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on the second deck, and I ll get into one before I go on to the storage. You
wait here a moment, I ll look in on Maulbow again before I start.
If Maulbow wasn t still unconscious, he was doing a good job of feigning it.
Gefty looked at the pale, lax face, the half-shut eyes, shook his head and
left the cabin, locking it behind him. It mightn t be Maulbow s doing, but
having the big snake loose in the storage could, in fact, make things
extremely awkward now. He didn t think his gun would make much impression on
anything of that size, and while several of the ship s mining tools could be
employed as very effective close-range weapons, they happened, unfortunately,
to be stored away on the same deck.
He found Kerim standing in the center of the instrument room, waiting for him.
 Gefty, she said,  do you notice anything? An odd sort of smell . . . 
Then the odor was in Gefty s nostrils, too, and the back of his neck turned to
ice as he recognized it. He glanced up at the ventilation outlet, looked back
at Kerim.
He took her arm, said softly,  Come this way. Keep very quiet! I don t know
how it happened, but the janandra s on the main deck now. That s what it
smells like. The smell s coming through the ventilation system, so the thing s
moving around in the port section. We ll go the other way.
Kerim whispered,  What will we do?
 Get ourselves into spacesuits first, and then get Maulbow s control unit out
of the ship. The janandra may be looking around for him. If it is, it won t
bother us.
He hadn t wanted to remind Kerim that, from what Maulbow said, there might be
more than one reason for getting rid of the control unit as quickly as
possible. But it had been constantly in the back of his mind; and twice, in
the few minutes that passed after Maulbow s strange weapons were silenced, he
had seen a momentary pale glare appear in the unquiet flow of darkness
reflecting in the viewscreens. Gefty had said nothing, because if it was true
that hostile forces were alert and searching for them here, it added to their
immediate danger but not at all to the absolute need to free themselves from
the inexorable rush of the Great Current before they were carried beyond hope
of return to their civilization.
But those brief glimpses did add to the sense of urgency throbbing in Gefty s
nerves, while events, and the equally hard necessity to avoid a fatally
mistaken move in this welter of unknown factors, kept blocking him. Now the
mysterious manner in which Maulbow s unpleasant traveling companion had
appeared on the main deck made it impossible to do anything but keep Kerim at
his side. If Maulbow was still capable of taking a hand in matters, there was
no reasonably safe place to leave her aboard the Queen.
And Maulbow might be capable of it. Twice as they hurried up the narrow,
angled passages along the Queen s curving hull towards an airseal leading to
the next compartment, Gefty caught a trace of the -ammonia-like animal odor
coming over the ventilating system. They reached the lock without incident;
but then, as they came along the second deck hall to the ship s magazine,
there was a sharp click in the stillness behind them. Its meaning was
disconcertingly apparent. Gefty hesitated, turned Kerim into a side passage,
guided her along it.
She looked up at his face.  It s following us?
 Seems to be. No time for the spacesuits in the magazine now something had
just emerged from the air lock through which they had entered the second deck
not many moments before. He helped the girl quickly down a section of
ladder-like stairs to the airseal connecting the second deck with the storage,
punched a wall button there. As the lock door opened, there was another noise
from the passage they had just left, as if something had thudded briefly and
heavily against one of the bulkheads. Kerim uttered a little gasp. Then they
were in the lock, and Gefty slapped down two other buttons, stood watching the
door behind them snap shut and, a few seconds later, the one on the far side
open on the dark storage deck.
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They scrambled down another twelve feet of ladder to the floor of a side
passage, hearing the lock snap shut behind them. As it closed, they were in
complete darkness. Gefty seized Kerim s arm, ran with her up the passage to
the left, guiding himself with his fingertips on the left bulkhead. When they
came to a corner, he turned her to the left again. A few seconds later, he
pulled open a small door, bundled the girl through, came in himself, and shut
the door to a narrow slit behind them.
Kerim whispered shakily,  What will we do now, Gefty?
 Stay here for the moment. It ll look for us in the vault first.
And it should go to the storage vault first where it had been guarding
Maulbow s machine, to hunt for them there. But it might not. Gefty eased the
gun from his pocket on the far side of Kerim. Across the dark compartment was
another door. They could retreat a little farther here if it became
necessary but not very much farther.
They waited in a silence that was complete except for their unsteady breathing
and the distant, deep pulse of the Queen s throttled-down drives. He felt
Kerim trembling against him. How did Maulbow s creature move through the
airseal locks? The operating mechanisms were simple a dog might have been
taught to use them. But a dog had paws . . .
There came the soft hiss of the opening lock, the faintest shimmer of light to
the right of the passage mouth he was watching through the door. A heavy thump
on the floor below the locks followed, then a hard click as the lock closed
and complete darkness returned.
The silence resumed. Seconds dragged on. Gefty s imagination pictured the
thing waiting, its great, wedge-shaped head raised as its senses probed the
dark about it for a sign of the two human beings. Then a vague rushing noise
began, growing louder as it approached the passage mouth, crossing it,
receding rapidly again to the left.
Gefty let his breath out slowly, eased the door open and stood listening
again. Abruptly, there was reflected light in the lock passage, coming now
from the left. He said in a whisper,  It s moving around in the main hall,
Kerim. We can go on the other way now, but we ll have to be fast and keep
quiet. I ve thought of how we can get rid of that thing.
The cargo lock on the storage deck had two inner doors. The one which opened
into the side of the vault hall was built to allow passage of the largest
chunks of freight the Queen was likely to be burdened with; it was almost
thirty feet wide and twenty high. The second door was just large enough to let
a man in a spacesuit climb in and out of the side of the lock without using
the freight door. It opened on a tiny control cubicle from which the lock s
mechanisms were operated during loading processes.
Gefty let Kerim and himself into the cubicle from one of the passages, steered
the girl through the pitch blackness of the little room to the chair before
the control panel and told her to sit down. He groped for a moment at the side
of the panel, found a knob and twisted it. There was a faint click. A
scattering of pale lights appeared suddenly on the panel, a dark viewscreen, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]