“Been burning paraine?” Hilton demanded unpleasantly. His head ached, and he didn’t want to find excuses for the skipper.
“It’s no drug dream,” Ts’ss said. “What about the chivalric traditions? We had our Chyra Emperor, who fought for—”
“I’ve read about Chyra,” Hilton said. “He was a Selenite King Arthur.”
Slowly Ts’ss nodded his head, keeping his great eyes on Hilton.
“Exactly. A tool who was useful in his time, because he served his cause with a single devotion. But when that cause died, there was nothing for Chyra-or Arthur-to do except die too. But until he did die, he continued to serve his broken god, not believing that it had fallen. Captain Danvers will never believe the hyper ships are passing. He will be a hyper-ship man until he dies. Such men make causes great-but when they outlive their cause, they are tragic figures.”
“Well, I’m not that crazy,” Hilton growled. “I’m going into some other game. Transmat or something.
You’re a technician. Why don’t you come with me after this voyage?”
“I like the Big Night,” Ts’ss said. “And I have no world of my own-no living world. There is nothing to-to make me want success, Mr. Hilton. On La Cucaracha I can do as I want. But away from the ship, I find that people don’t like Selenites. We are too few to command respect or friendship any more. And I’m quite old, you know.”
Startled, Hilton stared at the Selenite. There was no way to detect signs of age on the arachnoid beings. But they always knew, infallibly, how long they had to live, and could predict the exact moment of their death.
Well, he wasn’t old. And he wasn’t a deepspace man as Danvers was. He followed no lost causes.
There was nothing to keep him with the hyper ships, after this voyage, if he survived.
A signal rang. Hilton’s stomach jumped up and turned into ice, though he had been anticipating this for hours. He reached for a mike.
“Hyper stations! Close helmets! Saxon, report!”
“All work completed, Mr. Hilton,” said Saxon’s voice, strained but steady.
“Come up here. May need you. General calclass="underline" stand by! Grab the braces. We’re coming in.”
Then they hit the see-saw!
Chapter 5. Hilton’s Choice
No doubt about it, she was tough-that old lady. She’d knocked around a thousand worlds and ridden hyper for more miles than a man could count. Something had got into her from the Big Night, something stronger than metal bracing and hard alloys. Call it soul, though there never was a machine that had a soul. But since the first log-craft was launched on steaming seas, men have known that a ship gets a soul from somewhere.
She hopped like a flea. She bucked like a mad horse. Struts and columns snapped and buckled, and the echoing companionways were filled with an erratic crackling and groaning as metal, strained beyond its strength, gave way. Far too much energy rushed through the engines. But the battered old lady took it and staggered on, lurching, grunting, holding together somehow.
The see-saw bridged the gap between two types of space, and La Cucaracha yawed wildly down it, an indignity for an old lady who, at her age, should ride sedately through free void-but she was a hyper ship first and a lady second. She leaped into normal space. The skipper had got his figures right. The double sun wasn’t visible, for it was eclipsed by the single planet, but the pull of that monstrous twin star clamped down like a giant’s titanic fist closing on La Cucaracha and yanking her forward irresistibly.
There was no time to do anything except stab a few buttons. The powerful rocket-jets blazed from La Cucaracha’s hull. The impact stunned every man aboard. No watcher saw, but the automatic recording charts mapped what happened then.
La Cucaracha struck what was, in effect, a stone wall. Not even that could stop her. But it slowed her enough for the minimum of safety, and she flipped her stern down and crashed on the unnamed planet with all her after jets firing gallantly, the flooded compartments cushioning the shock, and a part of her never made of plastic or metal holding her together against even that hammer blow struck at her by a world.
Air hissed out into a thinner atmosphere and dissipated. The hull was half molten. Jet tubes were fused at a dozen spots. The stem was hash.
But she was still-a ship.
The loading of cargo was routine. The men had seen too many alien planets to pay much attention to this one. There was no breathable air, so the crew worked in their suits-except for three who had been injured in the crash, and were in sick-bay, in a replenished atmosphere within the sealed compartments of the ship. But only a few compartments were so sealed. La Cucaracha was a sick old lady, and only first aid could be administered here.
Danvers himself superintended that. La Cucaracha was his own, and he kept half the crew busy opening the heat-sealed jets, doing jury-rig repairs, and making the vessel comparatively spaceworthy.
He let Saxon act as straw-boss, using the engineer’s technical knowledge, though his eyes chilled whenever he noticed the Transmat man.
As for Hilton, he went out with the other half of the crew to gather the paraine crop. They used strong-vacuum harvesters, running long, flexible carrier tubes back to La Cucaracha’s hold, and it took two weeks of hard, driving effort to load a full cargo. But by then the ship was bulging with paraine, the repairs were completed, and Danvers had charted the course to Silenus.
Hilton sat in the control room with Ts’ss and Saxon. He opened a wall compartment, glanced in, and closed it again. Then he nodded at Saxon.
“The skipper won’t change his mind,” he said. “Silenus is our next port. I’ve never been there.”
“I have,” Ts’ss said. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
Saxon drew an irritated breath. “You know what the gravity pull is, then, Ts’ss. I’ve never been there either, but I’ve looked it up in the books. Giant planets, mostly, and you can’t come from hyper into normal space after you’ve reached the radius. There’s no plane of the ecliptic in that system. It’s crazy.
You have to chart an erratic course toward Silenus, fighting varying gravities from a dozen planets all the way, and then you’ve still got the primary’s pull to consider. You know La Cucaracha won’t do it, Mr. Hilton.”
“I know she won’t,” Hilton said. “We pushed our luck this far, but any more would be suicide. She simply won’t hold together for another run. We’re stranded here. But the skipper won’t believe that.”
“He’s insane,” Saxon said. “I know the endurance limits of a machine-that can be found mathematically-and this ship’s only a machine. Or do you agree with Captain Danvers? Maybe you think she’s alive!”
Saxon was forgetting discipline, but Hilton knew what strain they were all under.
“No, she’s a machine all right,” he merely said. “And we both know she’s been pushed too far. If we go to Silenus, it’s—” He made a gesture of finality.
“Captain Danvers says — Silenus,” Ts’ss murmured. “We can’t mutiny, Mr. Hilton.”
“Here’s the best we can do,” Hilton said. “Get into hyper somehow, ride the flow, and get out again somehow. But then we’re stuck. Any planet or sun with a gravity pull would smash us. The trouble is, the only worlds with facilities to overhaul La Cucaracha are the big ones. And if we don’t get an overhaul fast we’re through. Saxon, there’s one answer, though. Land on an asteroid.”
“But why?”
“We could manage that. No gravity to fight, worth mentioning. We certainly can’t radio for help, as the signals would take years to reach anybody. Only hyper will take us fast enough. Now-has Transmat set up any stations on asteroids?”