Pete stared at me until I lost my head. “She’s out on the hull alone! You hear? Alone, in a suit that won’t give her much protection! If her irons slip she’ll be done for! She’s either stark staring mad or—”
My thoughts came so fast I had to stop. But my mind raced on. Was she actually mad? Or had she crawled out of hiding to find herself in a ship that was fast becoming a droning death trap?
A woman hiding in the dark, with her senses abnormally alert, would be quick to get the awful feel of a ship about to fly asunder. She wouldn’t have to guess. She’d know!
A girl pilot? Well, why not? There were plenty of girl pilots working their fingers to the bone to earn passage money in Callisto City. Stowing away would be a shortcut to freedom and the green hills of Earth. You couldn’t blame a girl for hating the dust and roar of an atomic power plant, or the drudgery of a mining job.
I could picture her succumbing to blind panic, ripping a suit down from the locker, and crawling out into the void to tighten the gravity bolts on the naked hull with a magneto-wrench.
“Jeebies always try to kill themselves!” Pete croaked. “You get to pitying them! Your head swells and you get all choked up with pity! And that’s when you know you’ve blown your top!”
I answered that with a voice that rang hard. “All right, have it your own way! She’s a jeebie! But I’m not going to stand here pitying her! I’m going to help her!”
I never quite knew how I reached the locker, with imaginary eyes glittering at me from every corner of the ship. Pete’s wild talk hadn’t really shaken me. All loose talk about the mind is dangerous, of course. But I wasn’t scared of anything I couldn’t see.
The idea of a haunted ship seemed silly to me. Almost laughable. But I had to admit the ship had the feel of occupancy about it. I half expected that a second helmeted figure would pop out of the shadows before I could go to the aid of the first.
My palms were sweating as I struggled into a spacesuit that hadn’t been occupied for at least a century. There were five suits hanging in the locker, and I picked the biggest one. It was a little too small for me, but I couldn’t complain much on that score. It kinked a little, then drew tight over the shoulders, but nothing ripped when I moved.
I must have looked grotesque in that old, stiff, freakish garment, all bulges and creases. A big flaring dome over my head, feet like metal pancakes clattering on the deck.
But I wasn’t concerned with my appearance, just my oxygen intake.
Back by the gravity panel, Pete tried desperately to stop me. His bony hands went out, plucked at my wrists. I couldn’t hear him babbling outside the helmet. But I could see his shining eyes and moving lips. His eyes were tortured, pleading.
He might as well have been pleading with a man a hundred miles away—or a century dead!
I was deaf to reason. I was feeling merely a blind instinct to help a woman who had taken on a man’s job.
Pete’s eyes followed me as I went clumping toward the control board, and I felt a sudden tug of pity for him. If I never came back, he’d miss me a lot. Good old Pete! To make him feel better I flashed him a smile and waved him back.
“Sit down and relax, old-timer!” I said. “I’m just going out for a little breath of fresh air!”
It was just as well he couldn’t hear me. He was real touchy about space. You had to treat it with respect. The lads who sailed the seas of Terra before Pete started reaching for the stars with his little pink hands had what it takes, and their lingo is the spaceman’s lingo still. But to Pete spacemen were a notch higher in every respect. Nothing riled him more than loose talk about reading the weather by the glass or taking a squint at the North Star. Or going out for a breather on deck!
I thought of all that as I went out. Oh, Pete was a special character if ever there was one.
III
The Mirage Pup
I crawled out into the void on my hands and knees, clinging to the rough hull, digging with my magnetic irons into the thick coating of meteoric dust and grit and rubble the ship had picked up in deep space.
Brother, it’s all yours if you want it! A wind that isn’t a wind tearing at you; the stars blazing in a black pit, and a million light years staring you in the face, doing your thinking for you, warning you that forever is too long a time to go somersaulting through space shrouded in a blanket of ice.
You feel your grip slipping, know it can’t slip, and dig, dig with your knees. You look up and there’s the flame of a rocket jet missing you by inches. You look down and there’s nothing to maim or sear you—just utter blackness. Believe me, that’s worse!
I stared straight across the hull through a spiraling splotch of blue flame toward the stern rocket jets. The flame whorl came from diffuse matter friction. Tiny particles hit the ship, bounced off and set up an electrical discharge in the ether.
It’s cool and it doesn’t burn. If you keep your head you can crawl right through it.
I started crawling the instant I saw her. She was clinging to the hull between two flaring rocket jets, her magneto-wrench rising and falling in the unearthly glare.
A swaying figure wrapped in blue light, her face looking pinched and white and faraway through the globe on her shoulders. The helmet itself looked small against the vast backdrop of space. But as I crawled toward her it kept getting larger—like
