Tramp

By David Grace

I could feel the off-balance tremor of the displacers through the soles of my feet as I worked my way down the Orion's starboard side. Every thirty-three feet I had to duck to clear the blow-out hatches Captain O'Bannion had been forced to install on Carlon's World before the underwriters would let us break orbit. The welder's beads where the modules were jammed against the deck plates still glinted a clean blue-black, as yet free of the verdigris that tattooed the rest of the ship.

The Orion was typical of the freighters plying the ports of the Middle and Outer Rings. She sported twin Murray Hi-Twist Injectors to warp the ship into Non-E where six GMF 4100 displacers maneuvered her at a cruising Equivalent Velocity of about one light-year per standard day, more or less. In the Orion's case it was usually less as the synchronization of displacers two and five had degraded to 3 percent below book specs before Calipha's incantations had finally seemed to take hold.

According to the chron we should have been about 200 hours out of Coffernam, but judging by the buzz I was now detecting in the plates and the asymmetric shudder which had begun to torque the frames if you knew just where to look, I guessed that Calipha's magics were losing their potency and that our laboring displacers were again creeping to a higher level of distortion.

Today I was on the Charlie Watch, noon to eighteen hundred hours, with Adrian Mandell.

"Any traffic?" I asked Mandell as I took my place at the con.

"No, sir"

I would have been shocked had he said anything else. Nothing short of a military ship running high cycles in our immediate "vicinity" (though in Non-E there is no real physical location, which is why it's called Non-Euclidean Space) could have punched a message through to us. The first two hours of my watch were uneventful, as expected. The Prox would sound an alarm if anything came close enough to distort our bubble, the chances of which were about the same as two men three miles apart firing rifles in each other's direction and having the bullets collide in midflight.

The real reason for our watches was to guard against power failure, desynchronization, or the most feared danger, fire. Anything will burn if you get it hot enough--aluminum, even steel. This was a cargo ship, which meant it contained motors, cranes, cables, hydraulic lines, and power connections, all of which could leak, spark, and overheat. If, God help us, a fire started in the engineering decks or the crew quarters, we would have to control it fast or face death by burning, death by smoke inhalation, or death by oxygen deprivation, the operative word in each case being "death."

So, naturally, when the alarm sounded my first thought was, "Oh my God, we've got a fire!" and I immediately looked at the ship's interior schematic for the location of the blaze, but the view was clear--no smoke, no hot spots. It was only then that I turned back to the general data screen and studied the red letters which now filled the plate.

Desynchronization Alert

Displacement units 2 and 5 are now 4 percent out of synchronization and climbing. At present rate of decline, loss of non-e space capability is anticipated in approximately 5.3 minutes.

"Turn that damn thing off," I shouted as I punched up Calipha's code. The alarm cut off, and after four rings the engineer's singsong voice blared in my ear:

"I know, I know," Calipha snapped. "I'm doing the best I can!"

"Can you get them back into line?"

"I don't have a crystal ball, for Christ's sake! The damn things are fifty years old!'

"Look, Calipha, you've got three minutes or I'm going to have to drop us out. If we're still under power when we top 5 percent--"

"Don't you think I know that? Now let me do my job!"

"If I don't see stabilization in two minutes-thirty," I said punching up a real time display of the percentage variance, "I'm going to start powering down." My earpiece was silent for half a beat, then, in a resigned tone, Calipha said "Understood," and punched out.

"Get the captain down here," I ordered Mandell without turning my head from the slowly increasing numbers on the plate -- 4.21 percent, 4.23 percent, 4.25 percent. Whatever Calipha was trying, it wasn't working. A few moments later the alarm began to beep again.

"Damn it, Mandell, I told you to shut that damn thing off!"

"Don't blame me!" he growled, "Look at your board."

A new red lettered message now appeared on the secondary monitor:

Collision Alert

An object has made contact with the exterior of the bubble. Analysis indicates metallic-ceramic composition. Object's course--

Then the message flickered once and disappeared, replaced by the plate's normal power generation figures and ship's housekeeping information.

"Did you turn that off?" I asked, turning to Mandell.

"I didn't touch it."

"Well, what the hell--"

At that instant, the warning reappeared and the alarm began again. This time it lasted barely two seconds before flickering away.

"Mandell, punch the damn Prox system up on your plate and see if you can figure out what the hell's happening," I shouted, then turned back to my main display. The levels were not only still rising, but the rate of desynchronization was increasing: 4.69; 4.72; 4.76.

"I'm shutting her down," I called out and keyed the intercom. "Prepare for emergency drop-out. All hands: emergency dropout commencing in fifteen seconds."

"Dondero, what the hell's going on?" I jerked around and saw Dennis O'Bannion swinging through the hatch. Dressed only in a hastily pulled on pair of jeans and a T-shirt, Captain O'Bannion's face was puffy with sleep. He had pulled the Alpha shift, midnight to six a.m., and had probably gone to bed no more than four or five hours before.

"The displacers are crashing, Captain," I called, turning back to the controls. "Calipha can't hold them. We're already 4.91 percent out of sync." As I spoke I selected the "Emergency Dropout" command with a ten-second delay, typed in my Command Authorization Code and hit the "Accept & Activate" pad.

"Jesus!" I heard the Old Man hiss, but I was too busy to deal with him at that point. My plate changed to a green and white color scheme to indicate that my command had been accepted and the system began to echo the countdown over the ship's intercom.

"Dropout in ten seconds."

"Dropout in nine seconds."

The Captain hurried to the first officer's chair and activated the restraints. The day before we broke orbit from Carlon's World, our First Officer, Lin Chang, had come down with a case of measles and was barred from rejoining the ship. So now the ship's principal officers consisted of the captain, Mandell, Calipha, Everson, the navigator, and the ship's second officer, me. I hit the button on my chair and gallons of putty-like sludge were sucked from the tank beneath the deck and pumped into a series of bladders that expanded over my arms, legs, chest, and almost completely around my neck and head.

When the countdown reached three seconds, the data plate suddenly lit up for the third time with a collision alert, but this time the alarm did not flicker and disappear. Instead, overlaid against the computer's drone -- "Dropout in three seconds.--Dropout in two seconds . . . ." was the warbling beep beep beep of the Prox monitor.

When the countdown reached zero the ship shuddered like a wet dog. Plates, frames, and racks of equipment groaned. The bridge lights flickered out and were replaced by the glow of two of the four emergency panels, the other two having failed months or possibly years before, their death never having been noticed, or if so, the failed units never having been replaced.

In my guts I felt the twisting, tearing shudder of a return to E-space barely ahead of a collapsing bubble, the leakage of Non-E slipping past the dying fields and surging through my flesh and bone. With a final subliminal shake the Orion settled into normal space. An instant later our main power flickered back on.

"Calipha, report!" I ordered over my headset.

"The displacers are shut down. It'll take me a while to check them out. The engines are at nominal--no red lights."

"Mandell, check out the rest of the ship for damage or injuries--"

"I'll do it," O'Bannion broke in, anxious to get the status of his command.

"--And turn off that damn Prox alarm."

I keyed up several views generated by the proximity system: the first, a three-D schematic showing the relative positions of the Orion and the intruder; the second, a computer-generated, enlarged and enhanced view of the Orion and the other object; and lastly, a real-time visible-light view from the side of the Orion toward the point where the other object was supposed to be located. This third image showed only the black of interstellar space speckled with cold, distant stars.

Quickly, I ran through the spectrum down to IR then switched to active laser and radar. A dot about the size of a BB held at arms' length appeared, and I zoomed the display until the image filled the plate. The object wasn't a natural phenomenon, but I hadn't expected it to be. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever detected any natural objects in Non-E Space.

The thing was sort of a half globe with a bulge in the front, like a lady bug with a very small head. According to the computer it was about the size of an in-system shuttle or a small courier ship, perhaps 5 percent of the volume of the Orion.

"Mandell, is that thing--" the Captain began but was immediately cut off

"--I've got a distress beacon. Claims she's the Montclair out of Piedmont. Engine failure. Only one person on board. Requesting assistance."

"Dondero, take the boat and a couple of men. And draw a weapon from the arms locker. I don't trust coincidences."

"Yes, sir." I slipped out of the bridge and made my way "up" toward the blister where the gig was stored just aft of the forward hold. On the way I called two of the Cargo Master's AS's and ordered them to meet me at the hatch. I detoured just long enough to retrieve a pistol from the arms locker in the Captains' cabin.

I've seen old movies where the hero has some kind of a "ray gun" that fires a multicolored beam that burns its way through the villain’s chest. It's always amazed me that it could do that to a man and yet be safe to use on board a ship operating in hard vacuum. Ridiculous, of course.

The Orion carried four old-fashioned pistols loaded with soft plastic bullets. They were useless against any target farther than nine or ten yards and the loads were reduced so that at even two feet the projectile wouldn't penetrate a standard sixteenth-inch thick instrument panel housing. But then all they really needed to do was punish human flesh, and they did that very well. I know I wouldn't want to go up against someone armed with one of those guns.

I grabbed a loaded HKC ten-millimeter automatic together with an extra eighteen shot clip and hurried up to meet the two men from Essabhoy's crew, Sternman and Phelps, who were already waiting for me at the hatch for the midship boat blister.

"What's up, Mr. Dondero?" Phelps, a slender man with a shaved head and lustrous, pitch-black skin asked me uneasily when he saw the bulge under my coat.

"Nothing to worry about. We've got a small ship in distress, only one passenger. The captain just wants to play it safe. OK, let's get to it."

I punched in my CAC, checked that the atmosphere light was green, then popped the hatch. The boat smelled of damp iron and ammonia and a hundred other spaceship odors from overheated insulation to rancid machine oil, all concentrated in a small, cold room whose air had not circulated in two months or more.

The boat (it had no name any more than the rowboat tied to the stern of a schooner would have had a name) had seats for eight--two people at the command panel and two rows of three seats each behind. In shape the boat was similar to the Orion, a cylinder with a large Plex screen at one end with the seats down the center of the pipe. When stored, the floor was close to the hull so that "up" and "down" were what we would expect them to be, meaning we climbed "down" into the boat from the "B1" corridor. Of course, in flight, the boat's occupants were weightless. Once I had settled into the command chair, I took a quick look around and confirmed that both my men had strapped themselves in.

"Captain, we're ready to separate," I informed the bridge, then grabbed the joystick at the center of the board.

"Acknowledged," came the terse reply, followed by, "In three ... two ... one ..." and a terrific acceleration as the craft was flung from the Orion. Then all trace of apparent gravity disappeared. I pressed the button on the and spun the craft until the heads-up display overlaid on the front port showed that we were heading for the Montclair. It took only a few minutes to reach her, and except for her salmon-colored skin accentuated by teal-blue stripes, she looked identical to the image I had seen on the Orion's screens. I positioned us facing directly away from the Montclair's main port and keyed the boat's radio to her frequency.

"Montclair, this is Second Officer Harry Dondero, of the Orion out of Xanadu. Do you read me?"

"Orion, this is Slater Eves on the Montclair."

"I'm going to mate our locks. When I give you the word, undo your main hatch."

"That's not necessary, Mr. Dondero. I've still got a little power left. I think that with a bit of luck I should be able to follow you back to your ship."

Sure, that was a good idea--let an unknown vessel with malfunctioning engines and carrying an uninspected cargo power-up and head straight for the Orion. Not likely!

"Negative, Mr. Eves. I'll need to make a personal inspection of your vessel. Please make ready for docking."

"I don't like the idea of leaving the Montclair floating free out here. If you're worried about me losing control, just attach a line and tow me over to your ship."

"Sorry, Mr. Eves. Either let us on board or find yourself another ride."

"That doesn't leave me much choice, does it?" Eves said testily.

Well, too bad. At that point I had problems of my own, namely, the Orion's engines were down and we were floating around out here about eight light-years from the nearest inhabited planet.

"It's up to you," I told Eves, making it clear I didn't much care if he was shy about having visitors or not.

"I'm standing by. I'll release the lock when my board tells me that you've got a good seal."

I didn't bother to reply, just locked the rear camera on the Montclair's hatch and selected the "Approach & Dock" menu choice. The boat's computer plotted the most efficient course then deployed a flexible tube with variable-viscosity gum around the leading edge. The computer positioned the open end around the hatch like the mouth of a gigantic eel, then applied an electric current until the material had softened and made an airtight seal. By conduction through the plates I could hear the growing hiss of air filling the tube. Self-consciously, I patted the HKC under my coat, then released my straps.

"Phelps, you're with me. Sternman, you stay here. If everything's OK, I'll tell you that 'We're coming over.' If I say anything else, retract the tube and return to the ship. You got it?"

"Sure, but--"

"Repeat it."

"'We're coming over.' But, Mr. Dondero, what if you're already in the tube?"

"Then don't let us in. Look," I said trying to contain my frustration with the whole peculiar situation, "I'm just being cautious. There's probably nothing to worry about. Just do your job and we'll all be fine. Phelps, you ready?"

"Uhh, yes sir," Phelps said nervously as he sneaked another peek at the HKC's bulge under my coat.

I led Phelps to the rear of the boat, opened the hatch, and pulled myself into the tube. Knotted lines ran down each side at shoulder height. When we neared the Montclair's hull a rectangular pattern appeared as the hatch was first pulled in, then swung out of the way. The yacht's lock was tiny but Phelps and I both managed to squeeze in. In a few seconds the outer hatch cycled closed and the inner one opened.

The Montclair was barely more than one room serving as command cabin, lounge, and galley. Two small sleeping cabins and a head made up the balance of the accommodations, with the deck below dedicated to engines, fuel, provisions, and supplies. Slater Eves was waiting for us in the center of the room with a relieved but not necessarily friendly expression on his flat, pale face.

"Mr. Eves, I'm Harry Dondero. This is Mr. Phelps." Without the Velcro slippers Eves was wearing, Phelps and I would have floated helplessly around the cabin, so we kept our hands on the rubberized grips built into the wall near the hatch. Eves was slender with bone-white skin and a ruff of red-orange hair which, in this weightless environment, stood straight up an inch and a half above the crown of his head. Instead of the common disposable ship's jumpsuit, Eves wore a fanciful outfit of tight red pants and an almost fluorescent lemon-yellow shirt whose full sleeves and collar, with points at least three inches long, made him seem like a displaced showman or a clown who had removed his make-up but not his costume.

"I'm very glad to meet you, Mr. Dondero," Eves said in a melodious, tenor voice. "Thank you for answering my call. I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't come along." You would have starved to death, I thought to myself, but merely nodded to Eves, his unpleasant alternative being all too obvious.

"You said you were alone here?"

"Yes. Yes indeed. Just me."

Now why, I wondered, did Eves find it necessary to answer that question three times?

"Do you have an extra pair of those?" I asked, nodding at his feet.

"What?"

"Ship's slippers. Phelps and I will need to borrow a pair."

"What? Oh, slippers. Yes, of course. Let me see . . . ."

Eves rummaged through several drawers and cabinets while Phelps and I watched him with growing disbelief. How could a man traveling alone on his own ship not know where everything was? He should have been able to find the damn things with his eyes closed, but it took almost two minutes before Slater Eves finally turned them up.

"Here you go," he said with a forced smile as he scratched his way across the rug. I gave one pair to Phelps and we slipped them on over our shoes like old-fashioned rubbers Then Eves opened a hatch in the deck near the rear of the cabin and we descended to the engine room.

While I'm not an engineer, I've had the basic courses at the Academy plus over nine years in-service and I'd never seen engines like those. Oh, the basic power plant was standard enough, a GE Hercules 1900, but I didn't recognize much of anything else. Luckily, I didn't need to in order to figure out what had gone wrong. Eves had exhausted his main fuel tank and was well down into his reserves. Beyond that I couldn't see anything else wrong, though his displacers could have been as bad as or worse than those on the Orion, and without a full systems check I wouldn't have noticed a thing.

"OK, let's take a look at your hold," I told Eves when I was done with the engine room.

"Why?" he asked sharply. His face seemed to grow even more pale, if that was possible.

"We can't allow any craft to approach our hull without knowing what it's carrying."

Instead of replying. Eves just stared at me as if I had suddenly begun speaking in a language beyond his understanding.

"Mr. Eves?" I finally prompted him. Eves' eyes locked on mine for a heartbeat longer, then he gave a slight shrug and nodded toward a hatch mounted in the middle of the engine room's forward bulkhead.

"You'll need to enter your code," I said after a quick glance at the panel.

"Of course." Eves' voice was tight with an edge of barely suppressed irritation. He approached the panel as if someone had shoved a steel pipe up his spine. I watched him type in his code. A bonging tone filled the ship when the hatch slid aside, and Eves had to enter five more digits to cut it off. Once inside, I wondered what all the fuss was about--the hold was essentially empty. All it contained were two small cartons of emergency rations, perhaps a week's worth for one person, a small crate holding an assortment of gaskets, sealant and emergency patches, and a cupboard stocked with towels and galley supplies. I didn't even see the usual reserve drums of water or cylinders of compressed oxygen.

"Satisfied?" Eves asked scornfully as soon as I had completed my circuit of the room.

"Perfectly." I motioned to Phelps and we all left the hold. I noticed that Eves didn't bother to double-lock the hatch behind us. Stranger and stranger As soon as we returned to the main cabin I nodded toward Eves' sleeping room. "Better put together a bag of whatever you want to take with you."

"What about my ship? You're not going to just leave it here, are you?"

"Right now our engineer has his hands full readjusting our displacers so that we can get on with our voyage. When he's done I expect Captain O'Bannion will ask him to take a look at your engines. If there's nothing major wrong, he can probably fix them and you can be on your way. If not . . . ." I let the sentence hang but Eves was having none of it.

"If not, what?"

"Our holds are full. We can give you a ride to Coffernam, that's our next port of call. You'll have to hire a ship and come back to get the Montclair. We'll note the coordinates for you."

"Just leave it here? Out in the middle of nowhere?"

"Who's going to take her?"

"This is crazy. Can't we secure it to your hull?"

Well, firstly, anyone with any sense knew that a ship's bubble is carefully calculated for the craft's mass distribution and shape. If we tried to weld the Montclair to our hull, God knows if our displacers would ever come close to synchronization again. Secondly, you never refer to your own ship as "it" -- always "her." If I were a military officer, at that point I'd have demanded to see Eves' papers and his ID, but I was only the Second Officer on a tramp freighter so I did nothing.

"From what I know, that's not practical," I told him noncommittally, "but you can talk it over with the captain. We'd better get back." Eves' mouth opened, then closed soundlessly.

"All right, just a moment," he said finally as if he were a shopkeeper dealing with a disagreeable customer. Eves opened the door to his cabin, pulled a few pieces of clothing from a drawer, then from the floor, stuffed them in a dark blue crylon bag, and joined Phelps and me at the lock. "I'm ready," he said firmly, as if he were about to march into battle.

"Fine, let me use your radio to let my crew know we're finished here." I left him near the hatch with Phelps and walked over to his panel and keyed in the boat's frequency.

"Mr Sternman, this Dondero. We're coming over. Do you copy?"

"Uhh, yes sir. You said you're coming over?"

"Yes, we're coming over. Dondero out."

If Eves was puzzled by our radio exchange he had enough sense not to say so. In less than ten minutes we were all back on the Orion. Over Eves' objections I told Phelps to take him to my old cabin. This trip I was bunking in the first officer's quarters.

"But I must talk with the captain about my ship!"

"Sorry, Mr. Eves, but the captain's got other problems to deal with right now. When he has a chance, he'll talk to you. If you get hungry, the next meal's at eighteen hundred hours. Any of the men can help you find the crew's mess but I suggest you stay in your cabin so the captain will know where to find you when he's ready to discuss your situation." I left Eves standing there, angry and frustrated, but keeping him happy wasn't my problem. I headed back to the bridge to make my report.

"How's our new passenger?" the Old Man asked.

"I put him in my old cabin until you have the time to talk to him."

"And?" I had long ago learned not to play poker with the Captain.

"And, if that's really his ship, then I'm the Archon of Deniria."

"You're telling me he hijacked it?"

"I don't know how he got it, but I don't think he walked into the broker's office and bought it."

"Is there any reason why that's our problem?"

"Not as far as I know."

"OK, I'll take care of him later then."

"What's Calipha found out?"

"A couple of fried lines, popped breakers, mostly minor stuff. The engines seem to have come through it OK."

"Can he get the displacers back in sync?"

"He doesn't even know what put them out of sync."

"Wait a minute! Twenty hours out of Carlon he told me the concentrators were overheating and screwing up the PLL. Now he says he doesn't know?"

Halfway through my tirade O'Bannion scowled and gave his head a brief shake.

"The concentrators are still overheating and the PLL is losing sync, but he claims that's not responsible for more than a 2 to 3 percent variance. He claims he can't find anything that should have pulled them off baseline by four percent or more."

"Then how does he explain the fact that they were off by 4.97 percent and rising when I dropped us out of Non-E?"

"He can't."

"That's comforting."

"I'll have him check everything again, then try to rig up extra cooling for the concentrator housing."

"Then what?"

"Then we'll power up the injectors and try again. Do you have a better idea?"

I frowned as if I had just tasted something bitter and shook my head.

"OK, tell the crew we'll stay here one standard day to give Calipha time to check everything, then we'll be back under weigh. We may as well take advantage of the delay. I want you to put together a list of all the repairs and maintenance items that we haven't had the time to take care of, prioritize it, and assign teams to complete as many of them as we can so long as you don't divert any resources that Calipha needs to get the displacers back into working condition."

"What do you want to do about the Montclair? As far as I can tell, Eves just plain ran out of fuel." O'Bannion frowned and shook his head in disbelief

"When he's done with our engines and after he's gotten a meal and some sleep, have Calipha take a look at Eves' ship. If all she needs is fuel, calculate the minimum amount required to get her to the nearest port and I'll authorize the transfer if Eves can pay port prices."

"And if he can't?"

"Then we'll give him a ride to Coffernam and how he gets the Montclair home is his problem."

"He's not going to be happy about that."

"Eves' happiness is not our problem. You'd better get started on that list."