Alan greeted him with enthusiasm. To him, still an unmarried cadet and working for more provident men when his contemporaries were all heads of families and solid men of property, the knowledge that he was blood brother to a senior scientist was quite the most important thing that had ever happened to him, even overshadowing his recent adventures, the meaning of which he was hardly qualified to understand anyway.
Ertz cut him short, and hastily closed the door to the outer engineering office. "Walls have ears," he said quietly, "and certainly clerks have ears, and tongues as well. Do you want us both to make the Trip?"
"Aw, gosh, Bill... I didn't mean to--"
"Never mind. I'll meet you on the same stair trunk we came down by, ten decks above this one. Can you count?"
"Sure, I can count that much. I can count twice that much. One and one makes two, and one more makes three, and one more makes four, and one makes five, and--"
"That's enough. I see you can. But I'm relying more on your loyalty and your knife than I am on your mathematical ability. Meet me there as soon as you can. Go up somewhere where you won't be noticed."
Forty-one was still on watch when they reached the rendezvous. Ertz called him by name while standing out of range of slingshot or thrown knife, a reasonable precaution in dealing with a creature who had grown to man size by being fast with his weapons. Once identification had been established, he directed the guard to find Hugh Hoyland. He and Alan sat down to wait.
Forty-one failed to find Hugh Hoyland at Joe-Jim's apartment. Nor was Joe-Jim there. He did find Bobo, but the pinhead was not very helpful. Hugh, Bobo told him, had gone up where-everybody-flies. That meant very little to Forty-one; he had been up to no-weight only once in his life. Since the level of weightlessness extended the entire length of the Ship, being in fact the last concentric cylinder around the Ship's axis, not that Forty-one could conceive it in those terms, the information that Hugh. had headed for no-weight was not helpful.
Forty-one was puzzled. An order from Joe-Jim was not to be ignored and he had got it through his not overbright mind that an order from Ertz carried the same weight. He woke Bobo up again. "Where is the Two Wise Heads?"
"Gone to see knifemaker." Bobo closed his eyes again.
That was better. Forty-one knew where the knifemaker lived. Every mutie had dealings with her; she was the indispensable artisan and tradesman of mutie country. Her person was necessarily taboo; her workshop and the adjacent neighborhood were neutral territory for all. He scurried up two decks and hurried thence.
A door reading THERMODYNAMIC LABORATORY: KEEP OUT was standing open. Forty-one could not read; neither the name nor the injunction mattered to him. But he could hear voices, one of which be identified as coming from the twins, the other from the knifemaker. He walked in. "Boss," be began.
"Shut up," said Joe. Jim did not look around but continued his argument with the Mother of Blades. "You'll make knives," he said, "and none of your lip."
She faced him, her four calloused hands set firmly on her broad hips. Her eyes were reddened from staring into the furnace in which she heated her metal; sweat ran down her wrinkled face into the sparse gray mustache which disfigured her upper lip, and dripped onto her bare chest. "Sure I make knives," she snapped. "Honest knives. Not pig-stickers like you want me to make. Knives as long as your arm, ptui!" She spat at the cherry-red lip of the furnace.
"Listen, you old Crew bait," Jim replied evenly, "you'll make knives the way I tell you to, or I'll toast your feet in your own furnace. Hear me?"
Forty-one was struck speechless. No one ever talked back to the Mother of Blades; the Boss was certainly a man of power!
The knifemaker suddenly cracked. "But that's not the right way to make knives," she complained shrilly. "They wouldn't balance right. I'll show you." She snatched up two braces of knives from her workbench and let fly at a cross-shaped target across the room -- not in succession, but all four arms swinging together, all four blades in the air at once. They spwiged into the target, a blade at the extreme end of each arm of the cross. "See? You couldn't do that with a long knife. It would fight with itself and not go straight."
"Boss--" Forty-one tried again. Joe-Jim handed him a mouthful of knuckles without looking around.
"I see your point," Jim told the knifemaker, "but we don't want these knives for throwing. We want them for cutting and stabbing up close. Get on with it; I want to see the first one before you eat again."
The old woman bit her lip. "Do I get my usuals?" she said sharply.
"Certainly you get your usuals," he assured her. "A tithe on every kill till the blades are paid for, and good eating all the time you work."
She shrugged her misshapen shoulders. "O.K." She turned, tonged up a long flat fragment of steel with her two left hands and clanged the stock into the furnace. Joe-Jim turned to Forty-one.
"What is it?" Joe asked.
"Boss, Ertz sent me to get Hugh."
"Well, why didn't you do it?"
"I don't find him. Bobo says he's gone up to no-weight."
"Well, go get him. No, that won't do; you wouldn't know where to find him. I'll have to do it myself. Go back to Ertz and tell him to wait."
Forty-one hurried off. The Boss was all right, but it was not good to tarry in his presence.
"Now you've got us running errands," Jim commented sourly. "How do you like being a blood brother, Joe?"
"You got us into this."
"So? The blood-swearing was your idea."
"Damn it, you know why I did that. They took it seriously. And we are going to need all the help we can get, if we are to get out of this with a skin that will hold water."
"Oh? So you didn't take it seriously?"
"Did you?"
Jim smiled cynically. "Just about as seriously as you do, my dear, deceitful brother. As matters stand now, it is much, much healthier for you and me to keep to the bargain right up to the hilt. 'All for one and one for all!'"
"You've been reading Dumas again."
"And why not?"
"That's O.K. But don't be a damn fool about it."
"I won't be. I know which side of the blade is edged."
Joe-Jim found Squatty and Pig sleeping outside the door which led to the Control Room. He knew then that Hugh must be inside, for he had assigned the two as personal bodyguards to Hugh. It was a foregone conclusion anyhow; if Hugh had gone up to no-weight, he would be heading either for Main Drive, or the Control Room, more probably the Control Room. The place held a tremendous fascination for Hugh. Ever since the earlier time when Joe-Jim had almost literally dragged him into the Control Room and had forced him to see with his own eyes that the Ship was not the whole world but simply a vessel adrift in a much larger world -- a vessel that could be driven and moved -- ever since that time and throughout the period that followed while he was still a captured slave of Joe-Jim's, he had been obsessed with the idea of moving the Ship, of sitting at the controls and making it go!
It meant more to him than it could possibly have meant to a space pilot from Earth. From the time that the first rocket made the little jump from Terra to the Moon, the spaceship pilot has been the standard romantic hero whom every boy wished to emulate. But Hugh's ambition was of no such picayune caliber; he wished to move his world. In Earth standards and concepts it would be less ambitious to dream of equipping the Sun with jets and go gunning it around the Galaxy.
Young Archimedes had his lever; he sought a fulcrum.
Joe-Jim paused at the door of the great silver stellarium globe which constituted the Control Room and peered in. He could not see Hugh, but he knew that he must be at the controls in the chair of the chief astrogator, for the lights were being manipulated. The images of the stars were scattered over the inner surface of the sphere producing a simulacrum of the heavens outside the Ship. The illusion was not fully convincing from the door where Joe-Jim rested; from the center of the sphere it would be complete.