“I was shanghaied!”
“I know it. That’s the only way we can get a full crew to sign articles on La Cucaracha. I mentioned discipline. We don’t bother much with it here. Just the same, you’d better call me Mister when people are around. Now shut up and relax. Give him a sedative, Bruno.”
“No! I want to send a spacegram!”
“We’re in hyper. You can’t. What’s your name?”
“Saxon. Luther Saxon. I’m one of the consulting engineers on Transmat.”
“The matter-transmission gang? What were you doing around the space-docks?”
Saxon gulped. “Well—uh—I go out with the technical crews to supervise new installations. We’d just finished a Venusian transmission station. I went out for a few drinks—that was all! A few drinks, and—”
“You went to the wrong place,” Hilton said, amused. “Some crimp gave you a Mickey. Your name’s on the articles, anyhow, so you’re stuck, unless you jump ship. You can send a message from Fria, but it’d take a thousand years to reach Venus or Earth. Better stick around, and you can ride back with us.”
“On this crate? It isn’t safe. She’s so old I’ve got the jitters every time I take a deep breath.”
“Well, stop breathing,” Hilton said curtly. La Cucaracha was an old tramp, of course, but he had shipped on her for a good many years. It was all right for this Transmat man to talk; the Transmat crews never ran any risks.
“Ever been on a hyper-ship before?” he asked.
“Naturally,” Saxon said. “As a passenger! We have to get to a planet before we can install a transmission station, don’t we?”
“Uh-huh.” Hilton studied the scowling face on the pillow. “You’re not a passenger now, though.”
“My leg’s broken.”
“You got an engineering degree?”
Saxon hesitated and finally nodded.
“All right, you’ll be assistant pilot. You won’t have to walk much to do that. The pilot’ll tell you what to do. You can earn your mess that way.”
Saxon sputtered protests.
“One thing,” Hilton said. “Better not tell the skipper you’re a Transmat man. He’d hang you over one of the jets. Send him for’rd when he’s fixed up, Bruno.”
“Yessir,” Bruno said, grinning faintly. An old deep-space man, he didn’t like Transmat either.
Hilton pulled himself back to the control room. He sat down and watched the white visoscreens. Most of Ts’ss’ many arms were idle. This was routine now.
“You’re getting an assistant,” Hilton said after a while. “Train him fast. That’ll give us all a break. If that fatheaded Callistan pilot hadn’t jumped on Venus, we’d be set.”
“This is a short voyage,” Ts’ss said. “It’s a fast hyper-flow on this level.”
“Yeah. This new guy. Don’t tell the skipper, but he’s a Transmat man.”
Ts’ss laughed a little.
“That will pass, too,” he said. “We’re an old race, Mr. Hilton. Earthmen are babies compared to the Selenites. Hyper-ships are fading out, and eventually Transmat will fade out too, when something else comes.”
“We won’t fade,” Hilton said, rather surprised to find himself defending the skipper’s philosophy. “Your people haven’t—you Selenites.”
“Some of us are left, that’s true,” Ts’ss said softly. “Not many. The great days of the Selenite Empire passed very long ago. But there are still a few Selenites left, like me.”
“You keep going, don’t you? You can’t kill off a—a race.”
“Not easily. Not at once. But you can, eventually. And you can kill a tradition, too, though it may take a long time. But you know what the end will be.”
“Oh, shut up,” Hilton said. “You talk too much.”
Ts’ss bent again above the controls. La Cucaracha fled on through the white hyper-flow, riding as smoothly as the day she had been launched.
But when they reached Fria, it would be rough space and high gravity. Hilton grimaced.
He thought: So what? This is just another voyage. The fate of the universe doesn’t depend on it. Nothing depends on it, except, maybe, whether we make enough profit to have the old lady overhauled. And that won’t matter to me for it’s my last voyage into the Big Night.
He watched the screens. He could not see it, but he knew that it hung beyond the universal whiteness, in a plane invisible to his eyes. The little sparks of worlds and suns glowed in its immensity, but never brightened it. It was too vast, too implacable. And even the giant suns would be quenched in its ocean, in the end. As everything else would be quenched, as everything moved on the tides of time into that huge darkness.
That was progress. A wave was born and gathered itself and grew—and broke. A newer wave was behind it. And the old one slipped back and was lost forever. A few foam-flecks and bubbles remained, like Ts’ss, remnant of the giant wave of the ancient Selenite Empire.
The Empire was gone. It had fought and ruled a hundred worlds, in its day. But, in the end, the Big Night had conquered and swallowed it.
As it would swallow the last hyper-ship eventually. …
They hit Fria six days later, Earth time. And hit was the word. One of Ts’ss’ chitin-covered arms was snapped off by the impact, but he didn’t seem to mind. He couldn’t feel pain, and he could grow another limb in a few weeks. The crew, strapped to their landing braces, survived with minor bruises.
Luther Saxon, the Transmat man, was in the auxiliary pilot’s seat—he had enough specialized engineering training so that he learned the ropes fast—and he acquired a blue bump on his forehead, but that was all. La Cucaracha had come out of hyper with a jolt that strained her fat old carcass to the limit, and the atmosphere and gravity of Fria was the penultimate straw. Seams ripped, a jet went out, and new molten streaks appeared on the white-hot hull.
The crew had been expecting liberty. There was no time for that. Hilton told off working gangs to relieve each other at six-hour intervals, and he said, rather casually, that Twilight was out of bounds. He knew the
