Futures Past (15 page)

  
"Very well," the captain said, still in an almost offhand tone. "Harper will help you into the suit. Connect your phones to a reel of cable and pay it out as you go. That is the safest way to keep contact with us now that the ship's intercom system has fallen apart. When you reach Stuart—"

  
"Captain!" Smith's warning shout cut him off in mid-sentence. "Force-eddies—six, seven . . . no, nine of them! That ship we blasted must have flung them off just before we got her." His eyes swiveled wildly between Cross and the ghostly, undulating images on the screen. He was sweating.

  
It must have taken a superhuman effort for Cross to avoid looking at the screen, and to keep his voice at a conversational level as he added, "We haven't a lot of time, Doctor. Be as quick as you can."

  
Grayson was outside the control room, plugging his suit phones into the socket in its airlock, when the force-eddies struck. From his position flat on the heaving and shuddering floor he saw the section of the corridor leading sternwards twist crazily and bend upwards, so that only about twenty yards of its length was visible. A brief gale whistled through the corridor, subsided, and the fabric of his suit creaked and stretched outwards; the air had gone. He rechecked the control room airlock seals, then began moving quickly toward the ship's prow, and Stuart.

  
He ran into trouble almost at once.

  
One moment he was half running along the corridor, the next he was threshing about above the floor, weightless. Eventually he made contact with the wall, and continued on his way by pulling himself along a section of the ship's plumbing. He got about ten yards when a great, invisible hand flattened him viciously against what should have been the ceiling, and held him there. Sheer panic made him shout for help, but then he calmed quickly as he realized what must have happened. Luckily the suit transmitter had been switched off, so nobody knew about Ms bright blue funk. Switching it on, he said: "Grayson to Control..." and rapidly described his predicament.

  
The radioman's voice sounded, relaying a more technical version of it to Cross, then Smith said: "We're going to cut artificial gravity in this whole section. The captain says it will be safer for you that way. Luck, Doc. Off."

  
Grayson's stomach heaved as the three G's pinning him to the ceiling disappeared. He continued along the corridor, weightless.

  
He knew what had happened, of course. The matching grids that supplied an Earth-normal gravity to the human-occupied sections of the ship—the robot-worked sections didn't require it—had suffered whole or partial power failure as damage to the ship increased. The grids needed a lot of power, and were delicately balanced, or the strength of their artificial gravity fields became wildly erratic. Grayson had just had an object lesson of that.

 
 
It was a modification of the gravity grid that produced the Starcloud's defensive screen. That screen was impervious to all known forms of radiation, and if attacked by a solid body, it automatically brought to the point of contact a repulsive force of nearly one thousand gravities. If it was attacked at two or more points simultaneously, then the repulsive force was halved or quartered as the case might be. The Raghman ships had been quick to discover this particular weak spot in the Starcloud's, defense; sometimes their force-eddies had come five at a time.

  
But even if the ship had been able to keep its defense screen intact, Grayson knew that the Starcloud could not have held out for very long. Those screens used power at a fantastic rate—power which was strictly limited despite the ship's size. And Cross, unfortunately, was no Dunstan.

  
Almost, Grayson forgot his deadly danger as he remembered the excitement that the Dunstan report had caused throughout the Force—excitement which had rashly made him leave his safe and comfortable base hospital and apply for ship service. Captain Dunstan, surveying in Secant 18 when an accident to his main power pile forced him to jettison all atomic fuel, had found his ship being drawn in and not so slowly baked by the powerful gravity pull and unbelievably lethal radiation of a nearby White Dwarf. He had been in a very bad spot until the ship's astronomer found a planet circling that White Dwarf sun—a planet with a most unusual composition, for spectro-analysis showed that its crust was almost covered by deposits of radioactive isotopes similar to one used to power the overdrive generators of Dunstan's ship.

  
By a miracle of piloting he had been able to land on the planet using his small store of chemical fuel, and while the crew huddled in the deepest and most heavily shielded compartment of the ship, remote-controlled robots had collected enough radioactive fuel for the trip home. Before the planetary and solar radiation had penetrated too deeply into his ship, Dunstan had been able to take off and return with the news.

  
Immediately everyone wanted to investigate Dunstan's planet, and to search for more like it. But then the Raghman war came, and the patrol and survey ships had been ordered in for refitting. Missile launching tubes and the repulsion-screen grids replaced the telescopic mount- mgs and the forest of search antennae, and fuel could be obtained more easily—though admittedly at greater expense—on planets other than those circling White Dwarf suns.

  
Grayson came to an intersection and turned into the corridor leading to launching tube six, cautiously using the ruined communications plumbing to pull himself along. With gravity shut off, the danger of ceiling or walls collapsing wasn't so great. But though the metal now had the strength and consistency of soft putty, it retained all its weight and inertia, and could quite easily squash him flat by sheer momentum. He looked sickly at the brown streaks and patches on the once-bright metal walls, and he used the dirtiest word he knew.

  
The Raghman war.

  
Nobody knew why they had started the war, or even what a Raghman looked like. A white globular object had appeared suddenly over the planet of Clellane IV, and without warning or provocation had loosed a force-eddy which sent the ship coming to investigate it crashing back to the planetary surface, a softened, shapeless hulk. The globe didn't enter atmosphere, but remained in space viciously and insensately melting every ship which tried to take off. All sorts of weapons were tried against it, but the globe avoided the solid missiles aimed at it with an agility that was unbelievable, and it ignored radiation completely. It had only one offensive weapon, the ghostly, flickering force-eddy. But that one was plenty.

  
In the Clellanian tongue the word for the Specter of Death was "Raghman." The name had stuck.

  
Some of the ships fired on by the Raghman globe had fallen into orbits instead of crashing, and investigations carried out after the raider had departed showed that some of them were not completely melted. But their occupants, though outwardly unharmed, were dead. Diagnosis said a burned-out nervous system due to some subtle form of electrocution.

  
As more and more planets of the civilization that was beginning its spread into the galaxy suffered similar raids, Earth and its colonies—who were the technological arm of that civilization—soon knew that their backs were to the wall. The Raghman seemed completely disinterested in ground targets, but every ship entering or leaving the atmosphere of the planet under their surveillance that they could reach was hit with at least one force-eddy, and that was that. Massed attacks had no success either; before the Raghman globe came within range of Earth weapons that probably would not have worked anyway, the attacking ships became just so many menaces to navigation. Offense was futile, but if a defensive weapon could be found that would give Earth a little time to work something out, then there might be a chance. The scientists were bound to come up with something.

  
Starcloud was a last, desperate try for the answer. A great torpedo half a mile long and six hundred feet in diameter, only sheer luck had kept the Raghman from finding and destroying it during its fabrication while in orbit around Earth, and such luck was unlikely to hold for the half-completed sister ship if a defense against the force-eddy weapon wasn't found. But the Starcloud had a defense, of sorts.

  
The repulsion screens which gave protection against meteorite collisions—standard equipment on most ships— tended, it had been found, to slow attacking force-eddies down to a certain extent. The Starcloud had been designed for the purpose of coming to grips with the enemy, defending itself until an analysis of the force-eddy weapon could be obtained, and then hightailing it home with the news if the going got too tough. Its repulsion screen, and the generators backing it, were on such a gargantuan scale that many of its builders had loudly abhorred such a frightful waste of material, never doubting that it would be a complete success.

  
But Starcloud had met three Raghman globes. The overdrive engines, its means of running away, had gone during the first minutes of the engagement, and its super-efficient repulsion screen just wasn't.

  
To Grayson, drifting weightless at its center, the corridor seemed to shudder in annoyance at his invasion of its privacy, and a section of plating came free and drifted slowly away from the wall. He caught at it, pushed backward, and used its reaction to increase his speed along the corridor.

  
"Three eddies hit us, sir." Harper's voice in his phones sounded puzzled. "The other six are just hanging alongside, not even trying to get through the screen."

  
Cross's voice in reply seemed almost absentminded. Grayson could imagine him studying those drifting force-eddies, his incisive intelligence backed by all that remained of the ship's analyzing equipment trying to solve the problem that they represented. "They came from the ship we blasted, remember," the captain said. "Possibly they require direction from a mother ship, and may now be harmless."

  
Harmless!

  
Grayson didn't agree with that at all. In the control room he had seen the force-eddies come boring in, being flung back by the repulsion screen, only to come boring in again. He had watched the screen, overloaded by similar attacks at several other points, weaken for an instant, and the eddy make contact with the bare hull. Three things happened then. There was a flash of cold, blue light, and an explosion that occurred somehow without the heat or radiation normal with a chemical or atomic reaction, which peeled off an area of hull plating and smashed in the. structure underlying it, then, a few seconds later, the metal around the site of the explosion lost the molecular binding force which gave it strength, and turned brown. The softening penetrated deeply into the ship, but in a seemingly random manner that often left one wall of a room intact while the others were a soft, brown mess.

  
Ninety percent of the Starcloud was now in that semifluid state, and the consequent unbalance set up by its repulsion screen was slowly pulling the ship apart.

  
But the overall state of the ship wasn't Grayson's concern at the moment—just the condition of this particular corridor. Corridor, he thought grimly, was scarcely the word for something resembling the digestive tract of some monster reptile, with bulges and convolutions of walls and ceiling that pressed lower with every yard of progress he made. Though weightless, he was forced almost to crawl under that sagging, distorted ceiling, then he was actually wriggling and squeezing his way under it. Grayson was awfully glad that he had never suffered from claustrophobia. ...

  
Suddenly he was whimpering, and pushing and struggling back the way he had come. The thought of that awful mess of metal above him—hundreds of tons of superheavy jelly —with only the absence of gravity preventing it from squashing him like a beetle under a steamroller was too much for him. Grayson wanted out. He didn't care what happened to the ship or Cross or anybody, just so as he could be where he could stand up, or even kneel down without drowning in leaden waves of metal.

  
But he couldn't return. At least, not backward. In an hysterical surge of panic he arched his back, madly trying to lift the whole mass of settling metal by sheer muscle power. But harsh scraping sounds on the fabric of his suit —warning of the danger of puncture—returned him to a measure of sanity. He wriggled forward again, hoping desperately to find a spot wide enough for him to turn around.

  
He found it where the disabled Nurse 53 was propping up the corridor ceiling, but beyond the damaged robot he could see the entrance to number six, and Stuart's control pod.