Science fiction; Short stories; Space pirates -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction
After sleeping several times, Albrekt was ready to concede it was not
going to be as cozy in the control room as he had thought at first.
It offered basic comforts of home, but the showers were on the larger
navigation deck below. Several months without a bath promised to be
uncomfortable. All decks carried plenty of emergency rations in case
they were sealed off by a meteor collision, but the rations were not
too tasty, Albrekt's mouth was beginning to water at the thought of the
frozen meals stored two decks below, available to the crew.
Most of Carrel's book tapes were too technical to interest him, but he
spent much of his time listening to those which offered him information
in simple terms. The pattern of meaning of all the dials, switches and
buttons crowded into the control room became a little clearer to him.
Albrekt did not see how the crew, weaponless and locked below, could
challenge his mastery of the ship. He detected the first effort in this
direction about 80 hours after the _By Jove!_ had left the convoy.
Albrekt was eating a meal of emergency rations when he glimpsed
movement on one of the rear screens. He turned his attention to it at
once.
A spacesuited figure was emerging from the airlock, which was in a
narrow waist between the vessel's personnel sphere and the huge cargo
cylinder beneath it. From the suit, it was either Carrel or Migl.
The figure moved cautiously up on the outside of the airlock, gripping
its surface with heavy magnetic shoes. In the hooks of the spacesuit,
it carried two sledge hammers.
Albrekt flipped on the switch to the intercom, which was tuned to the
spacesuit helmet radios as well as the ship's system.
"I'd advise the man in the spacesuit to forget it, and get back
aboard," he said gently. "If he doesn't, I'll sweep the outside surface
with machine gun fire in exactly two minutes."
His fingers hovered over the firing buttons of the heavy weapons the
_By Jove!_ carried for defense against possible marauders. But in a
moment the spacesuited figure reentered the airlock.
"It would take you some time to break into the control room with a
sledge hammer," Albrekt said conversationally into the microphone. "At
the first blow, I'll blast anyone who tries it. That's fair warning."
It was several days later that Albrekt began to feel sleepy long
before his sleeping time. The realization hit him suddenly that for
some time he had been yawning and stretching, relaxing more and more
in the chair, his eyelids getting heavier and heavier. His head was
beginning to ache a little. He slept by the clock and awoke by the
clock. He should not be sleepy for hours yet.
Rousing himself with an effort, he swung bleary eyes around the control
room, anxiously. He could see nothing out of order. But how would one
detect something that made one abnormally sleepy? What could it be?
Illness?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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