“Two thousand UCs should cover it, I think. I have that much with me.” Eves handed the captain his card with the debit already coded. O’Bannion looked at it, frowned, then inserted it into the ship’s reader. Eves applied his left thumb to the pad, then wrote his code longhand beneath the privacy hood. The reader’s light signaled that the codes and handwriting matched. The transfer would be completed as soon as the captain indicated his acceptance by the entry of the ship’s code.
“Captain,” I interrupted as O’Bannion was about to enter the Orion’s CAC, “I want to go on record as advising Mr. Eves against leaving in his ship.”
“What?”
“Mr. Eves, your ship may well have sustained serious damage or equipment failure,” I said, turning to the clown-like figure. “If your injectors fail or the displacers are too far out of alignment or if anything else goes wrong, you’re going to find yourself stranded light-years away from any help. If you leave under these circumstances it could well mean your death.”
“I’m not leaving my ship here.”
“As I’ve told you, there’s no way we can take both you and the Montclair to Coffernam.”
“In that case, give me my fuel and I’ll leave under my own power.”
“Captain, for the Orion’s protection, I request that you log my warning to Mr. Eves and record his acknowledgment that he’s assuming all of the risks of this ill advised action.”
“Mr. Eves?” the captain said, looking at our pale, orange-haired guest.
“Fine, log whatever you like so long as I can get fueled up and on my way.”
The captain turned on the log cameras and Eves and I repeated our positions for the record. An hour later the Montclair briefly glittered a faint, pale blue, seemed to twist in on itself, and then was gone. Immediately thereafter the Orion brought up her own bubble, slipped herself into Non-E, and disappeared as well.
Calipha was as good as his word. With the additional cooling lines he had installed around the converter the displacers were now synchronized to within 2 percent of nominal so long as we held her to no more than three-quarters rated EV.
“I figure we’ll make Coffernam about four standards late,” I told Calipha over a cup of hot, bitter caff late the next day, “but at least we’ll make it in one piece.”
“I never thought otherwise. The Orion’s got a few years on her, but the old girl will get us where we’re going.” Calipha took a long look at the roiling black surface of his caff, as dark as the empty stretches between the stars, then, in a musing voice asked, “What do you think’s going to happen to Eves? You think the Combination will catch up to him before he can sell the secret of that Prox-2 of his to someone else?”
“God, who knows? Maybe they already have it. Maybe it was developed under private contract for the Feds and he just ripped off the prototype. Maybe right now there are five copies of her plans in five different protected vaults.”
“And maybe Eves blew up the lab and killed the technicians before he stole her and the only set of her plans is in the Montclair’s computer.”
“Hell, anything’s possible.”
I knew, of course, what was really behind all of Calipha’s questions. In a year or two or three, were we going to start seeing ships suddenly missing, finding discarded bodies exploded in vacuum after thieves and rapists and thugs from a hundred worlds had picked the broken ships clean and disappeared invisibly back into Non-E? If Eves and the Montclair made it to any industrialized world, I figured that nightmare was as certain as death. If he didn’t, well, like I said, who knows? No matter how you figured it, someone discovered this Prox-2 once, and sure as hell it would be discovered again. It was just a matter of time. But how much time, how long would we be safe? Five years? Ten? Twenty? Someday before I quit spacing, unless my ticket got canceled early, I was sure I’d see those blown-out hulls, those bodies drifting slowly around a looted ship. But not today. Not for a while yet.
“I told him not to go,” I said softly, talking more to myself than to Calipha.
“What?”
“I warned him. A ship that’s failed once can fail again. He was no engineer. He wouldn’t know a good displacer from a sour one. Out here, anything can happen.”
“What are you saying?”
“Nothing. It’s just a feeling I have.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“Just a hunch, like a cold puff of air on the back of my neck. Only a fool would trust a ship like the Montclair, experimental and all. I just don’t think she’ll make it to Jasmine. I’ve got this feeling that a few hours into Non-E something else is going to go wrong and dump Eves back into E-Space light-years from anywhere. And him with just those two boxes of emergency rations and no extra water tanks. I hope he finds an easier way out than starving to death.”
I glanced up from my cup and saw Calipha looking at me as if his eyes could pluck information directly from my mind if only he stared at me hard enough.
“Dondero, when I left you down there in the Montclair’s engine room, did you…? You didn’t…?”
Calipha’s voice trailed off as I continued to stare at a spot on the wall just to the right of his ear. “Uh… never mind.…” Calipha said finally, turning away. Then he looked back and spoke again a moment later in a more philosophical tone: “I guess a man shouldn’t get into this business unless he knows what he’s doing. There are just too many ways to end up dead out here if you happen to get the wrong ship.”
I didn’t say anything. For an instant I had a vision of the Montclair, dead and lifeless, floating out there somewhere in the black, empty space between the stars. Then I blinked, and it was gone.