CHAPTER II
Bad News
Hilton instantly exploded out of the cabin. The ship was bucking hard. Behind him the mate heard Danvers shouting something about incompetent pilots, but he knew it probably wasn’t the Selenite’s fault. He was in the control cabin while La Cucaracha was still shuddering on the downswing of the last jump. Ts’ss was a tornado of motion, his multiple legs scrabbling frantically at a dozen instruments.
“I’ll call the shot!” Hilton snapped, and Ts’ss instantly concentrated on the incredibly complicated controls that were guiding the ship into hyper.
The mate was at the auxiliary board. He jerked down levers.
“Hyper stations!” he shouted. “Close helmets! Grab the braces, you sun-jumpers! Here we go!”
A needle swung wildly across a gauge, hovering at the mark. Hilton dropped into a seat, sliding his arms under the curved braces and hooking his elbows around them. His ankles found similar supports beneath him. The visor screens blurred and shimmered with crawling colors, flicking back and forth, on and off, as La Cucaracha fought the see-saw between hyper and normal space.
Hilton tried another mike. “Captain Danvers. Hyper stations. All right?”
“Yeah, I’m in my suit,” Danvers’ voice said. “Can you take it? Need me? What’s wrong with Ts’ss?”
“The vocor at my board blew out, Cap’n,” Ts’ss said. “I couldn’t reach the auxiliary.”
“We must need an overhaul bad,” Danvers said, and cut off.
Hilton grinned. “We need a rebuilding job,” he muttered, and let his fingers hang over the control buttons, ready in case Ts’ss slipped.
But the Selenite was like a precision machine; he never slipped. The old Cucaracha shook in every brace. The atomic engines channeled fantastic amounts of energy into the dimensional gap. Then, suddenly, the see-saw balanced for an instant, and in that split-second the ship slid across its power-bridge and was no longer matter. It no longer existed, in the three-dimensional plane. To an observer, it would have vanished. But to an observer in hyper-space, it would have sprung into existence from white nothingness.
Except that there were no hyper-spatial observers. In fact, there wasn’t anything in hyper—it was, as some scientist had once observed, just stuff, and nobody knew what the stuff was. It was possible to find out some of hyper’s properties, but you couldn’t go much farther than that. It was white, and it must have been energy, of a sort, for it flowed like an inconceivably powerful tide, carrying ships with it at speeds that would have destroyed the crew in normal space. Now, in the grip of the hyper current, La Cucaracha was racing toward the Big Night at a velocity that would take it past Pluto’s orbit in a matter of seconds.
But you couldn’t see Pluto. You had to work blind here, with instruments. And if you got on the wrong level, it was just too bad—for you!
Hastily Hilton checked the readings. This was Hyper C-758-R. That was right. On different dimensional levels of hyper, the flow ran in various directions. Coming back, they’d alter their atomic structure to ride Hyper M-75-L, which rushed from Fria toward Earth and beyond it.
“That’s that,” Hilton said, relaxing and reaching for a cigarette. “No meteors, no stress-strain problems—just drift till we get close to Fria. Then we drop out of hyper, and probably fall apart.”
An annunciator clicked. Somebody said:
“Mr. Hilton, there’s some trouble.”
“There is. Okay, Wiggins. What now?”
“One of the new men. He was out skinside making repairs.”
“You had plenty of time to get back inside,” snapped Hilton, who didn’t feel quite as sure of that as he sounded. “I called hyper stations.”
“Yes, sir. But this fella’s new. Looks like he never rode a hyper-ship before. Anyhow, his leg’s broken. He’s in sick bay.”
Hilton thought for a moment. La Cucaracha was understaffed anyway. Few good men would willingly ship on such an antique.
“I’ll come down,” he said, and nodded at Ts’ss. Then he went along the companionway, glancing in at the skipper, who had gone to sleep. He used the handholds to pull himself along, for there was no accelerative gravity in hyper. In sick bay he found the surgeon, who doubled in brass as cook, finishing a traction splint on a pale, sweating youngster who was alternately swearing feebly and groaning.
“What’s the matter with him?” Hilton asked.
Bruno, the sawbones, gave a casual soft salute. “Simple fracture. I’m giving him a walker-splint, so he’ll be able to get around. And he shot his cookies, so he can’t be used to hyper.”
“Looks like it,” Hilton said, studying the patient. The boy opened his eyes, glared at Hilton.
“I was shanghaied!” he yelped. “I’ll sue you for all you’re worth!”
The first officer was unperturbed.
“I’m not the skipper, I’m mate,” Hilton said. “And I can tell you right now that we’re not worth much. Ever hear about discipline?”
“I was shanghaied!”
“I know it. That’s the only way we can get a full crew to sign articles on La Cucaracha. I mentioned discipline. We don’t bother much with it here. Just the same, you’d better call me Mister when people are around. Now shut up and relax. Give him a sedative, Bruno.”
“No! I want to send a spacegram!”
“We’re in hyper. You can’t. What’s your name?”
“Saxon. Luther Saxon. I’m one of the consulting engineers on Transmat.”
“The matter-transmission gang? What were you doing around the space-docks?”
Saxon gulped. “Well—uh—I go out with the technical crews to supervise new installations. We’d just finished a Venusian transmission station. I went out for a few drinks—that was all! A few drinks, and—”
“You went to the wrong place,” Hilton said, amused. “Some crimp gave you a Mickey. Your name’s on the articles, anyhow, so you’re stuck, unless you jump ship. You can send a message from Fria, but it’d take a thousand years to reach Venus or Earth. Better stick around, and you can ride back with us.”
“On this crate? It isn’t safe. She’s so old I’ve got the jitters every time I take a deep breath.”
“Well, stop breathing,” Hilton said curtly. La Cucaracha was an old tramp, of course, but he had shipped on her for a good many years. It was all right for this Transmat man to talk; the Transmat crews never ran any risks.
“Ever been on a hyper-ship before?” he asked.
“Naturally,” Saxon said. “As a passenger! We have to get to a planet before we can install a transmission station, don’t we?”
“Uh-huh.” Hilton studied the scowling face on the pillow. “You’re not a passenger now, though.”
“My leg’s broken.”
“You got an engineering degree?”
Saxon hesitated and finally nodded.
“All right, you’ll be assistant pilot. You won’t have to walk much to do that. The pilot’ll tell you what to do. You can earn your mess that way.”
Saxon sputtered protests.
“One thing,” Hilton said. “Better not tell the skipper you’re a Transmat man. He’d hang you over one of the jets. Send him for’rd when he’s fixed up, Bruno.”
“Yessir,” Bruno said, grinning faintly. An old deep-space man, he didn’t like Transmat either.
Hilton pulled himself back to the control room. He sat down and watched the white visoscreens. Most of Ts’ss’ many arms were idle. This was routine now.
“You’re getting an assistant,” Hilton said after a while. “Train him fast. That’ll give us all a break. If that fat-headed Callistan pilot hadn’t jumped on Venus, we’d be set.”
“This is a short voyage,” Ts’ss said. “It’s a fast hyper-flow on this level.”
“Yeah. This new guy. Don’t tell the skipper, but he’s a Transmat man.”
Ts’ss laughed a little.
“That will pass, too,” he said. “We’re an old race, Mr. Hilton. Earthmen are babies compared to the Selenites. Hyper-ships are fading out, and eventually Transmat will fade out too, when something else comes.”
“We won’t fade,” Hilton said, rather surprised to find himself defending the skipper’s philosophy. “Your people haven’t—you Selenites.”
“Some of us are left, that’s true,” Ts’ss said softly. “Not many. The great days of the Selenite Empire passed very long ago. But there are still a few Selenites left, like me.”
“You keep going, don’t you? You can’t kill off a—a race.”
“Not easily. Not at once. But you can, eventually. And you can kill a tradition, too, though it may take a long time. But you know what the end will be.”
“Oh, shut up,” Hilton said. “You talk too much.”
Ts’ss bent again above the controls. La Cucaracha fled on through the white hyper-flow, riding as smoothly as the day she had been launched.
But when they reached Fria, it would be rough space and high gravity. Hilton grimaced.
He thought: So what? This is just another voyage. The fate of the universe doesn’t depend on it. Nothing depends on it, except, maybe, whether we make enough profit to have the old lady overhauled. And that won’t matter to me for it’s my last voyage into the Big Night.
He watched the screens. He could not see it, but he knew that it hung beyond the universal whiteness, in a plane invisible to his eyes. The little sparks of worlds and suns glowed in its immensity, but never brightened it. It was too vast, too implacable. And even the giant suns would be quenched in its ocean, in the end. As everything else would be quenched, as everything moved on the tides of time into that huge darkness.
That was progress. A wave was born and gathered itself and grew—and broke. A newer wave was behind it. And the old one slipped back and was lost forever. A few foam-flecks and bubbles remained, like Ts’ss, remnant of the giant wave of the ancient Selenite Empire.
The Empire was gone. It had fought and ruled a hundred worlds, in its day. But, in the end, the Big Night had conquered and swallowed it.
As it would swallow the last hyper-ship eventually. . . .
They hit Fria six days later, Earth time. And hit was the word. One of Ts’ss’ chitin-covered arms was snapped off by the impact, but he didn’t seem to mind. He couldn’t feel pain, and he could grow another limb in a few weeks. The crew, strapped to their landing braces, survived with minor bruises.
Luther Saxon, the Transmat man, was in the auxiliary pilot’s seat—he had enough specialized engineering training so that he learned the ropes fast—and he acquired a blue bump on his forehead, but that was all. La Cucaracha had come out of hyper with a jolt that strained her fat old carcass to the limit, and the atmosphere and gravity of Fria was the penultimate straw. Seams ripped, a jet went out, and new molten streaks appeared on the white-hot hull.
The crew had been expecting liberty. There was no time for that. Hilton told off working gangs to relieve each other at six-hour intervals, and he said, rather casually, that Twilight was out of bounds. He knew the crew would ignore that order. There was no way to keep the men aboard, while Twilight sold liquor and even more effective escape-mechanisms. Still, there were few women on Fria, and Hilton hoped that enough working stiffs would keep on the job to get La Cucaracha repaired and spaceworthy before the fungus cargo was loaded.
He knew that Wiggins, the second mate, would do his best. For himself he went with the skipper in search of Christie, the Fria trader. The way led through Twilight, the roofed settlement that was shielded from the hot, diamond-bright glare of the primary. It wasn’t big. But then Fria was an outpost, with a floating population of a few hundred. They came in and out with the ships and the harvest seasons. If necessary, Hilton thought, some of the bums could be shanghaied. Still, it wasn’t too likely that any of the crew would desert. None of them would be paid off till they were back in the Solar System.
They found Christie in his plasticoid cabin, a fat, bald, sweating man puffing at a huge meerschaum pipe. He looked up, startled, and then resignedly leaned back in his chair and waved them to seats.
“Hello Chris,” Danvers said. “What’s new?”
“Hello, Skipper. Hi, Logger. Have a good trip?”
“The landing wasn’t so good,” Hilton said.
“Yeah, I heard about it. Drinks?”
“Afterward,” Danvers said, though his eyes gleamed. “Let’s clean up the business first. Got a good shipment ready?”
Christie smoothed one of his fat, glistening cheeks. “Well—you’re a couple of weeks early.”
“You keep a stock-pile.”
The trader grunted. “Fact is—look, didn’t you get my message? No, I guess there wasn’t time. I sent a spacemail on the Blue Sky last week for you, Skipper.”
Hilton exchanged glances with Danvers.
“You sound like bad news, Chris,” he said. “What is it?”
Christie said uncomfortably, “I can’t help it. You can’t meet competition like Transmat You can’t afford to pay their prices. You got running expenses on La Cucaracha. Jet-fuel costs dough, and—well, Transmat sets up a transmitting station, pays for it, and the job’s done, except for the power outlay. With atomic, what does that amount to?”
Danvers was growing red.
“Is Transmat setting up a station here?” Hilton said hastily.
“Yeah. I can’t stop ’em. It’ll be ready in a couple of months.”
“But why? The fungus isn’t worth it. There isn’t enough market. You’re pulling a bluff, Chris. What do you want? A bigger cut?”
Christie regarded his meerschaum. “Nope. Remember the ore tests twelve years ago? There’s valuable ores on Fria, Logger. Only it’s got to be refined plenty. Otherwise it’s too bulky for shipment. And the equipment would cost too much to freight by spaceship. It’s big stuff—I mean big.”
Hilton glanced at Danvers. The skipper was purple now, but his mouth was clamped tightly.
“But—hold on, Chris. How can Transmat get around that? By sending the crude ores to Earth in their gadgets?”
“The way I heard it,” Christie said, “is that they’re going to send the refining machines here and set ’em up right on Fria. All they need for that is one of their transmitters. The field can be expanded to take almost anything, you know. Shucks you could move a planet that way if you had the power! They’ll do the refining here and transmit the refined ores back Earthside.”
“So they want ores,” Danvers said softly. “They don’t want the fungus, do they?”
Christie nodded. “It looks like they do. I had an offer. A big one. I can’t afford to turn it down, and you can’t afford to meet it, Skipper. You know that as well as I do. Thirteen bucks a pound.”
Danvers snorted. Hilton whistled.
“No, we can’t meet that,” he said. “But how can they afford to pay it?”
“Quantity. They channel everything through their transmitters. They set one up on a world, and there’s a door right to Earth—or any planet they name. One job won’t net them much of a profit, but a million jobs—and they take everything! So what can I do, Logger?”
Hilton shrugged. The captain stood up abruptly.
Christie stared at his pipe.
“Look, Skipper. Why not try the Orion Secondaries? I heard there was a bumper crop of bluewood gum there.”
“I heard that a month ago,” Danvers said. “So did everybody else. It’s cleaned out by now. Besides, the old lady won’t stand a trip like that. I’ve got to get an overhaul fast, and a good one, back in the System.”
There was a silence. Christie was sweating harder than ever. “What about that drink?” he suggested. “We can maybe figure a way.”
“I can still pay for my own drinks,” Danvers lashed out. He swung around and was gone.
“Jehoshaphat, Logger!” Christie said. “What could I do?”
“It’s not your fault, Chris,” Hilton said. “I’ll see you later, unless—anyhow, I’d better get after the skipper. Looks like he’s heading for Twilight.”
He followed Danvers, but already he had lost hope.