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Read Ebook: Blow the Man Down by Fontenay Charles L Orban Paul Illustrator
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Ebook has 1597 lines and 52127 words, and 32 pages
BLOW THE MAN DOWN
BY CHARLES L. FONTENAY
Sure in his own wolfish strength, his attitude was that three peace-loving merchant spacemen could do much to contribute to his personal comfort, if kept under iron control. Besides, with adequate brain-washing to eliminate loyalty to the Solar Council, their technical skills could make them quite valuable to the somewhat undermanned Flanjo base on Rhea.
On the other hand, his concern for the others aboard the ship was so slight that he would not, on his own, have warned them of the impending acceleration, which could have injured or killed them.
He made his move at 10 minutes before zero hour. As a paying passenger from Mars City to Titan, he had the run of the ship, and had been lounging in the control room for half an hour. Migl, the engineer, was on duty and was sorting the blast-pattern tapes, a job Qoqol had started during his shift.
Albrekt simply took a heat gun from the rack, stuck it in Migl's back and ordered him to leave the control room. Migl took it as a joke, at first.
"It's no joke," Albrekt assured him, nudging him with the weapon. "Get below, if you don't want to get burned."
Puzzlement written all over his swarthy face, Migl unstrapped himself from the captain's chair and pushed himself across the room. Albrekt slid into the chair, buckled himself in and pulled two rolls of magnetic tape from the breast pocket of his coveralls. He found the roll marked "No. 1," stuck the other in the rack beside him and inserted the end of his tape in the automatic pilot.
Migl paused at the top of the gangway.
"You're not going to blast?" demanded Migl in amazement.
"I am," retorted Albrekt, holding the heat gun steady.
Albrekt glanced at his watch.
"You have five minutes to warn him and strap yourself in," he said. "I can't be bothered."
Migl vanished down the hatch and Albrekt flicked the switch that closed and locked it. A moment later the intercom system erupted with Migl's frantic voice from below:
"General alarm! Prepare for emergency acceleration! General alarm! Hurry, Carrel!"
Albrekt smiled grimly.
The second hand swept around the face of the chronometer, boosting the reluctant minute hand forward in jerks. At exactly 1300 hours, Albrekt pushed the firing button.
The tape chattered through the automatic pilot. Apparently, the makers of the tape had planned on a fast-get-away: the pressure must have approached 5-G, pinning Albrekt painfully back against the cushioned reclining chair.
He was able to move his eyes to watch the outside screens. The other eleven ships of the convoy, coasting in formation in their orbit, dwindled behind them and swung gradually to one side.
In a few moments, everything cut off, and weightlessness returned. Red lights were flashing all over the control board, and distant alarm bells were clanging in the depths of the ship. Albrekt had no idea what they meant. He was no spaceman.
After a moment:
Albrekt grinned.
The ship's intercom buzzed.
"Albrekt!" It was the voice of Carrel, the captain.
"Yes?"
"We'll get to the reason for this damn fool stunt later. Right now, do you plan any further acceleration?"
"Later. I'll warn you in time to strap down."
"I should hope so. Those G's nearly killed Qoqol. This ship wasn't built for that sort of acceleration, you idiot. Half the seams are sprung and leaking air."
"Repair them, then," snapped Albrekt. "You'll have time."
Albrekt inserted the spool in the projector and started it. An intense bearded face appeared on the screen, and the recorder said:
"It is not generally known, except to students of technological history, that the steam powered and electric powered automobile gave the familiar gasoline powered automobile of the last century a close race for preference in early automotive history. The factors that caused the gasoline powered automobile to become predominant are not important here. What is important is that there were alternative methods of automotive propulsion...."
This didn't start off well. Albrekt ran the spool up about half way and tried again. This time, the author was pointing to a well-chalked blackboard.
"The radiation is so much stronger at Venus than farther out, that it is here we find most common use of the principle," he said. "Using our formula, which, you remember, is F equals rA over 2 plus gM, we...."
It was about nine hours before the last red light on the control board winked out and the clanging of the last alarm bell died out below. Then Carrel's voice demanded an accounting over the intercom.
"I'm in command of the ship now," answered Albrekt, awakened from a light doze by the call. "I intend to remain so. As long as you and the others recognize that, you won't be harmed."
There was a brief silence.
"The only thing I can figure is that you've gone space happy," said Carrel at last. "Albrekt, you're no spaceman. You can't have known what you were doing when you switched on the jets."
Albrekt did not answer.
"Look," said Carrel, "it'll take several days to figure out what sort of orbit that blast threw us into, and I'm not sure we have enough fuel to correct it. You'd better let us in."
"We may as well understand each other," said Albrekt. "I'm no spaceman, but some very good spacemen figured out that blast tape--and the other one I'm going to use later. I'm a captain in the Flanjo military, and I've taken this ship and its cargo over, to deliver them to the Flanjo patrol. None of you will be hurt if you cause no trouble."
"So that's it!" snorted Carrel. "Damned pirate high-jacker! My advice to you, Albrekt, is to come out of there and let me put you under arrest, because if you don't we'll be coming in after you."
"Try it, and I'll burn you," retorted Albrekt.
After sleeping several times, Albrekt was ready to concede it was not going to be as cozy in the control room as he had thought at first. It offered basic comforts of home, but the showers were on the larger navigation deck below. Several months without a bath promised to be uncomfortable. All decks carried plenty of emergency rations in case they were sealed off by a meteor collision, but the rations were not too tasty, Albrekt's mouth was beginning to water at the thought of the frozen meals stored two decks below, available to the crew.
Most of Carrel's book tapes were too technical to interest him, but he spent much of his time listening to those which offered him information in simple terms. The pattern of meaning of all the dials, switches and buttons crowded into the control room became a little clearer to him.
Albrekt was eating a meal of emergency rations when he glimpsed movement on one of the rear screens. He turned his attention to it at once.
A spacesuited figure was emerging from the airlock, which was in a narrow waist between the vessel's personnel sphere and the huge cargo cylinder beneath it. From the suit, it was either Carrel or Migl.
The figure moved cautiously up on the outside of the airlock, gripping its surface with heavy magnetic shoes. In the hooks of the spacesuit, it carried two sledge hammers.
Albrekt flipped on the switch to the intercom, which was tuned to the spacesuit helmet radios as well as the ship's system.
"I'd advise the man in the spacesuit to forget it, and get back aboard," he said gently. "If he doesn't, I'll sweep the outside surface with machine gun fire in exactly two minutes."
"It would take you some time to break into the control room with a sledge hammer," Albrekt said conversationally into the microphone. "At the first blow, I'll blast anyone who tries it. That's fair warning."
It was several days later that Albrekt began to feel sleepy long before his sleeping time. The realization hit him suddenly that for some time he had been yawning and stretching, relaxing more and more in the chair, his eyelids getting heavier and heavier. His head was beginning to ache a little. He slept by the clock and awoke by the clock. He should not be sleepy for hours yet.
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