Star Quest Page 5

  Cyrus Stockton, among others, had been wiping sweat from his face. He stood up and pointed accusingly at the swami. "You have no basis whatsoever for making such an assinine statement!"

  "But I do," said the holy man gravely. "You must not disregard some of the special faculties that have been directed to the service of this mission. In my own case, I refer to a sensitivity to multiple levels of consciousness. I have sensed the presence of such an intelligence, especially in recent weeks."

  There was a moment of stunned silence.

  Then somebody shouted over one of the remote monitors. "He's speaking of the almighty hand of God!"

  "There go the fundamentalists again," said Poyntner disgustedly. "Thank God I'm an atheist!"

  That was when things began to come apart. Red lights flashed near Lyshenko, and P.Q. Bates whispered hastily in his ear. Amidst a rising storm of reaction in the staff room, the commander turned to his aides. A young medi-tech came running into the recovery room for Dr. Sachs. She was urgently needed. Without a word, she hurried out of the room.

  "This looks like a rash of the flippies," said Fitz.

  The swami excused himself, and Lalille went with him. Danny looked at Mabuse. "It's pretty way-out stuff, Boozie. Are you religious?" They both listened to the beep of distant alert horns.

  "They're cracking up around here, Danny. Just now I'll go for the Skipper's advice, to batten down the hatches!"

  For once, Foxy was noncommittal. He sat there staring into space, pale as a ghost. The speakers crackled as the commander's broad face dominated all the smaller screens. On the big screen, the joint-security men were visible behind him as they dictated orders through special corn circuits.

  "The hour is up!" Lyshenko fairly bellowed. "Under crisis provisions, this meeting is adjourned until after retropulsion. All personnel will have ten minutes to get to the pads. That is all!"

  There was a scuffling of feet in the recovery room, and a flurry of exclamations, as everyone moved toward the exits.

  "Good old hot Sachs wins her point," said Boozie as they all got up. "The joint's jumping, but the Skipper must have been ready. The screws are loose."

  Fitz nodded grimly. "He's going to tighten them down under high-G pressure."

  Foxy at last came to himself. "Yeah, it's the old fire hose technique!"

  They all headed for the pad rooms where the inertial slings were located. On each man's mind was a suspenseful thought: retropulsion was only an interim measure. It didn't have to mean that the Homers had lost the argument.

  It was later, when the great star ship was trembling under the high Gs of the mighty retroengines and when all personnel were strapped into their pads, that Danny experienced a shock of revelation. Boozie's remark about battening the hatches had suddenly shot his memory back to the death of Dr. Ernst Hahnemann, the former project administrator.

  "My God!" he shouted above the rumble of the bulkhead frames.

  Fitz lay closest to him in the racks. "What's wrong?" he yelled back.

  "The S-link! I think I know where it went!"

  His haunting new sense of futility rose inside of him like a suffocating flood. He knew now that there'd be no returning home. As for Holy Sam's alleged cosmic presence out here beyond the Barrier Wall, that part was too much for his comprehension. He wondered, however, if it had anything to do with the heavy increase of Jumpers in recent weeks. Were they responding to some strange wisdom of Nature, like lemmings, filled with a blind impulse to land on an unknown world?

  CHAPTER V

  "What is the nature of your business, Captain? The commander is very busy."

  Danny didn't exactly hate the pipsqueak adjutant, but he had little use for P.Q. Bates' supercilious attitude. Why did these types always crop up on staff?

  "Come on, Philo, this is urgent!" he said irritably into his cabin phone. "I have special information for that meeting. Now damn it, cut the red tape!"

  "You know your chain of command, Captain Troy. If you have something so vital to report, I'm sure that Major Pike–"

  Philo was interrupted as Lyshenko himself grabbed the phone.

  "All right, Captain, make it fast! What is it?"

  "Sir, I believe I know what happened to the S-link."

  "What? You mean the spare?"

  "Yes sir. I think I can prove it was lost."

  There was a brief moment of silence, during which he could hear the Russian's heavy breathing.

  "Troy, do you know what you're saying?"

  "Yes sir. I'm a Homer, Commander. I'm not in favor of a landing, but I felt you should have this information."

  "Feelings have nothing to do with duty, Captain. Now what's your proof?"

  "You want it now, sir, or at the meeting?"

  "Now, just the basics, and make it fast!"

  "It happened back at our last Barrier crossing, sir, during the warp shakes. I was outside, and I remember. One of our storage pods was ripped open and–"

  "Way back then? You mean when Hahnemann got killed?"

  "Yes sir."

  "So you think we lost the S-link then?"

  "Yes sir."

  "Anybody else see what you saw?"

  "Yes sir. Major Pike was there, plus some salvage techs."

  There was a longer moment of silence, followed by an abrupt decision: "The second leg of the staff meeting starts in ten minutes, Captain. Be there!"

  That was all, or at least Danny thought it was all. He found out shortly that he had started some kind of chain reaction, but just what kind he wasn't sure. Later he figured that Master Bates had tattled to Pike, because Adolf had quickly changed the signals.

  He was distracted in the interim by having to make a quick visit to sick bay for a fresh spray and bandages so that he could at least get his shirt on. He also encountered his other leadman, Flight Engineer Ogden Hapgood, who gave him the latest nav poop. The retropulsion had chopped down their speed to one-half C. He didn't have time to go into the S-link situation with Happy, but he knew that if they were faced with a landing decision there'd have to be several more heavy retro phases before they'd be down to planetary velocity. Then there would be the long grind back to that unknown solar system, and their final bid for survival.

  These things were on his mind when he acknowledged the salutes of the security guards and entered the staff room with an unbuttoned shirt. He stopped in the entrance and stared. No staff meeting. The few faces he did see staring back at him were not very happy ones.

  "Don't Just stand there, Troy," said Lyshenko. "On Major Pike's advice, this is a closed hearing. Now let's get on with it!"

  He had walked into the lion's den. Adolphus Pike sat there glowering at him. He found a seat beside Jerry Fontaine while the commander filled him in. He explained briskly that it was inadvisable to stir up hysteria prematurely until they were ready for a landing decision. This was a chance to kill two birds with one stone, by also having a forum on the cross-complaint involving Jerry Fontaine, Dr. Sachs, and Major Pike.

  "Besides," he said, "if we're faced with a planetary entry, I want to clear up some other items. That's why you're all here. P.Q., take a log entry."

  While he transmitted his official data on the closed hearing to Philo Bates, he was interrupted several times by the phones behind him. During this, everybody sat there engaged in some loaded eyeballing. Lined up across from Danny were Alonso Madrazo, Frederica Sachs, and Tallullah Marsh along with Dr. Cyrus Stockton, who was Jerry Fontaine's superior in the astrogeology section. Seated next to Lyshenko was Pike, still staring blazes at him. Obviously his message had to do with going to the commander over his head.

  Danny glanced at Frederica with the trace of a grin, as if to say, "Big deal!" Her pale, acquiline face was set for a battle, and her troubled gaze was fixed on Jerry. The blond-bearded exobiologist sat slumped beside him like a man sentenced to the pillory. His head was still bandaged, and he looked a bit groggy from a sedative he had taken.

  Lyshenko finally told Phi
lo to cut off the phones.

  "All right," he said to the group, "we have a short agenda to cover. By the way, Pike, who's on the bridge?"

  The first officer looked at him as if he'd been caught woolgathering. "Oh, well, Happy was on his way up."

  "No CO in the meantime?" As Pike hesitated, Lyshenko snapped at him. "That's an infraction, Major. We may have some screws loose around here, but I want the nuts and bolts tied down on my command deck. I know your crew of hard guts is competent, but that's no excuse, not with my first and second officers sitting here in the staff room!"

  Pike stared at him sullenly. Evidently this was not his day. "Speaking of clearing up a few items, sir," he said, "I have another complaint to file for the forum session." His long jaw muscles tensed visibly as he glared at Frederica. "It seems the headshrink department is getting out of bounds and causing a lot of hysteria by giving people too damn much to think about."

  Frederica reddened. "Speaking of going out of bounds," she said swiftly, "when a ship's officer can arrest and beat up injured members of the project staff–"

  Lyshenko slapped the table top. "Stop that, Doctor, right now! We'll get to all that in due time, but I'll tell you this: the psychology section had better lay off the panic button, or I'll take direct action myself! Is that clear?"

  Tallullah placed a hand on Frederica's in matronly defense. "Not too clear, Alex. Let's keep our heads now, all of us."

  Cyrus Stockton must have seen the chance he'd been waiting for. He was a small, beady-eyed man with a nervous mouth twitch. "It's hard to do that," he said sharply, "when you've got mad monks and swamis creating a lunatic fringe. We don't need that kind of warpage here. We've got to use our intelligence!"

  Frederica pulled her hand away from Tallullah. "God-given intelligence, were you going to say? Or are we playing God on our own?" The magnified amber eyes flashed defiance, or was it, Danny thought, a gleam of inner conflict? "I'm not a fundamentalist, but nobody's going to invade that kind of privacy–"

  Pike cut her off in acid disdain. "Look who's talking about invasion of privacy!" He appealed to Lyshenko. "Sir, there's a very dangerous piece of spying this woman is doing."

  "Alex," said Alonso, quietly but firmly, "may I suggest–"

  "Yes!" said Lyshenko heatedly. "You certainly may! Now that's enough from all of you, or I'll start making use of my mode-one prerogatives! We're going to get down to business. First, let's have the report from Troy. Captain, what do you know about the spare S-link?"

  Danny told his story as simply and to the point as he could. He referred to the warp-storm crisis eighteen months ago, describing the crews who went out on the frame in suits. (Why the devil was Pike watching him like a cat?) "A tie frame had broken loose under the stress, and it ripped open cargo pod six." As he talked he wondered about the strange surveillance he was getting from the Big M and the Duke. Their eyes never left his face. Was this an inquest or something? "I and some of the other men saw the shell rupture, sir. As you know, the pods are under a light helium pack. It was enough pressure to blow loose some of the spares."

  "Is that the only proof you have?"

  "Pod six was where the S-link was stored, and in the damaged section. There was an inventory later, after repairs and all, but–"

  "Yes?"

  "It was a manual report, sir."

  Pike interrupted. "I saw a tab-out several months later from the computer. The spare link was listed then."

  "And still is," said Alonso. "But we have no spare. As we all know, a crew went out to pod six right after the explosion to get the extra link, and it was missing."

  As Lyshenko's heavy-lidded eyes swung back to him, Danny felt obliged to say the rest. "The data base files are all computer dated, sir. I checked that out. The inventory input that listed the spare link was dated before the warp storm."

  "And the manual report?"

  "It was never fed in."

  "Why not?"

  "I believe it was burned in the fire we had later, down in data control. No one's taken an inventory since." He nodded his head toward Alonso. "Except, as the doctor says, when men were sent out to the pod just recently."

  Tallullah cleared her throat huskily. "It would appear, then, that there's no use searching for it on board. There would be no reason for it to be here, would there?" Her shrewd array eyes swept the small group as if daring anyone to challenge her logic.

  Lyshenko stared at all of them, one by one, and finally looked at Pike. "At this stage, the verification of the pod rupture is the final point. Major, you were there, as I recall. What did you see?"

  Pike stiffened slowly and glanced around at everyone warily. Suddenly, Danny's mouth almost gaped as a rush of memory came back to him about the death of Eric Hahnemann.

  Dr. Hahnemann had been a nuclear-propulsion specialist. There had been a question about control lines out to the laser pile. Pike had been assigned to take him out there, but they never got that far. He saw the scene now as Pike must be seeing it. There was a cable flailing about, which was the probable cause of the leak in Hahnemann's suit. He and Pike were momentarily dislodged from the frame, trying to hand jet back to the manlock. Hahnemann finally just drifted, unconscious, unable to make it yet only yards away. The most startling recollection was of that one brief moment when Pike had stood in the manlock, undecided, before closing the outer hatch.

  "Yes," said Pike hesitantly, "it happened just before–"

  "I know," said Lyshenko impatiently, "just before the accident that killed Dr. Hahnemann. What we're getting at now is, did you see pod six when it ruptured?"

  Pike's brow gleamed faintly with perspiration. "Yes, I saw it. Like Danny says, quite a few spare racks went out with the helium burst."

  There was a moment of charged silence that was broken by Cyrus Stockton. "Alex, I'd say the matter is closed. There is no spare. We have to face the alternative."

  The Major seemed relieved to get off the subject of the barrier crisis. "I have to second that, sir. We've searched the ship pretty well, anyway." He turned to face the commander's inscrutable surveillance. "You know I'm a Homer. The last thing I want is to play Robinson Crusoe out here, but that's it! We lost the spare link when that pod was ruptured."

  Commander Lyshenko straightened his heavy frame and then leaned forward with both thick elbows on the table, his slightly slanted dark eyes sweeping the group with a fierce intensity. "All right, but before I abort this mission I want to explore something quickly. Cyrus, you're the planetary geologist. What are our chances? You and Poyntner have been running the scans on that system."

  Stockton smiled faintly, his thin lips twitching involuntarily. "Running scans is one thing, interpreting them is another. Jerry's the expert on that. He's managed to obtain some new data."

  Jerry Fontaine raised his bandaged head in dazed startlement as all eyes turned to him. A discussion followed that brought out an unexpected point. Jerry bad been down in the keel-pod observatory just before the explosion. This explained his presence in the maintenance section. He had started back just after the catastrophe happened. As they all went into the technical aspects of remote planetary analysis, Danny kept thinking about Pike. Now he could understand why the Major had wanted a private hearing on the subject of the barrier crisis. Inevitably it would have reminded everybody on board about the Hahnemann incident. He had tried to live it down. Danny grimly appreciated how peeved Adolf must have been when he had gone over his head on a thing like that. Arriving at a landing decision, in view and hearing of everybody on board, would have gotten things out of control. Perhaps he owed Pike an apology.

  As it was, he had a hard enough time to keep down his own emotions, considering the inevitable. They were to be castaways for life, if they survived. He looked across at young Freddie Sachs and her blousy picture collar. To hell with Robinson Crusoe. Who would play Adam?

  Back in the corner, P.Q. Bates sat at his button and phone board, pale, frightened, and stripped of every supercilious atom.
The poor little shrimp was trembling. To those present who were listening, the technical discussion was scary talk. The experts were speculating about things like galactic radiations and high-magnitude solar flares, thermal mapping, carbon-based life catalysis, ionization layers, carbon dioxide pressure bands and signs of volcanism. However, nothing was said about usable Lebensraum. One photographic orbital probe and one biochemical landing probe had been sent out during their closest approach. The photo-probe's telemetry had failed, although it was well within the system by now. The bio-probe had successfully landed on the most interesting of the ten planets of the system and had sent back promising signs of a life-support environment.

  However, Lyshenko soon cut off the discussion. "This can take too long, and I'll be damned if I'm going to approach the survival problem by forming another committee. We have to make a landing in any case. In the months ahead, just find out all you can!"

  "That will be my department," said Alonso. "But in the meantime, may I suggest that we hold onto a message Alex has given us. We are intelligent members of an advanced civilization and are backed by the highest technology in our history. I would add this thought: landing and surviving on an alien plant is one thing. Should we succeed with that phase there is still another possibility of eventually returning to Earth."

  "What?" Philo Bates jumped to his feet, but he was ignored as everybody stared at the Duke.

  "Do you think there's an outside chance of that?" asked Lyshenko with visible intensity.

  "Well, according to Jerry here, the hydrogen and helium stability of number four may not all be due to photodecomposition of water vapor. Some of it may be attributable to radioactive decay in the crust."

  "And we're not dealing with a proto-atmospheric state there," said Stockton, "considering the low count of neon, argon, and krypton. As for survival, the ultraviolet absorption gives us plenty of oxygen. With the fairly heavy greenhouse effect and signs of volcanism, I'd say you're looking at a late Mesozoic or early Cenozoic stage. That's plenty of time for isotropic development in the natural state. It seems workable."