Rogue Ship

19

'Are you going to hold an election?' Tellier asked.

The big ship, under Lesbee's command, had turned back and had picked up his friends. The lifeboat itself, with the remaining Karn still aboard, was put into orbit around Alta III and abandoned.

The two young men were sitting now in the captain's cabin.

After the question had been asked, Lesbee leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He didn't need to examine his total resistance to the suggestion. He had already savored the feeling that command brought.

Almost from the moment of Browne's death, he had observed himself having the same thoughts that Browne had voiced – among many others, the reasons why elections were not advisable aboard a spaceship. He waited now while Ilsa, one of his three wives – she being the younger of the two widows of Browne – poured wine for them and went softly out. Then he laughed grimly.

'My good friend,' he said, 'we're all lucky that time is so compressed at the speed of light. At a time ratio of five hundred to one, any further exploration we do will require only a few months or years at most. And so, I don't think we can afford to take the chance of defeating at an election the only person who understands the details of the new acceleration method. Till I decide exactly how much exploration we shall do, I shall keep our speed capabilities a secret. But I did, and do, think one other person should know where I have this information documented. Naturally, I am selecting First Officer Armand Tellier.'

He raised his glass. 'As soon as I have the full account written, you shall have a copy.'

'Thank you, Captain,' the young man said. But he was thoughtful as he sipped his wine. He went on finally, 'Captain, I think you'd feel a lot better if you held an election. I'm sure you could win it.'

Lesbee laughed tolerantly, shook his head. 'I'm afraid you don't understand the dynamics of government,' he said. 'There's no record in history of a person, who actually had control, handing it over.'

He finished with the casual confidence of absolute power: 'I'm not going to be presumptuous enough to fight a precedent like that.'

He was sitting there, smiling cynically, when the buzzer of the front door of the captain's cabin sounded in the adjoining room. Lesbee was aware of one of his wives going to the door and opening it. Surprisingly, then, there was not another sound. No greeting, no acknowledgment; total silence.

Lesbee thought, 'Whoever it is, has handed her a note.'

The instant analysis ended a feeling of uneasiness. He was about to settle back in his chair, when a man's rough voice came quietly from behind him.

'All right, Mr. Lesbee, your take-over is ended and ours is begi

Lesbee froze. Then, turning, stared with an awful sinking sensation at the armed men who were crowding in behind the man who had spoken. He didn't know any of the men but he saw that they were laborers, garden men, and kitchen help. People of whose existence he had never been more than vaguely aware.

The leader of the group spoke again.

'Gourdy is my name, Mr. Lesbee, and we're taking over -these men and I – because we want to go home, back to Earth... Be careful, and you and your friends won't be hurt -'

Lesbee sighed with relief as those final words were spoken. All was not lost.

20

Gourdy was thirty-four when he led the revolt that overthrew Lesbee V. He was a thick-built, small man with very black eyes, and he had been brought up with the daily memory that his father had led an abortive rebellion. Long ago, he had determined that he would carry out his father's ideals to the death, if necessary. He had a courage that derived from hatred and a shrewdness that had gradually developed from his skeptical attitude toward any and every bit of information that had ever come down to the lower decks from above. He had instantly spotted as false the apparent friendship of Browne and Lesbee, and recognized it as a struggle and not a collaboration. Far more important, he had seen that this was the opportunity for which he himself had been waiting.

He moved into the captain's cabin, and because it was all new to him he took nothing for granted. What was visible to his keen, wondering gaze merely served as an inducement to explore what was not visible. Thus, in raising the metal floor to make sure there was nothing under it that could be used against him, he discovered the detectaphone system by which it was possible to listen in to every room of the big ship. And when he had some of the walls broken open, he found the labyrinth of passageways by which technicians like Lesbee had kept track of tens of thousands of miles of wiring.

For the first time, he was able to reconstruct how his father had been killed – from such a passageway – while apparently safe behind the barred doors of a storeroom. The finding of these and other hidden chambers took some of the magic out of the scientific realities of the ship. Gourdy reasoned that a leader need not himself be a scientist to run the ship, but he had a strong feeling that he would probably have to kill a few people, before the scientific community would accept him and his untrained helpers.

From the begi

Most of the scientists seemed resigned to working with him. Many of them expressed relief that someone was finally in command of the ship who really would set course for Earth. All of these Gourdy listed to return to their regular duties under the system he had worked out, whereby never more than one third of any staff would be admitted to the laboratories at one time.

About a score of men made him uneasy in some way: their ma

All of Browne's and Lesbee's officers he told bluntly that he pla

Of the entire group of nearly two hundred persons, only one technician and two minor scientists proved resistant. They were openly contemptuous of the new government of the Hope of Man. All three offered Gourdy direct insults as he questioned them. They sneered at his clothes, at his way of speaking, and swore at him.

Gourdy parried the invective thoughtfully. He was not suspicious or afraid that the three were part of a conspiracy; they were too obvious. He surmised extreme unawareness, but he had a hardness of purpose that rejected sympathy or understanding. He saw with grim satisfaction that here were his examples.

He killed all three men and a

That done – all the preliminaries done – he ordered Lesbee to be brought up to him. And so, a few minutes later, for the first time since the take-over, the two men faced each other. In a cool, incisive voice, Gourdy told his prisoner, 'I thought I'd keep you to the last -'

He didn't explain why, and for Lesbee, now that the executions had taken place, it didn't matter. It was too late. Sitting there, with the other's intense black eyes staring at him, Lesbee silently cursed himself. He had actually had the fleeting thought earlier that this man might do something drastic, had actually thought of sending a message to Gourdy asking him not to do anything irrevocable without a discussion. But the new captain might have insisted on knowing why, and so he had held back.