trademark,
Sam waved him back to his seat before the Mue could spill his dinner in a futile effort to rise quickly. “I already looked. The volume of food basics below the synthesizer is in unmarked containers.”
Hurkos frowned, sat down. “Well, let’s see what we
“Agreed thus far,” Sam said, putting down his food, wiping his mouth.
“What’s the matter? You hardly ate.”
Sam grimaced, waved a hand vaguely and let it fall into his lap. “I don’t know exactly. I’m afraid to eat.”
Hurkos looked down at his own tray, paused half-finished with a mouthful. “Afraid?”
“There’s this… hazy sort of fear… because…”
“Go on!”
“Because it’s been made by machines. The food isn’t natural.”
Hurkos swallowed. “There is the fifth piece of data. You’re afraid of machines. I thought so earlier — judging by your reaction to the sight of the robosurgeons.”
“But I’ll starve!”
“I doubt that. You ate enough to keep you going. You just won’t get fat is all.”
Sam started to say something, but in the moment it took for his words to come from his larnyx to his tongue, he felt his head being ripped apart by thunders that shook every ounce of his flesh and soul. He opened his mouth, tried to scream, closed it abruptly. There was a chaos of noise in his head, a fermenting, fizzing, erupting madness. He was just barely aware that Hurkos was still talking to him, but he heard nothing. The world of the ship was distant and unreal. The noises, then, were speaking to him in a language of cacophony. Then he lost all awareness, was wrapped into the boomings, the dissonance. He pushed from the floor, found his seat, strapped in.
Hurkos was beside him, obviously shouting. But he heard nothing.
Nothing but the dissonance.
He saw the Mue running, crawling into the flexoplast mattress they had taken off the surgeon’s table. They had decided, since there was no second chair, that the flexoplast — wrapped completely around the Mue as a protective shell — would be a perfect substitute for a chair.
Sam slammed down on the toggles, blasted… then hyperspaced with a gut-wrenching jerk.
Hurkos was shouting from inside his mattress.
The ship moaned.
He reclined in his seat. The ship reached top hyperspace in incredibly short time. And collided with something…
IV
The thunders, as soon as Sam had thrown the ship out of hyperspace and into Real Space, had faded into silence. He again had control of his body.
Hurkos was rolling all over the floor, bounding off the walls as the ship shuddered, wallowed with the impact.
Sam remembered, suddenly, that they had struck something, and he looked up at the viewplate and the blank expanse of normal space. So near that he could almost touch it, another ship was drifting in front and slightly to the left of him. Perhaps only a mile away. Close for a shield-collision. He punched for open radio and tried to contact the other vessel, but he received no response.
“What the hell were you doing!” Hurkos shouted, freeing himself of the flexoplast and staggering to his feet.
Sam loosened his seatbelt and also stood. He felt as if he was about to throw up, but he fought the urge. “I don’t know! I just lost control of my mind, my body, everything! Someone told me to set a course for the capital.”
“Hope?”
“Yes. It told me to set a course for Hope and to hyperspace. Argument was impossible.”
Hurkos rubbed a sore spot on his arm, bruised because he had not gotten it into the flexoplast in time. “Did you recognize the voice?”
“It wasn’t exactly a voice. It was more like… well…”
There was a sudden pounding noise.
They whirled in the direction of the sound and saw a suited figure against the viewplate, rapping his fist against the glass. He had his suit phone turned up to maximum volume and was shouting something. They moved to the window. The man outside was huge — six feet six if an inch, two hundred and sixty pounds if an ounce. “Open up and let me in!” he was shouting. “Let me in before I tear this tub apart plate for plate!”
He looked as if he just might be able to carry out that threat.
“He must be from the other ship,” Hurkos said, moving to open the outer doors into the Scavenger that served as a pressure chamber.
The figure moved away from the viewplate toward the port. They waited nervously until the chamber closed, equalized with cabin pressure, and the door in the floor was opened.
If the stranger from the other ship had been imposing seen through the viewplate, he was overwhelming seen at first hand, inside the cabin, his head towering dangerously close to the ceiling. He pulled back his helmet, spewing a stream of curses, his eyes two fiery droplets within the flushed fury of his face. His blond hair was a wild disarray, uncombed and completely uncombable. “What the hell are you, some kinda moron? Morons have been wiped out of the culture! Haven’t you been told? You’re a one-of-a-kind, and I have to meet up with you in all this emptiness where — by all rights — we should never even be able to imagine each other’s existence!”
“I guess you’re angry about the collision,” Sam began, “and—”
The big man allowed his mouth to drop to his ankles and bounce back to a more respectable level just below the chin. “You guess I’m angry about the collision! You guess I” He turned to Hurkos. “He guesses I’m angry about the collision,” he repeated as if the stupidity of the remark was the most glaring understatement ever pronounced and had to be shared and discussed to be believed.
“I—” Sam began once more.
“Of course I’m angry about the collision! Damn furious is what I am! You hyperspaced without checking to see if there was another ship in hyperspace within the danger limit. Your field locked in mine and jolted us out into Real Space. What would have happened if our ships had struck instead of just our fields?”
“That’s rather unlikely,” Hurkos said. “After all, the fields are five miles in diameter, but the ships are far, far smaller than that. The odds against our ships striking in so vast a galaxy—”
“A moron spewing logic!” the big stranger shouted. “A real, honest moron shouting scientific gobbleygook at me like it really meant something to him! This is amazing.” He slapped one hammy hand against his forehead in a snow of amazement.
“If you’ll just listen a moment…” Sam sighed, seeing the big man’s lips open for comment even before he had said three words.
“Listen? I’m all ears. I’m just all ears for your excuse! Some excuse that could possibly explain your imbecilic reactions, and—”
“Wait a minute!” Hurkos shouted gleefully. “I know you!”
The stranger stopped talking abruptly.
“Mikos. You’re Mikos, the poet. Gnossos Mikos!”
The rage was swept away in the wash of a wide grin, and the grin became a flush of embarrassment. The huge fist dropped away from the forehead and became a hand again — a hand that was abruptly stuck out to
