The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (91 page)

We’re dead, thought Brent morbidly, all of us. Only we haven’t started to act like it yet.

Before they did act dead, things would happen it was not pleasant to anticipate.

He stopped beside the girl, Kit Harlow. She and her father were standing by themselves, looking at the other passengers. Their expressions were peculiar. It wasn’t that they didn’t know what the blown overdrive meant, but that they were taking it in their own way.

“Pardon,” said Brent. “I’m Jim Brent. I think you know what’s happened. I—saw you back in port and—I’m traveling by myself. Things will be bad presently. I thought I’d offer—”

The girl looked at him detachedly.

Her father said harshly, “You thought you’d offer what?”

He saw a bitter anger in the older man’s eyes. And then Brent realized what the other man was thinking. He flushed angrily.

“We are dead,” he said coldly. “You know it. You know what’s likely to happen as these people go mad. I intended to offer to help keep things decent for her for as long as it can be managed. I happen to be a fool, and I meant to offer to act like one.”

With that, he turned away, frustrated, bitter. They’d thought he meant something very different. Reasonable enough, at that. Some men, knowing that nothing can make what is coming any worse…

“Just a moment, said the girl.

He turned back. Her voice was just what he’d thought it would be: clear, level, and good to listen to. She smiled faintly at him.

“Thank you very much. If you can organize some other passengers, you may be able to prevent some horrors—for a while.”

Her father said bitterly, “I doubt it. That might make things worse. After all, the loudspeakers may have spoken the truth. The overdrive may only be turned off. It may not be blown.”

Brent shook his head as if to clear it. Her father wasn’t thinking very straight, and he knew it. Nobody does, immediately after discovering that he cannot have any possible hope.

Kit said sharply, “You really think that?”

“I’ve been thinking it out,” said her father. “You know what happened where we were! It would be most indiscreet to murder me in any ordinary way. Or you.” Then he said harshly, “This young man had better not talk to us.”

The girl caught her breath. She went paler.

“I hadn’t thought of that!” Then she turned to Brent and said quietly, “My father is right. We do not think this—
accident
—is just what it seems. There will be confusion and horror, of course. People will go mad, and people will be killed. We—will be among those killed. But we think that—ultimately—the overdrive will be repaired. Probably, when it is repaired, the ship will go back to Khem IV.”

Brent still could not think very straight. His mind was possessed by the horrors which could be anticipated.

“But—you can do us a very great favor,” said the girl. She moistened her lips and looked at her father. He nodded. “It is—very important. Much more important than my father’s life or mine. Will you try?”

Brent had been carefully trained to think, clearly in emergencies, but this was not an emergency. It still seemed to him pure disaster. There was nothing for his mind to take hold of, to think about.

“First,” said Kit, very pale, “you mustn’t talk to us again. Don’t avoid us conspicuously, but—especially don’t try to keep us from being killed. That’s necessary.”

Brent tried to listen, with the back of his mind trying to tell him something that fitted in.

“Then,” said Kit composedly, “when you get back to Earth, go to the Commerce Commission and find someone who knows my father. Tell him exactly what happened to my father and me, and say that we think it happened because the planet ruler of Khem IV had
vistek
served at a state banquet by mistake. It was served to us.
Vistek.
V-I-S-T-E-K. It was a mistake. He had his cooks executed for the mistake. And—we couldn’t be murdered in any ordinary fashion. That’s the message.”

She looked again at her father. Again he nodded.

“That’s all,” she said. “You can’t do any more for us. And you can’t do that if you are known to be friendly to us. Now please don’t talk to either of us again.”

She turned away, and her father turned with her. As they moved off, a voice panted in Brent’s ear:

“He’s an important man! What’d he say? He’s Earth Commissioner of Commerce! He’d know all the inside! What’d he say?”

It was a pimply-faced man named Rudl who, during the first two weeks of the voyage, had thrust himself into every gathering, talked to every individual passenger, and had succeeded in making a general nuisance of himself.

Brent said briefly, “He said just what the loudspeaker said. That we’re in touch with base and if there’s any trouble a rescue-ship will come to take us off this ship.”

Again it was untrue, but panic would come soon enough.

Rudl whimpered. “They can’t! They couldn’t get word back, and they couldn’t find us if they knew we were lost! They couldn’t—”

Brent was irritated, but the man was right. A ship’s communicators have an extreme overload dot-dash range of six light-minutes. A ship coming out of overdrive after a two-light-year run is rarely within a light-day of its intended position, either in distance or in direction. A rescue-ship trying to find the
Delilah
—but there could be no rescue-ship—could not know the
Delilah
’s error of position or its own. It would be extraordinary if it stopped within two hundred and fifty times the distance at which two ships can contact each other. To search a globe of such size would be utterly impossible…

But Brent said savagely, “You fool! Do you want to start a panic by babbling like that? Go talk to a ship’s officer! Ask him!”

Rudl stumbled away. Brent clenched his hands. Kit’s father was an important man. He was too important a man to be murdered in any ordinary way without great repercussions. But why should anybody want to murder him? Why should a ship pretend that its overdrive was blown, and then repaired, simply to arrange for the death of a man and a girl at the hands of fear-crazed passengers? And the message they wanted him to give—what was that about?

Brent wanted to think. Unconsciously, he was beginning to think like a member of the Profession, though he was no longer under any obligation to do so. He was, if the
Delilah
’s overdrive was blown, as free of all obligations and duties and all need to think of the consequences of his acts as a man in a coffin six feet underground. If the drive was blown, he was effectively in a coffin midway between suns.

He went to the
Delilah
’s bar. There were a dozen passengers already in it. Brent saw one of them furtively filling his pockets with snack-packets. A bad sign—a man preparing to hoard food against his fellows.

Brent ordered a drink of
sarfane
, and the bartender served him. He sipped his drink—and froze.
Sarfane
was a light drink, and ordinarily delicious. It could not be mixed with anything else, though, or its flavor was spoiled. Something had obviously been mixed with this.

He sat very still.
This is quick!
he thought. If the
Delilah
’s officers knew the ship’s situation was hopeless, it would be reasonable to have served drinks doctored with sedative. The more unstable passengers, who would crack up first, would be the first to drink. If drugged, they would grow sleepy instead of desperate. That would make sense. But it had not been twenty minutes since the overdrive went off.
Quick action,
Brent thought.
Too quick! Much too quick!

It was.

CHAPTER III

Every six months, a liner from the Caldarian planets landed on Luxor V. Only twenty light-years apart, the light-metal planets found a perfect complementary economic system in Luxor V. A brisk exchange of agricultural products was only matched by the swapping of lithium and magnesium for bismuth, thorium, and uranium, and there was equally friendly interchange of inhabitants.

The liner
Caldaria
had full holds of commercial goods and passengers. The liner came down gently, signalling its arrival, and with its communicator sending out a list of passengers and its invoice even before touching ground.

An explosive shell hit its nose just as the descent was checked because of the suddenly-realized absence of any response. The shell shattered the control-room and all possibility of navigating the huge ship. Other shells smashed into it. It went reeling to the ground with huge gashes in its sides.

Only when there was no possibility of its rising again did any movement show around the edges of the landing-field. Then ground vehicles came briskly toward it to examine it for salvageable loot. Men from the ground vehicles began to cut their way into the wrecked ship to see if any personable women had survived its fall…

The men in the ground vehicles were not Luxorians. They were looters, from somewhere else. All the Luxorians were dead.

* * * *

A woman began to scream hysterically out in the passenger-lounge of the
Delilah
. Brent turned his head. The pimply-faced Rudl was being thrust angrily from her side by another passenger.

The men in the bar talked loudly. Brent sat with the drink of
sarfane
with something else in it in his hand.

Kit Harlow had said that madness and frenzy would come upon the
Delilah
’s passengers. The overdrive would stay off until that frenzy developed. It would continue until she and her father had been killed. Then, she had said composedly, the overdrive would be repaired and the
Delilah
would probably return to the port from which she had started, taking back its shaken half-crazed passengers and the bodies of those who had died. None of it made sense, anyhow.

One thing was sure. The drinks of the
Delilah’
s bar had been doctored within twenty minutes of the cutting of the overdrive. It should have taken nearly that long to be sure that a failure was irreparable. It seemed almost like a measure planned in advance. It was
too
quick.

Brent tasted his
sarfane
again. He considered the taste carefully, trying to discern what had been added to ruin the delicate flavor. The addition was aromatic, bitter. It was just enough to spoil the pleasure of drinking
sarfane
.

It’s iposap,
thought Brent. He tasted again.
Taurine iposap
. It was a flavoring ingredient for mixed drinks, like the ancient bitters. It came in blue bottles with gold labels, and it was very, very expensive, and on some planets it was forbidden by law. Its flavor was fascinating and blended perfectly with most bar-dispensed beverages. It made them taste better, but most people avoided it. One drink, with one drop of
iposap
in it, was very good, but two were murder. Most drunks became fighting drunks when their drinks had been laced with
iposap,
and most drinkers were drunk with two such servings under their belts.

If all the
Delilah
’s drinks had been dashed like Brent’s, they were not dosed to make drinkers sleepy, but to make them lunatics. In that case, the officers of the
Delilah
were not planning to check the horrors to be expected in any ship hopelessly lost in space, but were planning to hurry them and increase them. It was designed that madness should follow instantly upon despair. Decent people were to be overwhelmed by madmen before they could organize to die with dignity.

A child began to scream, “Mummy! Mummy! Don’t let them eat me! He says—”

The pimply Rudl scuttled away from a terror-stricken child. The child’s mother comforted it, her own face ashen.

A man shouted hysterically in the bar: “If we gotta die, we oughta kill those officers that didn’t take care—” The bartender moved suavely about his duties—duties which consisted of mixing and serving drinks.

Rudl sidled to the bar. There was weeping in the passengers’ lounge. A little girl screwed up her face and began to whimper through the mere contagion of despair. Her father picked her up and began to pat her back, his face vacant of all thought. He looked blankly at the wall, mechanically trying to soothe the child.

There was a thwack of fist against flesh. Someone at the bar, reeling, had struck someone else. Thick-tongued, he defied the world and fate and chance.

The bartender set out more drinks. There was no flicker of light to indicate that the drink-charges were being punched on the bar-accounting system. Brent suddenly realized that the charge register had not flashed once since he had entered the bar.