But “old” was not quite the same as “historic.”
He began pulling out the desk drawers, one by one, until he found what he was looking for: the log—a big, glossy, leather-bound book with tarnished clasps. He examined it standing up, not yet having mustered the courage to sit down in the sprawling, worn-out desk chair. He turned back the cover. The first page bore the date of the ship’s trial run, along with a photocopy insert of its technical specs. He glanced at the date again and batted his eyes; he wasn’t even born then! He turned to the last, and most crucial, entry. It confirmed what the agent had told him: for the past week the ship had been taking on machine equipment and general cargo for Mars. Lift-off, originally scheduled for the twenty-eighth, had been several times postponed, making this the third demurrage day. That explained the rush; the demurrage fees in a terrestrial spaceport were steep enough to bust a millionaire.
He thumbed through the book slowly, his eye occasionally lingering over a bit of navigational lingo, course data, or computer figures—but only in passing, as if on the lookout for something else. Only one page stood out from all the others, the one headed:
Ship consigned to Ampers-Hart Shipyard for class A repairs.
The entry was three years old.
Let’s see what repairs were made. Out of idle curiosity he scanned the itemized list of part replacements, his incredulity growing from one item to the next: ablation shield, sixteen deck sections, shielding braces, airtight bulkheads…
New bulkheads and shielding braces?!
Okay, the agent had said something about an accident in the past. But accident, hell! Disaster would be more like it!
He flipped back a page to see what he could dig out of the entries that came before:
Port of destination: Mars. Payload: General cargo. Crew: Pratt—engineer and first officer. Wayne—second officer. Potter and Nolan - — pilots. Simon—mechanic…
Hm. No mention of the skipper.
He turned back another page and winced.
The date of the ship’s first command was—nineteen years ago! The signature of the ship’s first commanding officer read Momssen, first navigator.
Momssen!
A dry heat engulfed him.
It can’t be! Not the Momssen! But… that was on another ship!
The date squared, though; it was exactly nineteen years ago that… Whoa, there! Easy does it…
He went back to the log. A strong and legible hand, in faded ink. First day out. Second day, third day… Moderate reactor leakage: 0.42 roentgen per hour. All leaks sealed. Course coordinates such-and-such… Stellar fix…
Come on, come on!
He was no longer reading, just skimming over the hand-written lines.
There it was!
The date he had been forced to memorize as a schoolkid, and underneath it:
1640 hours. Rec’d. Deimos’s met. warning re: cloud headed our way from Jupiter perturbation of the Leonids. Cloud approaching on a collision course at vel. 40 km/sec. MW confirmed. PM alert sounded for crew. Despite persistent reactor leakage of 0.42 roentgen per hour, full-thrust escape maneuver on a course approximating Orion delta.
New paragraph:
1651. Im—
The rest of the page was blank.
No marks, no scribbling, no ink stains—nothing except for the final vertical stroke of the letter m, dipping down in willful defiance of the rules of good penmanship.
This wobbly, several-millimeters-long extension, breaking off the text to wander aimlessly across the white expanse of paper, told the whole story: the crash on impact, the exploding decompression, the shrieks of men at the moment their throats and eyeballs burst…
But Momssen’s ship had a different name. What was it called?
It was unreal. A ship almost as famous as Columbus’s, and he couldn’t remember the name of it!
What was the name of that ship, Momssen’s last ship?
He hopped over to the bookshelf. The fat volume of Lloyd’s Shipping Register seemed to plunk down right into his hands. A word that began with C. Cosmonaut? No. Condor? Not it, either. A longer name… the title of a play… a hero, a knight…
He flung the book down on the desk and squinted at the walls. Hanging between the chart cabinet and the bookshelf were some instruments: a hygrometer, a radiation counter, a carbon-dioxide gauge…
He scrutinized each of them, turning them this way and that. Not one inscription. They looked brand new, in fact.
Over in the corner!
Screwed into the oak paneling was a chronometer, plainly visible because of its shiny dial. A rather quaint-looking model, an antique, with cute little brass doodads around the dial… Wasting no time, he undid the screws, carefully slipped the chassis out with his fingertips, and cradled it in his palm. The glossy, brass-plated bottom bore the engraving CORIOLANUS.
That was it—the name of Momssen’s ship.
His eyes swept the cabin. So it was in this room and in this very same chair that Momssen had sat during the final moments!
He opened Lloyd’s Shipping Register to the C’s.
CONDOR, CORINTHIAN, CORSAIR, CORIOLANUS: Registered with the company of… rest mass 19,000 tons… launched in the year… uranium-hydrogen reactor, type… cooling system… maximum thrust… introduced on the Terra-Mars line; listed as missing following a collision with the Leonids; located sixteen years later by a patrolship in the aphelion of its orbit… underwent class A repairs at Ampers-Hart… reintroduced by the Southern Company on the Terra-Mars line… licensed as general cargo transport… insurance premium… Ho hum… Ha, here it is:… under the name THE BLUE STAR.
He shut his eyes… Gosh, it’s quiet in here. So that’s it—they changed the name. To make it easier to hire a crew, I bet. Maybe that’s what the agent had meant when he said…
He began thinking back to when he was still a cadet. One of their patrolships from the Base had discovered the wreckage… Those were the days when meteorite warnings always came too late… Then there was the Commission’s report, brief and to the point: “Conditions beyond control. No one at fault.”… What about the crew? The evidence indicated that not all of them had been killed instantly… that among the survivors was the skipper, and that, thanks to him, the crew—though cut off from one another by the collapsing bulkheads and with no hope of being rescued—had held out to the end, down to the last oxygen bottle… But there was something else, some morbid detail that the press had played up for weeks, until some new sensation had put it out of the public’s mind… What in the world was it?
Suddenly he saw the Institute’s huge lecture auditorium… his pal Smiga, caked with chalk, plodding his way through a blackboard full of math equations… and him-self, his head bent over an open desk drawer, reading on the sly the newspaper spread out flat on the bottom: “Only the Dead Survive”… Of course! There was only one who could have survived, who was not in need of any oxygen or food… The robot! Sixteen years, and all that time it was lying there, buried under the rubble!
Pirx rose to his feet. Terminus! The lone surviver had to be Terminus! And to think that he had him right here on board his ship… Now was his chance, his golden opportunity…
To what? Pump a mechanical moron, a machine programmed for sealing leaks, by now so old it was almost deaf and blind? What a laugh. It was the press’s fault, the press in its eternal effort to sensationalize the hell out of everything, whose glaring headlines had made him a “mysterious witness” of the tragedy, even had him being interviewed by the Commission behind closed doors. He thought of Terminus’s imbecilic patter. What a put-on!
He slammed the log shut, tossed it back into the drawer, and checked the time.
0800 hours. No time to lose. He started rounding up the shipping papers. Everything was set for lift-off: hatches closed, health and port inspection out of the way, flight clearance, customs declarations… He skimmed through the bill of lading and was surprised not to find any cargo manifest. Machines, okay—but what kind of machines? What about the tare weight? And why no loading chart specifying the ballast? Nothing except for the gross tonnage and a rough plan showing the freight distribution in the holds. Why only 300,000 tons back aft? Was it to lighten the maximum load for takeoff? Say, why wasn’t this brought to his attention earlier? While he was rummaging through the files in search of something, he became so distracted that he completely forgot about the ship’s past history; the moment he laid eyes on the dismantled chronometer, however, he winced in recollection. A second later he found what he was after: a little slip of paper on which it was noted that the last hold—the one abutting on the reactor chamber—was stocked with forty-eight crates of what was generally described as “food perishables.” Why in the hold with the worst ventilation? he wondered. Didn’t they care about the spoilage?
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in!” he hollered, hurriedly gathering up the papers scattered on the desktop and stuffing them back into their folders. Two men entered but ventured no farther than the doorway.