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Title: Admiral's Inspection
Author: Jameson, Malcolm (1891-1945)
Date of first publication: April 1940
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1940
   [New York: Street & Smith]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 30 May 2016
Date last updated: 30 May 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1323

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






ADMIRAL'S INSPECTION

By Malcolm Jameson



    It was a new trick from ancient history--the Admiral's Inspection.
    But man, what an inspection that turned out to be!




"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 gastight 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 Berkley,
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.

It was a tableau that was repeated all over the ship.  Captain Dongan
was at Control, the exec in Plot, and on down the line each was where
he should be.  And beside each was the inevitable umpire with his
ticking watch and his telltale notebook.  Now was the hour.  Here is
where the fun began.  Were the Polliwogs fair-weather sailors or what?

"Start watches," signaled the chief umpire, and the problem was begun.

At four and a half seconds, Bullard let go his first salvo.  Swiftly
his men threw in the second load.

The machinery-packed turret was uncomfortably full of men, what with
the doubling up due to the presence of the umpires.  These latter were
dancing about, trying to keep out of the way while at the same time
recording the fire-control data as it came in over the visuals, or
otherwise making notes of the efforts of the _Pollux_ men.  In the
booth with Bullard was Heine Bissel, the turret officer of the
_Castor_, keeping one eye on what Bullard was doing and the other
peeking at the list of casualties in his hand.  Bullard envied the
umpires their freedom of movement, for unlike the men at battle
stations, there was no necessity for the umpires to dress themselves in
space-suits.  In battle, of course, suits were donned before its
commencement.  A chance hit, penetrating an outer bulkhead, might at
any instant cause a compartment to lose its air.

Bullard's second salvo went, but coincidentally with it the lights
flickered, dimmed a moment, then blazed up again.  Somewhere below
something had gone wrong with the primary lighting circuit and there
had been a shift made to another.

"Your ammunition hoist motors are inoperative," announced Bissel,
looking at his list.

"Hoist by hand!" ordered Bullard, almost in the same breath.  He
attempted to report the casualty to CC, but the phone was dead on his
ears.  He snatched its jack from the outlet and plugged in on No. 2
circuit.  It was dead.

His men managed to get the guns fired a third time.  It was a full
three seconds late, due to the delay occasioned by having to serve the
guns by hand, but under the circumstances, in good time.  Bullard saw
them ram the fourth set of projectiles home.  His eyes caught the
racing words on the telescribe above his head, "Transverse hit
penetrated both CC and Plot--captain and executive dead--control now in
sub-CC--Chinnery commanding."

"Your lights have gone out," remarked Bissel, with a triumphant gleam
in his eye, reaching for the cut-out switch overhead.  The lights
_were_ out.

Bullard kicked out with his left foot and found the emergency battery
switch.  Again there was light, this time from the turret's own
batteries, independent of any general ship's circuit.  Tobelman shot
the propellant into the breech of the last gun and closed the firing
key.  There was no recoil.  He jerked the lanyard and fired the guns by
percussion.  At that moment an umpire rose from behind the loading tray
and fired a pan of flashlight powder.  There was an instant's
brilliance, blinding in its intensity.  Then all was black.

"Your battery has short-circuited," came the calm voice of Bissel
through the murk.  There was suppressed amusement in it, and Bullard
suspected this last casualty was an improvised one.  But it did not
matter.  Bissel had kicked the turret switch open again, and that made
it official.

"Loaded in dark, sir!" called Tobelman.  "Ready!"

"Fire!" Bullard was proud of his gang.

"Enemy shell just entered and wiped out turret crew," whispered Bissel.
There was silence outside the booth as the men desisted from their
efforts in the dark.  Each had been told the same thing by his own
umpire.  Bissel snapped on a portable flash long enough to jot down the
time of the massacre.

"Am I dead, too?" inquired Bullard.

"Oh, no.  You're all right.  Your turret is all shot, that's all."

Bullard dived out of the escape hatch.  If all his men were dead, there
was nothing to be gained by sitting in the darkened control booth
waiting for the end.  His duty was elsewhere.



The elevator was stuck between decks, probably another casualty.
Bullard, trailed by the panting Bissel, flung himself down the ladder
and dropped through the armored hatchway into CC.  It was empty, except
for a couple of lounging umpires, comparing notes.  Bullard cast an
anxious eye at the settings on the main control board, but with it saw
that the master switch at the top of it was open.  Control, of course,
had been shifted elsewhere.  The positions, of the controls here,
regardless of how they were set, were meaningless.

He dashed down the passage toward sub-CC, a little cubbyhole abaft
Plot, not wasting a second in a futile stop at the Plotting Room.  What
he had seen in CC, would doubtless, be repeated there.  As he passed
the door of the wardroom he caught a glimpse of the officers crowded in
there, and what he saw made him pause a moment and take a closer look.
Peering through the glassite panel he was astonished to see most of the
officers of the _Pollux_ in there, either out of their spacesuits or in
the act of taking them off.  Chinnery, whom he thought in temporary
command, was one of them.

"The corpses," grinned Bissel.  "They are where they won't interfere
and they may as well be comfortable."

But from the indications, Captain Dongan was anything but comfortable.
He was pacing the deck impatiently, grave concern in every line of his
rugged face.  Beckley looked scarcely less uneasy.

Bullard hurried on.  He had seen every one of his brother officers in
there except Fraser.  Could it be that he and Fraser were the only
survivors?  He jerked the door of sub-CC open.  The place was a
madhouse, five men stationed at voice tubes yelling to five other men
in some other place--and each of the five communications was a
different one.

"Thought you were dead," exclaimed Fraser, seeing Bullard come bursting
in.  "Everything has gone to pot and communications are terrible, but
if you are looking for a job, jump down into the engine room and make a
check--"

"Apoplexy!" screamed an excited umpire, pointing at Fraser.  "You!
You're dead."

Fraser choked his words in the middle, stamped a foot in disgust, and
jerked off his helmet.  He turned in the doorway and looked as if he
was about to say something; then, as if thinking better of it, stalked
off toward the wardroom to join the rest of the "dead."

Bullard suddenly realized that he was left in command on the ship, but
he had not the faintest idea of her running condition beyond knowing
from her heave, that she was still accelerating full power.  Until he
could learn what had happened and what was left in operating condition,
he could give no intelligent orders.  Then it was that he saw the
admiral, Captain Allyn, Commander Warlock and others watching him
intently, through the broad deadlight let into the bulkhead between
Plot and the sub-CC.  So _he_ was to be the goat of this inspection!  A
sorry trick.  He, the next most junior officer on the ship and the
latest to join her, put to this severe test!  It angered him, but the
thought as suddenly struck him that the test was also one of the
_Pollux_.  As long as any man of her complement remained alive, he must
carry on.  These foxy umpires must be shown that the _Pollux_ was
prepared, and well prepared.  The three tedious weeks of intensive
drills and the unceasing labors of the captain and his exec in teaching
their men must not be in vain.  If the ship still could be handled, he
would handle it!



"Silence!" he roared.  The weary talkers at the voice tubes looked at
him and blinked.  He flung a finger at the first one.  "Report!"

One by one, the five told the story, staccato words coming fast.  As
the details appeared, Bullard was aghast at the task set for him.  The
torpedo room, like the turret, was out of commission, its crew wiped
out.  There was a fire raging in the chemical stores locker.  The great
mercury boilers were shut down, their superheaters riddled and leaking,
and as a result, all auxiliary power was off.  There was only the weak
and inadequate current flowing in from the helio units, sufficient only
to maintain the standing lights.  All means of communication was gone
except voice tubes.  And to cap the climax, the main jets were said to
be jammed--full speed ahead.  And ahead, perilously close, lay
Jupiter--Jupiter the colossal, the huge, the devouring magnet.  Drill
or no drill, something must be done, and that very soon.

As Bullard sprang into action, he wondered how long the farce of
imaginary disabilities would be kept up.  Yet until the war game was
called off he could touch none of the umpire-guarded valves or
switches.  He had to work with the disorganized residuum of the mighty
ship's power.  A new note of danger began to hum, warning him that
whatever he was to do could no longer be postponed.  Since the
automatic controllers on the uranium feed lines were not operating, the
acceleration was slowly picking up--when he wanted none at all he was
getting more--and there was no way of cutting it off except manually.

He raised the tube room and found to his immense satisfaction that it
was Benton, the rocketman, who was in charge there.  Benton assured him
there was no way to shut off the uranium flow other than by using the
forbidden electrically controlled valves.

"Get pipe cutters, then, or Stilsons, and _break_ the lines!"

"Aye, aye, sir."

Bullard knew that Benton knew that the uranium would continue to
dribble out, wasting into the wake, but unless it was fed to the exact
focus of the disintegrating inferno, it could not flare into the
tremendous energy of exploding atoms.  Once the supply was cut off, the
quenching sprays would make short work of the bits still at the focal
points.

An insistent call kept coming from the chemical locker, where the fire
was supposed to be.  The Polliwog there complained that the umpire
would declare him burnt to a crisp unless some action was taken to
subdue the fire.  For a moment, Bullard hesitated.  Actually, there was
nothing inflammable in the chemical locker--except the fireworks flare
the umpires had set themselves to add realism to their act--and
consequently the compartment was not fitted with fire-fighting devices.

"Evacuate the storeroom," ordered Bullard.  "Gather up all the _Pollux_
men near you and transfer everything in it to the reserve magazine
inboard of you."

"Aye, aye, sir," came the voice, relieved from his dilemma of having
either to abandon his post or be roasted alive.

Bullard felt the lagging of the vessel as the acceleration ceased and
knew that Benton had succeeded in breaking the atomic feed lines.  It
was a pity to have to waste power in that fashion, but it was
unthinkable to continue longer on a power dive into Jupiter.  The
jet-deflectors were locked rigidly fore and aft and there could be no
turning with those jets.  He got Benton to the voice tube once more.

"What's wrong with the old rudder flaps over the liquid tube jets?"

"Not a damn thing, sir."

"Then warm up your tubes and let's get going--"

"Aye, aye, sir."

"And, Benton, when they've started spewing, flip 'er halfway around and
shoot ninety degrees from the present course.  You'll have to do that
by local control--there is none for those old tubes in this
sub-station."

"Aye, aye, sir."



Bullard felt better.  He was devoutly thankful they had spared Benton
for him.  Benton was a man of parts.  Shortly they would have this
wildly careering warship under some degree of control.  Then Bullard
could proceed with some of the badly needed minor corrections.  One
thing that was a source of great annoyance was the all-pervading noise,
much augmented by the shouts of his voice tube talkers.  He decided to
abandon the use of the archaic tubes and instead, employ the
etherphones in their space helmets.  It meant setting up a manifold
party line, for the helmet phones were not selective and if everyone
should start talking at once the result would be babel.

"Tell all hands," he directed the group of talkers in sub-CC, "to close
their face plates and tune in on the etherphone.  No one is to speak
except in answer to me or to report an exceptional emergency."

The word was passed.  Bullard, to check the efficiency of this means of
communications, called the various parts of the ship in succession to
receive their reports.  There were a gratifying number of men still
alive and at their posts, despite the wholesale slaughter of the
officers.  It was not until he checked on the chemical locker fire that
he heard anything to disturb him unduly.  All was going well until the
wild laughter and silly words of the man in charge of the magazine rang
in his helmet.  Bullard snapped back harsh questions, and for answer
got only maudlin ravings, interspersed with outbursts of giggling.  The
man was drunk--or something.

Bullard glanced sharply in the direction of the admiral and the knot of
inspecting officers watching him from Plot.  They, too, showed some
signs of glee, several of them grinning vacuously.  Pete Roswell was
executing an awkward burlesque of the _quilliota_, a rather risque
version of the time-honored muscle dance often seen in the cabarets of
Ursapolis.  A sudden anger surged within Bullard.  Had they turned the
inspection into an outright farce?  A bad joke at his expense?  As he
stared indignantly at the group in Plot, he was further outraged to see
Abel Warlock waggishly begin ripping the meter leads from their
terminals.  And--of all things--the admiral himself, was capering about
madly, an absurd elfin smirk spread across his usually ultradignified
features.

Again Bullard sharply challenged his man in the magazine.  This time
the voice that came back was more sober--almost penitent.

"Sorry, sir--had a crazy dream, I guess.  But it was awfully funny,
sir."  As he talked his voice grew even more sober and more contrite.
"And sir, I ought to tell you--the umpires have passed out.  They're
lying around all over the place--"

A funny dream!  Umpires dropping unconscious!  Bullard lost not a
second.  With a bound he left sub-CC, headed for the trunk leading down
to the magazines.

He fought his way through the smoke of the flares, passed through the
half-emptied chemical locker and into the reserve magazine.  Dimly he
saw his magazine keeper bending over several limp forms on the deck.
Bullard paused to examine the smoke bomb but was convinced that it was
not the cause of what was wrong.  It was a standard product--a mixture
of luciferin with a little strontium salts, giving at once, a ruddy
flame and considerable quantities of smoke, yet without much heat.  Its
fumes were neither intoxicating nor hypnotic.

He saw that much of the miscellaneous assortment of chemicals that had
been stowed in the locker were now standing about the floor of the
magazine, but all of them were ordinary substances and not regarded as
hazardous.  There were barrels of various salts and carboys of acids,
but none of those were broken.  On top of the pile stood three roundish
flat crystal flasks of nearly black liquid.  He recognized them as
containers of an iodine solution--also harmless.

Before going to assist his man in reviving the stricken umpires,
Bullard opened his face plate by a tiny crack and took a cautious
sniff.  Ah!  That sickly sweetish odor was strangely familiar.  And as
a queer ringing in his ears began he snapped his helmet shut and
fumbled for his oxygen valve.  He kept a firm grip on his
consciousness; he knew that in a second his momentary giddiness would
pass, for the whiff he had had was nothing more noxious than nitrous
oxide.  But where was the N2O coming from, and how much of it was there?

He sprang to the bin holding the ammonium nitrate.  To the eye it was
normal, yet his reason told him it must be the source of these fumes.
He moved closer to it and was suddenly aware of a warm spot between his
shoulder blades.  It was as if he had stepped in front of a firebox
door.  He wheeled to see the source of the heat, and saw--only the
three flasks of iodine, and behind and beyond them the lazy smoke of
the dying flare.

His bewilderment left him with a rush.  The situation was transparently
clear.  The iodine flasks, shaped as they were, were acting as focusing
lenses for the infrared rays from the smudge bomb, concentrating its
weak heat until it was plainly perceptible.  Under the influence of
that mild heating, the ammonium nitrate had begun to break down and
give off the nitrous oxide fumes.  Now he understood the lunatic
behavior of the magazine man before he shut his face plate, and why the
umpires were lying unconscious about the place.  He flung himself at
the iodine lenses and dashed them to the deck.  Then he leaped to the
atmospheric control valves on the bulkhead and stepped up the amount of
oxygen entering the compartment.  He called to Benton in the tube room
and ordered him to hook up the storage batteries hitherto held in
reserve, and put power on the blowers.  He must clear the magazine of
the "laughing gas."



"Laughing gas!"  The antics of the inspecting officers!  Now it began
to make sense.  He shot a glance at the open voice tubes and knew in
that instant, what had occurred.  And knowing it, he shuddered to think
of what might be going on above.  The nitrous oxide, being heavier than
air, was naturally flowing through the open tubes toward the control
room and the other compartments clustered about the ship's center of
gravity.  All those unhelmeted officers, those of the _Pollux_ as well
as the Castorian inspectors, would be tipsy at the very least.  Perhaps
by now they were dropping unconscious.  Bullard snapped shut the
gaslight voice tube covers and shouted warnings into his helmet phone
to his other men throughout the ship.

"Too late," came back Benton's report.  "They're acting like crazy
men--but how was I to know?  I couldn't smell and I thought it was all
part of the game.  Only now--"

"Only now what?" snapped Bullard, his heart sinking.

"Well," reported Benton, hesitant to quote so august a personage as the
Commander of the Jovian Patrol Force when the latter was in an
uninhibited mood, "the admiral came dancing in and slapped our captain
on the back and said, 'Let's make it a good party,' and Captain Mike
said, 'Sure!  You've overlooked a lot of bets--'"

Bullard groaned.  The stuff must have seeped into the wardroom, too.

"Then they all laughed like hell and began busting things."

Bullard listened dully as Benton recited the list of outrages.  Cables
had been torn out bodily, others crazily connected and short-circuited;
controls were smashed and the needles on gauges twisted to weird
angles; in short, they had raised hell generally.  The hilarious
victims of the gas had made everyone--and more--of the invented
casualties a grim reality.  Now the ship _was_ out of control.

"Keep shooting the oxygen to them," yelled Bullard.  "I'm on my way up."

Benton had not overstated the case.  The CC, Plot, subplot and the
engine spaces suggested the wake of a terrestrial typhoon.  The decks
were cluttered with controller handles, broken dials and tattered
paper.  They had even torn up the astragational tables and the log.
From the bulkheads dangled the stray ends of leads and bashed-in
indicators.  The place was an unholy mess.  And all about sat the
drooping officers who had done it, too groggy by then to do more, but
still staring about with imbecilic expressions.

There was no use crying over spilt milk.  Outside was the threat of
Jupiter, more ominous than before, and Bullard was reminded of it as he
felt the thrust when the six old-fashioned liquid-fuel tubes fired
their first blast.  Good old Benton!  Despite the madhouse raging about
him, he had persevered with the task assigned and had got them to
firing.  The ship lurched in reaction and with the lurch many of the
dizzy observers were flung to the nearest bulkhead.  The busy hospital
corpsmen, darting among them with their first aid kits, had a fresh
problem to cope with.  Some of their patients were doubly unconscious.

Bullard might have been more concerned with the comfort of his stricken
seniors, but hard on the heels of the success in getting the tubes to
blasting came a new casually, and an utterly unforeseen one.  A strange
throb shivered through the ship and she began to tilt unaccountably,
and with it came a violent side-wise oscillation that made the skin
crawl.  A still conscious umpire huddled in a corner gave way frankly
to his nausea; dangling wreckage battered against the bulkheads while
the rubbish strewn about the decks shifted back and forward like the
tides of the sea.  The din and clatter of it was unbearable.

Above it all rose the shrilling whine of runaway motors.  As the wild
and sickening oscillations increased in amplitude it became painfully
apparent that something was happening to the massive whirling gyros at
the heart of the vessel.  Bullard fought his way toward them, clinging
to such projections his hands could reach and dodging the missiles of
debris flung about by the bucking ship.  In time, he reached the
armored door of the gyro housing and by then he had gained an inkling
of what had gone wrong, but the remedy for it was not so obvious.

In their drunken orgy of devastation, the umpires had broken the leads
feeding the motor field coils, and the gyros were running away--but at
unequal rates, probably due to the inequalities of their own bearing
frictions.  Bullard knew, of course, that he could cut off the armature
current, but if he did that the acceleration would shortly be reversed.
Should the gyros be slowed rapidly, their rotational momentum would be
transferred to the ship and force it into a dizzy whirling, a condition
the crew could not endure.  Bullard had scant hope of being able to
restore the field current.  Finding the breaks among the tangle of
wreckage would take hours, whereas he had only minutes available, and
not many of those.



"Send me a man and plenty of stray cable," he called to Benton, "and I
want juice up to the gyro housing from the batteries."

Bullard was looking at the steel columns that held the bearings of the
gyro axles--six of them, in pairs, each pair at right angles to the
others.  What he could not do by electrical resistance he would do by
friction.  If he could regulate the bearing thrust, he could keep the
speed of the gyros under control.  It had looked hopeless to him at
first, for there was no way to insert the huge jacks they had on board,
but he had thought of a way that was at least worth a trial.

"Throw the end of that cable around there," he directed, "and make a
coil--a helix--around that bearing column.  I intend to magnetize it."

The man--one of Fraser's--did as he was told, but the unbelief in his
face was easy to read.  What difference did it make whether the thrust
columns were magnetic or not?

"That's well!" shouted Bullard, when the last of the six had been
wound.  Then he ordered current--a weak current, but under his instant
control by means of the rheostats he had had inserted in the lines.  It
had been a tough job, getting that far, for all the while they had been
flung this way and that as the whirling masses of metal fought to take
charge of the battered cruiser.  But Bullard and his helpers had hung
on, and now was to come the test.

He was rewarded, after a little, by the halting of the steadily rising
crescendo of the motor wail.  At least he had stopped the acceleration.
Now all he had to do was bring the three into harmony.

"You've got the idea," he said to the principal electrician who had
been helping him.  "Keep monkeying with them until they are all
together.  The bearings will get hot, but we can't help that.  Flood
'em with oil, and if that don't do it, send down for some liquid air.
Whatever you do, don't let 'em freeze, or we'll be flung clear out of
the System."

"Aye, aye, sir," said the man, "but how did we do it?"

"Magnetostriction," Bullard explained, as he prepared to slip from the
compartment.  "A _little_ magnetism makes steel expand, that's all.  If
your bearings get too tight, give 'em either more juice or less, and
you'll shorten those columns."

Bullard slid out of the housing and picked his way aft.  He wondered
where they were by now and whether they would win their fight with
Jupiter.  He could feel the surge of the ship as the six flaming tubes
drove it, and knew from his sense of weight that they were pulling
out--but how fast?



Benton looked worried.  His tubes were behaving wonderfully, but they
lacked power for the job imposed.  The _Pollux_ was checked in her
fall, and that was all.  She needed more kick to escape, and Benton did
not dare apply it.  Bullard came and looked.

"Can't be helped," he muttered, "give 'er the works."

"They'll melt," warned Benton.

"Let 'em," said the youthful acting captain, with grim finality.  "We
can't be any worse off."

Benton shrugged, and began the doubling of his fuel lines.  Others of
his men scurried off to storerooms and presently came back, lugging
spare injectors.  Those, after a few minutes of frenzied work, were
coupled with improvised super-chargers and inserted into the new fuel
into the laboring tubes, the _Pollux's_ wake bloomed from a mere
meteoric streak of ruddy fire to the whitely dazzling fan of a Grade A
comet.  Her determined masters piled gravity after gravity onto her
acceleration, building her up until her men could stand no more,
despite copious injections of _gravonol_.  Harried hospital corpsmen
had been pulled off their work of salvaging the unhappy "dead" and the
Castorian umpires long enough to administer those precautionary shots.

Presently a sobered and grave-faced chief umpire--Captain Allyn of the
_Castor_--staggered into the tube room, supported by two of his junior
officers.  All of them looked the worse for wear, bruised and cut as
they were and only partially bandaged, but at least they had managed to
get onto their feet.  Like everyone else, while still woozy from the
effects of the gas they had been badly flung about during the bout with
the rebellious gyros.

"The admiral says," Captain Allyn announced, "that all imposed
casualties are rescinded.  Cease present exercises and return to base."

"Like hell he does!" snorted Bullard, flaring with resentment.  "You
tell the admiral he lacks authority to rescind the casualties _I'm_
contending with.  You can tell him that I'll get out of here how, when,
and if I can: and that it will be time enough after that to talk about
ceasing something and returning somewhere.  In the meantime, kindly get
out of that man's way.  He has real work to do."

Captain Allyn opened his one good eye in blank astonishment, but he
stepped to one side and let the burdened tube man pass with his armful
of fresh spare parts.  The skipper of the _Castor_ looked from the
angry young man in his soiled and torn uniform to the chaotic tube room
about him, and then back again.  He had not realized what a pass things
had come to.  There were no instruments of any kind in working order,
either astragational or engineering.  These sweating, strained-looking
men could only guess at the pressures, voltages, amperages and the rest
that they were dealing with.  Now, if ever, a man had to have the
_feel_ of a ship--and this one had an awkward feel, a terrible feel.
It was the sickening feeling of doom.



"There goes the first one," remarked Benton calmly, as the ship
shuddered and gave a little jump.  They felt, rather than heard, the
increased roar outside, and a white-faced man sitting astride the
smoking supercharger in No. 4 tube feed-line frantically fought to
close the valve beneath him.  The first of the overtaxed liners had
reached the ultimate temperature--had been volatilized and sneezed out
into Jupiter's face.  Benton's voice was quiet and the lines about his
chin unquavering, but there was anxiety in his eyes.

"Hang on," said Bullard.  "We can't ease off now.  The others may be
tougher.  We're going uphill now--if they'll only last half an hour
we'll be over the hump."

Captain Allyn and his two aids discreetly withdrew to a corner of the
tube room.  He was too competent an officer to meddle, now that he had
some understanding of the situation, and he could see that this
dirty-faced lad knew what he was about.  He contented himself with
putting a few additional entries into his already crowded notebook.

It was nearly twenty minutes before the next tube collapsed to be
hurled into the wake as a cloud of vividly incandescent vapor.  That
was No. 3, and five minutes later went No. 1--and almost simultaneously
with it, No. 6.  But the other two held out until they reached the
crest, and beyond.  The critical point was passed, judging by the feel
of things, and the order was on Bullard's lips to cut the blasts by
twenty percent when one of the remaining tubes let go, too.  That left
but one, all the motive power the ship had, and that woefully
inadequate, but at least they were moving outward into the clean, dark
depths of the ether.  Bullard cut its output hastily until it was down
to normal, wondering hopefully as he did, whether they were out of the
woods yet.

He left the oppressively hot tube room to Benton and his gang and went
out into the disordered ship in search of an altiscope.  For minutes he
struggled through cluttered passages and choked trunks, looking into
the now deserted turrets and other fire-control stations for an
unsmashed instrument that bore.  It was in the topsy-turvy wreckage of
the torpedo room he found one, and it was with a sense of almost dread
that he put his eyes to it and took a squint at Jupiter.  Then his
heart leaped with joy and relief, for the great rose disk took up only
part of the telescopic field and as he hastily read the graduations
along the cross hairs he saw they were out of the worst of its
gravitational field.  In fact, they must be not far from the orbit of
the small satellite that was their destination.

Bullard whirled the altiscope until he brought the tiny iron body into
his field of vision, and the moment he sighted it he began barking
orders to his men back in the tube room.  They must turn now, and with
their single good tube and the five frayed and oversized ones, and buck
their own forward momentum.  The problem had shifted from the desperate
need for acceleration to the necessity of checking their flight.  To
conform to the terms of the admiral's order, they must land on that
barren lump of iron.



Somehow they did it.  It may have been four hours later, or six, for
time had ceased to have meaning, when a haggard and very dirty young
lieutenant and the exhausted remnants of his crew staggered out onto
the black plain of Jupiter's inmost satellite.  They wasted but a
moment in staring up at the huge hulk that had brought them there.
Outwardly, she was the sleek, powerful cruiser that she had been the
day before, however disarranged she might be inside, but they were not
concerned with her general appearance.  They had come to inspect the
damage done to her after hull by the disintegration of the tube liners.
Was it irreparable?  And what sort of terrain lay beneath the now
helpless Pride of the Skies?

For Lieutenant Bullard was not content with merely having escaped the
grip of Jupiter.  As he understood it, he was in temporary command of
the _Pollux_; and of the tactical problem aligned only the first leg
had been completed.  He must get off this rock next and take her back
to Ursapolis and set her down in her launching cradle in the yard.
Benton shook his head gloomily.  There were no more rabbits in the hat.
To sit down on Callisto they would need not one tube but three, and at
that, the maneuver was sure to be jerky and full of risk.

It was while these two were in their huddle, talking over ways and
means, that the admiral and Captain Dongan found them.  Allyn had
roused them and told them where to look.

"Well done, Bullard," said Captain Mike.  "The admiral has promised you
a special commendation.  Tell me now the exact condition of the ship
and I will relieve you.  The first thing the admiral wants is a
jury-rigged radio so we can have tugs come out.  As soon as that is
done you may go and rest.  I'll take charge now."

"No, sir," protested Bullard hotly.  "I _demand_ the right to carry on.
They have put us into this mess as a test.  Well--the test is not over
yet.  According to the rules, if we call for help, we lose.  We can't--"

"We have not lost," said Captain Mike, quietly.  "The problem has been
canceled.  Unforeseen developments--"

"Yes!" cried Bullard, his voice almost a scream, he was so outraged at
the implications, "that's just it--unforeseen developments, and the
_Pollux_ couldn't take it!  That is what the sky fleet will be saying
and laughing at us in every mess from Pluto to Mercury.  If we let 'em
call this thing off now, we're all washed up and done as far as being
the best ship in the whole--"

Bullard was a bit hysterical and quite unaware of his seeming
insubordination.  He had been through a lot and his nerves were frayed
and jumpy, but for hours now he had concentrated on this dilemma and he
was in no mood to be shoved to one side.  It was up to him to find a
way out--he _must_ find a way out, one way or another.  Any other
solution would be to let the _Pollux_ down, an admitted failure, and
that was unthinkable.  After all, what was this unforeseen development
that had wrecked them?  Nitrous oxide!  So what?  That was a legitimate
hazard.  It could have been generated under other and more normal
conditions and would have had to have been dealt with.  To call off
this test now would be simply to take refuge behind an alibi, and a
weak one at that.  Bullard was the one the umpires had chosen for the
guinea pig and he couldn't quit.  As he saw it, not only was the
reputation of the ship at stake, but his own personal honor.

Hot words poured from him, reckless words--mutinous sounding, but
Captain Mike listened, gravely.  He looked at this lieutenant of his
thoughtfully.

"I like your spirit, Bullard, but that is beside the point.  There is
no way out now.  It is too late.  As for your reputation, have no
fear--"

"Oh, that's not it, sir--"  Bullard was on the verge of tears.

"Let the boy have his way," interposed the admiral.  "His stand is the
correct one.  Personally, I think we're wasting time, but I won't have
it said that I denied justice to any man.  If he thinks he can pull out
of here, let him try it.  I will allot you twenty-four more hours to
carry on the problem, Bullard, and during that time you will have no
interference.  Good luck!"



If Bullard's tears had been close to the surface from rage and anger,
the reason a few dribbled down his cheeks now was a different one.  His
first emotion was jubilation.  But in a moment that gave way to a sense
of awe as the full implication of what he had assumed made itself
apparent to him.  He realized that in insisting on carrying this
problem to its conclusion he had put both himself and the _Pollux_ on
the spot.  Before, they had at least an out--a plausible and an
officially acceptable alibi.  If he failed now, the ship failed with
him.  Remorse smote him.  Had his vanity led him to compromise the name
of this ship he had become so attached to?  It was a sobering thought.
Now he knew as he never had before, that he must succeed.  Not until
the _Pollux_ was snugged down in the yard could he rid himself of the
responsibility.

That thought was all the bracer he needed.  As by a miracle, his
fatigue dropped away from him, and by a few terse words he managed to
convey to Benton and his helpers somethings of the same fiery spirit
that animated him.  To a man, they knew that excuses would have no
value--they must deliver.

It was an interested group of spectators who thronged about the
grounded cruiser.  By common consent the rules had been relaxed to the
extent that the "dead" could look on and converse, provided only they
did not interfere.  From the deceased Polliwogs came words of
cheer--the whole crew was rooting for them, while now and then a Castor
Bean would relieve himself of some wisecrack at the expense of the
toiling repair men.  The admiral, for all his magnanimity, was fretful
and impatient.  He had a dinner date with the Governor of Callisto for
the following evening and it annoyed him to think he might not be
there.  The Castorians, too, were anxious to get back to the yard.
They yearned to get aboard their own vessel, for in the last few hours
they had learned there was much to do to that fine ship.  Her
inspection--by the Polliwogs--was set for the following week.

Bullard doggedly disregarded them all.  He had opened a cargo hatch
along the keelson and from the nether hold his men had dragged five
huge cylinders.  Using heavy tackles, they ranged them alongside the
_Pollux_ in the wan sunlight of the Jovian System.  Farther aft, heavy
tripods had been set up and diamond-pointed drills were biting into the
native iron of the little satellite.  Other men were high up on the
sternpost, driving portable reamers into the ragged tunnels of the tube
housings.  Chinnery and Roswell, chief engineers respectfully of the
_Pollux_ and _Castor_, stood by, watching.

Chinnery evinced no joy at seeing this young officer from the gunnery
department making bold with his spare stores, nor did he take pains to
conceal his contempt for this latest effort.

"Spare bushings for the old-style tubes," he explained to Roswell.  "I
forgot I had a set.  But they won't do him any good.  They're
over-sized.  We carry 'em because they are too big forgings to pick up
anywhere, but it takes a well-equipped yard to put 'em in--they have to
be pressed in, you know, to a tight fit."

Roswell nodded.  As a rival, he was quite willing to see the job
miscarry.  Up until then, the _Pollux_ had parried every one of his
devastating casualties.  He was hoping they would muff this real one.

But Bullard neither knew nor cared what they were saying.  He and
Benton were on top one of the huge tubes, manipulating a gigantic pair
of calipers.  They already knew they were oversize, and their plans for
pressing them in were at that very moment in the process of execution.
Astern of the ship a group of holes had been drilled into the iron, and
now the men had substituted fat taps for the drills.  Those who had
originally brought the tubes out of the storeroom were back within the
ship, rousing out hundreds of fathoms of high tensile chain--carried
for the rare emergency of a heavy tow.

The men up in the tubes reported their job completed, but Bullard
frowned when he read the finished diameter.  It was too little.  He
wished ardently for a giant lathe so he could take a cut off the
massive tubes.  But there was no such lathe nearer than Ursapolis.  He
would have to reduce the outer diameter of the bushings some other way.

He bled air from the ship through outlets on its shady side, and
collected the liquefied gas in buckets and doused the tubes with the
cold liquid air, but even when they had shrunk to their minimum size,
they were still too large.  It was a disappointment, for he had little
time to spare for the actual work ahead and none at all for
experimentation.  The tapping of the holes was done, and now men were
already setting the heavy eyebolts and reeving the chains through,
ready to hold the ship against the thrust of the great hydraulic jack
he had placed astern of her.  But still the tubes were too fat.  If the
ram was strong enough to force them in, the chains would part, he must
reduce the resistance, but he saw no way to do it now except to heat
the tubes, and that he was reluctant to do, for his tank soundings
showed he was already dangerously short of fuel.  They had expended it
lavishly in their escape from Jupiter.  There was barely enough liquid
hydrogen to get them off the satellite and on their way to port, with a
small margin over for the landing.

Benton shook his head when questioned as to possible sources of
substitute fuel.  All the uranium had been lost overboard when the feed
pipes were broken with full pressure still behind the fuel supply.
That had been necessary at the time, and it was fruitless to waste
regrets on it now.

Bullard sat down and explored the ship mentally, checking off one by
one, the contents of the storerooms.  There was nothing he could use
that did not have some drawback.  _Ammonal_ there was plenty of, but he
had doubts as to its safety.  Then, suddenly, the solution hit him.

"Go ahead and set your first tube," he directed; "No. 1.  Then send all
the men you can spare into the nose blister--break out a couple of tons
of that steel wool.  That's what we will use."



It made a pretty blaze, that tube housing stuffed with steel wool
saturated in liquid air, and a short one.  Under the terrific
outpouring of heat, the tube reddened and swelled, and the ready nose
of the first of the bushings was jockeyed into the mouth of the tube
and the great jack set in motion.  Upward it drove, the ship straining
against her leashes, but the pad-eyes set in the hard, planetary iron
held, and the quivering _Pollux_ had to receive her bushing.  There was
no evading the thrust of the ram.

One by one the other bushings were run in and rammed light, and as the
surrounding housing cooled, its contraction crushed the liner to as
tight a fit as any yard in the Solar System could have achieved with
all their fine equipment.  Bullard had no misgivings as to their
reliability.  They would stay in place.

He was an hour ahead of schedule when the last tool was back on board
and the warning howlers announced the imminent take-off.  The _Pollux_
spouted flame--old-fashioned flame, such as the _Asia_ still used--then
roared upward on her homeward flight.

"Send this, please," the admiral crisply commanded the tired but
contented acting captain of the _Pollux_.  Bullard looked at him in
surprise.  The radio had been repaired, but why did he want to send a
signal?  No one needed a tug now.  They would be in in an hour--long
before any tug could be warmed up.  But he took the signal, since the
admiral had offered it, and read.  It was addressed to all ships and
stations and began, "I have this day inspected the cruiser _Pollux_ and
find her ready in all respects for any contingency of the service--"

The first casualty of the trip really to hit Bullard occurred at that
point.  Something went wrong with his eyes, and for a moment the
message in his fingers was just a blur.  He saw the words "special
commendation," and a mention of a Commander Bullard, and by then he had
reached the familiar signature--Abercrombie.  He did notice that the
ship's score was a flat four-o, and at the moment that was all he cared
about.  She had made the grade.



THE END.






[End of Admiral's Inspection, by Malcolm Jameson]
