Metal rungs lined the wall of the shaft. Rand scrambled down rung by rung to the level where the storage holds were located. The hatch here was sealed too, of course.
One of the computer’s scanning pickups was mounted over the hatch. “This is Captain Rand,” he said to it. “Open up, fast!”
The hatch opened. Rand jumped through, into the passageway.
There was plenty of smoke here, too. He looked around, trying to find the storage hold. He had never been down in the storage level before, and he didn’t know his way around. But the doors here were numbered in the high thirties. The storage hold must be far down the passage, near the damaged end of the ship.
It was hard to see with all the smoke in the air.
He knew he didn’t have much time. He started to trot.
A huge figure appeared suddenly out of the dimness ahead and blocked Rand’s way. The big man put up one gigantic arm like a traffic cop telling a motorist to halt.
“Where you think you going, fella?”
“Get out of my way, will you?” Rand said impatiently. “I’m in a hurry.”
“Well, slow down. There ain’t nothing down there you need to see,” the big man rumbled.
He looked more like a gorilla than a man. He was at least half a foot taller than Rand, and Rand wasn’t small. His clothes were torn and stained with grease. His face and his thick red hair were blackened by smoke. He didn’t seem to have shaved in a month. Beads of sweat ran down into his bright blue eyes.
The big man was a deckhand, one of the crewmen who did the dirty jobs in the engine room. Jetmonkeys, they were called. You didn’t need much brain to be a jetmonkey, only lots of muscle. But this one was no monkey. He was more like an ape.
It figures, Rand thought, that this rockhead would be the only survivor of the engine crew. Just a big hunk of walking meat that hardly rates as a human being.
The man kept his hand pressed casually against Rand’s chest, holding him back.
“I told you I’m in a hurry,” Rand said again. He grabbed the other man’s thick wrist with both his hands and tried to wrench it away. But the jet-monkey’s arm didn’t budge.
“You ain’t in any hurry, mac, really, you ain’t,” the jetmonkey said. “You can’t go but twenty feet more thisaway. Look, I just come from there myself.”
“What do you mean, twenty feet?”
The jetmonkey shrugged. “The red wall’s down, thisaway. You can’t get past that nohow. So why knock yourself out trying?”
The red wall?
That topped it, Rand thought. That was the chocolate frosting on the cake.
The red wall was ship slang for the radiation shields that were hidden every fifty feet or so in all the passageways. In case hard radiation was spreading through some part of the ship, the red wall would come down to protect the other part.
The computer must have lowered the red wall here a couple of minutes ago, while Rand was scrambling down the shaft. It meant that the deadly radon had reached the storage hold. Anything on the far side of that wall—including of course the drug cargo—was hopelessly hot from a bath of hard radiation.
Rand knew that he could probably make the computer lift the red wall, just as he had made the computer open the hatches. But what for? He’d never come out of the hold alive.
Shoulders slumping in defeat, he turned away. His rescue mission was a total failure. He hadn’t been able to save Professor Loder, and he hadn’t succeeded in getting the drugs. The overdrive blowup had destroyed everything of value, then.
The jetmonkey looked cheerful, though. He grinned and said, “Hey, smile, mac? You look all used up!”
“I feel all used up.”
“Why you so gloomy? You ain’t dead, are you?”
Rand shook his head angrily. “I might as well be,” he said in a low voice. “Might as well.”
“Hey? What kinda dumb talk is that?” The big man punched Rand cheerfully. “Come on, mac—let’s you and me go find a lifeship and clear outa here. I got a feeling the whole place is goin’ to blow.”
Rand nodded wearily. “All right, let’s go find a lifeship. But first we’ve got to hunt for survivors.” He pointed down the smoke-filled corridor. “Anybody else alive down there?”
“That’s pretty funny,” the jetmonkey said. “Tell me another joke, now.”
“The whole crew’s dead, then?”
“All but me, looks like. I always knew I was a lucky one. When the drive blew, I was down back getting some new fuel rods. I heard a big bang and came out for a look. Boom! No engine room! The whole thing gone! Boom!”
“Killed everyone at once?”
“Don’t know about killed, but they sure weren’t there no more! Except a few, anyway. And they weren’t looking so good. I woulda brought them out, but there wasn’t no sense in it. Not much left of them, you know?”
They reached the hatch of the service shaft. The jetmonkey tried to pull it open, but it stayed shut.
Rand looked up at the computer’s scanner pickup and said, “This is Captain Rand. Open up!”
The hatch opened. The jetmonkey looked at Rand in amazement.
“Captain Rand?” he said. “You ain’t really the captain, are you?”
Rand managed to smile. “Does this look like a uniform I’m wearing? The captain’s dead. So are all the other officers. I got the computer to believe I was the new captain, so it would obey my orders.”
“Hey, pretty nice going! You got to be smart to think faster than them brains! Glad to know you, Captain Rand!”
“Rand’s enough. What’s your name?”
“Dombey,” the jetmonkey said. “Bill Dombey.”
“Okay, Dombey, let’s go find survivors.” Rand made a gloomy face. “I know of at least one. A character named Leswick. He’s no bargain, but I guess we ought to rescue him.”
Rand led the way up the hatch and back to the cabin level. The smoke was thicker than ever up there, now.
“Leswick!” he yelled. “Where are you, Leswick?”
“Near Cabin Five,” came the faint voice of the Metaphysical Synthesist. “Someone’s alive down here!”
“We’re coming,” Rand called.
He and Dombey stumbled through the smoke. Soon the figure of Leswick could dimly be seen. The philosopher was standing over someone who was covered with blood.
Leswick glanced up. “It’s that businessman from the Mars Colony. He’s badly hurt, but maybe he’ll pull through. We can carry him to the lifeship—”
“Wait,” Rand said.
He knelt beside the fallen man and examined him. It was a messy sight. The businessman must have been thrown against the side of the cabin by the shock of the blowup. His head was twisted in a funny way and there was a deep cut behind one ear. Blood was trickling from his lips.
Rand said, “We’ll have to leave him behind.” “We can’t do that!”
Leswick gasped. “That would be murder!”
“Look,” Rand said, “this fellow’s got a broken neck and maybe a fractured skull too. And we aren’t doctors. By the time we could carry him to the lifeship he’d be dead.”
“But to abandon him in cold blood—” Leswick protested.
“Do you think he could survive a voyage in a lifeship?” Rand asked. “Forget about him. There’s no way we can help him, Leswick. Absolutely no way.”
Dombey chimed in, “Yeah. This guy, he’s mostly dead right now. We better save room in the lifeship for somebody in better shape.”
“And we’d better get going fast,” Rand said.
He turned and headed back down the passageway. Dombey followed him. After a moment, so did Leswick, leaving the dying man where he lay.