“This one isn’t empty,” he grunted, as it lifted very slightly off the floor.
Muttering under his breath, he knocked off the cover and looked in. For a half second he just stared and then he backed away slowly. He tripped over something and fell into a sitting position, still gaping at the case.
I watched his actions with raised eyebrows, then glanced hastily at the case in question. The glance froze into a steady glare, and I emitted a hoarse yell that rattled off each of the four walls.
A boy was sticking his head out of the case-a red-haired dirty-faced kid of thirteen or thereabouts.
“Hello,” said the boy as he clambered out into the open. Neither of us found the strength to answer him, so he continued, “I’m glad you found me. I was getting a cramp in my shoulder trying to curl up in there.”
Whitefield gulped audibly, “Good God! A kid stowaway! And on a voyage to Callisto !”
“And we can’t turn back,” I reminded in a stricken voice, “without wrecking ourselves. The Jovian satellite run is poison.”
“Look here,” Whitefield turned on the kid in a sudden belligerence. “Who are you, you young nut, and what are you doing here?”
The kid flinched. “I’m Stanley Fields,” he answered, a bit scared. “I’m from New Chicago on Ganymede. I-I ran away to space, like they do in books.” He paused and then asked brightly, “Do you think we’ll have a fight with pirates on this trip, mister?”
There was no doubt that the kid was filled to the brim with “Dime Spacers.” I used to read them myself as a youngster.
“How about your parents?” asked Whitefield, grimly.
“Oh, all I got’s an uncle. He won’t care much, I guess.” He had gotten over his first uneasiness and stood grinning at us.
“Well, what’s to be done?” said Whitefield, looking at me in complete helplessness.
I shrugged, “Take him to the Captain. Let him worry.”
“And how will he take it?”
“Anyway he wants. It’s not our fault. Besides, there’s absolutely nothing to be done about the mess.”
And grabbing an arm apiece, we walked away, dragging the kid between us.
Captain Bartlett is a capable officer and one of the deadpan type that very rarely displays emotion. Consequently, on those few occasions when he does, it’s like a Mercurian volcano in full eruption-and you haven’t lived until you’ve seen one of those.
It was a case of the final straw. A satellite run is always wearing. The image of Callisto up ahead was harder on him than on any member of the crew. And now there was this kid stowaway.
It wasn’t to be endured! For half an hour, the Captain shot off salvo after salvo of the very worst sort of profanity. He started with the sun and ran down the list of planets, satellites, asteroids, comets, to the very meteors themselves. He was starting on the nearer fixed stars, when he collapsed from sheer nervous exhaustion. He was so excited that he never thought to ask us what we were doing in the storeroom in the first place, and for that Whitefield and I were duly grateful.
But Captain Bartlett is no fool. Having purged his system of its nervous tension, he saw clearly that that which cannot be cured must be endured.
“Someone take him and wash him up,” he growled wearily, “and keep him out of my sight for a while.” Then, softening a bit, he drew me towards him, “Don’t scare him by telling him where we’re going. He’s in a bad spot, the poor kid.”
When we left, the old soft-hearted fraud was sending through an emergency message to Ganymede trying to get in touch with the kid’s uncle.
Of course, we didn’t know it at the time, but that kid was a Godsend-a genuine stroke of Old Man Luck. He took our minds off Callisto. He gave us something else to think about. The tension, which at the end of four days had almost reached the breaking point, eased completely.
There was something refreshing in the kid’s natural gayety; in his bright ingenuousness. He would meander about the ship asking the silliest kind of questions. He insisted on expecting pirates at any moment. And, most of all, he persisted in regarding each and every one of us as “Dime Spacer” heroes.
That last flattered our egos, of course, and put us on our mettle. We vied with each other in chest-puffing and tale-telling, and old Mac Steeden, who in Stanley’s eyes was a demi-god, broke the all-time record for plain and fancy lying.
I remember, particularly, the talk-fest we had on the seventh day out. We were just past the midpoint of the trip and were set to begin a cautious deceleration. All of us (except Harrigan and Tuley, who were at the engines) were sitting in the control room. Whitefield, with half an eye on the Mathematico, led off, and, as usual, talked zoology.
“It’s a little slug-like thing,” he was saying, “found only on Europa. It’s called the Carolus Europis but we always referred to it as the Magnet Worm. It’s about six inches long and has a sort of a slate-grey color-most disgusting thing you could imagine.
“We spent six months studying that worm, though, and I never saw old Mornikoff so excited about anything before. You see, it killed by some sort of magnetic field. You put the Magnet Worm at one end of the room and a caterpillar, say, at the other. You wait about five minutes and the caterpillar just curls up and dies.
“And the funny thing is this. It won’t touch a frog-too big; but if you take that frog and put some sort of iron band about it, that Magnet Worm kills it just like that. That’s why we know it’s some type of magnetic field that does it-the presence of iron more than quadruples its strength.”
His story made quite an impression on us. Joe Brock’s deep bass voice sounded, “I’m damn glad those things are only four inches long, if what you say is right.”
Mac Steeden stretched and then pulled at his grey mustachios with exaggerated indifference, “You call that worm unusual. It isn’t a patch on some of the things I’ve seen in my day-.” He shook his head slowly and reminiscently, and we knew we were in for a long and gruesome tale. Someone groaned hollowly, but Stanley brightened up the minute he saw the old veteran was in a story-telling mood.
Steeden noticed the kid’s sparkling eyes, and addressed himself to the little fellow, “I was with Peewee Wilson when it happened-you’ve heard of Peewee Wilson, haven’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” Stanley’s eyes fairly exuded hero-worship. “I’ve read books about him. He was the greatest spacer there ever was.”
“You bet all the radium on Titan he was, kid. He wasn’t any taller than you, and didn’t scale much more than a hundred pounds, but he was worth five times his weight in Venusian Devils in any fight. And me and him were just like that. He never went anyplace but what I was with him. When the going was toughest it was always me that he turned to.”
He sighed lugubriously, “I was with him to the very end. It was only a broken leg that kept me from going with him on his last voyage-”
He choked off suddenly and a chilly silence swept over all of us. Whitefield’s face went gray, the Captain’s mouth twisted in a funny sort of way, and I felt my heart skid all the way down to the soles of my feet.
No one spoke, but there was only one thought among the six of us. Peewee Wilson’s last trip had been to Callisto. He had been the second-and had never returned. We were the eighth.
Stanley stared from one to the other of us in astonishment, but we all avoided his eyes.
It was Captain Bartlett that recovered first.
“Say, Steeden, you’ve got an old spacesuit of Peewee Wilson’s, haven’t you?” His voice was calm and steady but I could see that it took a great deal of effort to keep it so.
Steeden brightened and looked up. He had been chewing at the tips of his mustachios (he always did when nervous) and now they hung downwards in a bedraggled fashion.
“Sure thing. Captain. He gave it to me with his own hand, he did. It was back in ‘23 when the new steel suits were just being put out. Peewee didn’t have any more use for his old vitri-rubber contraption, so he let me have it-and I’ve kept it ever since. It’s good luck for me.”
“Well, I was thinking that we might fix up that old suit for the boy here. No other suit’ll fit him, and he needs one bad.”
The veteran’s faded eyes hardened and he shook his head vigorously, “No sir. Captain. No one touches that old suit Peewee gave it to me himself. With his own hand! It’s-it’s sacred, that’s what it is.”
The rest of us chimed in immediately upon the Captain’s side but Steeden’s obstinacy grew and hardened. Again and again he would repeat tonelessly, “That old suit stays where it is.” And he would emphasize the statement with a blow of his gnarled fist.
We were about to give up, when Stanley, hitherto discreetly silent, took a hand.
“Please, Mr. Steeden,” there was just the suspicion of a quaver in his voice. “Please let me have it. I’ll take good care of it. I’ll bet if Peewee Wilson were alive today he’d say I could have it.” His blue eyes misted up and his lower lip trembled a bit. The kid was a perfect actor.
Steeden looked irresolute and took to biting his mustachio again, “Well-oh, hell, you’ve all got it in for me. The kid can have it but don’t expect me to fix it up! The rest of you can lose sleep-I wash my hands of it.”