The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (34 page)

"You're next in line to be sector commander, aren't
you, sir?"

"I guess so," said the commander.

"If this pans out, you'll be in a position to knock him
over and grab his job, won't you?" asked Schninkle slyly.

"Could be," admitted Krogson in a tired voice.
"Not because I want to, though—but because I have to. I'm not as young as
I once was, and the boys below are pushing pretty hard. It's either up or out
—and out is always feet first."

"Put yourself in the sector commander's shoes for a
minute," suggested the little man. "What would you do if a war base
commander came through with news of a possible Imperial base?"

A look of grim comprehension came over Krogson's face.
"Of course! I'd ground the commander's ships and send out my own fleet. I
must be slipping; I should have thought of that at once!"

"On the other hand," said Schninkle, "you
might call him and request permission to conduct routine maneuvers. He'll
approve as a matter of course and you'll have an excuse for taking out the full
fleet. Once in deep space, you can slap on radio silence and set course for the
scout. If there is an Imperial base out there, nobody will know anything about
it until it's blasted. I'll stay back here and keep my eyes on things for you."

Commander Krogson grinned. "Schninkle, it's a pleasure
to have you in my command. How would you like me to make you Devoted Servant of
the Lord Protector, Eighth Class? It carries an extra shoe ration coupon!"

"If it's all the same with you," said Schninkle,
"I'd just as soon have Saturday afternoons off."

XII

As Kurt struggled up out of the darkness, he could hear a
gong sounding in the faint distance.
Bong!
bong!
BONG!
It grew nearer and louder. He shook his
head painfully and groaned. There was light from some place beating against his
eyelids. Opening them was too much effort. He was in some sort of a bunk. He
could feel that. But the gong. He lay there concentrating on it. Slowly he
began to realize that the beat didn't come from outside. It was his head. It
felt swollen and sore and each pulse of his heart sent a hammer thud through
it.

One by one his senses began to return to normal. As his nose
re-assumed its normal acuteness, it began to quiver. There was a strange scent
in the air, an unpleasant sickening scent as of—he chased the scent down his
aching memory channels until he finally had it cornered—rotting fish. With that
to anchor on, he slowly began to reconstruct reality. He had been floating high
above the floor in the armory and the captain had been trying to get him down.
Then he had pushed a button. There had been a microsecond of tremendous
acceleration and then a horrendous crash. That must have been the skylight.
After the crash was darkness, then the gongs, and now fish-dead and rotting
fish.

"I must be alive," he decided. "Imperial
Headquarters would never smell like this!"

He groaned and slowly opened one eye. Wherever he was he
hadn't been there before. He opened the other eye. He was in a room. A room
with a curved ceiling and curving walls. Slowly, with infinite care, he hung
his head over the side of the bunk. Below him in a form-fitting chair before a
bank of instruments sat a small man with yellow skin and blue-black hair. Kurt
coughed. The man looked up. Kurt asked the obvious question.

"Where am I?"

"I'm not permitted to give you any information,"
said the small man. His speech had an odd slurred quality to Kurt's ear.

"Something stinks!" said Kurt.

"It sure does," said the small man gloomily.
"It must be worse for you. I'm used to it."

Kurt surveyed the cabin with interest. There were a lot of
gadgets tucked away here and there that looked familiar. They were like the
things he had worked on in Tech School except that they were cruder and
simpler. They looked as if they had been put together by an eight-year-old
recruit who was doing the first trial assembly. He decided to make another stab
at establishing some sort of communication with the little man.

"How come you have everything in one room? We always
used to keep different things in different shops."

"No comment," said Ozaki.

Kurt had a feeling he was butting his head against a stone
wall. He decided to make one more try.

"I give up," he said, wrinkling his nose,
"where'd you hide it?"

"Hide what?" asked the little man.

"The fish," said Kurt.

"No comment."

"Why not?" asked Kurt.

"Because there isn't anything that can be done about
it," said Ozaki. "It's the air conditioner. Something's haywire
inside."

"What's an air conditioner?" asked Kurt.

"That square box over your head."

Kurt looked at it, closed his eyes, and thought for a
moment. The thing did look familiar. Suddenly a picture of it popped into his
mind. Page 318 in the "Manual of Auxiliary Mechanisms."

"It's fantastic!" he said.

"What is?" said the little man.

"This," Kurt pointed to the conditioner. "I
didn't know they existed in real life. I thought they were just in books. You
got a first echelon kit?"

"Sure," said Ozaki. "It's in the recess by
the head of the bunk. Why?"

Kurt pulled the kit out of its retaining clips and opened
its cover, fishing around until he found a small screwdriver and a pair of
needle-nose pliers.

"I think I'll fix it," he said conversationally.

"Oh, no you won't!" howled Ozaki. "Air with
fish is better than no air at all." But before he could do anything, Kurt
had pulled the cover off the air conditioner and was probing into the intricate
mechanism with his screwdriver. A slight thumping noise came from inside. Kurt
cocked his ear and thought. Suddenly his screwdriver speared down through the
maze of whirring parts. He gave a slow quarter turn and the internal thumping
disappeared.

"See," he said triumphantly, "no more
fish!"

Ozaki stopped shaking long enough to give the air a
tentative sniff. He had got out of the habit of smelling in self-defense and it
took him a minute or two to detect the difference. Suddenly a broad grin swept
across his face.

"It's going away! I do believe it's going away!"

Kurt gave the screwdriver another quarter of a turn and
suddenly the sharp spicy scent of pines swept through the scout. Ozaki took a
deep ecstatic breath and relaxed in his chair. His face lost its pallor.

"How did you do it?" he said finally.

"No comment," said Kurt pleasantly.

There was silence from below. Ozaki was in the throes of a
brainstorm. He was more impressed by Kurt's casual repair of the air
conditioner than he liked to admit.

"Tell me," he said cautiously, "can you fix
other things beside air conditioners?"

"I guess so," said Kurt, "if it's just simple
stuff like this." He gestured around the cabin. "Most of the stuff
here needs fixing. They've got it together wrong."

"Maybe we could make a dicker," said Ozaki.
"You fix things, I answer questions—some questions that is," he added
hastily.

"It's a deal," said Kurt who was filled with a burning
curiosity as to his whereabouts. Certain things were already clear in his mind.
He knew that wherever he was he'd never been there before. That meant evidently
that there was a garrison on the other side of the mountains whose existence
had never been suspected. What bothered him was how he had got there.

"Check," said Ozaki. "First, do you know
anything about plumbing?"

"What's plumbing?" asked Kurt curiously.

"Pipes," said Ozaki. "They're plugged.
They've been plugged for more time than I like to think about."

"I can try," said Kurt.

"Good!" said the pilot and ushered him into the
small cubicle that opened off
the
rear bulkhead. "You might tackle
the shower while you're at it."

"What's a shower?"

"That curved dingbat up there," said Ozaki
pointing. "The thermostat's out of whack."

"Thermostats are kid stuff," said Kurt, shutting
the door.

Ten minutes later Kurt came out. "It's all fixed."

"I don't believe it," said Ozaki, shouldering his
way past Kurt. He reached down and pushed a small curved handle. There was the
satisfying sound of rushing water. He next reached into the little shower
compartment and turned the knob to the left. With a hiss a needle spray of cold
water burst forth. The pilot looked at Kurt with awe in his eyes.

"If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it!
That's two answers you've earned."

Kurt peered back into the cubicle curiously. "Well,
first," he said, "now that I've fixed them, what are they
for?'*

Ozaki explained briefly and a look of amazement came over
Kurt's face. Machinery he knew, but the idea that it could be used for
something was hard to grasp.

"If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed
it!" he said slowly. This would be something to tell when he got home.
Home! The pressing question of location popped back into his mind.

"How far are we from the garrison?" he asked.

Ozaki made a quick mental calculation.

"Roughly two light-seconds," he said.

"How far's that in kilometers?"

Ozaki thought again. "Around six hundred thousand. I'll
run off the exact figures if you want them."

Kurt gulped. No place could be that far away. Not even
Imperial Headquarters! He tried to measure out the distance in his mind in
terms of days' marches, but he soon found himself lost. Thinking wouldn't do
it. He had to see with his own eyes where he was.

"How do you get outside?" he asked.

Ozaki gestured toward the air lock that opened at the rear
of the compartment. "Why?"

"I want to go out for a few minutes to sort of get my
bearings."

Ozaki looked at him in disbelief. "What's your game,
anyhow?" he demanded.

It was Kurt's turn to look bewildered. "I haven't any
game. I'm just trying to find out where I am so I'll know which way to head to
get back to the garrison."

"It'll be a long, cold walk." Ozaki laughed and
hit the stud that slid back the ray screens on the vision ports. "Take a
look."

Kurt looked out into nothingness, a blue-black void marked
only by distant pinpoints of light. He suddenly felt terribly alone, lost in a
blank immensity that had no boundaries.
Down
was gone and so was
up.
There
was only this tiny lighted room with nothing underneath it. The port began to
swim in front of his eyes as a sudden, strange vertigo swept over him. He felt
that if he looked out into that terrible space for another moment he would lose
his sanity. He covered his eyes with his hands and staggered back to the center
of the cabin.

Ozaki slid the ray screens back in place. "Kind of gets
you first time, doesn't it?"

Kurt had always carried a little automatic compass within
his head. Wherever he had gone, no matter how far afield he had wandered, it
had always pointed steadily toward home. Now for the first time in his life the
needle was spinning helplessly. It was an uneasy feeling. He had to get
oriented.

"Which way is the garrison?" he pleaded.

Ozaki shrugged. "Over there some place. I don't know
whereabouts on the planet you come from. I didn't pick up your track until you
were in free space."

"Over where?" asked Kurt.

"Think you can stand another look?"

Kurt braced himself and nodded. The pilot opened a side port
to vision and pointed. There, seemingly motionless in the black emptiness of
space, floated a great greenish-gray globe. It didn't make sense to Kurt. The
satellite that hung somewhat to the left did. Its face was different, the details
were sharper than he'd ever seen them before, but the features he knew as well
as his own. Night after night on scouting detail for the hunting parties while
waiting for sleep he had watched the silver sphere ride through the clouds
above him.

He didn't want to believe but he had to!

His face was white and tense as he turned back to Ozaki. A
thousand sharp and burning questions milled chaotically through his mind.

"Where am I?" he demanded. "How did I get out
here? Who are you? Where did you come from?"

"You're in a spaceship," said Ozaki, "a
two-man scout. And that's all you're going to get out of me until you get some
more work done. You might as well start on this microscopic projector. The
thing burned out just as the special investigator was about to reveal who had
blown off the commissioner's head by wiring a bit of plutonite into his
autoshave. I've been going nuts ever since trying to figure out who did
it!"

Kurt took some tools out of the first echelon kit and knelt
obediently down beside the small projector.

Three hours later they sat down to dinner. Kurt had repaired
the food machine and Ozaki was slowly masticating synthasteak that for the
first time in days tasted like synthasteak. As he ecstatically lifted the last
savory morsel to his mouth, the ship gave a sudden leap that plastered him and
what remained of his supper against the rear bulkhead. There was darkness for a
second and then the ceiling lights flickered on, then off, and then on again.
Ozaki picked himself up and gingerly ran his fingers over the throbbing lump
that was beginning to grow out of the top of his head. His temper wasn't
improved when he looked up and saw Kurt still seated at the table calmly
cutting himself another piece of pie.

"You should have braced yourself," said Kurt
conversationally. "The converter's out of phase. You can hear her build up
for a jump if you listen. When she does you ought to brace yourself. Maybe you
don't hear so good?" he asked helpfully.

"Don't talk with your mouth full, it isn't
polite," snarled Ozaki.

Late that night the converter cut out altogether. Ozaki was
sleeping the sleep of the innocent and didn't find out about it for several
hours. When he did awake, it was to Kurt's gentle shaking.