A. E. Van Vogt by Rogue Ship

Author:Rogue Ship
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-11-01T23:36:10+00:00

22

Averill Hewitt hung up the phone, and repeated aloud the message he had just been given: 'Your spaceship, Hope of Man, is entering the atmosphere of Earth.'

The words echoed and re-echoed in his mind, a discordant repetition. He staggered to a couch and lay down.

Other words began to join the whirlpool of meaning and implication that was the original message: After six years ... the Hope of Man ... after six years, when by even his minimum estimates he had pictured it a good fifth of the way to the Centaurus suns ... re-entering the atmosphere of Earth...

Lying there Hewitt thought: 'And for ten years I've accepted Astronomer John Lesbee's theory that our sun is due to show some of the characteristics of a Cepheid Variable - within months now!'

Worse, he had spent the greater part of his huge, inherited fortune to build the giant vessel. The world had ridiculed the West's richest sucker; Joan had left him, taking the children; and only the vast, interstellar colonizing plan had finally won him government support for the journey itself --

All that was now totally nullified by the return of the Hope of Man, on the eve of the very disaster it had been built to avoid.

Hewitt thought hopelessly, 'What could have made John Lesbee turn back--?'

His bitter reverie ended, as the phone began to ring. He climbed off the couch, and as he went to answer, he thought, 'I'll have to go aboard and try to persuade them. As soon as they land, I'll--'

This time, his caller was an official of the Space Patrol. Hewitt listened, trying to grasp the picture the other was presenting. It had proved impossible to communicate with those aboard.

'We've had men in space suits at all the observation ports, Mr. Hewitt, and on the bridge. Naturally, they couldn't see in, since it's one-way-vision material. But they pounded on the metal for well over an hour, and received no response.'

Hewitt hesitated. He had no real comment to make, but said finally, 'How fast is the ship going?'

'It's overtaking the earth at about a thousand miles an hour.'

Hewitt scarcely heard the reply. His mind was working faster now. He said, 'I authorize all expense necessary to get inside. I'll be there myself in an hour.'

As he headed for his private ship, he was thinking, 'If I can get inside, I'll talk to them. I'll convince them. I'll force them to go back.'

He felt remorseless. It seemed to him that for the first time in the history of the human race, any means of compulsion was justified.

Two hours later, he said, 'You mean, the airlock won't open?'

He said it incredulously, while standing inside the rescue ship, Molly D, watching a huge magnet try to unscrew one of the hatches of the Hope of Man. Reluctantly, Hewitt drew his restless mind from his own private purposes.

He felt impatient, unwilling to accept the need to adjust to the possibility that there had been trouble aboard. He said urgently, 'Keep trying! It's obviously stuck.

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