"How about a snappy round of meteor ball before we eat?"
"You know me," grinned Kingman, the torpedo officer, from the cushions of the transom.
"Swell," said Fraser, gathering up the cards from his solitaire game. Fraser had charge of the auxiliaries and the mercury vapor boilers.
"How about you, Bullard?" Lieutenant Bullard was the latest comer to the Pollux. He had belonged to the mess too short a time for the others to learn much about him.
"Why, sure," said Bullard. He slid a marker into his book — "Hints on Ship-control, Star-class Cruisers" — and laid the volume carefully to one side. "Only I didn't know — " he hesitated, glancing in the direction of the executive officer seated in a wicker chair in a corner of the wardroom.
"In the Pollux, Bullard," spoke up the exec — Commander Beckley — "keeping fit is as important as anything else you do. If you're inclined to split hairs over the regulations, I'll ease your mind on that score. You are detailed to play. That makes it official."
Bullard reddened slightly at the implication he might be a sky lawyer, the bane of ships from time immemorial. But Commander Beckley was smiling pleasantly. He did not mean it that way; he was employing his own method of initiating his newest officer into the usage of the ship. It was true that officers were not supposed to leave a ship while under way, but notwithstanding the regulations, Beckley saw no good reason for making them forgo their daily exercise. The Pollux was swinging lazily in a wide orbit about the Jovian System, her electronic blasts cold and dark, patrolling for routine traffic-control purposes. Forbidding men to go over the side was as senseless a restriction as to prohibit swimming from an anchored ship.
"I think some exercise would do me good, too," yawned Chinnery, chief engineer, stretching languidly. "Count me in."
Chief Watch Officer Moore, who had proposed the game, frowned slightly. That upset the balance; five made unequal teams and there was no one else free. He turned toward the exec with a question on his lips, but Beckley had leaned over and was clicking the intership phone, calling Central Control.
"CC? Put the O.D. on. Carlson? A little game of meteor ball is starting. They need a sixth. You're it. Climb into your suit and report to Mr. Moore on the port boat deck. I'll take over for the duration."
The phone was slammed down with a click. The exec looked up. "You had a question, Moore?"
"Why, no, sir. That is, thank you, sir."
"Half an hour," smiled the exec as he rose to go to Central Control to relieve Carlson.
Bullard glowed inwardly. What a ship! No wonder she was regarded as the happiest home in the sky fleet. Clean, taut as a bowstring, yet friendly. From what he had seen, officers and crew were like one big family. The discipline was excellent — but invisible. One could almost term it voluntary. In the few days he had been aboard, Bullard already sensed the difference between the spirit exhibited on this snappy cruiser of the first line and that on the obsolescent reserve mine-layer he had just left, but it took this incident to make him understand why. It was the difference, in the personalities of those in control of the two ships.
He had no regrets now for leaving the old Asia, even if he had been chief engineer of her and here he was only a junior officer. As he recalled her meddlesome, old-womanish captain and the endless bickerings of the wardroom, he was aware he was glad to be well out of her. In contrast, the Pollux had Captain Mike Dongan, aloof and reserved, but capable and invariably pleasant; her exec, despite his air of geniality, held the ship to strict standards of performance; her wardroom officers, for all their pose of flippant indifference, were conscientious in the performance of their duties; her crew, in consequence, were fiercely loyal. All that together made for that prime essential of a "good" ship — esprit de corps — something a man could work for, fight for, die for. There was a new lilt in Bullard's stride as he hurried down the passage to shift into a lightweight spacesuit for the game.
He made his way to the boat deck, and as he stepped out of the air lock onto the broad fin he was impressed by the size of the huge vessel. Its hull sloped upward and away from him, gray in the dim light of a dwindled sun, and he saw for the first time, the row of alcoves let into the ship's side that sheltered the boats. Those, he knew, were used for the reconnaissance of asteroids or areas too rugged to put the ship down on, or for minor searches, or for rescue expeditions. Star-class cruisers, being designed for all-planet service, were equipped with vertical and horizontal fins to stabilize them when easing into an atmosphere, and the horizontal ones made ideal landing decks for their boats.
Bullard saw that the other players were already gathered at the extreme edge of the fin and behind them two diminutive Ganymedian messboys were struggling with the squat sports-howitzer. As he made his way toward them they fired the first of the two low-velocity luciferin bombs, and in a moment, the two shells bloomed into pale green stars, several miles apart and several miles away — the goals for the game. By the time he had joined Fraser and Kingman on the right, the messboys were loading the mesothorium-coated ball into the howitzer. The game was ready to start.
At a signal from Moore, one of the Ganymedians yanked the lanyard and the glowing ball was hurled out into space, squarely between the goals. In the same moment the six players took off, soaring in swift pursuit behind it, belching thin threads of fire behind them. Ten seconds later the sky to port and above was a maze of streaking, interlacing flames as the players zigzagged to and fro, intent on getting a grip on the ball long enough to propel it toward one or the other of the slowly receding goals.
Commander Beckley watched the fiery skylarking with keen interest. Meteor ball, he thought, as he gazed into the visiplate in CC, was the ideal game for skymen. It was good for the muscles, for although the player had no weight to speak of, he was compelled to put himself through continuous contortions in order to manipulate the flexible, bucking rocket nozzle and still keep an arm free to fend off tackling opponents or to bat the ball along. But far more beneficial was the ingrained sense of tridimensional orientation the game developed, and the capacity to appraise the reaction from the hand-jet impulses. That sense of action and reaction in time, became almost instinctive, giving the player that quality so indispensable in the handling of spaceships — that elusive thing known as the feel of a ship. A man possessing that could, in a pinch, handle his vessel blindfolded or without instruments.
Twice Beckley watched a thin line of flame lash through the cool green blaze of the luciferin goal marker, other lightninglike flashes hard behind. That meant that one of the teams had scored twice — clever work for so short a time. And it was unusual, for although the Polliwogs had many good players, they lacked brilliant ones. Beckley correctly surmised that it must have been Bullard who scored the goals, the two officer-teams were too evenly matched otherwise.
He chuckled as he suddenly realized that now the Polliwogs might snatch another trophy from the Castor Beans, their traditional rivals on the sister cruiser Castor. He reached for the long-range televise transmitter on the impulse to call Warlock on the instant and challenge his gang to a game the very next time the two ships fell in together, but as he turned away from the visiplate he noticed the men in the control room silently stiffening to attention. The captain had come in.
Beckley was astonished at the gravity of the skipper's expression, for so far as he knew, all was serene. But at first the captain said nothing. He merely looked thoughtfully about the control room and, seeing his exec in charge and no officer of the deck, he glanced at the visiplate.
"Sound recall," said Captain Mike. "Then read this."
At a nod from the exec, the man on the signal board closed a key. The wailing buzz it set up in the helmets of the officers flitting about outside would inform them they were wanted on board with all dispatch. Commander Beckley took the proffered signal from the captain's hand and glanced through it, noticing that as he did, Captain Mike was watching him stolidly, giving no hint of what was in his own mind.
"Yes, I saw this," said Beckley. "What is it, a joke?"
"Joke!" snorted the captain. "Apparently you have not heard of the outcome of the Canopus' inspection. Do you realize that Joey Dill has been relieved of his command and stuck in the dark on Uranus for a five-year hitch as commandant of that flea-bitten outpost? That every one of his officers is awaiting court-martial on charges ranging from 'gross inefficiency' to 'culpable negligence'? That the Canopus, herself, is practically a wreck and has been ordered to the sky yard on Mars for survey and wholesale repairs? There is nothing funny about that. And now it appears we are next."
Commander Beckley stared again at the innocuous-looking message in his hand. It still looked like a prank fathered by someone on the admiral's staff. It read:
From Commander Jovian Patrol to CO Pollux.
You will be in readiness for General Efficiency Inspection 1400 SST 14 May 8940 Terrestrial Year. Entire personnel Castor will inspect in accordance with Archive Reprint USN-1946-FT-53.
ABERCROMBIE.
"Unless I'm crazy — and I won't admit it," said Beckley slowly, "this says that we will be inspected by the crew of the Castor."
"Yes." The captain's eye was gleaming.
"And if that is not joke enough, it goes on to say that they will do it according to some aboriginal practice or other. Shades of Hanno and Nelson! What did they ever do on a trireme that is applicable to us?"
"The principles of warfare change very little through the millennia," remarked Captain Mike, dryly, "and, moreover, your history is a bit foggy, Beckley. The Phoenicians much antedated the Americans. The latter were far more advanced. As a matter of fact, they are credited with the invention of the first spaceship. In any case, our admiralty commission, that has been digging through the records unearthed in the excavations for the fifth sublevel at Washington, has decided that some of their practices were good enough to be reinstated. So there we are."
"Meaning, I take it, that we are to be inspected according to some system invented by John Paul Jones, Sims, Leahy, or some other long-dead old sea dog?" Beckley was thankful he had remembered the names of a few of the early Terrestrials. It was a polite rebuttal of the skipper's comment on his historical knowledge.
"Exactly."
"All right," said the executive officer. "In that case, I will get ready. In fact, we're ready now. You know inspections never gave us any worry."
"We've never been really inspected before," was the captain's grim retort. "Step down to my cabin and I will give you a copy of that reprint."
Ordinarily, the commander would have greeted the returning ball players with some jolly pleasantry, but although he saw them trooping in, gay and ruddy from their brisk work-out and the bracing showers after it, he said not a word to them. He was deep in the perusal of the antique document exhumed from the vaults below the old city of Washington. The deeper he read, the faster his confidence in the ship's readiness oozed away. At first he had some difficulty with the outmoded terminology, but as he groped his way through it, glimmerings of the immense difficulties before him began to appear.
In the end, he sat in astounded admiration at the ingenuity of a people he had long thoughtlessly regarded as primitive. Small wonder their ships had behaved so well during the great Terminal War of the Twentieth Century. The marvelous stamina they displayed was due to the fact they were prepared — prepared for anything, whether accident, damage in action, or catastrophe of nature. So long as any craft of that age remained afloat, its crew continued to work it and to fight it. And now he had learned why. They knew their stuff. The system they followed forced them to. Hence, the admiralty's recent adoption of that system.
Beckley sat through supper very quiet and seemingly morose. He was engaged in appraising himself — Chinnery, Moore, Fraser, and the rest. How good were they, for all the trophies they had won? He remembered wryly, how they won first place in the acceleration contest. He and Chinnery knew that the circuit-breakers were lashed down and every fuse in the ship jumped by heavy copper cable. He and the surgeon knew how heavily the men had been doped with gravonol. It had taken four days of special rigging to accomplish that feat. Highly artificial! Bah! It was an empty triumph, now that he thought of it honestly in the light of what he had been reading.
After supper, over the cigars, he attempted to convey to his juniors, some of what he had just learned and what was ahead of them. It was not easy. The Pollux had for a long time been considered a model ship and it was the conviction of most of her officers and practically all her crew, that she could do anything any other ship could do and do it quicker and more smoothly than any other afloat in the ether.
"So what?" demanded Chinnery, as soon as he learned that for the duration of the tests, Pete Roswell of the Castor, would be at his elbow, watching and noting everything he did, and that rating for rating, every man in the black gang would be matched by his opposite number from the sister cruiser. "Let 'em come. Let 'em watch. They'll learn something. Who cares what they see? My uranium consumption, acceleration for acceleration, is the lowest in the whole star-spangled fleet. We haven't had a breakdown of an auxiliary in more than a year, and that's a record for any man's service."
"That is just it," observed Beckley pointedly. "You're too good. It makes you cocky and you take too much for granted. What would you do if you did have a breakdown — cut in your reserve generators, I suppose?"
"Sure — always have. They work, too. Both sets."
"And if those went on the blink?"
"Well — there are the selenium units on the hull, only — "
"Quite so. Only there isn't much sun power out here by Jupiter and you haven't run a test on them since we left Venutian Station. But suppose you did hook 'em up and could get a little juice out of them and then they went out, what?"
"For the love of — Why, storage batteries, of course."
"'Storage batteries' is good," snapped the exec. "In the last quarterly report, if my memory is correct, they were listed as being in 404D, your space storeroom. How many amps do you think you could pull from there?"
Chinnery lapsed into a glum silence. He had never seen the exec in this mood. Beckley turned to Fraser and asked abruptly:
"What do we do if the intership phone goes out?"
"Shift to telescribes."
"And after that?"
"The annunciator and telegraph system."
"And after that?"
Fraser looked puzzled. "If we lose the juice on the annunciators they can be operated by hand." He shrugged. "After that, if you insist on it, there are always messengers."
"Why not voice tubes?" queried Beckley, cocking an eyebrow.
"Voice tubes?" echoed several. The others laughed. The admiralty had gone primitive.
"That is what I said. Believe it or not, gentlemen, but the Pollux is equipped with a complete system of voice tubes, gas-tight covers, and all. Yet not one of you knows it. You have probably painted them over, or stuffed them with old socks or love letters. Now get out of here, all of you, and inspect your parts of the ship. Come back at midnight and I will tell you more about this inspection and what we have to do to get ready for it."
The group of officers returned to the wardroom at twelve, not greatly enlightened by their inspection. They knew what the commander was driving at, but most of them felt they already knew the answers. On a warship there are always many alternative ways of doing the same thing, for in the heat of action things go wrong and there is no time for repairs. But most of them were already familiar with what they had to deal with, except Bullard, of course, who was new. He was the only one of them who had the slightest doubt of his readiness for any test that might be put to him.
Cracking jokes, but at the same time slightly mystified by the slant the executive had taken, they assembled. Commander Beckley entered and tossed the reprinted early-American document on the wardroom table. Moore crossed the room and fingered it, noting its title. It was "Chief Umpire's Report, Battle Efficiency Inspection U.S.S. Alaska, Spring, 1940."
"I have told you we are to be inspected by the Castor," began Beckley. "What I didn't tell you is that later on, we inspect them."
"Whee!" yelled Fraser. "I've always wanted to know how they puttied up that main condenser. It is nothing short of a miracle how it hangs together."
A look of smug satisfaction flitted across Chinnery's face. In his estimation, Pete Roswell, engineer of the Castor, was a stuffed shirt.
Moore was smiling, too, the contented smile of a cat contemplating a canary. Freddy McCaskey, navigator and senior watch of the rival ship, was also his rival for the hand of a certain young lady residing in Ursapolis. His brilliant take-offs and landings in the sky port there had long annoyed Moore, for Moore knew, even if the admiral did not, that they were made possible by certain nonreg gadgets bolted to the underside of the Castor's chart rack. They were nonreg for the reason that they were unreliable — they could not be counted upon to stand up under the shock of action. Moore itched to be in a position officially, to expose them, and by doing it burst the bubble of McCaskey's vaunted superiority as a ship handler.
There were others present who had similar designs calculated to upset the peace of mind and complacency of their friendly enemies, judging by the ripple of anticipatory grins that swept the room.
Beckley's eye roved the group, missing the reaction of no one.
"Ah," he breathed, "so that's the way you feel? Well, let me tell you this — so do the Castor Beans. And don't ever forget, they inspect us first.
"But don't misunderstand me. There will be no cutthroat competition about this. Friendly rivalry, such as we enjoy with the Castor, or outright malice, if it were present, makes very little difference. The men from the Castor do not inspect us in the sense of passing judgment; they merely observe and record the data. It is the admiral who does the judging. But you can bet your bottom dollar they won't miss anything. They live and work in a ship the exact twin of ours, and they follow the same routine. They know our weak spots and how we go about covering them up, for they have the same spots and, I daresay, use the same tricks. We might fool the old man, but never a Castor Bean.
"As I said before, they will all be here, from Captain Allyn down to the landsman for cook's helper, and every man jack of them will have a stop watch and a notebook. We will be covered, station for station, all over the ship.
"Leaving out the preliminaries, such as looking at the bright work and haircuts and all that sort of thing — which worries none of us — the first thing that happens to us will be the emergency drills. Those are going to be different. The American doctrine was that the real test of an emergency organization is an emergency, and one peculiarity of emergencies is that they come when you least expect them. Moreover, the people on watch at the time are the ones who will have to handle them. That means we cannot hand-pick our best and most experienced men to do the drilling."
"It will be worked this way. The admiral will ask to see our watch list. He'll run down through the names and pick one at random. It might even be Bullard, here — "
Bullard winced. He did not like that "even," though he was only three days in the ship.
"And he will say, 'Send Lieutenant Bullard in.' Bullard will have to relieve the deck. We may cruise along an hour after that, not knowing what is coming, when suddenly the chief umpire will announce, 'Fire in the lower magazine,' or 'Penetrating collision,' or whatever emergency they have picked. Every Castor man starts his stop watch, licks his pencil, and looks at the man he's umpiring. The test will be not only of Bullard, but of the whole organization. As for Bullard, he is in sole charge, and neither Captain Dongan nor I can advise him, and the rest of you can only execute what orders he gives. Whatever he does, whether the right thing, or the wrong thing, or nothing at all, goes down in the notebooks, and also the manner of its execution.
"Let us say the conditions announced are that a small meteorite has penetrated the collision bulkheads and padding and has come into the crew's quarters. We are in ordinary cruising condition — that, is, without spacesuits on. Were our interior gas-tight doors closed and dogged? If they were not, we lose air throughout the ship. Bullard, no doubt, would order a repair party forward. The Castor's repair party will go through the intermediate lock with our party, noting everything. Did the lock work smoothly? What kind of patch did the repair party put on, and how long did it take? Were they skillful or clumsy? How long after that before air was back in the compartment? Did the patch leak? How much elapsed time between the alarm and 'secure'?
"You get an idea from that, of how closely we will be supervised. I need not go into all the other emergency drills, or the possible variations on them. The point to engrave in your memories, is that any of you may be called upon to conduct them, and without prior notice. You had better know the answers."
"I think we do," remarked Moore, looking about at the others.
"Those tests are comparatively trifling," pursued Commander Beckley. "It is the battle drills that are apt to give us trouble. There they will spring casualties on us."
"Casualties?"
"Yes — imaginary accidents, failures of equipment, fatalities. In battle, you know, things happen. We bump into mines. Torpedoes hit us, and shells. We overload motors and they burn up. Controls get jammed. People get hurt and drop out of the picture and somebody else has to step into their shoes and carry on. Our thermoscopes may go dead. A thousand things can go wrong. The big question is, what do we do when they do?
"Captain Allyn and his officers will work out a schedule of such casualties, neatly timed, and shoot them at us, one by one. As they do, they will make it as realistic as possible. If the primary lighting system is declared out of order, they will pull the switches. If the phones go out, they will jerk the connections in Central, and we can't touch them. If gas is reported in some compartment, they will let loose some gas in there. You can expect those casualties to come thick and fast, and you will have to know your switchboards and pipe manifolds from A to Z. It will test your versatility and coolness to the utmost."
"They ought to be able to think up some good ones," drawled Chinnery, and a few of the others laughed. The Castor had stripped the blades in her main auxiliary turbine only six months earlier, and she had had a serious switchboard fire during her last battle practice. Not only that, but in a recent take-off, a jet-deflector had jammed and she had spun for more than fifteen minutes about eight miles above Europa City, a gigantic pin wheel, spewing blue fire. That brought her a biting rebuke from the Patrol Force Commander.
"They will," said Beckley, grimly.
There was some laughter, but there was a hint of uneasiness in some of it. Ever since the exec's crack about voice tubes, their complacency had waned. To their surprise, the voice tubes were found to be there. What else was there about the ship they did not know?
"I think that covers it," said Commander Beckley, rising. "That is, all but one feature — human casualties. It appears from this" — and he tapped the Archive Reprint — "that it was considered a rare bit of humor by our lusty ancestors to kill off the skipper early in the game, and they usually followed that promptly with the disposition of the executive officer. In this report, they killed off practically all their officers in the first five minutes, and a great many of the crew with them.
"The moment an umpire declares us dead we cannot utter another word, no matter what happens. Our organization has to carry on without us. That may be a good test, but I fancy it is agonizing to watch. I recommend you put a little more attention into your drills hereafter. But above all, each of you must be prepared on an instant's notice, to succeed to the command of the ship as a whole."
"By the time we get it," observed Kingman, anxiously, "she will be virtually a wreck — riddled with imaginary holes, on fire, lights out, generators dead, controls jammed, two thirds of the crew knocked out and — "
"You get it," grinned Beckley, relaxing for the first time since the captain had interrupted the meteor ball game. "Good night, boys — pleasant dreams!"
"Don't you worry, Mr. Bullard," said Tobelman, his chief turret captain, after General Quarters the next morning. "There isn't anything in this turret we can't handle, somehow."
But Bullard did worry, for he knew he was green. But he worried with a purpose. Every day of the three weeks that intervened between the exec's warning and the time set for the inspection, he plugged away at learning the ship and its intricate mechanism. By day he crawled through access and escape hatches, tracing cables and conduits; at night he pored over wiring diagrams and pipe layouts. He learned how to break down and assemble the breech mechanisms of his guns, how to train the turret by hand, and how to load in the dark. He became acquainted with the use of his stand-by thermoscope and practiced for an hour each day on the old Mark XII Plotter installed in his control booth, so as to be able to maintain his own fire should his communication with the CC be cut off.
In like manner he checked his "ready" magazines and found out what he needed to know about their sprinkler systems and smothering-gas ducts. He went on beyond them and made himself familiar with the reserve magazines with their stores of TNT, ammonium nitrate, and bins of powdered aluminum. His ammonal he did not mix until needed, a precaution to reduce the fire hazard.
By the end of the second week he had gained a sense of confidence. In his own little department, at least, he knew his way around. And the more he worked with Tomlinson, the more he realized that back of him was a splendid bunch of boys. What he couldn't do, they would. It was in his capacity as officer of the deck that he had the most misgivings. As a watch officer, he took his regular turn in supreme command of the ship, and the more he prowled its recesses the more he was impressed by the magnitude of the task he had set himself — to learn all about the ship.
Every cubic yard of her vast bulk contained some machine or electrical device, the use of many of which he had but the vaguest knowledge. The Pollux was a very different breed of ship than the old Asia, relic of the Third Martian War and long overdue for the scrap heap.
On the Asia he had been chief engineer, and as such, knew every trick of the balky old tub, yet when he would go into the engineering compartments of the Pollux, he stood humble before its glittering intricacies, almost dazed by the array of strange equipment. They showed him the clustered nest of paraboloid propelling reflectors, together with their cyclotronic exciters. They traced for him the slender tubes that conveyed the pulverized Uranium 235 to the focal disintegrating points, and explained how to operate the liquid hydrogen quenching sprays. Fraser took him through the boiler rooms and sketched out for him the cycle of heat transfer, beginning with the queerly designed atomic power fire boxes, and ending with the condensers outside on the hull. Elsewhere, he examined the mercury vapor turbines and the monstrous generators they drove. In all that vast department there was but one section that struck a familiar chord. And it, he discovered, was kept locked off.
"Oh, that?" sneered Chinnery, when Milliard tapped the sealed door. "A set of old oxy-hydrogen propelling motors. Stand-by, you know. Some dodo in the admiralty drafting room is responsible for that, I guess — supposed to be used when we are in extremis."
Chinnery gave a short laugh and turned away, but Bullard was persistent. He wanted to see them and check their fuel leads. At least, he had found something in this ultra-engine room he could understand at a glance.
"I forgot you came from the Crab Fleet," said Chinnery, in mock apology, "but since you ask it, you shall see those noble engines," and Chinnery beckoned to a rocketman, first-class, who stood nearby.
"Show Mr. Bullard the skeleton in our closet," said Chinnery, and departed, his spotless dungarees a mute reproach to Bullard's own grease-smeared overalls.
"I was Crab-Fleet, too," grinned Benton, the rocketman, as he forced the door. "They don't think much on these Star-ships of the old liquid-fuel tubes, but you and I know what they can do. At least, you can count on 'em. These atom busters are O.K. when they work, but they're too temperamental to suit me. But you're the first officer I ever saw in the Pollux that even wanted to look at them tubes — our oars, Mr. Chinnery calls 'em."
Bullard laughed outright. The Patrol Force was a strange blend of ultramodernism and old customs, a sore of bivalence — where practical men of the old sailorman psychology used every modern gadget and hated it as he used it; and trim, smart scientists applied archaic sea terms to their latest triumphs.
On another day Bullard let himself into the big nose "blister," and saw for himself, the arrangement by which the impact of stray cosmic gravel and small mines was distributed and absorbed. Beneath the false bow plate of vanadium steel was a roomy forepeak stuffed with steel wool, and scattered irregularly throughout were other loosely connected plates separated by sets of spiral springs. In general, the anti-collision compartment resembled a titanic innerspring mattress laid across the ship's bow. A cosmic lump striking the nose plate could not be prevented from penetrating, but each of the inner bulkheads it pierced gave a little, disturbing the force of the impact and slowing down the celestial missile by a large percentage. Only a massive body moving at relatively high velocity could retain enough velocity to crash through the last bulkhead into the crews' quarters.
Behind the crews' quarters stood the armored bulkhead that shielded the heart of the ship — the colossal triple-gyro stabilizer that formed the nucleus of the egg-shaped spaceship and marked the location of the vessel's center of gravity. It in turn, was supported by a massive steel thrust column, rising directly from the arches that held the propelling motors, and clustered around the thrust column and in the lee of the armored stabilizer housing lay the Central Control Room, Plot, the H.E. magazines, and the more volatile of the chemical stores. Elsewhere in the ship were the various auxiliaries — the air-circulating fans, the renewers, and the garbage converters, and all the rest of the multitudinous motors for every purpose.
Bullard was exhausted, mentally and physically, by the time he had completed the comprehensive survey, but he felt better for having done it. In his journeys he had missed nothing, taking in storerooms as well as machinery spaces, viewing the planetary bombing racks recessed in the landing skids, and the selenium helio-generators on the upper halves of the hull. There were many details he knew he had not fully grasped, but the main thing was he had regained his customary self-confidence. He no longer felt himself a stranger on the ship.
The others had not been idle, either. Intensive drills had been held daily in all departments, and as nearly as was humanly possible, every conceivable contingency had been foreseen and provided for.
"If those Castor Beans have thought up just half the stunts I have," observed Kingman, at the end of a strenuous day's preparations, "this inspection is going to be a honey. But what the hell! My conscience don't hurt. If there is anything unprovided for, it's the fault of my lack of imagination — nothing else."
"Yeah," grunted Chinnery. Chinnery had become a trifle touchy over the coming ordeal. The exec had made him clear out the old battery room and reinstall his storage batteries.
"They say," chimed in another, "that Freddie McCaskey is going to make Moore set the ship down on top that spiny ridge at the north end of Io, with two of his underjets out of commission. To make it tough they are going to put an egg on the chart-rack. If it falls off and busts when he hits, the mark will be a swab-o."
"Scuttlebutt, you dope," commented Fraser, "nobody knows what they'll spring on us. But, personally, my money is on the old Pollux. All that's worrying me is — "
And on and on it went. Speculations was rife in every nook and cranny of the powerful sky cruiser. The lowest rating on board tossed feverishly in his hammock throughout the rest period called "night," trying to imagine what crazy orders might be given him, and what he would do about it when he got them. The Polliwogs were agreed on one thing, though. Come what might, the only visible reaction any umpire would get, would be a cheery "Aye, aye, sir." Deadpan compliance was the password. They swore that under no circumstances would any of them display surprise or dismay.
Came the momentous day. Clean as a shower-washed sky and burnished and polished until she shone almost painful brilliance, the Pollux lay proudly in her launching cradle at Ursapolis Yard. To the shrilling of pipes, another vestige of age-old tradition, the spry little admiral clambered aboard, his staff at his heels, for the first stage of the inspection.
His trip through the spotless compartments was swift. Although few details of the interior could have escaped his darting glances, he took no notes, nor did he pause at any place to make comment. It was not until he had completed his tour that he broke his silence.
"She looks good," he said, cryptically, to Captain Dongan. Whereupon he trotted off to his quarters in the yard for his lunch, sending back word that he would return in two hours for the remainder of the exercises.
"Cinch!" muttered someone, but the captain wheeled and scowled at him. To the captain's mind, the admiral's serene disregard for the snowy whiteness of the paint work was significant. Plainly, the old man's interest was centered elsewhere, and that could only be on the practical tests. It was not that the captain was especially dubious as to the outcome — he merely wondered. After all, as he had told Beckley, they had never really been inspected before.
Hardly had the admiral left than the Castor Beans began pouring aboard. The enlisted men came first, swarming down the dock and waving their notebooks.
"Hi-ya, Pollutes!" they yelled. "Boy, if you only knew!" Grinning Polliwogs let them aboard and led them off into the recesses of the ship, hoping, while their umpires were in a boastful mood, to worm some of their secrets from them in advance. A little later Captain Allyn and his officers came, and later, at the appointed hour, the admiral.
"Ahem," announced the admiral, his words very crisp, for all his high-pitched, thin voice. "The Pollux will lay a course past Jupiter to the small, innermost satellite, now in opposition. She will land on it, then take off and return to base. During the problem, she shall not communicate with nor receive assistance from the outside. At various times, as we go, we shall hold drills, introducing various casualties. It must be understood that these artificial casualties are to be treated in every respect as if they were real, and if the ship departs in any manner from such treatment, the score for the tests shall be zero."
Captain Dongan acknowledged the admiral's instructions with a nod.
"And let me add," went on the admiral, "that should there, by chance, occur any real accident or casualty, it shall be treated as part of the problem. Are you ready, gentlemen?"
Carlson, the baby of the mess, drew the take-off, and despite a rather obvious self-consciousness, managed it well. The ship drew upward cleanly and smoothly, and gradually curved like a soaring eagle toward the great rose disk of the System's primary. Carlson drew a perfunctory, "Well done," from the chief umpire, and withdrew, mopping his brow in relief. It was Kingman who succeeded him.
"Fire in the paint locker!" was what Kingman had to deal with — the commonest and most obvious of fire drills. People ran to their stations in jig time and were duly checked off. Their performance was faultless, their apparatus was in perfect condition, the most carping critic could find nothing to complain of. A great load rolled off the exec's troubled mind. Fire in the paint locker, indeed! If they kept on springing chestnuts like that, this expedition would be a picnic.
"And think of all the useless work he put us to," crabbed Chinnery into Fraser's ear.
It fell to Fraser's lot to conduct the Abandon Ship Drill. The Polliwogs were tense as televox repeaters throughout the ship chanted the call to the boats. No. 3, on the starboard side, was a balky slut. Five times out of six her tube would not fire unless preheated with a blowtorch. It was a mystery why, for they had successively put in four spares and still No. 3 performed in the same erratic manner. But today she took off like a startled dove at the first touch of the coxswain's button. Pure luck that was, for there was not a chance to use the torch with watchful umpires writing down all they saw.
The Castor Beans pawed through the returned boats, looking for error, but their search was unsuccessful. Boat boxes were correct, down to the first aid kit, as was the power installation and the handling. Fraser drew another four-o and was excused.
Bullard was called up and there was a long lull. They were inside Ganymede's orbit before the umpires raised the alarm of collision.
That, too, was expeditiously dealt with, although a penalty of one tenth of a point was assessed because a third-rate carpenter's mate in his haste, entered the air-exhausted compartment before putting his vacuum helmet on. When Bullard heard that that was all that was wrong, he drew a deep breath and relaxed. It was annoying to have sullied the ship's hitherto perfect score with a penalty, but it could well have been worse.
Moore drew the "Search and Rescue Party" and while the ship hove to above Mount Sarpedon in Equatorial Europa, descended into that noisome crater and found and brought back the dummy which an aid of the admiral had planted there some days before. It was a triumph for the Pollux, for the dummy was lying smack in the midst of the dreaded Halogen Geysers. Raw fluorine is hard on standard equipment, but the Pollux's rescue boat carried what it took. Aside from a mild gassing of two members of the boat's crew, there were no mishaps.
The admiral was standing on the boat deck when Moore came back. He stared at the remnants of the corroded dummy and at the pitted helmets and reeking suits of the rescue party. A Castorian umpire stepped out of the boat and reported the two cases of gassing.
"Too nice work to spoil with a penalty," decreed the old man. "Chalk up a four-o for Lieutenant Moore."
That night the mess was jubilant. They were two thirds the way through the inspection and hadn't slipped yet — except for that fractional point against Bullard. No one reproached him for that, for it was not that kind of a mess, but Bullard was none too happy. Had there been other penalties, he would not have minded, but this one stood glaring in its loneliness.
"We're better than you thought, eh?" said Beckley, slapping Abel Warlock, exec of the Castor, on the back.
"You're not out of the woods, yet," was Warlock's dry rejoinder, and he threw a wink to Pete Roswell. "Tomorrow's another day."
Io was under the stern and drawing aft when General Quarters was sounded. Men tumbled to their battle stations and manned their weapons. Bullard crawled into his control booth and strapped on his headphone. "Ready," he reported, after an instantaneous check-up of his turret crew. Every man was at his post, poised and ready.