Read Ebook: Milk Run by Locke Robert Donald

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 82 lines and 6729 words, and 2 pages

MILK RUN

Captain Jock Warren came out of his drunken stupor to check the flight of his ship. What he found aboard made him dash for blessed oblivion!

The Star Rover, a rusty freighter that shuttled between Rigel and the home system, hovered above a transfer station some two million miles out from Rigel's twelfth planet, awaiting port clearance. Every crewman knew the skipper was oiled, but they knew the entropy barrier would set him back a full day, shocking him into cold alertness.

Second Officer Charles Guhn knocked at the captain's cabin, entered and saluted: "Sir, cargo's loaded and customs cleared."

The skipper, his face bagged like the Coal Sack, his blood-cracked eyes possessing chilling steel-blue irises that could blister a super-cargo's hide at fifty paces, was unable to focus on the papers handed him. He growled, "Blast off, Mr. Guhn! Blast off!"

"Aye aye, sir," Guhn paused, then reported: "I thought you should know, Captain. We just brought on some skags. Some archeology outfit's shipping the things to Earth for further study."

"Blasted mummies. Next, we'll be hauling heathen idols." Captain Warren glanced at his chronometer. "Shove-off time, is it? Go to the bridge and tell Mr. Caldwell I said to make her grunt."

This was his final utterance. His massive head slumped back into narcol stupor, his sotted brain dreaming of days when every space lane was a new frontier and adventure lurked on all unknown planets.

On his way up to the bow, Charlie Guhn poked his head into the wardroom, thinking it possible First Officer Mark Caldwell might be getting off one last message to the brunette on Rigel. But no one was in the lounge. Guhn followed the catwalk over the pulsing auxiliaries and mounted the starboard companionway to the bridge. There, he found the astrogator, pouring over a set of star charts.

"The old man says shove off," Guhn greeted him. "Got your DS done?"

Caldwell grinned, without looking up from his desk: "A DS is just a formality the rule book says you've got to enter in the log. Hyperspace's too slinky to obey normal laws. That's why we cut it in fifty parsec slices--to see how far we've drifted."

"You brain boys and your double talk."

"Not at all. Normal Einstein space is curved. Hyperspace isn't. Very simple."

"Simple like wombat chess, huh?"

"You can politely remove yourself to the deck," Caldwell replied. "I've got to get our junk pile coasting through the midnight black. Any women on board?"

"None your speed, Romeo ... unless you like skags." A split second dodge through the hatchway eluded the waste basket hurled at him.

After his calculations looked satisfactory, Caldwell unhinged his solar plane compass. Its needle pointed not to Earth, but to that vast imaginary plane in the galaxy to which the home system was horizontal and to which a line drawn through the sun and Polaris was nearly perpendicular. Once a heading was determined, it was possible by quadrangulation to arrive at an effective course.

The transparent stardome that enveloped the bridge admitted the light of a thousand molten suns from this crowded corner of space. The astrogator looked at the clusters and thought how glad he was to leave the hot dry climate of Rigel's dusty barren worlds, not to mention the primitive women. Now, Arcturus was an exciting run, he'd heard. A spaceman's Paradise, with an exotic native culture and a nitrogen-major atmosphere. Not like the damned helium envelope of the Rigellian system, in which a man's voice rose to female pitch.

Caldwell rang the engine room: "Prepare to blast."

"Aye aye, sir. Curium piles on 40 plus."

"Open rear vents."

"Rear vents opened."

"Attention, deck. Close all ports."

Throughout the vessel, shutters descended to screen out the cosmic radiations that would bathe the hull as light speed approached. Alarm bells rang. The astrogator's slender hands caressed a set of blue-sheened knobs, while a dozen dials glowed with sudden green light. Bulbs dimmed as power from the auxiliaries added their load to the direct blasters. The Star Rover shuddered violently and bulkheads screamed as tortured metal leaped forward through the void.

And in the hold, the skags still slept.

On deck, Charlie Guhn sickened briefly as acceleration took hold. Still, free space takeoffs weren't as tormenting as shaking off six to eight gravities in a surface departure. More, on some of the big planets. He wondered vaguely why the skipper preferred a narcol stupor to reality. Who knew? Perhaps thirty years of probing the black void and the deeper black of hyperspace would gnaw away any man's defenses. It took a wife and kids to anchor a man to a world. Guhn, himself, was grateful for his family on Earth and the days he would spend with his feet planted firm on terrestrial soil. He was privileged in a way Capt. Jock Warren could never know.

He approached the compartment that contained the skags. Here he halted, sensitive to the enigma which had baffled the galaxy. The strange frozen skags constituted the first and only evidence of a non-humanoid culture yet found.

They were known to have been intelligent. Their cities, lacy things of steel and plastic, still reached for clouds on the slag-red sands of Rigel IV, silent and deserted. In vaults beneath cities' surface had been discovered the last few inhabitants, perfectly preserved in death.

Controlling his repulsion, Charlie Guhn studied the three skags lying in composed attitudes within their globe-shaped transparent shells. Blue tentacles stuck out of bulbous heads like medusae. Inhumanly majestic faces, but lacking nostrils and ears, were supported by strong granite bodies with abnormally long arms and legs. At first glance, they appeared to be perverted human mutations. In their repose, they seemed almost alive.

Unable to look longer, Guhn climbed the nearest ladder. At the top, a crewman commented to him: "Must've been frightful in life, them skags. We'd had a battle, then, sir; a real bloody battle."

The ship's speaker vibrated with Mark Caldwell's magnified voice: "Attention, all hands. We are entering minus point."

In his cabin, Capt. Jock Warren mumbled in his narcol stupor but his burly body never stirred.

Veteran astrogator though he was, Mark Caldwell always dreaded the approach of minus point. You never could predict what effect the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction might produce just before the jump into hyperspace when the laws of the Einsteinian universe broke down. But only at minus point could warper coils take over from blast engines.

At minus point, which set in at 186,100 miles a second, time started to reverse itself and flow backwards. Bending of the space-time continuum distorted entropy, causing an indescribably extended vessel and occupants to actually grow younger. Because human minds were unable to function during this period of cellular regeneration, robot pilots took over immediately. Two hours past the barrier, the crew would awake--at least two hours younger than at the moment of plunge.

Relays shuffled and clutches locked, clamping the Star Rover's directional controls, while Mark Caldwell fed the ship's heading figures into the mercury vat memory of the pilot. Then, he prepared for the big sleep. When consciousness returned, his brain would no longer be fogged.

The astrogator's sensitive fingers closed the last switch. Around the plowing freighter, the void strained and twisted in the flux of new forces, squeezing the vessel out of the universe as a grape is squeezed from its skin.

It was at that moment of passing the barrier, that the skags--after a million years in the dream-barren sleep of suspended animation--awoke from their life in death. The time-reverting effect of minus point returned their bodies to that instant in the forgotten past when they had retreated into mass oblivion.

First to be jolted into life in the Star Rover's dim gray hold was the mind of K'Gol. Tentacles rustled in violent wriggling activity, then massive eyelids opened to reveal cold purple eyes. As inhuman strength massed in his limbs, K'Gol stood erect, found the release to his prison shell and pressed the button. The transparent envelope collapsed, leaving him free.

Thought vibrations brought perplexed messages from the two other skags.

K'Gol studied his surroundings and said: "We have failed. The gas nebula penetrated and we are in the realm of the dead."

"We are dead, yet we breathe."

"Let us look around. We must arrive at the truth."

Stumbling along with heavy tread, the skags made their way from compartment to compartment until they found a ladder, by which they mounted. Only the faint throb of the auxiliary engines, now supplying the warpers, was to be heard. On the deck, K'Gol found two erect bodies in sculptured attitudes, the unconscious shapes of Second Officer Charles Guhn and a boatswain. All three skags halted, racked by uncontrollable revulsion at sight of the alien species.

K'Gol's limbs glowed with yellow light and he reached forth to death-shock the monsters. But the skag behind him warned: "They may be harmless. Perhaps, we should wait until they awaken."

They explored the ship from bow to stern, stopping only to wonder at the warper coils which they would have designed differently. "It is clear. We are prisoners in a vessel-between-the-stars."

Presently, they found a control that opened the starboard view ports. Their eyes were greeted by the wrenching chaos of hyperspace. "It is a new dimension. Our captors are highly advanced and their minds are impervious to our probing. We must take over, before they recover." The skags hurried through the freighter, gathering up all possible weapons and locking them in the hold. Then, K'Gol mounted the bridge and familiarized himself with the instruments and controls.

Mark Caldwell's mind snapped back into full consciousness. For a moment, he thought that waitress at Arcturus had followed him; then, the vision suddenly changed into something horrible and he found himself facing a living skag who stood watching him with curious eyes. Caldwell's skin crawled and he started to cry out. A muscle jerk caused his arms to fail and a yellow glow simultaneously exuded from the skag, bathing the astrogator in needle-like flame that paralyzed.

Skag and human studied each other, unable to communicate directly and each filled with horror and disgust at the other's sight. Then, having made his captive helpless, K'Gol examined the star charts on the desk, only to discover a million years had exploded the constellations like dust clouds, and the suns were unfamiliar. Again, man and skag faced each other. Without communication, the skags could not learn the ship's destination and so, although they were in power, they were as helpless as their captives.

Charlie Guhn had been thinking of Earth's green fields, a moment before the Star Rover entered minus point. Now, his mind was snapped back to terrifying reality with the knowledge that the starboard ports were unshuttered. No human found it easy to gaze at hyperspace and the officer rushed to close the ports, wondering who was responsible. He made his way to the hold and there discovered the collapsed envelopes of the skags.

His first thought was for the captain. But as he neared Jock Warren's cabin, his hackles rose as if in warning: there was a new odor in the air, slimy and deathly ancient. Then at the far end of the passageway, he saw the back of a tentacled head rise from the steps to the engine room. Yellow flame seemed to pursue him along the corridor as he fled. An emergency hatch that led past the fore-castle to the lifeboats afforded him temporary escape and seconds later he found refuge in a lifeboat.

When his trembling ceased, he started to formulate plans to regain the ship. In the lifeboat, he discovered two force band pistols which he stuck in his belt. If worse came to worse, he could bolt the ship, risking the unknown dangers of a hyper-universe in preference to the skags.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet