HILIFTER
IT WAS LOCKED—from the outside.
Not only that, but the mechanical latch handle that would override the button lock on the tiny tourist cabin aboard the Star of the North was hidden by the very bed on which Cully When sat cross-legged, like some sinewy mountain man out of Cully’s own pioneering ancestry. Cully grinned at the image in the mirror which went with the washstand now hidden by the bed beneath him. He would not have risked such an expression as that grin if there had been anyone around to see him. The grin, he knew, gave too much of him away to viewers. It was the hard, unconquerable humor of a man dealing for high stakes.
Here, in the privacy of this locked cabin, it was also a tribute to the skill of the steward who had imprisoned him. A dour and cautious individual with a long Scottish face, and no doubt the greater part of his back wages reinvested in the very spaceship line he worked for. Or had Cully done something to give himself away? No. Cully shook his head. If that had been the case, the steward would have done more than just lock the cabin. It occurred to Cully that his face, at last, might be becoming known.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the steward had said, as he opened the cabin’s sliding door and saw the unmade bed. “Off-watch steward’s missed making it up.” He clucked reprovingly. “I’ll fix it for you, sir.”
“No hurry,” said Cully. “I just want to hang my clothes; and I can do that later.”
“Oh, no, sir.” The lean, dour face of the other—as primitive in a different way as Cully’s own—looked shocked. “Regulations. Passengers’ gear to be stowed and bunk made up before overdrive.”
“Well, I can’t just stand here in the corridor,” said Cully. “I want to get rid of the stuff and get a drink.” And indeed the corridor was so narrow, they were like two vehicles on a mountain road. One would have to back up to some wider spot to let the other past.
“Have the sheets in a moment, sir,” said the steward. “Just a moment, sir. If you wouldn’t mind sitting up on the bed, sir?”
“All right,” said Cully. “But hurry. I want to step up for a drink in the lounge.”
He hopped up onto the bed, which filled the little cabin in its down position; and drew his legs up tailor-fashion to clear them out of the corridor.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the steward as he closed the door, and went off. As soon as he had heard the button lock latch, Cully had realized what the man was up to. But an unsuspecting man would have waited at least several minutes before hammering on the locked door and calling for someone to let him out. Cully had been forced to sit digesting the matter in silence.
At the thought of it now, however, he grinned again. That steward was a regular prize package. Cully must remember to think up something appropriate for him, afterwards. At the moment, there were more pressing things to think of.
Cully looked in the mirror again and was relieved at the sight of himself without the betraying grin. The face that looked back at him at the moment was lean and angular. A little peroxide solution on his thick, straight brows had taken the sharp appearance off his high cheekbones and given his pale blue eyes a faintly innocent expression. When he really wanted to fail to impress sharply discerning eyes, he also made it a point to chew gum.
The present situation, he considered now, did not call for that extra touch. If the steward was already even vaguely suspicious of him, he could not wait around for an ideal opportunity. He would have to get busy now, while they were still working the spaceship out of the solar system to a safe distance where the overdrive would be engaged without risking a mass-proximity explosion.
And this, since he was imprisoned so neatly in his own shoebox of a cabin, promised to be a problem right from the start.
* * *
He looked around the cabin. Unlike the salon cabins on the level overhead, where it was possible to pull down the bed and still have a tiny space to stand upright in—either beside the bed, in the case of singlebed cabins, or between them, in the case of doubles—in the tourist cabins once the bed was down, the room was completely divided into two spaces—the space above the bed and the space below. In the space above, with him, were the light and temperature and ventilation controls, controls to provide him with soft music or the latest adventure tape, food and drink dispensers and a host of other minor comforts.
There were also a phone and a signal button, both connected with the steward’s office. Thoughtfully he tried both. There was, of course, no answer.
At that moment a red light flashed on the wall opposite him; and a voice came out of the grille that usually provided the soft music.
“We are about to maneuver. This is the Captain’s Section speaking. We are about to maneuver. Will all lounge passengers return to their cabins. Will all passengers remain in their cabins and fasten seat belts. We are about to maneuver. This is the Captain’s Section—”
Cully stopped listening. The steward would have known this announcement was coming. It meant that everybody but crew members would be in their cabins and crew members would be up top in control level at maneuver posts. And that meant nobody was likely to happen along to let Cully out. If Cully could get out of this cabin, however, those abandoned corridors could be a break for him.
However, as he looked about him now, Cully was rapidly revising downward his first cheerful assumption that he—who had gotten out of so many much more intentional prisons—would find this a relatively easy task. On the same principle that a pit with unclimbable walls and too deep to jump up from and catch an edge is one of the most perfect traps designable—the tourist room held Cully. He was on top of the bed; and he needed to be below it to operate the latch handle.
First question: How impenetrable was the bed itself? Cully dug down through the covers, pried up the mattress, peered through the springs, and saw a blank panel of metal. Well, he had not really expected much in that direction. He put the mattress and covers back and examined what he had to work with above-bed.
There were all the control switches and buttons on the wall, but nothing among them promised him any aid. The walls were the same metal paneling as the base of the bed. Cully began to turn out his pockets in the hope of finding something in them that would inspire him. And he did indeed turn out a number of interesting items, including a folded piece of notepaper which he looked at rather soberly before laying it aside, unfolded, with a Boy Scout type of knife that just happened to have a set of lock picks among its other tools. The note would only take up valuable time at the moment, and—the lock being out of reach in the door—the lock picks were no good either.
There was nothing in what he produced to inspire him, however. Whistling a little mournfully, he began to make the next best use of his pile of property. He unscrewed the nib and cap of his long, gold fountain pen, took out the ink cartridge and laid the tube remaining aside. He removed his belt, and the buckle from the belt. The buckle, it appeared, clipped onto the fountain pen tube in somewhat the manner of a pistol grip. He reached in his mouth, removed a bridge covering from the second premolar to the second molar, and combined this with a small metal throwaway dispenser of the sort designed to contain antacid tablets. The two together had a remarkable resemblance to the magazine and miniaturized trigger assembly of a small handgun; and when he attached them to the buckle-fountain-pen-tube combination the resemblance became so marked as to be practically inarguable.
Cully made a few adjustments in this and looked around himself again. For the second time, his eye came to rest on the folded note, and, frowning at himself in the mirror, he did pick it up and unfold it. Inside it read; “O wae the pow’r the Giftie gie us. Love, Lucy.” Well, thought Cully, that was about what you could expect from a starry-eyed girl with Scottish ancestors, and romantic notions about present-day conditions on Aldebaran IV and the other new worlds.
“. . . But if you have all that land on Asterope IV, why aren’t you back there developing it?” she had asked him.
“The New Worlds are stifling to death,” he had answered. But he saw then she did not believe him. To her, the New Worlds were still the romantic Frontier, as the Old Worlds Confederation newspapers capitalized it. She thought he had given up from lack of vision,
“You should try again . . .” she murmured. He gave up trying to make her understand. And then, when the cruise was over and their shipboard acquaintance—that was all it was, really—ended on the Miami dock, he had felt her slip something in his pocket so lightly only someone as self-trained as he would have noticed it. Later he had found it to be this note—which he had kept now for too long.
He started to throw it away, changed his mind for the sixtieth time and put it back in his pocket. He turned back to the problem of getting out of the cabin. He looked it over, pulled a sheet from the bed and used its length to measure a few distances.
The bunk was pivoted near the point where the head of it entered the recess in the wall that concealed it in Up position. Up, the bunk was designed to fit with its foot next to the ceiling. Consequently, coming up, the foot would describe an arc—
About a second and a half later he had discovered that the arc of the foot, ascending, would leave just enough space in the opposite top angle between wall and ceiling so that if he could just manage to hang there, while releasing the safety latch at the foot of the bed, he might be able to get the bed up past him into the wall recess.
It was something which required the muscle and skill normally called for by so-called “chimney ascents” in mountain climbing—where the climber wedges himself between two opposing walls of rock. A rather wide chimney—since the room was a little more than four feet in width. But Cully had had some little experience in that line.
He tried it. A few seconds later, pressed against walls and ceiling, he reached down, managed to get the bed released, and had the satisfaction of seeing it fold up by him. Half a breath later he was free, out in the corridor of the Tourist Section.
The corridor was deserted and silent. All doors were closed. Cully closed his own thoughtfully behind him and went along the corridor to the more open space in the center of the ship. He looked up a steel ladder to the entrance of the Salon section, where there would be another ladder to the Crew Section, and from there eventually to his objective—the Control level and the Captain’s Section. Had the way up those ladders been open, it would have been simple. But level with the top of the ladder he saw the way to the Salon section was closed off by a metal cover capable of withstanding fifteen pounds per square inch of pressure.
It had been closed, of course, as the other covers would have been, at the beginning of the maneuver period.
Cully considered it thoughtfully, his fingers caressing the pistol grip of the little handgun he had just put together. He would have preferred, naturally, that the covers be open and the way available to him without the need for fuss or muss. But the steward had effectively ruled out that possibility by reacting as and when he had. Cully turned away from the staircase, and frowned, picturing the layout of the ship, as he had committed it to memory five days ago.
There was an emergency hatch leading through the ceiling of the end tourist cabin to the end salon cabin overhead, at both extremes of the corridor. He turned and went down to the end cabin nearest him, and laid his finger quietly on the outside latch handle.
There was no sound from inside. He drew his put-together handgun from his belt; and, holding it in his left hand, calmly and without hesitation, opened the door and stepped inside.
He stopped abruptly. The bed in here was, of course, up in the wall, or he could never have entered. But the cabin’s single occupant was asleep on the right-hand seat of the two seats that an upraised bed left exposed. The occupant was a small girl of about eight years old.
The slim golden barrel of the handgun had swung immediately to aim at the child’s temple. For an automatic second, it hung poised there, Cully’s finger halfpressing the trigger. But the little girl never stirred. In the silence, Cully heard the surge of his own blood in his ears and the faint crackle of the note in his shirt pocket. He lowered the gun and fumbled in the waistband of his pants, coming up with a child-sized anesthetic pellet. He slipped this into his gun above the regular load; aimed the gun, and fired. The child made a little uneasy movement all at once; and then lay still. Cully bent over her for a second, and heard the soft sound of her breathing. He straightened up. The pellet worked not through the blood stream, but immediately through a reaction of the nerves. In fifteen minutes the effect would be worn off, and the girl’s sleep would be natural slumber again.
He turned away, stepped up on the opposite seat and laid his free hand on the latch handle of the emergency hatch overhead. A murmur of voices from above made him hesitate. He unscrewed the barrel of the handgun and put it in his ear with the other hollow end resting against the ceiling which was also the floor overhead. The voices came, faint and distorted, but understandable to his listening.
“. . . Hilifter,” a female voice was saying.
“Oh, Patty!” another female voice answered. “He was just trying to scare you. You believe everything.”
“How about that ship that got hilifted just six months ago? That ship going to one of the Pleiades, just like this one? The Queen of Argyle—”
“Princess of Argyle.”
“Well, you know what I mean. Ships do get hilifted. Just as long as there’re governments on the pioneer worlds that’ll license them and no questions asked. And it could just as well happen to this ship. But you don’t worry about it a bit.”
“No, I don’t.”
“When hilifters take over a ship, they kill off everyone who can testify against them. None of the passengers or ship’s officers from the Princess of Argyle was ever heard of again.”
“Says who?”
“Oh, everybody knows that!”
Cully took the barrel from his ear and screwed it back onto his weapon. He glanced at the anesthetized child and thought of trying the other cabin with an emergency hatch. But the maneuver period would not last more than twenty minutes at the most and five of that must be gone already. He put the handgun between his teeth, jerked the latch to the overhead hatch, and pulled it down and open.
He put both hands on the edge of the hatch opening; and with one spring went upward into the salon cabin overhead.
He erupted into the open space between a pair of facing seats, each of which held a girl in her twenties. The one on his left was a rather plump, short, blonde girl who was sitting curled up on her particular seat with a towel across her knees, an open bottle of pink nail polish on the towel, and the brush-cap to the bottle poised in her hand. The other was a tall, dark-haired, very pretty lass with a lap-desk pulled down from the wall and a handscriber on the desk where she was apparently writing a letter. For a moment both stared at him, and his gun; and then the blonde gave a muffled shriek, pulled the towel over her head and lay still, while the brunette, staring at Cully, went slowly pale.
“Jim!” she said.
“Sorry,” said Cully. “The real name’s Cully When. Sorry about this, too, Lucy.” He held the gun casually, but it was pointed in her general direction. “I didn’t have any choice.”
A little of the color came back. Her eyes were as still as fragments of green bottle glass.
“No choice about what?” she said.
“To come through this way,” said Cully. “Believe me, if I’d known you were here, I’d have picked any other way. But there wasn’t any other way; and I didn’t know.”
“I see,” she said, and looked at the gun in his hand. “Do you have to point that at me?”
“I’m afraid,” said Cully, gently, “I do.”
She did not smile.
“I’d still like to know what you’re doing here,” she said.
“I’m just passing through,” said Cully. He gestured with the gun to the emergency hatch to the Crew Section, overhead. “As I say, I’m sorry it has to be through your cabin. But I didn’t even know you were serious about emigrating.”
“People usually judge other people by themselves,” she said expressionlessly. “As it happened, I believed you.” She looked at the gun again. “How many of you are there on board?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” said Cully.
“No. You couldn’t, could you?” Her eyes held steady on him. “You know, there’s an old poem about a man like you. He rides by a farm maiden and she falls in love with him, just like that. But he makes her guess what he is; and she guesses . . . oh, all sorts of honorable things, like soldier, or forester. But he tells her in the end he’s just an outlaw, slinking through the wood.”
Cully winced.
“Lucy—” he said. “Lucy—”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said. “I should have known when you didn’t call me or get in touch with me, after the boat docked.” She glanced over at her friend, motionless under the towel. “You have the gun. What do you want us to do?”
“Just sit still,” he said. “I’ll go on up through here and be out of your way in a second. I’m afraid—” He reached over to the phone on the wall and pulled its cord loose. “You can buzz for the steward, still, after I’m gone,” he said. “But he won’t answer just a buzzer until after the maneuver period’s over. And the stairway hatches are locked. Just sit tight and you’ll be all right.”
He tossed the phone aside and tucked the gun in his waistband.
“Excuse me,” he said, stepping up on the seat beside her. She moved stiffly away from him. He unlatched the hatch overhead, pulled it down; and went up through it. When he glanced back down through it, he saw her face stiffly upturned to him.
He turned away and found himself in an equipment room. It was what he had expected from the ship’s plans he had memorized before coming aboard. He went quickly out of the room and scouted the Section.
As he had expected, there was no one at all upon this level. Weight and space on interstellar liners being at the premium that they were, even a steward like the one who had locked him in his cabin did double duty. In overdrive, no one but the navigating officer had to do much of anything. But in ordinary operation, there were posts for all ships personnel, and all ships personnel were at them up in the Captain’s Section at Control.
The stair hatch to this top and final section of the ship he found to be closed as the rest. This, of course, was routine. He had not expected this to be unlocked, though a few years back ships like this might have been that careless. There were emergency hatches from this level as well, of course, up to the final section. But it was no part of Cully’s plan to come up in the middle of a Control room or a Captain’s Section filled with young, active, and almost certainly armed officers. The inside route was closed.
The outside route remained a possibility. Cully went down to the opposite end of the corridor and found the entry port closed, but sealed only by a standard lock. In an adjoining room there were outside suits. Cully spent a few minutes with his picks, breaking the lock of the seal; and then went in to put on the suit that came closest to fitting his six-foot-two frame.
A minute later he stepped out onto the outside skin of the ship.
As he watched the outer door of the entry port closing ponderously in the silence of airless space behind him, he felt the usual inner coldness that came over him at times like this. He had a mild but very definite phobia about open space with its myriads of unchanging stars. He knew what caused it—several psychiatrists had told him it was nothing to worry about, but he could not quite accept their unconcern. He knew he was a very lonely individual, underneath it all; and subconsciously he guessed he equated space with the final extinction in which he expected one day to disappear and be forgotten forever. He could not really believe it was possible for someone like him to make a dent in such a universe.
It was symptomatic, he thought now, plodding along with the magnetic bootsoles of his suit clinging to the metal hull, that he had never had any success with women—like Lucy. A sort of bad luck seemed to put him always in the wrong position with anyone he stood a chance of loving. Inwardly, he was just as starry-eyed as Lucy, he admitted to himself alone with the vastness of space and the stars, but he’d never had much success bringing it out into the open. Where she went all right, he seemed to go all wrong. Well, he thought, that was life. She went her way and he would go his. And it was probably a good thing.
He looked ahead up the side of the ship, and saw the slight bulge of the observation window of the navigator’s section. It was just a few more steps now.
Modern ships were sound-insulated, thankfully, or the crew inside would have heard his dragging footsteps on the hull. He reached the window and peered in. The room he looked into was empty.
Beside the window was a small, emergency port for cleaning and repairs of the window. Clumsily, and with a good deal of effort, he got the lock-bolt holding it down unscrewed, and let himself in. The space between outer and inner ports here was just enough to contain a space-suited man. He crouched in darkness after the outer port had closed behind him.
Incoming air screamed up to audibility. He cautiously cracked the interior door and looked into a room still empty of any crew members. He slipped inside and snapped the lock on the door before getting out of his suit.
As soon as he was out, he drew the handgun from his belt and cautiously opened the door he had previously locked. He looked out on a short corridor leading one way to the Control Room, and the other, if his memory of the ship plans had not failed him, to the central room above the stairway hatch from below. Opening off this small circular space surrounding the hatch would be another entrance directly to the Control Room, a door to the Captain’s Quarters, and one to the Communications Room.
The corridor was deserted. He heard voices coming down it from the Control Room; and he slipped out the door that led instead to the space surrounding the stairway hatch. And checked abruptly.
The hatch was open. And it had not been open when he had checked it from the level below, ten minutes before.
For the first time he cocked an ear specifically to the kinds of voices coming from the Control Room. The acoustics of this part of the ship mangled all sense out of the words being said. But now that he listened, he had no trouble recognizing, among others, the voice of Lucy.
It occurred to him then with a kind of wonder at himself, that it would have been no feat for an active girl like herself to have followed him up through the open emergency hatch, and later mount the crew level stairs to the closed hatch there and pound on it until someone opened up.
He threw aside farther caution and sprinted across to the doorway of the Captain’s Quarters. The door was unlocked. He ducked inside and looked around him. It was empty. It occurred to him that Lucy and the rest of the ship’s complement would probably still be expecting him to be below in the Crew’s section. He closed the door and looked about him, at the room he was in.
The room was more lounge than anything else, being the place where the captain of a spaceship did his entertaining. But there was a large and businesslike desk in one corner of the room, and in the wall opposite, was a locked, glassed-in case holding an assortment of rifles and handguns.
He was across the room in a moment, and in a few savage seconds had the lock to the case picked open. He reached in and took down a short-barreled, flaring-muzzled riot gun. He checked the chamber. It was filled with a full thousand-clip of the deadly steel darts. Holding this in one hand and his handgun in the other, he went back out the door and toward the other entrance to the control room—the entrance from the central room around the stairway hatch.
“. . . He wouldn’t tell me if there were any others,” Lucy was saying to a man in a captain’s shoulder tabs, while eight other men, including the dour-faced steward who had locked Cully in his cabin, stood at their posts, but listening.
“There aren’t any,” said Cully, harshly. They all turned to him. He laid the handgun aside on a control table by the entrance to free his other hand, and lifted the heavy riot gun in both hands, covering them. “There’s only me.”
“What do you want?” said the man with the captain’s tabs. His face was set, and a little pale. Cully ignored the question. He came into the room, circling to his right, so as to have a wall at his back.
“You’re one man short,” said Cully as he moved. “Where is he?”
“Off-shift steward’s sleeping,” said the steward who had locked Cully in his room.
“Move back,” said Cully, picking up crew members from their stations at control boards around the room, and herding them before him back around the room’s circular limit to the very entrance by which he had come in. “I don’t believe you.”
“Then I might as well tell you,” said the captain, backing up now along with Lucy and the rest. “He’s in Communications. We keep a steady contact with Solar Police right up until we go into overdrive. There are two of their ships pacing alongside us right now, lights off, a hundred miles each side of us.”
“Tell me another,” said Cully. “I don’t believe that either.” He was watching everybody in the room, but what he was most aware of were the eyes of Lucy, wide upon him. He spoke to her, harshly. “Why did you get into this?”
She was pale to the lips; and her eyes had a stunned look.
“I looked down and saw what you’d done to that child in the cabin below—” her voice broke off into a whisper. “Oh, Cully—”
He laughed mournfully.
“Stop there,” he ordered. He had driven them back into a corner near the entrance he had come in. “I’ve got to have all of you together. Now, one of you is going to tell me where that other man is—and I’m going to pick you off, one at a time until somebody does.”
“You’re a fool,” said the captain. A little of his color had come back. “You’re all alone. You don’t have a chance of controlling this ship by yourself. You know what happens to Hilifters, don’t you? It’s not just a prison sentence. Give up now and we’ll all put in a word for you. You might get off without mandatory execution.”
“No thanks,” said Cully. He gestured with the end of the riot gun. “We’re going into overdrive. Start setting up the course as I give it to you.”
“No,” said the captain, looking hard at him.
“You’re a brave man,” said Cully. “But I’d like to point out something. I’m going to shoot you if you won’t cooperate; and then I’m going to work down the line of your officers. Sooner or later somebody’s going to preserve his life by doing what I tell him. So getting yourself killed isn’t going to save the ship at all. It just means somebody with less courage than you lives. And you die.”
There was a sharp, bitter intake of breath from the direction of Lucy. Cully kept his eyes on the captain.
“How about it?” Cully asked.
“No brush-pants of a colonial,” said the captain, slowly and deliberately, “is going to stand in my Control Room and tell me where to take my ship.”
“Did the captain and officers of the Princess of Argyle ever come back?” said Cully, somewhat cryptically.
“It’s nothing to me whether they came or stayed.”
“I take it all back,” said Cully. “You’re too valuable to lose.” The riot gun shifted to come to bear on the First Officer, a tall, thin, younger man whose hair was already receding at the temples. “But you aren’t, friend. I’m not even going to tell you what I’m going to do. I’m just going to start counting; and when I decide to stop you’ve had it. One . . . two . . .”
“Don’t! Don’t shoot!” The First Officer jumped across the few steps that separated him from the main Computer Panel. “What’s your course? What do you want me to set up—”
The captain began to curse the First Officer. He spoke slowly and distinctly and in a manner that completely ignored the presence of Lucy in the Control Room. He went right on as Cully gave the First Officer the course and the First Officer set it up. He stopped only as—abruptly—the lights went out, and the ship overdrove.
When the lights came on again—it was a matter of only a fraction of a second of real time—the captain was at last silent. He seemed to have sagged in the brief interval of darkness and his face looked older.
And then, slamming through the tense silence of the room came the sound of the Contact Alarm Bell.
“Turn it on,” said Cully. The First Officer stepped over and pushed a button below the room’s communication screen. It cleared suddenly to show a man in a white jacket.
“We’re alongside, Cully,” he said. “We’ll take over now. How’re you fixed for casualties?”
“At the moment—” began Cully. But he got no further than that. Behind him, three hard, spaced words in a man’s voice cut him off.
“Drop it, Hilifter!”
Cully did not move. He cocked his eyebrows a little sadly and grinned his untamable grin for the first time at the ship’s officers, and Lucy and the figure in the screen. Then the grin went away.
“Friend,” he said to the man hidden behind him, “your business is running a spaceship. Mine is taking them away from people who run them. Right now you’re figuring how you make me give up or shoot me down and this ship dodges back into overdrive, and you become a hero for saving it. But it isn’t going to work that way.”
He waited for a moment to hear if the off-watch steward behind him—or whoever the officer was—would answer. But there was only silence.
“You’re behind me,” said Cully. “But I can turn pretty fast. You may get me coming around, but unless you’ve got something like a small cannon, you’re not going to stop me getting you at this short range, whether you’ve got me or not. Now, if you think I’m just talking, you better think again. For me, this is one of the risks of the trade.”
He turned. As he did so he went for the floor; and heard the first shot go by his ear. As he hit the floor another shot hit the deck beside him and ricocheted into his side. But by that time he had the heavy riot gun aimed and he pressed the firing button. The stream of darts knocked the man backward out of the entrance to the control room to lie, a still and huddled shape, in the corridor outside.
Cully got to his feet, feeling the single dart in his side. The room was beginning to waver around him, but he felt that he could hold on for the necessary couple of minutes before the people from the ship moving in alongside could breach the lock and come aboard. His jacket was loose and would hide the bleeding underneath. None of those facing him could know he had been hit.
“All right, folks,” he said, managing a grin. “It’s all over but the shouting—” And then Lucy broke suddenly from the group and went running across the room toward the entrance through which Cully had come a moment or so earlier.
“Lucy—” he barked at her. And then he saw her stop and turn by the control table near the entrance, snatching up the little handgun he had left there. “Lucy, do you want to get shot?”
But she was bringing up the little handgun, held in the grip of both her hands and aiming it squarely at him. The tears were running down her face.
“It’s better for you, Cully—” she was sobbing. “Better . . .”
He swung the riot gun to bear on her, but he saw she did not even see it.
“Lucy, I’ll have to kill you!” he cried. But she no more heard him, apparently, than she saw the muzzle-on view of the riot gun in his hands. The wavering golden barrel in her grasp wobbled to bear on him.
“Oh, Cully!” she wept. “Cully—” And pulled the trigger.
“Oh, hell!” said Cully in despair. And let her shoot him down.
When he came back, things were very fuzzy there at first. He heard the voice of the man in the white jacket, arguing with the voice of Lucy.
“Hallucination—” muttered Cully. The voices broke off.
“Oh, he said something!” cried the voice of Lucy.
“Cully?” said the man’s voice. Cully felt a two-finger grip on his wrist in the area where his pulse should be—if, that was, he had a pulse. “How’re you feeling?”
“Ship’s doctor?” muttered Cully, with great effort. “You got the Star of the North?”
“That’s right. All under control. How do you feel?”
“Feel fine,” mumbled Cully. The doctor laughed.
“Sure you do,” said the doctor. “Nothing like being shot a couple of times and having a pellet and a dart removed to put a man in good shape.”
“Not Lucy’s fault—” muttered Cully. “Not understand.” He made another great effort in the interests of explanation. “Stars’n eyes.”
“Oh, what does he mean?” wept Lucy.
“He means,” said the voice of the doctor harshly, “that you’re just the sort of fine young idealist who makes the best sort of sucker for the sort of propaganda the Old World’s Confederation dishes out.”
“Oh, you’d say that!” flared Lucy’s voice. “Of course, you’d say that!”
“Young lady,” said the doctor, “how rich do you think our friend Cully, here, is?”
Cully heard her blow her nose, weakly.
“He’s got millions, I suppose,” she said, bitterly. “Hasn’t he hilifted dozens of ships?”
“He’s hilifted eight,” said the doctor, dryly, “which, incidentally, puts him three ships ahead of any other contender for the title of hilifting champion around the populated stars. The mortality rate among single workers—and you can’t get any more than a single lifter aboard Confederation ships nowadays—hits ninety per cent with the third ship captured. But I doubt Cully’s been able to save millions on a salary of six hundred a month, and a bonus of one tenth of one per cent of salvage value, at Colonial World rates.”
There was a moment of profound silence.
“What do you mean?” said Lucy, in a voice that wavered a little.
“I’m trying,” said the doctor, “for the sake of my patient—and perhaps for your own—to push aside what Cully calls those stars in your eyes and let a crack of surface daylight through.”
“But why would he work for a salary—like that?” Disbelief was strong in her voice.
“Possibly,” said the doctor, “just possibly because the picture of a bloodstained hilifter with a knife between his teeth, carousing in Colonial bars, shooting down Confederation officers for the fun of it, and dragging women passengers off by the hair, has very little to do with the real facts of a man like Cully.”
“Smart girl,” managed Cully. “S’little mixed up, s’all—” He managed to get his vision cleared a bit. The other two were standing facing each other, right beside his bed. The doctor had a slight flush above his cheekbones and looked angry. Lucy, Cully noted anxiously, was looking decidedly pale. “Mixed up—” Cully said again.
“Mixed up isn’t the word for it,” said the doctor angrily, without looking down at him. “She and all ninety-nine out of a hundred people on the Old Worlds.” He went on to Lucy. “You met Cully Earthside. Evidently you liked him there. He didn’t strike you as the scum of the stars, then.
“But all you have to do is hear him tagged with the name ‘hilifter’ and immediately your attitude changes.”
Lucy swallowed.
“No,” she said, in a small voice, “it didn’t . . . change.”
“Then who do you think’s wrong—you or Cully?” The doctor snorted. “If I have to give you reasons, what’s the use? If you can’t see things straight for yourself, who can help you? That’s what’s wrong with all the people back on the Old Worlds.”
“I believe Cully,” she said. “I just don’t know why I should.”
“Who has lots of raw materials—the raw materials to support trade—but hasn’t any trade?” asked the doctor.
She frowned at him.
“Why . . . the New Worlds haven’t any trade on their own,” she said. “But they’re too undeveloped yet, too young—”
“Young? There’s three to five generations on most of them!”
“I mean they haven’t got the industry, the commercial organization—” she faltered before the slightly satirical expression on the doctor’s face. “All right, then, you tell me! If they’ve got everything they need for trade, why don’t they? The Old Worlds did; why don’t you?”
“In what?”
She stared at him.
“But the Confederation of the Old Worlds already has the ships for interworld trade. And they’re glad to ship Colonial products. In fact they do,” she said.
“So a load of miniaturized surgical power instruments made on Asterope in the Pleiades, has to be shipped to Earth and then shipped clear back out to its destination on Electra, also in the Pleiades. Only by the time they get there they’ve doubled or tripled in price, and the difference is in the pockets of Earth shippers.”
She was silent.
“It seems to me,” said the doctor, “that girl who was with you mentioned something about your coming from Boston, back in the United States on Earth. Didn’t they have a tea party there once? Followed by a revolution? And didn’t it all have something to do with the fact that England at that time would not allow its colonies to own and operate their own ships for trade—so that it all had to be funneled through England in English ships to the advantage of English merchants?”
“But why can’t you build your own ships?” she said. Cully felt it was time he got in on the conversation. He cleared his throat, weakly.
“Hey—” he managed to say. They both looked at him; but he himself was looking only at Lucy.
“You see,” he said, rolling over and struggling up on one elbow, “the thing is—”
“Lie down,” said the doctor.
“Go jump out the air lock,” said Cully. “The thing is, honey, you can’t build spaceships without a lot of expensive equipment and tools and trained personnel.
You need a spaceship-building industry. And you have to get the equipment, tools, and people from somewhere else to start with. You can’t get ‘em unless you can trade for ‘em. And you can’t trade freely without ships of your own, which the Confederation, by forcing us to ship through them, makes it impossible for us to have.
“So you see how it works out,” said Cully. “It works out you’ve got to have shipping before you can build shipping. And if people on the outside refuse to let you have it by proper means, simply because they’ve got a good thing going and don’t want to give it up—then some of us just have to break loose and go after it any way we can.”
“Oh, Cully!”
Suddenly she was on her knees by the bed and her arms were around him.
“Of course the Confederation news services have been trying to keep up the illusion we’re sort of half jungle-jims, half wildwest characters,” said the doctor. “Once a person takes a good look at the situation on the New Worlds, though, with his eyes open—” He stopped. They were not listening.
“I might mention,” he went on, a little more loudly, “while Cully here may not be exactly rich, he does have a rather impressive medal due him, and a commission as Brevet-Admiral in the upcoming New Worlds Space Force. The New Worlds Congress voted him both at their meeting just last week on Asterope, as soon as they’d finished drafting their Statement of Independence—”
But they were still not listening. It occurred to the doctor then that he had better uses for his time—here on this vessel where he had been Ship’s Doctor ever since she first lifted into space—than to stand around talking to deaf ears.
He went out, closing the door of the sick bay on the former Princess of Argyle quietly behind him.