Ah, me!
The ingrate System will regret this injustice to a mortal hero!”
He wiped the tears away, then, with the back of a great fat hand, and tilted up the flagon.
He had found opportunity for a raid on the galley, since they took the ship.
His capacious pockets were stuffed with slabs of synthetic Legion rations, sweet-cakes, and fragments of baked ham, which now flowed again toward his mouth in a stream of traffic interrupted only by the trips of the wine-flagon to the same destination.
The Purple Dream was adrift in space, a hundred thousand miles off the huge, tawny, ocher globe of Mars.
Tiny Phobos had long been lost among the million, many-hued points that pierced the black sphere of vacant night.
They lay with lights and signals dead, helpless; and the avid fleets of the Legion hunted them.
Commander Adam Ulnar safely locked in the brig, their other prisoners released through the air-lock, they had driven the cruiser away from the landing stage on the Purple Hall under rocket power.
John Star had felt freedom in their grasp.
But then a dying engineer—true to the Legion traditions—had thrown a switch, burned out a geodyne unit.
With generators useless and rockets inadequate to move the vessel fast or far through these hostile immensities, the four had gathered for a council of desperation.
“She’s in the hands of those monsters?” huge Hal Samdu asked again, his big hands knotting.
“The monsters that Eric Ulnar’s crazy veterans kept talking about?”
“Yes.
Except that I doubt that those things are enough like men to have hands.”
“With care,” began Jay Kalam, “organization———”
“Ah, that’s the word,” broke in Giles Habibula.
“Organization.
Regularity.
Four good meals, hot on the moment; twelve hours of good sound sleep.
Organization—though a blessed man might still take a cat-nap now and then, or a cold bite and a sip of wine between meals.”
“There’s the matter of navigation,” Jay Kalam went on.
“I know the rudiments, of course, but———” He looked doubtfully about, at the walls of the bridge-room, be-wilderingly crowded with all the shining, intricate mechanism of telescopic periscopes, geodesic telltales, meteor deflectors, rocket firing keys, geodyne controls, gyroscope space-compasses, radar, thermal and magnetic detector screens, star-charts, planetary maps, position-, velocity-, and gravitation-calculators, atmosphere and temperature gauges—all the apparatus for the not quite simple business of taking the cruiser safely from planet to planet.
“I can handle her,” offered John Star quietly.
“Good. Then we must have an engineer.
To repair the geodynes— we must somehow get them repaired!—and then to run them.”
Giles Habibula grunted, sputtered crumbs, failed to speak.
“That’s right, Giles.
I’d forgotten that you were a qualified technician.”
He swallowed, tilted the flagon, found his voice.
“Sweet life, yes, I can run the precious geodynes.
Giles Habibula can fight, when fighting has to be done, old and lame and feeble as he is.
Ah, me, no man is braver than old Giles—all of you know that.
When fighting must be done.
But, as a matter of choice, he’ll always stick to his blessed generators.
It’s safer—and there’s nothing else but wisdom in a blessed bit of caution.”
“You can fix the burned-out unit?”
“Ah, yes, I can re-wind it,” promised the new engineer.
“But it will be hard to synchronize it with the others.
Those units are matched when they are made. When one is off balance, it makes the whole system mortal hard to tune.
But I’ll do my blessed best.”
“And, Hal,” went on Jay Kalam, “you’ve been a proton gunner.
You can handle the big proton blast needle, if the Legion stumbles on us—though we can’t afford a fight, with just four men on a crippled ship.”
“Yes, I can do that,” gigantic Hal Samdu nodded slowly, his red face very grave.
“That’s simple. I can do it.”
“That leaves you, Jay,” spoke up John Star.
“We need you to do just what you’re doing now.
To plan, organize.
You will be our commander.”