Subspace Explorers. E.E. "Doc" Smith
too, Babe?” Jones asked.
“That’s right; but the girls can’t start packing pistols now.”
Bernice laughed. “I wouldn’t know how to shoot one if I did. I’ll throw things—I’m very good at that.”
Jones didn’t know his new wife very well yet, either. “What can you throw hard enough and straight enough to do any good?”
“Anything that weighs less than fifty pounds,” she replied, confidently. “In this case... chairs, I think. Flying chairs are really hard to cope with. I’ll start wearing a couple of knives in leg-sheaths, but I won’t throw ’em unless I absolutely have to. Who will I knock out with the first chair?”
“I’ll answer that,” Barbara said. “If it’s Blaine against Babe, it’ll be Lopresto against Herc. So you’ll throw your chair at that unspeakable oaf Newman.”
“I’d rather brain him than anyone else I know, but that would leave that gigantic gorilla to... in that case, Bobby, you’ll simply have to go armed.”
Barbara held out her hands. “I always do.”
“Against a man-mountain like him? You’re that good? Really?”
“Especially against a man-mountain like him. I’m that good. Really. And we should have a signal—an unusual word—so the first one of us to sense their intent yells ‘BRAHMS!’ Okay?”
That was okay, and the four went to bed.
Three days later, the intended victims allowed themselves to be inveigled into the lounge. All was peace and friendship—until suddenly a four-fold “BRAHMS!” rang out an instant ahead of Lopresto’s stentorian “NOW!”
It was all a very good thing that Deston had had warning for he was indeed competing out of his class. As it was, his bullet crashed through Blaine’s head, while the gunman’s went into the carpet. The other pistol duel wasn’t even close and Newman didn’t get to aim his gun at Adams at all.
Bernice, even while shrieking the battle-cry, leaped to her feet, hurled her chair, and reached for another; but one chair was enough. It knocked the half-drawn pistol from Newman’s hand and sent his body crashing to the floor, where Deston’s second bullet made it certain that he would stay there.
If Moose Mordan had had time to get set, he might have had a chance. His thought processes, however, were lamentably slow; and Barbara Deston was very, very fast. She reached him before he even realized that this pint-sized girl actually intended to hit him; thus his belly-muscles were still completely relaxed when her left fist sank half-forearm-deep into his solar plexus.
With an agonized “WHOOSH!” he began to double up, but she scarcely allowed him to bend. The fingers of her right hand, tightly bunched, were already boring savagely into a spot at the base of his neck. Then, left hand at his throat and right hand pulling hard at his belt, she put the totalized and concentrated power of her whole body behind the knee she drove into his groin.
That ended it. To make sure, however—or to keep Barbara from knowing that she had killed a man?—Deston and Jones each put a bullet through the falling head before it struck the floor.
Both girls flung themselves into their husbands’ arms.
“Oh, I killed him, Carl!” Barbara sobbed. “And the worst of it is, I really meant to! I never did anything like that before in... ”
“You didn’t kill him, Barbara,” Adams said.
“Huh?” She raised her head from Deston’s shoulder; the contrast between streaming eyes and dawning relief was almost funny. “Why, I did too! I know I did!”
“By no means, my dear. Nor did Bernice kill Newman. Fists and knees and chairs do not kill instantly; bullets through the brain do. The autopsies will show, I’m quite certain, that these four men died instantly of gunshot wounds.”
* * * *
With the gangsters out of the way, life aboardship settled down, but not into a routine. When two spacemen and two grounder girls are trying to do the work of a full crew, no routine is possible. Adams, much older than the others and working even longer hours, became haggard and thin.
“But this work is necessary, my dear children,” he informed the two girls when they remonstrated with him. “This material is all new. There are many extremely difficult problems involved and I have less than a year left to work on them. Less than one year, and it is a task for many men and all the resources of a research center.”
To the officers, however, he went into more detail. “Considering the enormous amounts of supplies carried; the scope, quantity, and quality of the devices employed; it is highly improbable that we are the first survivors of this type of catastrophe to set course for a planet.”
After some discussion, the officers agreed with him.
“While I can not as yet analyze or evaluate it, we are carrying an extremely heavy charge of an unknown nature; the residuum of a field of force which is possibly more or less analogous to the electromagnetic field. This residuum either is or is not dischargeable to an object of planetary mass. I am now virtually certain that it is; and I am of the opinion that its discharge is ordinarily of such violence as to destroy the starship carrying it.”
“Good God!” Deston exclaimed. “Oh—that was what you meant by ‘fantastic precautions’?”
“Precisely.”
“Any idea of what those precautions will have to be?”
“No. This is all so new... and I know so little... and am working with pitifully inadequate instrumentation... however, we have months of time yet, and if I am unable to derive a solution before arrival—I don’t mean a rigorous analysis, of course; merely a method of discharge having a probability of success of at least point nine—we will remain in orbit around that sun until I do.”
* * * *
The Procyon bored on through space at one gravity of acceleration; and one gravity, maintained for months, builds up to an extremely high velocity. And, despite the Einstein Effect, that acceleration was maintained, for there was no lack of power. The Procyon’s uranium-driven Wesleys did not drive the ship, but only energized the Chaytor Effect engines that tapped the total energy of the universe.
Thus, in seven months of flight, the spaceship had probably attained a velocity of about six-tenths that of light. The men did not know the day or date or what their actual velocity was, since the brute-force machine that was their only clock could not be depended upon for either accuracy or uniformity. Also, and worse, there was of course no possibility of determining what, if anything, the Einstein Effect was doing to their time rate.
At the estimated midpoint of the flight the Procyon was turned end for end; and, a few days later, Barbara and Deston cornered Adams in his laboratory.
“Listen, you egregious clam!” she began. “I know that Bun and I both have been pregnant for at least eight months and we ought to be twice as big as we are. You’ve been studying us constantly with a hundred machines that nobody ever heard of before and all you’ve said is blah. Now, Uncle Andy, I want the truth. Are we in a lot of trouble?”
“Trouble?” Adams was amazed. “Of course not. None at all. Perfectly normal fetuses, both of them. Perfectly.”
“But for what age?” she demanded. “Four months, maybe?”
“But that’s the crux!” Adams enthused. “Fascinating; and indubitably supremely important. A key datum. If this zeta field is causing it, that gives me a tremendously powerful new tool, for certain time vectors in the generalized matrix become parameters. Thus certain determinants, notably the all-important delta-prime-sub-mu, become manipulable by... but you aren’t listening!”
“I’m listening, pops,