Danvers carefully closed the door, testing the broken lock.
“Got to have that fixed,” he murmured. “It isn’t shipshape this way.” He found a brace and stood opposite the mate, his eyes cool and watchful, the strain still showing on his tired face. Hilton reached for a cigarette.
“Next time your tomcat jumps me, I’ll burn a hole through him,” he promised.
“I stationed him here to guard you, in case there was trouble,” Danvers said. “To take care of you if we cracked up or ran into danger. I showed him how to close your helmet and start the oxygen.”
“Expect a half-witted Canopian to remember that?” Hilton said. “You also told him to keep drugging me.” He reached toward the shining liquid sphere floating near by and pushed a forefinger into it. He tasted the stuff. “Sure. Vakheesh. That’s what you slipped in my drink on Fria. Suppose you start talking, skipper. What’s this Canopian doing aboard?”
“I signed him,” Danvers said.
“For what? Supercargo?”
Danvers answered that emotionlessly, watching Hilton.
“Cabin-boy.”
“Yeah. What did you tell Wiggins? About me, I mean?”
“I said you’d got doped up,” Danvers said, grinning. “You were doped, too.”
“I’m not now.” Hilton’s tone rang hard. “Suppose you tell me where we are? I can find out. I can get the equations from Ts’ss and run chart-lines. Are we on M-Seventy-Five-L?”
“No, we’re not. We’re riding another level.”
“Where to?”
The Canopian shrilled, “I don’t know name. Has no name. Double sun it has.”
“You crazy!” Hilton glared at the skipper. “Are you heading us for a double primary?”
Danvers still grinned. “Yeah. Not only that, but we’re going to land on a planet thirty thousand miles from the suns—roughly.”
Hilton flicked on his deadlight and looked at white emptiness.
“Closer than Mercury is to Sol. You can’t do it. How big are the primaries?”
Danvers told him.
“All right. It’s suicide. You know that. La Cucaracha won’t take it.”
“The old lady will take anything the Big Night can hand out.”
“Not this. Don’t kid yourself. She might have made it back to Earth—with a Lunar landing—but you’re riding into a meat-grinder.”
“I haven’t forgotten my astrogation,” Danvers said. “We’re coming out of hyper with the planet between us and the primaries. The pull will land us.”
“In small pieces,” Hilton agreed. “Too bad you didn’t keep me doped. If you keep your mouth shut, we’ll replot our course to Earth and nobody’ll get hurt. If you want to start something, it’ll be mutiny, and I’ll take my chances at Admiralty.”
The captain made a noise that sounded like laughter.
“All right,” he said, “Suit yourself. Go look at the equations. I’ll be in my cabin when you want me. Come on, Dzann.”
He pulled himself into the companionway, the Canopian gliding behind him as silently as a shadow.
Hilton met Bruno with coffee as he followed Danvers. The mate grunted, seized the covered cup, and sucked in the liquid with the deftness of long practise under antigravity conditions. Bruno watched him.
“All right, sir?” the cook-surgeon said.
“Yeah. Why not?”
“Well—the men are wondering.”
“What about?”
“I dunno, sir. You’ve never—you’ve always commanded the launchings, sir. And that Canopian—the men don’t like him. They think something’s wrong.”
“Oh, they do, do they?” Hilton said grimly. “I’ll come and hold their hands when they turn in for night-watch. They talk too much.”
He scowled at Bruno and went on toward the control room. Though he had mentioned mutiny to the skipper, he was too old a hand to condone it, except in extremity. And discipline had to be maintained, even though Danvers had apparently gone crazy.
Ts’ss and Saxon were at the panels. The Selenite slanted a glittering stare at him, but the impassive mask under the audio-filter showed no expression. Saxon, however, swung around and began talking excitedly.
“What’s happened, Mr. Hilton? Something’s haywire. We should be ready for an Earth-landing by now. But we’re not. I don’t know enough about these equations to chart back, and Ts’ss won’t tell me a blamed thing.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Ts’ss said. Hilton reached past the Selenite and picked up a folder of ciphered figures. He said absently to Saxon:
“Pipe down. I want to concentrate on this.”
He studied the equations.
He read death in them.
IV
Gamble with Death
Logger Hilton went into the skipper’s cabin, put his back against the wall, and started cursing fluently and softly. When he had finished, Danvers grinned at him.
“Through?” he asked.
Hilton switched his stare to the Canopian, who was crouched in a corner, furtively loosening the locks of his spacesuit.
“That applies to you, too, tomcat,” he said.
“Dzann won’t mind that,” Danvers said. “He isn’t bright enough to resent cussing. And I don’t care, as long as I get what we want. Still going to mutiny and head for Earth?”
“No, I’m not,” Hilton said. With angry patience he ticked off points on his fingers. “You can’t switch from one hyper-plane to another without dropping into ordinary space first, for the springboard. If we went back into normal space, the impact might tear La Cucaracha into tiny pieces. We’d be in suits, floating free, a hundred million miles from the nearest planet. Right now we’re in a fast hyper-flow heading for the edge of the universe, apparently.”
“There’s one planet within reach,” Danvers said.
“Sure. The one that’s thirty thousand miles from a double primary. And nothing else.”
“Well? Suppose we do crack up? We can make repairs once we land on a planet. We can get the materials we need. You can’t do that in deep space. I know landing on this world will be a job. But it’s that or nothing—now.”
“What are you after?”
Danvers began to explain:
“This Canopian—Dzann—he made a voyage once, six years ago. A tramp hyper-ship. The controls froze, and the tub was heading for outside. They
