to free himself from the bunk.
“MR4, come in, MR4.”
An eternity seemed to pass as he floated across the room, deliberately disregarding the strategically-placed hand-grips on the walls, floor, and ceiling. It seemed aeons before he reached the narrow little control compartment, and got the ultra-wave radio into action, nearly wrecking it in his clumsy-fingered haste.
“MR4 to Earth. Over.”
He waited a few moments and then repeated the message as no acknowledgment came through. Then he abruptly remembered the nearby presence of the Sun and its interference with radio transmission and reception. He was white and shaken by the time his message was received and his report requested and given.
He gave the whole tragic picture in frantic short wave. The amount of atomic fuel left in the ship, the internal and external temperatures, the distance from the Sun, and the strength of the solar disk’s magnetic field and his rate of drift toward it—along with a staggering list of other pertinent factors.
At last it was over and he stood by awaiting the decision from Earth headquarters.
It came at last.
“MR4.” The growling voice was Donnelly’s, the huge space-engineer in charge of the smaller mail-rocket units. “You’re in a tough spot but we’ve got an expert here from the Government. He’s worked on deals like this with me before and he’s got an idea.
“Here’s the substance of it. We’re going to send out a space tug from Mercury to see if we can haul you in. It’s a new, experimental tug and it’s been kept under wraps until now. But it’s been designed for jobs like this and we figure it can sure as hell do it.
“There’s just one hitch, though, kid. It’s a mighty powerful ship so there’s going to be a terrific shock when it contacts you and the magnetic grapples set to work. In your medicine kit you’ll find a small hypo in a red-sealed plastic box. Take the shot that’s in it immediately and we’ll have the tug out there as soon as we can. It will probably take about twelve hours.”
Donnelly’s voice broke and he hesitated strangely for a moment. “You’ll be out fast,” he went on. “So you won’t feel a thing when the shock wave hits you. There’s less chance of injuries, this way.”
*
“It’s a lousy thing to do,” cried Donnelly as he snapped off the set. “A rotten, heartless way of giving the lad false hopes. But then you don’t give a damn about anybody’s feelings but your own, do you, Doc?”
“Take it easy, Joe—”
“Shut up, Williams. I’m talking to this little Government time-server over here, not to you.”
The psychiatrist shrugged wearily. “I don’t care what you think. I’ve worked with you both on cases similar to this before, though I’ll admit that none of them were quite as hopeless. In any case, I’ll do it my way, or not at all.”
“Maybe you will, maybe you will,” said Donnelly. “But if I had to wait thirty days in that thing and somebody told me it was only a matter of hours—”
“I know what I’m doing even if you think that I don’t. The Government has developed a set approach in matters like this. Fortunately, there aren’t many of them. Perhaps if there were—”
“Let me take over, Doc,” broke in Donnelly. “I’m a space-engineer and that makes me far better qualified to handle this than you are. Why the hell they ever put a psychiatrist on this job in the first place is something I’ll never know, if I live to be a hundred and ten. It’s a job for an engineer, not a brain washer.”
“There’s a lot of things you’ll never know, Donnelly,” the gaunt, thin little man sighed wearily. He sat down at the long mahogany table in the Radio Room. With a careless wave of one arm, he swept a pile of papers and magazines to the floor.
“Try and get this through your head, Donnelly. There’s not too much you can do by yourself for that boy up there. You just don’t know how to cope with the psychological intangibles. That’s why they have me here—so that we could work together as a team.
“Now the sooner you get on that radio and follow my instructions for the pilot the sooner we’ll get this over with. Then maybe I can go home and spend a hundred years trying to forget about it. Until then please try and keep your personal opinions to yourself. Please.”
Donnelly’s face flushed a still deeper red. His fists clenched and, as a muscle started to twitch warningly in his cheek, he started to get up. He stopped for a moment—frozen in silence. Then he relaxed and pushed back his chair. With a heavy sigh, he maneuvered his huge bear of a body to its feet.
He rumbled something disgustedly in his throat and then spat casually on the floor. “Williams,” he thundered. “Get the hell out of here and get us some coffee.”
He waited a moment until the only witness had left the room and then, with grim determination, he turned to the little psychiatrist seated at the table.
“You, Doc,” he said coldly and with deliberate malice, “are a dirty, unclean little—”
*
Williams, when he eased his slight body through the door a few minutes later, found a suspicious scene. The little doctor, his face flushed and rage-twisted, his effortless and almost contemptuous composure shaken for once, was on his feet. Speechless, he faced the grinning space-engineer who was waving a huge and warning finger in his face.
“Easy, Doc,” Donnelly roared in a friendly voice. “I might take advantage of it if you keep on giving me a good excuse. Then where would all your psychiatry and your fine overlording manners get you?”
“Joe,” yelled Williams in explosive sudden fright. “Leave him alone. You’re liable to have the Government Police down on us.”
“Sure, Williams. The police and the newspapers too. They’d just love to have the taxpayers find out what they’re doing to those kids out in deep space. What would they call it, Doc? Just an interesting psychological experiment? Is that what it’s meant to be, eh, Doc?”
He chuckled suddenly as the little doctor flinched under his virulent attack. “I really hit the spot that time, didn’t I, Doc? So that’s what the Government’s so scared and hush-hush about. They’re really scared to hell and back, aren’t they? I wonder what’s really going on behind all this?”
He leaned forward, suddenly roaring and ferocious. “Why are Williams and I followed everywhere we go when we leave here? To see who we talk to? Is that the way of it? Why do quite a few of the ships you and I and Williams have rescued in the past few years never show up again? Just where are they? I don’t see them reported missing in the newspapers, either.”
He leaned back in exhausted satisfaction at the look on the little doctor’s face. “Yeah, Doc, the only way to get anything out of you is to blast it out, isn’t it?”
Pale and frightened, Williams hurried across the room to the table and, with shaky hands, took out three containers of coffee from the paper bag and passed them out.
Nobody bothered to thank him.
The hidden tension in the room had begun to mount steadily, so Donnelly helped it out a little.
“Is this the first time you’ve ever been on the defensive, Doc?” he asked.
Williams jumped in before the explosion. “When will the rocket get to the kid’s ship, Doctor?” he asked.
“In about thirty days,” the little man answered, coldly and deliberately.
Williams blinked in surprise. “Good Lord,” he said. “I thought it was supposed to be in twelve hours or so?”
“That’s the whole point,” snapped Donnelly. “That’s what I’m so fighting mad about. Think of it yourself, Williams. Suppose you had a son or a brother up there,