Read Ebook: The Spicy Sound of Success by Harmon Jim Francis Dick Illustrator

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Ebook has 198 lines and 8970 words, and 4 pages

"Wait a minute, Spaceman!" I bellowed. "Where the devil do you think you're dragging me? Halt! That's a direct order."

"I'm not sure I do want to find out what that was just now. I didn't like the feel of it. But the important thing is for us not to get any further from the ship."

"That's important, Captain?"

"To the best of my judgment, yes. This--condition--didn't begin until we got so far away from the spacer--in time or distance. I don't want it to get any worse. It's troublesome not to know black from white, but it would be a downright inconvenience not to know which way is up."

"Not for an experienced spaceman," Quade griped. "I'm used to free-fall."

But he turned back.

"Just a minute," I said. "There was something strange up ahead. I want to see if short-range radar can get through our electrogravitational jamming here."

I took a sighting. My helmet set projected the pattern on the cornea. Sweetness building up to a stab of pure salt--those were the blips.

Beside me, there was a thin thread of violet. Quade had whistled. He was reading the map too.

The slope fell away sharply in front of us, becoming a deep gorge. There was something broken and twisted at the bottom, something we had known for an instant as a streak of spice.

"There's one free-fall," I said, "where you wouldn't live long enough to get used to it."

He said nothing on the route back to the spacer.

"I know all about this sort of thing, Gav," First Officer Nagurski said expansively. He was rubbing the well-worn ears of our beagle mascot, Bruce. A heavy tail thudded on the steel deck from time to time.

My finger could barely get in the chafing band of my regulation collar. I was hot and tired, fresh--in only the chronological sense--from a pressure suit.

"What do you know all about, Nagurski? Dogs? Spacemen? Women? Transphasia?"

"Yes," he answered casually. "But I had immediate reference to our current psychophysiological phenomenon."

I collapsed into the swivel in front of the chart table. "First off, let's hear what you know about--never mind, make it dogs."

"Take Bruce, for example, then--"

"I didn't." His dark, round face was bland. "Bruce picked me. Followed me home one night in Chicago Port. The dog or the man who picks his own master is the most content."

"Bruce is content," I admitted. "He couldn't be any more content and still be alive. But I'm not sure that theory works out with men. We'd have anarchy if I tried to let these starbucks pick their own master."

"Did your crew voluntarily elect you as their leader?"

"Of course they did, Gav. I'm an old hand at controlling crews."

"Then why are you First Officer under me now?"

He blinked, then decided to laugh. "I've been in space a good many years. I really wanted to relax a little bit more. Besides, the increase in hazard pay was actually more than my salary as a captain. I'm a notch nearer retirement too."

"Tell me, did you always feel this way about letting the men select their own leader?"

Nagurski brought out a pipe. He would have a pipe, I decided.

"No, not always. I was like you at first. Fresh from the cosmic energy test lab, suspicious of everything, trying to tell the old hands what to do. But I learned that they are pretty smart boys; they know what they are doing. You can rely on them absolutely."

He was pained. "If you don't trust the men, they won't trust you, Gav."

The dog growled. He must have sensed what I almost did to Nagurski.

"Never mind that for now," I said wearily. "What was your idea for getting our exploration parties through this transphasia?"

"There's only one idea for that," said Quade, ducking his long head and stepping through the connecting hatch. "With the Captain's permission...."

"Go ahead, Quade, tell him," Nagurski invited.

"There's only one way to wade through transphasia with any reliability," Quade told me. "You keep some kind of physical contact with the spaceship. Parties are strung out on guide line, like we were, but the cable has to be run back and made fast to the hull."

"How far can we run it back?"

Quade shrugged. "Miles."

"How many?"

"We have three miles of cable. As long as you can feel, taste, see, smell or hear that rope anchoring you to home, you aren't lost."

"Three miles isn't good enough. We don't have enough fuel to change sites that often. You can't use the drive in a gravitational field, you know."

"What else can we do, Captain?" Nagurski asked puzzledly.

"You've said that the spaceship is our only protection from transphasia. Is that it?"

Quade gave a curt nod.

"Then," I told them, "we will have to start tearing apart this ship."

Sergeant-Major Hoffman and his team were doing a good job of ripping out the side of the afterhold. Through the portal I could see the suited men expertly guiding the huge curved sections on their ray projectors.

"Cannibalizing is dangerous." Nagurski put his pipe in his teeth and shook his head disapprovingly.

"Spaceships have parts as interchangeable as Erector sets. We can take apart the tractors and put our ship back together again after we complete the survey."

"You can't assemble a jigsaw puzzle if some of the pieces are missing."

"You can't get a complete picture, but you can get a good idea of what it looks like. We can take off in a reasonable facsimile of a spaceship."

"Nagurski, if you are looking for a job safer than space exploration, why don't you go back to testing cosmic bomb shelters?"

Nagurski flushed. "Look here, Captain, you are being too damned cautious. There is a way one handles the survey of a planet like this, and this isn't the way."

"It's my way. You heard what Quade said. You know it yourself. The men have to have something tangible to hang onto out there. One slender cable isn't enough of an edge on sensory anarchy. If the product of their own technological civilization can keep them sane, I say let 'em take a part of that environment with them."

"In departing from standard procedure that we have learned to trust, you are risking more than a few men--you risk the whole mission in gambling so much of the ship. A captain doesn't take chances like that!"

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