Science fiction; Time travel -- Fiction; War stories; World War, 1939-1945 -- Fiction
The captain of the _Siegfried_ squinted at the tables the navigator had
handed him, mentally translating their figures into acceleration units.
The ship was only an hour from the assigned point in space, and it
was necessary to make a final, ultimately correct alignment, in which
seconds of arc meant miles of displacement in the dispersion of the
dust on Earth's surface.
The captain's concentration was disturbed by the nagging conviction
that something was amiss--or had been amiss a minute or so
earlier--about his familiar control room. For a moment he had fancied
that the door to the sternward-descending stairshaft was standing open;
but it was obviously closed....
He put the doubts angrily out of his mind, frowned at the papers, and
ordered the expectant pilot: "_Funf Minuten sechsunddreissig Sekunden
dritter Geschwindigkeit dem Backbordgetriebe!_"
They were not very inspired last words, but he had no chance to make
additions, for in the next instant Kane's sharp knife sank between his
ribs. The captain gurgled in an oddly muffled fashion and would have
fallen, save that invisible hands caught and lowered him.
The navigator, looking straight at him, finally realized something had
happened. He opened his mouth to cry out, but his throat was cut from
ear to ear and no sound emerged.
The pilot, about to press the buttons that would wake the portside
rocket bank, was stupefied to see that his hand hung over the controls
and refused to move as if paralyzed. Enveloped in the mind-numbing
field of an invisibility unit at full power, he did not feel the grip
that held him or the knife-thrust that killed him.
The four Americans switched off their units and indulged in the luxury
of removing the metal-stiffened hoods. They had no more to fear aboard
the _Siegfried_; two other members of the crew had already been
disposed of in the cabins below, and now even if all Germany had known
of their presence aboard the dust ship--no method had ever been devised
for attacking a ship in space.
But they did not exchange many words. There was work that desperately
had to be done as the _Siegfried_ drove toward its rendezvous. Kane
flung himself into the navigator's seat, and glancing ever and anon
at the figures for the original course, began to punch keys on the
calculator. Manning hunched over the controls, continuing an intensive
study that had begun over the German pilot's shoulder. And Vzryvov
stationed himself before a black box fixed to the wall beneath a large
clock and conspicuously sealed with a _Hakenkreuz_.
Dugan was left without a job; but he was content to slump into an
unused seat and think queasily of Earth thousands of miles below. He
was out of his element here--but so were the others. None of them had
ever been into space before; only Kane had a theoretical acquaintance
with rocket navigation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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