Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
“I don’t understand it,” said the captain. “I’ve been loading mag on this run for eight years now.” He mopped his head. “I know all about it—specific gravity 1.75, boiling point 1100, melting point 632.7. But I guess no one ever thought I’d have to know how to put it out if it started to burn.”
“And you never thought to look it up,” I said.
He shook his head.
I’d noticed that Hume had been sulking a little too silently in a corner after Fuzzy had shoved him there. He suddenly let out a yip and dove for the valves.
“Now what?” I asked.
“That would-be over there,” Hume said, nodding toward Fuzzy, “barked up the wrong stump. I’ve got it! We’re safe! Look—when mag burns—when anything burns—it hooks up with oxygen—right? It burned the oxygen in the air. It burned the oxygen in the water. It burned the oxygen in the CO
2
. But there ain’t no oxygen in nitrogen!”
I turned it over gleefully, and slapped him on the back. He and the captain got busy hooking up the nitrogen tanks to the hold pipe lines. I called for No. 22. It took a little longer this time, due to Hume’s accidentally turning the water valve on instead of off when he had finished turning a whole set of wrong valves, so that the nitrogen, under pressure, backed up into the water tanks. But we got that straightened out and proceeded.
Nothing happened. One of the stooges got hysterical and had to be locked in the storeroom. The needle wavered a little, went down
twenty degrees, stayed there. In a few minutes it went up.
“It used up all the nitrogen!” wailed the captain.
Hume said, “Must have combined with it. Damn. That mag sure is hungry.” He looked at me as if I were a policeman and he were a little lost boy.
“Don’t look at me that way,” I said. I glanced at the dials. More than half the mag cargo was either burning or ready to. I had a bright idea. “Dump the cargo!”
The captain spread his hands. “Can’t. If the hatches are opened, the automatic relays will break the power beam. The ship can’t take off, operate, or anything else with the hatches open.”
“Oh.” I started walking up and down. I took off my shirt. Everyone else already had. Some had gone further than that. These automatic controls might have some good points, but—boy, oh, boy! when they started working against you!
I whirled on the captain. “What about the lifeboats?”
He looked up hopefully and then shook his head. “There’s one forward and one aft. But they’re both aft of here; we’re right up in the nose now. The impenetron shields have locked us in. There’s an escape hatch here, but—no, the lifeboat locks can only be opened from the inside. We couldn’t get to the boats if we went out in space suits.”
Hume got excited then. “How about those space suits?” he rapped out. “When it gets too hot in here, couldn’t we cling to the hull in suits until the ship docks?”
We streamed into the storeroom. On each of the space helmets was a tag describing the air, water and food rations for each suit. Enough for eight days. We wouldn’t be in for another two weeks. We went back to the control room and sat down. The stooge who had been locked in came out with us, much chastened. It got hotter.
Four days later we were a sorry-looking lot. No one had spoken for twelve hours. We’d thrown away all our clothing with metal fasteners, all rings, wrist chronometers and radios, because the metal was too hot to bear. The refrigerator in the storeroom had afforded some relief until it broke down. We were in a bad way. And one by
one the crew started to crack. Hume began to giggle quietly to himself, on and on and on. Fuzzy lay still like some great hairy animal, panting silently. The captain sat unmoving with an insanely complacent smirk on his excuse for a face. No one dared move or speak because of the agonizing impact of the hot air on their bare flesh when they did so. There was no relief, no help for it. By now the sodium cargo was molten, the mag burning wherever it could find air—and it found air every time it got a bulkhead hot enough to work on it. The bulkheads weren’t built for that sort of thing. They could take any kind of hammering when they were fairly cool, but that damn alloy couldn’t take it when it got much over a thousand degrees. The hull resisted nicely enough, more’s the pity. We’d have been happy to see the mag burn its way through into space.
No one noticed the faint rumbling sound any more, once we had doped it out as merely the opening up of new bulkheads, feeding more air and more mag to the voracious fire. But all of us started weakly at the tremendous shuddering crash that echoed suddenly through the ship. The captain began to laugh crazily. We looked at him numbly.
“She’s still working,” he whispered hoarsely. “And that finishes us. The ship was getting off balance. The automatic equalizing chutes just opened. All the mag on the port side’s open to the fire now.” He waved weakly at the temperature board. Every needle on it had begun to climb.
Hume said something that made my flesh creep. “I wish I had the guts to kill myself.”
Another two days. The crew sprawled around, asleep or unconscious or dead. I came to for a little while, I remember, because I started coughing weakly. Hume, in a last effort to accomplish something, had opened a water valve he’d discovered in the storeroom, thinking it would cool us off. It puffed into steam where it touched metal, and the air was full of it. Somehow someone else—Fuzzy, I think—managed to turn it off.
Then there was a time when someone began shaking me and shaking me. I didn’t see how I could be alive, but I must have been
because I felt the heat again. It was Hume. He had lost about thirty pounds. He had a red beard. Red eyes.
“Whassamarrer?”
“The gauges! They’re … they’re going down!”
I lay there for a long time, not able to react. He crouched over me, a thin line of moisture creeping out of the corner of his mouth.
“The holds are cooling down!” he said again and began shaking me.
I sat up, blinked at the board. It took quite a while for me to focus my eyes, but when I saw he was right I somehow found the energy to get my feet under me, climb upright.
It was unbelievable, it was past all hope, but it was true! Hume started giggling again, and this time it didn’t annoy me because I giggled, too.
“The mag,” he said. “You see? Why’n hell didn’t we think of that before? Mag’s a good conductor. When the ship equalized herself, the rest of the mag smashed down on what was burning, soaked up heat, distributed it so much that it lowered the temperature below kindling point!”
“Throw another log on the fire,” I crooned, “an’ the fire goes out!” And then the rest of it occurred to me.
“Th’ sodium!” I said. “See what happened? It dumped onto the hot mag, vaporized. The vapor conducted the heat to the ship’s hull. She’s radiating it off! If it wasn’t for that, the temperature would just get to a certain point and stay there, and we’d have gotten roasted anyway, fire or no fire!”
We hugged each other gleefully and then started working on the rest of the crew.
“Well, that’s all there is to it. We rode in to Titan on the super-efficient wreck. We were all of us more dead than alive, but what the hell—as long as there was life enough left to bring back.” The second officer of the new passenger liner stood up and stretched himself.
“So they restored the office of chem super?”
“Yep. But now those boys really know their stuff. Man—you ought to see the examinations they have to pass to get that kind of
money for doing nothing! I’d sooner work for pay all along the line than work for nothing trying to learn that much about a job I might flunk out of anyway.”
“Just a second,” I said. “A couple of things I’d like to know. What happened to Hume and Fuzzy?”
“Both got the jobs they wanted. You’d be surprised how hard they studied their chemistry!”
“Not under those circumstances I wouldn’t,” I said. “Er … one thing I don’t understand. You said that the ship was thrown off balance when one half of the mag cargo was ignited. How come? Where’d the weight come from?”
The second officer fastened his collar. “Very shrewd of you, my lad. Can you keep something to yourself?”
“I can try.”
He sat down again and put his head close. “The
Maggie Northern
didn’t put her own fire out. I did.”
“
You
did?”
“Yeah. Now wait a minute—don’t go giving me credit for it. I turned plumb yellow. I got hysterical. I couldn’t stand to see those boys gasping out their lives for days on end. Most of all, I guess, I couldn’t stand the idea of dying that way myself. That ‘log on the fire’ business was my idea. If half the cargo would burn and kill us slowly, I assumed that if the whole cargo burned we’d die fast. I dumped the rest of the cargo on the fire. Maybe some of them saw me, but no one noticed. Well, it turned the trick, and it wasn’t the kind of thing I’d bring out at the inquest if nobody else did.”
“Completely automatic,” I murmured. “I’ve sure changed my opinion about these useless jobs. You guys can get along swell without brains!”
W
E ALL HAD
to get up early that morning, and we still hadn’t sense enough to get up from around the poker table. We’d called in that funny little guy from the accounting department they called Face to make it a foursome with the three of us. It had been nip and tuck from nine o’clock on—he played a nice game of stud. But tonight there was no one lucky man, and when Harry jokingly bet a nickel on a pair of fours and Delehanty took him up on it, the game degenerated into penny-ante. After a while we forgot whose deal it was and sat around just batting the breeze.
“Screwy game,” said Delehanty. “What’s the use of squattin’ here all this time just to break even? Must be your influence, Face. Never happened before. We generally hand all our money over to Jack after four deals. Hey, Jack?”
I grinned. “The game still owes me plenty, bud,” I said. “But I think you’re right about Face. I don’t know if you noticed, but damn if that winning didn’t go right around behind the deal—me, you, Face, Harry, me again. If I won two, everyone else would win two.”
Face raised an eyebrow ridge because he hadn’t any eyebrows. There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about his features, except that they were absolutely without hair. The others carried an
AM
stubble, but his face gleamed nakedly, half luminous. He’d been a last choice, but a pretty good one. He said little, watched everyone closely and casually, and seemed like a pretty nice guy. “Noticed that, did you?” he asked. His voice was a very full tenor.
“That’s right,” said Harry. “How about it, Face? What is this power you have over poker?”
“Oh, just one of those things you pick up,” he said.
Delehanty laughed outright. “Listen at that,” he said. “He’s like the ol’ mountain climber who saw a volcano erupting in the range
he’d scaled the day before. ‘By damn,’ he says, ‘why can’t I be careful where I spit?’ ”
Everybody laughed but Face. “You think it just happened? Would you like to see it happen again?”
They stopped the hilarity. We looked at him queerly. Harry said, “What’s the dope?”
“Play with chips,” said Face. “No money, no hard feelings. If you like, I won’t touch the cards. Just to make it easy, I’ll put it this way. Deal out four hands of stud. Jack’ll win the first with three threes. Delehanty next with three fours. Me next with three fives. Harry next with three sixes. Each three-spread will come out hearts, diamonds, clubs, in that order. You, Delehanty, start the deal. Go on—shuffle them all you like.”
Delehanty was a little popeyed. “You wouldn’t want to make a little bet on that, would you?” he breathed.
“I would not. I don’t want to take your money that way. It would be like picking pockets.”
“You’re bats, Face,” I said. “There’s so little chance of a shuffled deck coming out that way that you might as well call it impossible.”
“Try it,” said Face quietly.
Delehanty counted the cards carefully, shuffled at least fifteen times with his very efficient gambler’s riffle, and dealt around quickly. The cards flapped down in front of me—a jack face down, a six, and then—three threes; hearts, diamonds, clubs, in that order. Nobody said anything for a long time.
Finally, “Jack’s got it,” Harry breathed.
“Let me see that deck,” snapped Harry. He swept it up, spread it out in his hands. “Seems O.K.,” he said slowly, and turned to Face.
“You deal,” said Face woodenly.
Harry dealt quickly. I said, “Delehanty’s s’posed to be next with three fours—right?” Yeah—right! Three fours lay in front of Delehanty. It was too much—cards shouldn’t act that way. Wordlessly I reached for the cards, gathered them up, pitched them back over my shoulder. “Break out a new deck,” I said. “Your deal, Face.”
“Let Delehanty deal for me,” said Face.
Delehanty dealt again, clumsily this time, for his hands trembled.
That didn’t matter—there were still three fives smiling up at Face when he was through.
“Your deal,” whispered Harry to me, and turned half away from the table.
I took up the cards. I spent three solid minutes shuffling them. I had Harry cut them and then cut them again myself and then passed them to Delehanty for another cut. I dealt four hands, and Harry’s was the winning hand, with three sixes—hearts, diamonds, clubs.
Delehanty’s eyes were almost as big now as his ears. He said, “Heaven. All. Might. Tea.” and rested his chin in his hands. I thought he was going to cry or something.
“Well?” said Face.
“Were we playing poker with this guy?” Harry asked no one in particular.
When, by a great deal of hard searching, I found my voice again, I asked Face, “Hey, do you do that any time you feel like it, or does it come over you at odd moments?”
Face laughed. “Any time,” he said. “Want to see a really pretty one? Shuffle and deal out thirteen cards to each of us, face down. Then look them over.”
I gave him a long look and began to shuffle. Then I dealt. I think we were all a little afraid to pick up our cards. I know that when I looked at mine I felt as if someone had belted me in the teeth with a night stick. I had thirteen cards, and they were all spades. I looked around the table. Delehanty had diamonds. Face had hearts. Harry had clubs.