The sleek-haired young man nodded and detached himself from the group. Halderson watched him jogging toward the ship. If Merrick ever got inside that airlock, it meant the Disaster Patrol scout was stranded on this planet for life.
Halderson had only one way to save himself. He hoped these castaways didn’t know about it.
A spaceship’s airlock can be opened from outside, with the proper equipment—the equipment being a radio transmitter keyed to the operating frequency of the airlock door. Every Patrol uniform carried such a minute transmitter; they were handy in those rare cases when a lone pilot has accidentally locked himself out of his ship, and wants to get back in.
But the transmitter could also be used to close the airlock door from outside.
Gently, so that the motion was barely perceptible, Halderson let his dangling arms meet behind his back. He had to move a fraction of an inch at a time, in order not to alarm the girl with the gun. And in the meantime Merrick was getting closer and closer to the open airlock…
Halderson reached out with his thumb and flipped the actuator on the airlock control just a moment before Merrick had succeeded in scaling the catwalk. The airlock door clanged shut in his face. He cursed and pounded angrily on the unyielding metal.
“What kind of a trick was that?” the party-girl demanded hotly. “Why did the door close?”
“It was an automatic reaction,” Halderson said. “Just before I got out of the ship I set the lock to close in case anyone unauthorized came near the door. It’s a precaution I like to take on strange planets.”
“Open the lock!”
Halderson smiled. “I can’t, even if I want to,” he said untruthfully. “Once the door closes that way, it stays closed for twenty-four hours. Not even I can open it now.”
The girl frowned, but she seemed to accept the statement. “Very well,” she said. “You can’t do any harm while your ship is sealed, anyway. But understand this: we don’t want to be meddled with. We like it here.”
Halderson looked around in total confusion. Two old dowagers, one potbellied businessman, three good-looking young girls and a handsome playboy. All castaways. And they had murdered the man who had sent out the S.O.S. signal. They liked it here.
It made no sense at all.
They took his guns away from him, which he didn’t like but which couldn’t be helped. He knew he would simply have to bide his time now. Whenever he got his chance, he would have to make a break for his ship, open the airlock, and try to get away. Later, he could call for a pickup ship that would come to get these obviously crazed castaways.
It seemed that the whole tribe of them was going on a short migration, and Halderson was forced to accompany them. They ambled away from the ships, heading up the winding stream that ran through the valley, until they came to a grassy area where, Halderson saw, they had pitched the bubbletents carried in the lifeship’s cargo hold. Four tents had been pitched; each held two people. Halderson wondered who was coupled up with whom.
The party-girl never relaxed her aim, keeping Halderson in check all the time. He noticed a clear blue spring running past the tent area. He touched his dry tongue to his lips. The water was clear, sparkling, probably ice-cold, and he was thirsty.
“How’s the drinking-water?” he asked.
“Fine,” said the party-girl. As if to illustrate her statement, several of the others knelt by the spring’s banks and lifted cupped handfuls of water greedily to their lips.
Halderson said, “Mind if I get a drink? I’m pretty thirsty right now.”
“Go right ahead,” the party-girl said. “Just don’t try anything tricky.”
“No—don’t,” said a tense voice.
Halderson looked around. The person who had spoken was one of the other young women of the group. Her face was pale and lean, her eyes a little wild.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“If you value your sanity—don’t drink that water! Don’t go near it!”
“She’s out of her head,” scoffed the party-girl. “Don’t pay any attention to her ravings. If you want a drink, go ahead—drink hearty!”
But something in the other girl’s tone of voice made Halderson hesitate, thirsty as he was. “Why shouldn’t I drink?” he asked. “Who are you?”
“I’m Marian Chase. Daughter of Raymond Chase, if that name means anything to you.”
“The Governor-General of the Somilak Colony-world?” Halderson asked.
“Yes. He—he was killed in the explosion on the ship. We were on vacation, you see, Father and I.” Her lips firmed bitterly. “But you mustn’t drink that water. I’m the only one who hasn’t—and you see what’s become of all the others!”
“You mean, not wanting to leave this planet?”
Marian Chase nodded. She was a slim girl, dark of complexion, with large eyes made even larger by the pallor of her face. She wore expensive clothes, but they were tattered and filthy now. Her skirt was ripped to the thigh, her blouse torn in half a dozen places. “Each day they forget a little more,” she said. “It’s like a drug, the water on this planet. We tested it—Mr. Chivers did, before they killed him—and chemically it seems pure enough. But there’s something in it that attacks the nerve fibers. Weakens them; blots out the mind. One of those old women hardly knows what’s happening around her now; the others will be like that soon enough. Like a drug, washing away their minds! And of course they don’t want to leave this world now. They want to stay here, drinking from that spring, until their minds are gone completely and they’re just idiots.” She paused. “Maybe that’s a good thing. Blotting out all our memories, all our fears and agonies.”
Halderson stared at her. “You mean you haven’t touched any of the water of this planet?”
“Not a drop.”
“How long have you people been here?”
“This is the fifth day.”
“And you’ve gone without water for five consecutive days?”
Marian Chase smiled weakly. “Oh, no. There was a small water supply aboard the lifeship. Not much, but I’ve been rationing myself, just a few cupfuls a day. The others drink from the spring, you see, which leaves the entire ship supply, such that it is, for me. There’s not much left, though. And when that’s gone—”
“Don’t think about that,” Halderson said. “Maybe I’ll be able to get away in the ship with you before that happens.”
“Do you think there’s a chance?”
“What are you two jabbering about?” demanded the party-girl, who squatted about fifteen feet away from them with the gun trained steadily on Halderson.
“The spaceman is thirsty,” Marian Chase said.
The party-girl tossed her head contemptuously toward the spring. “Plenty of water down there, if he’s thirsty.”
“No. I’ll bring him a drink from the ship.”
Halderson looked up. “There isn’t much of that water left. You’d better keep it all for yourself.”
She shook her head. “Please—I couldn’t do a thing like that. Let me bring you a cup.”
Before he could answer, she was gone, trotting across the field down to the lifeship. Halderson frowned. The other members of the survivor party were still busily slaking their thirst at the spring. He shuddered as he watched them splash the water into their mouths.
Then Marian Chase returned, bearing a half-full cup of water. Halderson smiled thankfully at her and took the cup. The water was warmish and stale, but at least he knew it was pure. He drank slowly, savoring it.
“I checked the tank,” the girl said. “If we each have three cups of water a day, we have enough left for three more days.”
“Two cups a day, almost five days,” he said.
“And one cup a day, enough for more than a week. But no matter how thrifty we are, it’s all going to be gone soon. And then we either die of thirst or become like them.”
Halderson wondered if they planned to keep him under guard permanently. It would make sense, he thoug
ht, simply to shoot him down and blast the airlock of his ship open with that Kesterton, if all they were afraid of was his getting word back to Headquarters about them.
That was the sensible thing to do. But, Halderson reflected, these people were not rational. According to Marian Chase, their minds were rapidly ebbing away. And probably within each of them was some residual decency that kept them from taking the obvious way of disposing of him.
So they would sit around with a gun pointed at him until he died of thirst, it seemed. It wasn’t a pretty way to die.
During the next hour Marian Chase told him about the events that had occurred between the destruction of the James P. Drew and the present moment. The trouble had begun with a sudden explosion in the Drew’s drive compartment, and from there the flames and smoke had spread rapidly. There were other explosions. Within minutes, the great ship was crippled and the alarm bells were sounding.
Marian Chase and her father, the famous statesman Raymond Chase, had been in their cabin on the upper deck when the first explosion came. The ship had seemed to shudder, and then the wall of the cabin had buckled and split, crushing and killing the elder Chase. Marian had fled out into the companionway. A passing crewman had paused to tell her to head for the nearest lifeship. Then the alarms began to sound, and the abandon-ship order, with the traditional cry: “Women and children first! Women and children first!”
Somehow Marian had found her way through the turmoil and the smoke to one of the lifeships. Four people were in it when she entered: Mrs. Dugan and Mrs. Lumley, the two venerable dowagers who were traveling together; a hysterical young woman who had seen her husband killed before her eyes; and a fourth woman, dowdy and middle-aged, who said she had been traveling with her sister. The sister was somewhere outside, but the woman was afraid to go out to look.
In the next few minutes four more people entered the lifeship. The first was Ronald Merrick, a 29-year-old playboy who was on his third honeymoon; his wife was somewhere in the confused and panicky mob on deck, but he didn’t care. He was only interested in saving himself. Behind Merrick came an odd threesome. Lora Ryne was the party-girl, half-nude and disheveled. She came in with the fat businessman she had been entertaining, Max Dominick. Dominick, it seemed, was determined to have female companionship in case they were cast away on some lonely planet, and had brought the not unwilling party-girl with him.
Dominick had also brought someone else with him at the point of a Kesterton blaster. He was a crewman named Chivers, who insisted that he had no right aboard a lifeship until all the passengers were safely aboard the ships.
“Nonsense,” Dominick rumbled. “Do you think we know how to operate this ship? You’re going to pilot it for us, my good man!”
“But there’s an instruction manual on board—”
“Never you mind that,” Dominick told him, brandishing the deadly blaster. “Get this ship out of here, and do it fast.”
“We’re not full up,” the crewman protested.
“Would you wait around until the ship explodes?” Dominick bellowed. “Come on, now—blast off!”
And so the lifeship took off, bearing only nine passengers instead of the maximum complement of more than thirty. Marian had no idea whether any other lifeships made successful departures from the ship. All she knew was that minutes after they had left, a ferocious brilliance radiated through the portholes—the light, not of a sun going nova, but of the explosion of the James P. Drew.
The crewman, Chivers, did some quick astrogating and piloted them to the planet of their landing. The trip took two days. It was a faulty landing, and they were all fairly well knocked around as the ship touched down. Marian was thrown against a wall and made unconscious. When she woke, the ship stood open; there was no one in it but Chivers, who was unconscious.
She went to the open lock and looked out. The others had wandered upstream to the little spring and were drinking. Chivers woke, and he and Marian went to join them. The crewman had berated them for doing something as risky as drinking untested water on an alien planet, and he had tested it for them. He had pronounced it pure.
Then he had returned to the ship, saying he would compute their position and flash out an S.O.S. signal. Marian, who was thirsty, had been about to join the others at the spring when she noticed curious changes coming over them. They seemed dreamy and strange—and they were apparently alarmed at the idea of an S.O.S.
Before she could do anything, Merrick was racing back to the lifeship. She followed, hoping to warn Chivers. The crewman had just begun to send the S.O.S signal when Merrick, snatching up the portable fire extinguisher, crushed Chivers’ skull and smashed the radio equipment.
They were marooned.
And for the next five days Marian watched the gradual deterioration of her fellow survivors and the gradual depletion of her own water supply, until the day Halderson arrived.
The afternoon wore along. Halderson knew that if he could only get back to his ship and activate the radio transmitter that would open the airlock to let him in, he could use the ship’s subradio to call Headquarters and explain his predicament. They would send out a pickup ship and bring these people back to civilization, and, if it could be done, they would attempt to undo the damage to their minds.
But Halderson was guarded constantly.
His mind thought of half a dozen tricks he could use to get back into his ship. But none of them seemed even nearly adequate. All he could do was wait, and hope that the others would relax their guard before the supply of drinkable water ran out.
Late that afternoon Lora Ryne, who had been tirelessly guarding him all day, called to Merrick to take over. She handed him the gun and, rising languidly, stripped off her single flimsy garment and strolled to the river for a swim. The two dowagers were lying in a stupor near the spring. Halderson had a theory that the older a person was, the quicker he was affected by the action of the water. Merrick and the two younger women still seemed able to carry on a coherent conversation, even though their thoughts and actions were not sane ones.
Mrs. Dugan, Mrs. Lumley, and fat Max Dominick were all well along in years, and they seemed to have little contact with reality any more. It was as if they had drifted back into earliest childhood. They sat by the edge of the spring and smiled cheerfully, and from time to time they helped themselves to another drink.
It would not be long, he thought, before Merrick and Lora and the young widow, Lucy Clay, began to undergo the full mind-blurring. Already he could see that the other woman, Mrs. Brewster, who was in her forties or fifties, was starting to show the same dreaminess demonstrated by the three oldest survivors.
But how soon would it happen? he wondered. How soon would it be before Merrick and Lora and Lucy Clay slipped back to childish idiocy? Would he and Marian Chase be dead of thirst by that time?
Night fell. Marian had brought Halderson a sort of a meal, a few cabbage-like leaves and a yellow waxy fruit plucked from a nearby tree.
“It’s the best I can do,” she said. “Without the gun there’s no way we can get meat. We’ll just have to live off foraging.”
“How about the others? What do they eat?”
Marian shrugged. “The oldest ones don’t seem to bother eating at all, the last couple of days. They just drink the spring-water. It’s almost as if they’ve forgotten the very fact that they need food to stay alive. As for the others, they eat whatever they can find—the sort of stuff I’ve brought you.”
Overhead the two big moons were bright and clear, the smaller one whirling dizzily past and eclipsing the other every hour or so. It was growing darker rapidly.
Mrs. Dugan and Mrs. Lumley, the two ancient battleaxes, had crawled off to one of the plastic bubbletents to sleep. Halderson could hear their loud snoring from here, fifty feet away.
Max Dominick sat propped against a tree like a fat sleepy Buddha, his hands folded over his belly. He looked sloppy, with his week-old growth of stubbly gray beard. Mrs. Brewster, the woman who ha
d saved for years and years to be able to take a voyage on the James P. Drew, wandered blankfaced around the camp area for a few hours and finally, after a long draught of the spring-water, disappeared into one of the other tents.
Halderson figured that those four would be finished soon. They had hardly spoken a word in the last half day, and what they had spoken was largely incoherent. The drug in the water was at work, corroding their tired brains, lulling them into forgetfulness.
The other three, though—they still were troublesome. They sat facing Halderson, debating insanely what to do with him, while he and Marian Chase listened quietly and in numb fear.
Merrick said, “I think we ought to break his head open the way we did to that other one.”
“Which other one?” asked Lucy Clay sleepily. She was a good-looking woman in her middle twenties, whose husband, killed aboard the Drew, had been on his way to Darrinoor to serve in the administrative corps there.
“The other one in the ship,” said Lora Ryne acidly. The party-girl still had a fairly sharp mind. “The one who tried to warn the rescue men. We broke his head open.”
“We ought to break that one’s head open too,” Merrick said thickly, pointing to Halderson.
“And the girl, too,” added Lora Ryne. “She might be dangerous.”
“Kill them all,” muttered Lucy Clay.
“We’ll do it tomorrow,” Merrick said. “Let’s tie them up and go to bed.”
Halderson tensed. Tie them up! With what?
He got his answer quick enough. Merrick tottered down to the lifeship, which was hidden behind the slight rise in the valley floor. He returned a few moments later carrying two lengths of rope. With a cleverness surprising in him, considering the effect the water had taken, he tied Halderson and Marian together, back to back, with a tight twist around their wrists, and then hobbled their feet.
“That ought to keep them till morning,” Merrick said, surveying his handiwork. “Sure. They won’t move till morning. Morning, we decide what to do with them.”