Space Trap Read online

  “It’ll work,” Ken said, bucking up his flagging confidence.

  “It has to,” the captain underlined. Without communications, they were a speck in an endless void.

  They set all the safeties and checked and double-checked the interlocks.

  The pilot slammed the last grounding lock into place and the two men stared at their work: a jury-rig.

  “I’ll try it,” Ken volunteered, but not from heroics. Suspense aside, he wanted to find out the worst at once.

  R.C. nodded, sitting by the panel. Ken kicked through debris to the pilot’s console. His own was junk, but Zachary’s unit was merely bent out of true.

  He played a series of harmonics, tuning the systems, brightening when they came to life. “It’s working,” he announced. “So far.”

  The responses were a little shaky, but the console was responding normally. Give it a few minutes to perk on all cells …

  As he reached for the master com controls Ken paused, staring at that gaping hole in the ship’s side. Odd. He could have sworn someone was standing there, watching him. It was a very uncomfortable sensation that raised hair on the back of his neck.

  He looked over his shoulder, but the opening in the hull was empty. Nothing was visible but pale blue sky and clouds beyond.

  Ken’s stomach tightened with an atavistic instinct he couldn’t name.

  “What’s the matter?” R.C. queried. “You all right?”

  “Yes, just a little dizzy for a second.” Ken fingered the slippery spray bandage on his wound. “It’s gone now.”

  R.C. looked unconvinced, but didn’t ask any more questions. Forced to lie to cover his own hallucinations, Ken felt embarrassed. But blaming his momentary hesitation on the wound meant he didn’t have to tell R.C. that he was seeing phantoms.

  But for a second Ken had known there was someone standing in the jagged opening in the hull. Someone was looking at him. He had seen the face on his mapping screen twice, before the planet, or that blurry area, had dragged them down into a trap.

  No, he couldn’t tell R.C. The pilot had enough problems without worrying about Ken’s hallucinations.

  Ken shook off his illusions and calmed himself by focusing on the com board. It had to be done exactly right, but there was certainly no harm in superstition. He crossed his fingers on both hands and reached for the “on” switch.

  Tingling fire shot up Ken’s arm and sparks erupted from both the console and the wall.

  Held in the vibrating grip of electric impulses, he couldn’t move. Somewhere in the back of his consciousness, Ken heard R.C. pounding at the input panel and swearing, trying desperately to trip the nonfunctioning breakers.

  Abruptly, the tingling stopped, releasing Ken’s hand. He groaned and slumped forward over the darkened com board.

  “Let’s see,” R.C. demanded gruffly. He’d crossed the cabin in a hurry, cradling Ken’s hand in his own, looking for burns.

  “It didn’t … last long enough,” Ken gasped. The tension eased out of him, allowing him to think and speak.

  “Are you sure? It seemed to take forever to get those interlocks to trip.” R.C. manipulated Ken’s fingers, assuring himself there was no serious damage.

  Again Ken felt that strange, peering-over-his-shoulder sensation. A powerful psychic urge made him turn quickly, hoping to catch whoever was staring at him.

  The hole in the ship’s side was empty, as it should have been. No one standing there, neither animal, nor jewel-skinned woman. R.C. gripped his shoulder and asked gently, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  R.C. looked at the rip in the bulkhead, unconvinced. “Then what did you think you saw?”

  “I’m not sure,” Ken stalled. The sting in his fingertips and his anxiety combined to stimulate both his nerve ends and his courage. Maybe he should tell the captain about his hallucination and solicit an opinion. But Ken’s preternaturally sharpened senses sounded an alert. “Do you smell something, Captain?”

  R.C. stiffened, picking up the same ominous odor. An acrid scent took Ken’s breath away, growing stronger by the millisecond. “What in blazes?” the pilot exclaimed.

  Circuitry simmered inside the bulkheads! Smoke seeped from relay covers and began to fill the cabin.

  “It can’t do that!” R.C. argued, a man betrayed by his own equipment. “It can’t. The non-flammable cut-offs —”

  Ken recalled the blurry area and the other things that had gone wrong. Whatever the cause, the crisis was very real. Adrenaline shot through his veins, erasing all pain and fatigue. They would suffocate if they didn’t get out! “Captain, let’s talk about it later!”

  “Right! Go!”

  By now they were both coughing, eyes filling with tears as their mucous membranes protested. There was one logical quick way out, through that rip in the hull. Ken didn’t know what lay beyond, but he was past caring.

  He and R.C. crowded into the jagged opening, clinging to the sharp metal edges peeled back in the crash. Through tear-blurred eyes, Ken saw a purplish-green meadow a couple of meters below. Was there time to gauge his jump?

  Explosions rocked the ship’s interior, and Ken sailed forward and down, blown clear. He relaxed, curling into a ball, ready to take the shock. As he landed on the grass and rolled, the impact knocked his little remaining breath away.

  Another roar overhead signalled a much bigger explosion.

  As Ken slithered to a stop, belly-down in the grass, he flung his hands over his head. Debris pattered onto his back and buttocks and legs. Gradually the noise and the shower of wreckage died.

  *

  Warily, Ken gazed about. He was sprawled on thick purplish grass, and amazingly, he was unhurt. “Captain?”

  “Over here,” the pilot muttered, disgruntled. The older man sat up and dusted shards of plexi off his fatigues. Then he and Ken looked at the ship.

  She’d plowed the grasslands for dozens of kilometers during her dangerous, unplanned landing. A deep gouge in the planet’s surface stretched to the horizon, finally coming to a stop here, nose first in an earthen embankment. Canted at a fifteen-degree angle, with her battered and drained power package supporting her at the base of the slope, the two-man ship formed a ramp of metal on the natural landscape. The tear in the hull was only one of the injuries she’d suffered; sensors, power linkage, lifeboat section, everything was wrecked. Survey ships weren’t built to take that kind of impact. The gallant little ship was dead.

  “It’s a good thing we got out when we did,” R.C. said, pointing. Fumes boiled out of the jagged opening in the cabin wall and drifted through big gaps in the hull.

  Ken tried to think of something comforting to say as R.C. studied the ruins of his ship; but Ken’s own thoughts were pretty grim. That was a big galaxy out there, and Earth had opened only a tiny wedge into an immense universe. Survey Ship Two 4004 was lost and not likely to attract anyone’s attention for a long while. Considerable bureaucracy governed billions of humans on dozens of colony worlds. A Mayday was the only possible thing that might have earned R.C. and Ken a prompt rescue.

  They hadn’t been able to send one. Fate — or planet NE 592 — hadn’t let them.

  Maybe it hadn’t let them repair the communications system, either. R.C. was right; there was no reason for the circuitry to fry in the bulkheads. There was no way it could have! Yet it had happened. Ken could guess what the ship’s interior looked like now! It seemed they were utterly stranded, totally without supplies.

  In a year, Earth Central’s master computer might spit out a tape on ship 4004. Check: present location of Survey Ship, R.C. Zachary, Comm. There would be leisurely cross-checks by bored programmers, demands that the computer trot through its files again to be sure. In Central Processing, that tedious procedure would take a month, minimum. If the computer finally confirmed that Survey Ship Two 4004 was indeed overdue, there’d be a routine hailing call followed by a lengthy wait for the missing ship to respond on sub-space frequencies,
for the gulf of space to be spanned by electronic appeals.

  But Survey Ship Two 4004 wasn’t going to answer. Her communications system and the ship itself were a mess of stinking rubble.

  It might take a year-and-a-half or two years to untangle all the red tape. Then somebody in authority would issue a standard order to Patrol: “Investigate missing Survey Ship. Last reported bound for …” Such an order would be low priority, buried amid demands for peace-keeping on Earth’s frontier worlds and the need to collar interstellar lawbreakers.

  Well, Ken had known all this when he signed on. This was the frontier. The challenges were heady, but so were the risks involved.

  R.C. tore up a blade of the purplish grass surrounding them. He snapped it tautly between his fingers and said, “Like it or not, Ken — we’re going to be the first colonists on planet NE 592.”

  CHAPTER 4

  There it was again. It had become more and more difficult to ignore. Ken paused while sorting through the meager pile of medical supplies he had salvaged from the lifeboat bay. Someone was touching his hands and sorting through the supplies with him, curiously examining spray bandage and a medicomp scanner.

  But he saw nothing.

  Dammit! He could almost hear someone breathing, almost detect a warm, live body next to his. There was a delicate, flowering fragrance too, competing with the lingering fumes of the shipwreck. The scent, at least, could be explained rationally; a copse of pink-leaved willowy trees grew on the slope nearby. Perhaps the trees exuded a pleasant odor.

  But the other sensory impressions were unnerving and growing ever stronger. Again Ken turned to look, knowing he’d see nothing. R.C. was braving the fumes, poking about in the litter outside the ship’s lifeboat bay, trying to salvage something from their disaster. Ken knelt in purplish grass fifty meters from the ship. He and the Captain had picked this spot as a likely salvage dump and a possible campsite while they got their bearings. The vegetation was soft and lush, indicative of the moderate year-round climate Noland Eads promised for planet NE 592. There was not a whisper of breeze — no logical reason why Ken should imagine he felt hands touching him or breathing close beside him.

  He sat back on his heels, shivering. Was he cracking up? If he hadn’t suffered the same hallucination a couple of times while the ship was still in space, he might blame these recurring hallucinations on his head wound.

  “Why don’t you show yourself?” Ken begged, then cursed his imagination. Who was he talking to? That jewel-skinned woman was a fantasy, the distorted recreation of some woman he’d met during leave.

  “Did I hear you say something just now?” R.C. had come back from the ship in time to overhear Ken’s remark.

  “Just talking to myself,” Ken replied, hoping he wasn’t as red-faced as he should be.

  R.C. squatted down and added a few more things to the salvage pile. There wasn’t much to work with: an incomplete medi-kit, scraps of clothing, a few heavy tools. Ken opened the medi-kit and shook out another gravity compensation gel. The medicine was working well, fortunately. Without it, both men would spend too much time lying around feeling weak when they ought to be constructing a shelter.

  “We’d better make everything last as long as possible,” R.C. warned. “I couldn’t save anything out of the food section. We’ve got a few concentrates, and that’s it.”

  Ken nodded soberly and restored the gravity medication to the kit. Because they were wary of further explosions, they had established the salvage dump some distance from the ship out in the grassland, near the pink trees. The site was well outside the range of flying debris. Each had chanced several hunting trips back to the ship, neither staying long, because of the fumes clogging the ship’s interior.

  When he looked up, he noticed R.C. staring about them, and not toward the ship. Looking for what? “What is it, Captain?” Ken asked hesitantly. “Eads said there weren’t any dangerous wild animals on the planet.”

  “No.” R.C. was narrow-eyed and edgy, standing up to survey the landscape beyond their makeshift camp. A rivulet of clear water bubbled past the trees and along a dip in the rolling grassland. “Can you make anything out of that?”

  Ken saw what had attracted the pilot’s attention — a peculiar fogbank, drifted across the prairie. To the west, it blanketed the horizon completely. Like the grass, the fog was purplish in color, a pale, not-quite-translucent veil. “Natural phenomenon?” Ken said uncertainly, and R.C. shook his head in strong disagreement. The apprentice squinted at the fog again, then speculated, “That must be the blurred area we saw from space.”

  “How did you determine that?” R.C. demanded. “You know where we landed?”

  “I have a rough fix,” Ken went on. “I had an estimated distance and vector compute before the mapper froze.”

  “All right. Are you going to produce the golden egg or sit on it until it hatches?” R.C. growled with waspish humor.

  Smirking, Ken gave in and said, “We’re northeast of the blurry area. Can’t be more than a couple of kilometers off the perimeter. It’s almost as if we were pulled here.”

  His own words silenced him, and he and R.C. stared at each other for several long minutes. Finally R.C. said it for them. “I think we were. Believe me, Ken, I’ve fought ships through a lot of tough problems over the years, but nothing compares to that. Something in there is creating one hell of a gravitic force, an unnatural one.”

  He didn’t continue. He didn’t need to. Ken was thinking along the same track — if the blurred area and the powerful gravitic force had been present on NE 592 twenty years ago, there wouldn’t have been an Initial Survey report from Noland Eads. Eads would never have returned from his mission. He would have crashed on this planet, just as R.C. and Ken had.

  The pilot sighed heavily, accepting what they couldn’t change. “When we’re better organized, we’ll have to investigate that fog and see what’s in it. For the moment, since you calculated where we landed, did you also consider the daylight problem? How much have we got left to work in before nightfall?”

  Ken did some hasty mental calibrating. “Let’s see, terminator’s approximately … hmm … give us six or seven hours, maximum.”

  “All right.” R.C. tightened the belt cinching his fatigues. His clothing was torn here and there as was Ken’s. In a few months they’d likely be wearing native materials and pelts. The pilot pursed his lips, then said decisively, “Let’s try to rig a shelter here for the night. Give the wreck a chance to air out. Maybe by morning those fumes will be gone.”

  Ken did not voice his worry that the ship might succumb to another mysterious explosion by morning.

  *

  The men used the hand tools they’d salvaged as clumsy axes, hacking at the pink-leaved saplings nearby. Later, when the wreck cooled, they might be able to cannibalize panelling and plastics for construction use. Now they were limited to a slightly charred metallic tarp and whatever they could find for tent poles. The trees provided a handy lumber yard, if they were willing to work.

  It seemed to Ken that the pilot was attacking the saplings with unnecessary vigor. The older man ought to nurse his strength, give the gravity compensation medicine time to do its job. Instead R.C. chopped and hewed like a lumberjack, venting his spleen on the slender tree trunks — a man sublimating anger.

  In a way, that had been true of R.C. ever since they’d left Earth. Ken recalled the unusual surliness of the man in the Hall of Pioneers outside Central Dispatching. R.C. had snarled at Dave Saunders and Ken, though the apprentice hadn’t earned a reprimand.

  A bad mood had been eating at R.C. Zachary ever since they had lifted ship and headed for planet NE 592: a world that wasn’t on the regular schedule for Secondary Survey.

  Carefully, busily trimming small twigs off a felled sapling, Ken said, “Captain, if you don’t mind my asking, why did we come here?”

  R.C. halted his spanner wrench in mid-swing. He’d been mauling a willow to untidy shreds. Now he gaped at Ken and gr
owled, “What?”

  Ken scanned the fog-draped horizon, the empty prairie. They were alone, and they were going to stay that way a long time. Formalities be damned. He might be a mere apprentice, but right now he deserved some straight answers. “This planet wasn’t on our assignment sheet,” he said levelly.

  Breathing hard, R.C. rested the spanner and leaned on it. Encouraging. Zachary’s temper had never been violent, but just the same Ken was glad the pilot wasn’t in a ready position to swing at his apprentice’s head. Outrageous questions sometimes got outrageous answers. “You questioning the assignment?” R.C. was using his well-honed commander’s voice.

  “The assignment wasn’t on the regular sheet,” Ken insisted, hammering the point. He leaned the pole he’d trimmed against some furry bushes and dusted his hands, considering how best to phrase things. “According to the data banks, Eads surveyed this planet nineteen point eight years ago. It’s not due for Secondary Survey for quite a while. There must be hundreds of planets ahead of this on the priority list. So why did we come to NE 592 in the first place?”

  The crash landing had left a network of bruises on R.C.’s face and hands. Right now those bruises looked very dark against a space-pale skin. “You’re asking a lot of questions, mister,” he said, without pique. A stalling technique, one Ken had grown used to.

  Ken’s irritation rose to a simmer and he flared, “After what’s happened don’t you think I’m entitled to —”

  He gawked disbelievingly. Over R.C.’s shoulder he saw the woman! She had the same face that had appeared on his mapping screen!

  Standing just beyond the copse of pink willows, she was looking intently at him.

  Not a ghostly image, this time, she was slender and delicate, no taller than R.C.’s shoulder. Her clothes were the same color as the pink-leaved willows. In fact they draped and flowed across her breasts and thighs as naturally as the leaves themselves, as if she wore garments fashioned of living material. Her hair was sleek, close to her head, a green-black iridescence, shimmering in the sunlight.