And Freddy’s unpopularity had not lessened. The engineer officer cursed him luridly. The stranger’s engines, now— They had been patched up after an explosion, and they were tantalizingly suggestive. But their working was unfathomable. The engineer officer wanted to get his hands on them. The physiochemical officer wanted to do some analysis with his own hands, instead of by cold-light spectrography over a scanner. And every man, from the lowest enlisted apprentice to the skipper himself, wanted to get hold of some artifact made by an alien, nonhuman race ten thousand years ahead of human civilization. So Freddy was unpopular.
But that was only part of his unhappiness. He felt that he had acted improperly. The Ethical Equations gave mathematical proof that probabilities and ethics are interlinked, so that final admirable results cannot be expected from unethical beginnings. Freddy had violated discipline—which is one sort of ethics—and after that through his uncle had interjected politics into Patrol affairs. Which was definitely a crime. By the Equations, the probability of disastrous coincidences was going to be enormous until corrective, ethically proper action was taken to cancel out the original crimes. And Freddy had been unable to devise such action. He felt, too, that the matter was urgent. He slept uneasily despite his fatigue, because there was something in the back of his mind which warned him stridently that disaster lay ahead.
Freddy awoke still unrefreshed and stared dully at the ceiling over his head. He was trying discouragedly to envision a reasonable solution when there came a tap on his door. It was Bridges with a batch of papers.
“Here you are!” he said cheerfully, when Freddy opened to him. “Now we’re all going to be happy!”
Freddy took the extended sheets.
“What’s happened?” he asked. “Did the skipper send for fresh orders regardless, and I’m to go in the brig?”
Bridges, grinning, pointed to the sheets of paper in Freddy’s hand. They were from the physiochemical officer, who was equipped to do exact surveys on the lesser heavenly bodies.
“Elements found in the alien vessel,” was the heading of a list. Freddy scanned the list. No heavy elements, but the rest was familiar. There had been pure nitrogen in the fuel tank, he remembered, and the engineer officer was going quietly mad trying to understand how they had used nitrogen for atomic power. Freddy looked down to the bottom. Iron was the heaviest element present.
“Why should this make everybody happy?” asked Freddy.
Bridges pointed with his finger. The familiar atomic symbols had unfamiliar numerals by them. H3, Li5, Gl8— He blinked. He saw N15, O17, F18, S34,35— Then he stared. Bridges grinned.
“Try to figure what that ship’s worth!” he said happily. “It’s all over the Arnina. Prize money isn’t allowed in the Patrol, but five percent of salvage is. Hydrogen three has been detected on Earth, but never isolated. Lithium five doesn’t exist on Earth, or glucinium eight, or nitrogen fifteen or oxygen seventeen or fluorine eighteen or sulphur thirty-four or thirty-five! The whole ship is made up of isotopes that simply don’t exist in the solar system! And you know what pure isotopes sell for! The hull’s practically pure iron fifty-five! Pure iron, fifty-four sells for thirty-five credits a gram! Talk about the lost treasures of Mars! For technical use only, the stripped hull of this stranger is worth ten years’ revenue of Earth government! Every man on the Arnina is rich for life. And you’re popular!”
Freddy did not smile.
“Nitrogen fifteen,” he said slowly. “That’s what’s in the remaining fuel tank. It goes into a queer little aluminum chamber we couldn’t figure out, and from there into the drive tubes. I see—”
He was very pale. Bridges beamed.
“A hundred thousand tons of materials that simply don’t exist on Earth! Pure isotopes, intact! Not a contamination in a carload! My dear chap, I’ve come to like you, but you’ve been hated by everyone else. Now come out and bask in admiration and affection!”
Freddy said, unheeding:
“I’ve been wondering what that aluminum chamber was for. It looked so infernally simple, and I couldn’t see what it did—”
“Come out and have a drink!” insisted Bridges joyously. “Be lionized! Make friends and influence people!”
“No,” said Freddy. He smiled mirthlessly. “I’ll be lynched later anyhow. Hm-m-m. I want to talk to the engineer officer. We want to get that ship navigating under its own power. It’s too big to do anything with towlines.”
“But nobody’s figured out its engines!” protested Bridges. “Apparently there’s nothing but a tiny trickle of nitrogen through a silly chamber that does something to it, and then it flows through aluminum baffles into the drive tubes. It’s too simple! How are you going to make a thing like that work?”
“I think,” said Freddy, “it’s going to be horribly simple. That whole ship is made up of isotopes we don’t have on Earth. No. It has aluminum and carbon. They’re simple substances. Theirs and ours are just alike. But most of the rest—”
He was pale. He looked as if he were suffering.
“I’ll get a couple of tanks made up, of aluminum, and filled with nitrogen. Plain air should do— And I’ll want a gyro-control. I’ll want it made of aluminum, too, with graphite bearings—”
He grinned mirthlessly at Bridges.
“Ever hear of the Ethical Equations, Bridges? You’d never expect them to suggest the answer to a space-drive problem, would you? But that’s what they’ve done. I’ll get the engineer officer to have those things made up. It’s nice to have known you, Bridges—”
As Bridges went out, Freddy Holmes sat down, wetting his lips, to make sketches for the engineer officer to work from.
The control room and the engine room of the monster ship were one. It was a huge, globular chamber filled with apparatus of startlingly alien design. To Freddy, and to Bridges too, now, there was not so much of monstrousness as at first. Eight days of familiarity, and knowledge of how they worked, had made them seem almost normal. But still it was eerie to belt themselves before the instrument board, with only their hand lamps for illumination, and cast a last glance at the aluminum replacements of parts that had been made on some planet of another sun.
“If this works,” said Freddy, and swallowed, “we’re lucky. Here’s the engine control. Cross your fingers, Bridges.”
The interior of the hull was still airless. Freddy shifted a queerly shaped lever an infinitesimal trace. There was a slight surging movement of the whole vast hull. A faint murmuring came through the fabric of the monster ship to the soles of their spacesuit boots. Freddy wet his lips and touched another lever.
“This should be lights.”
It was. Images formed on the queerly shaped screens. The whole interior of the ship glowed. And the whole creation had been so alien as somehow to be revolting in the harsh white light of the hand lamps the men had used. But now it was like a highly improbable fairy palace. The fact that all doors were circular and all passages round tubes was only pleasantly strange, in the many-colored glow of the ship’s own lighting system. Freddy shook his head in his spacesuit helmet; as if to shake away drops of sweat on his forehead.
“The next should be heat,” he said more grimly than before. “We do not touch that! Oh, definitely! But we try the drive.”