The Fifth Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®: Lester del Rey. Lester Del Rey
loose.” I’d expected surprise, but there was none. “Why?”
He shrugged. “Muller claimed he needed his mate free to handle the crew, and that there was no place the man could go. I think it was because the men are afraid they’ll be outnumbered by your group.” His mouth smiled, but it was suddenly bitter. “Jenny talked Pietro into agreeing with Muller.”
Mess was on when I reached the group. I wasn’t hungry. The wine had cut the edge from my appetite, and the slow increase of poison in the air was getting me, as it was the others. Sure, carbon dioxide isn’t a real poison—but no organism can live in its own waste, all the same. I had a rotten headache. I sat there playing a little game I’d invented—trying to figure which ones I’d eliminate if some had to die. Jenny laughed up at Muller, and I added him to the list. Then I changed it, and put her in his place. I was getting sick of the little witch, though I knew it would be different if she’d been laughing up at me. And then, because of the sick-calf look on Bill Sanderson’s face as he stared at Eve, I added him, though I’d always liked the guy. Eve, surprisingly, had as many guys after her as Jenny; but she didn’t seem interested. Or maybe she did—she’d pulled her hair back and put on a dress that made her figure look good. Either flattery was working, or she was entering into the last-days feeling most of us had.
Napier came in and touched my shoulder. “Lomax is conscious, and he’s asking for you,” he said, too low for the others to hear.
I found the chemist conscious, all right, but sick—and scared. His face winced, under all the bandages, as I opened the door. Then he saw who it was, and relaxed. “Paul—what happened to me? The last I remember is going up to see that second batch of plants poisoned. But—well, this is something I must have got later.…”
I told him, as best I could. “But don’t you remember anything?”
“Not a thing about that. It’s the same as Napier told me, and I’ve been trying to remember. Paul, you don’t think—?”
I put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back gently. “Don’t be a damned fool, Hal. I know you’re no killer.”
“But somebody is, Paul. Somebody tried to kill me while I was unconscious!”
He must have seen my reaction. “They did, Paul. I don’t know how I know—maybe I almost came to—but somebody tried to poke a stick through the door with a knife on it. They want to kill me.”
I tried to calm him down until Napier came and gave him a sedative. The doctor seemed as sick about Hal’s inability to remember as I was, though he indicated it was normal enough in concussion cases. “So is the hallucination,” he added. “He’ll be all right tomorrow.”
In that, Napier was wrong. When the doctor looked in on him the next time, the big chemist lay behind a door that had been pried open, with a long galley knife through his heart. On the bloody sheet, his finger had traced something in his own blood.
“It was.…” But the last “s” was blurred, and there was nothing more.
IV
I don’t know how many were shocked at Hal’s death, or how many looked around and counted one less pair of lungs. He’d never been one of the men I’d envied the air he used, though, and I think most felt the same. For awhile, we didn’t even notice that the air was even thicker.
Phil Riggs broke the silence following our inspection of Lomax’s cabin. “That damned Bullard! I’ll get him, I’ll get him as sure as he got Hal!”
There was a rustle among the others, and a suddenly crystallized hate on their faces. But Muller’s hoarse shout cut through the babble that began, and rose over even the anguished shrieking of the cook. “Shut up, the lot of you! Bullard couldn’t have committed the other crimes. Any one of you is a better suspect. Stop snivelling, Bullard, this isn’t a lynching mob, and it isn’t going to be one!”
“What about Grundy?” Walt Harris yelled.
Wilcox pushed forward. “Grundy couldn’t have done it. He’s the logical suspect, but he was playing rummy with my men.”
The two engine men nodded agreement, and we began filing back to the mess hall, with the exception of Bullard, who shoved back into a niche, trying to avoid us. Then, when we were almost out of his sight, he let out a shriek and came blubbering after us.
I watched them put Hal Lomax’s body through the ’tween-hulls lock, and turned toward the engine room; I could use some of that wine, just as the ship could have used a trained detective. But the idea of watching helplessly while the engines purred along to remind me I was just a handyman for the rest of my life got mixed up with the difficulty of breathing the stale air, and I started to turn back. My head was throbbing, and for two cents I’d have gone out between the hulls beside Lomax and the others and let the foul air spread out there and freeze.…
The idea was slow coming. Then I was running back toward the engines. I caught up with Wilcox just before he went into his own quarters. “Wilcox!”
He swung around casually, saw it was me, and motioned inside. “How about some Bartok, Paul? Or would you rather soothe your nerves with some first-rate Buxtehude organ.…”
“Damn the music,” I told him. “I’ve got a wild idea to get rid of this carbon dioxide, and I want to know if we can get it working with what we’ve got.”
He snapped to attention at that. Half-way through my account, he fished around and found a bottle of Armagnac. “I get it. If we pipe our air through the passages between the hulls on the shadow side, it will lose its heat in a hurry. And we can regulate its final temperature by how fast we pipe it through—just keep it moving enough to reach the level where carbon dioxide freezes out, but the oxygen stays a gas. Then pass it around the engines—we’ll have to cut out the normal cooling set-up, but that’s okay—warm it up.… Sure, I’ve got equipment enough for that. We can set it up in a day. Of course, it won’t give us any more oxygen, but we’ll be able to breathe what we have. To success, Paul!”
I guess it was good brandy, but I swallowed mine while calling Muller down, and never got to taste it.
It’s surprising how much easier the air got to breathe after we’d double-checked the idea. In about fifteen minutes, we were all milling around in the engine room, while Wilcox checked through equipment. But there was no question about it. It was even easier than we’d thought. We could simply bypass the cooling unit, letting the engine housings stay open to the between-hulls section; then it was simply a matter of cutting a small opening into that section at the other end of the ship and installing a sliding section to regulate the amount of air flowing in. The exhaust from the engine heat pumps was reversed, and run out through a hole hastily knocked in the side of the wall.
Naturally, we let it flow too fast at first. Space is a vacuum, which means it’s a good insulator. We had to cut the air down to a trickle. Then Wilcox ran into trouble because his engines wouldn’t cool with that amount of air. He went back to supervise a patched-up job of splitting the coolers into sections, which took time. But after that, we had it.
I went through the hatch with Muller and Pietro. With air there there was no need to wear space suits, but it was so cold that we could take it for only a minute or so. That was long enough to see a faint, fine mist of dry ice snow falling. It was also long enough to catch a sight of the three bodies there. I didn’t enjoy that, and Pietro gasped. Muller grimaced. When we came back, he sent Grundy in to move the bodies to a hull-section where our breathing air wouldn’t pass over them. It wasn’t necessary, of course. But somehow, it seemed important.
By lunch, the air seemed normal. We shipped only pure oxygen at about three pounds pressure, instead of loading it with a lot of useless nitrogen. With the carbon dioxide cut back to normal levels, it was as good as ever. The only difference was that the fans had to be set to blow in a different pattern. We celebrated, and even Bullard seemed to have perked up. He dug out pork chops and almost succeeded in making us cornbread out of some coarse flour I