. She was becoming increasingly terse and irritable, and he could see why. She was a professional who had somehow allowed the religious side of her nature to blind her to the fact that she was joining a company of fools. It had become apparent to Fleischer that her faith in Corey Montane was going to cost her plenty, possibly her life, and she felt deeply embittered as a result.
There’s a good chance of the Gaseous Vertebrate gaining another convert here, Nicklin thought, allowing a few drops of brandy to float on to his tongue. We’ll just have to see how it goes.
“The Lord will decide everything in the end,” Voorsanger said, reproving the pilot for her lack of humility. “Anyway, it makes me feel better to know that we’re on our way back.”
“I’ll probably feel the same way—when we actually begin travelling back.”
“But you turned the ship ages ago!” Voorsanger pointed at the sun and its fantastic retinue of planets on the main screen. “That’s a forward view, isn’t it? It-says so underneath. Nought degrees! That means the camera is looking dead ahead, doesn’t it?”