“Silence!” he roared. “Stand to attention!”

  I sighed. “Go to hell,” I said tiredly. “Take the shortest route.” Obviously this defiance of authority was painful for Zignawitsch to witness. He stared at the roof and pretended none of us was there.

  Red-faced, wordless, Marley tried to slay me on the spot with a Gorgon look. I remained impervious. Abruptly he turned his back to me and his glare on the HAPU. It wouldn’t melt either.

  That left Thomson as the only person apparently aware of my existence. He regarded me even more quizzically and held out his hand.

  “I’m Thomson, the medico on this trip.”

  I nodded and shook his hand.

  He had an Edinburgh burr I shan’t attempt to render. It was noticeable when he attempted to introduce the diminutive zombie behind him.

  “This is Pettigue. He’s a government prospector, geologist, metallurgist, qualified surveyor, and all-round explorer. He’s been all over the world. Now, like us, he’s been assigned to the next world.”

  It would be an exaggeration to say that Pettigue came alive. But his eyes—pale as boiled onions—slowly turned in my direction and seemed attracted by the glitter of my belt buckle. Without raising his eyes, he deposited a small brown monkey claw of a hand in mine and left it there. I held it for a moment, wondering whether I was expected to warm it into life, and then gave it back to him. He let it fall disinterestedly to his side. He seemed to regard it as a mere appendage.

  His lower jaw moved. I thought he was about to speak, but I expected too much. He was merely changing the position of a wad of chewing gum. But he didn’t want to work on it. His face became quiescent again. I wondered why he troubled to carry the gum around at all.

  Thomson shrugged and smiled at me. Plainly he had no time for Pettigue, and I didn’t feel inclined to spare much either.

  Zignawitsch was still staring at the ceiling, Marley at the HAPU, and Pettigue was back to watching nothing.

  I remarked to Thomson, “Do you have a deck of cards on you? We could play poker.”

  Thomson shook his head, still smiling, and turned to the Harwell prodigy. “You must be Dr. Zignawitsch.”

  Zignawitsch brought his gaze down, applied it to empty space before him, and—to shame me—stood to attention without being told to.

  Marley turned to look on him with approval. “Yes, this is Zignawitsch. He’s a genius.”

  Zignawitsch’s chest expanded some more, as though the colonel were pinning a medal to it. This was one of his big moments.

  Marley said confidentially to Thomson, “My friend Howard, the Minister of Supply, expects big things of Dr. Zignawitsch. He thinks he’ll be running Harwell before he’s forty.”

  Zignawitsch’s eyebrows began to twitch with emotion.

  Thomson said, “Yes, I’d heard the HAPU is largely your baby, Doctor. Could you tell us what makes it tick?”

  Zignawitsch, who’d behaved to me like a human clam, became eager to open up his small heart to these bigger bugs. For them he trotted out his top secret files, verbally.

  In brief, the HAPU solved the problems which hitherto had barred the way to the full-scale atomic rocket ship. The problem of rapid heat transference to the propellant (hydrogen in this case) had been met by a new method of direct contact with the fissioning element.

  The old problem of the near impossible weight of shielding material needed to protect crews from atomic radiation had also been overcome. All particles flying in the direction of the living quarters of the ship were (after they had heated the hydrogen) caught by a deflector and cast out harmlessly into space.

  This deflector wasn’t just a curved electrode, like that in a cyclotron which bends back the paths of high-speed particles. It was a pattern of magnetic fields which performed the same deflecting duty far more effectively.

  So far as I was concerned, Zignawitsch need never have opened his files on this magnetic field pattern. I understood about one word in six of its principles. He could have been talking in Polish.

  I doubt if the others were any wiser either, but one could never tell about Pettigue. He still looked as though rigor mortis were about to set in.

  During the discourse Marley’s grin slowly returned. He assumed a proprietary interest in Zignawitsch. At the end he announced, “You see, gentlemen, Harwell’s taken care of everything.”

  He markedly avoided my eyes when he said “gentlemen.”

  Thomson, who was markedly included, said, “Mightn’t there be a wee spot of trouble after the takeoff? Among the local inhabitants, I mean. The ship will squirt the atmosphere full of radioactivated hydrogen, which wouldn’t be exactly healthy for them.”

  Zignawitsch answered politely, “The ship will be—er—launched from a—um—disinhabited island in the Pacific Ocean. It will cause no more harm than an atomic bomb exploded under test conditions.”

  Dr. Thomson shrugged.

  “All the same,” continued Zignawitsch, registering a hint of pain, “the government is not prepared to take the smallest risk. They have—er—insisted that the HAPU is not to be brought into action until the height of one hundred miles is reached, where atmosphere is negligible.”

  Marley caught the note of protest. “The PM insisted on that, not I,” he said quickly.

  I stared at Zignawitsch and asked, “And how do you propose to get the Endeavor up to that height of one hundred miles—fire it from a catapult?”

  Zignawitsch ignored me.

  “How?” Thomson pursued.

  “By a chemical—er—” fumbled Zignawitsch, looking sullen.

  “Booster rocket,” I supplied, and saw that I was right. “So a human pilot is necessary after all.”

  “Not in my opinion,” said Zignawitsch glacially. “The takeoff could be radio-controlled from the ground—it would be easy. The dropping of the booster could be automatic. The HAPU is automatic in any case.”

  “You’re straying from your beat, son,” I said. “You’d do better to stick to your atomic physics. If ground control is the best way, why hasn’t it been used on all the chemical ships so far? Don’t bother to refuse to answer—I’ll tell you. It’s because no instruments you backroom boys have cooked up yet have been half so reliable as these.”

  I held out my hands.

  I went on. “No servomotors can do what these can do—the hands of an experienced space pilot. These fingertips can feel. When they’re on the controls, those controls become extensions of my nerves. Oh, I’ve had it happen scores of times, testing controls which your meters say are okay—but my nerves tell me are not. My reflexes are one hundred per cent reliable. Your automatic gadgets, at a generous estimate, rate no more than ninety-seven per cent accuracy. You and the colonel here have forgotten something: in his youth the Prime Minister was a jet-plane test pilot.”

  “Well hit, sir,” said Dr. Thomson.

  Zignawitsch seemed to have run out of words, even the wrong ones.

  Marley said, expressionlessly, “I side with Zignawitsch about this. I make no secret of it—I said as much to the PM. The Endeavor will make space pilots obsolete. The very first flight will show that that conclusion can’t be avoided. But we must indulge the PM. He’s a little sentimental—perhaps all great men are. I must confess that I myself regret the human factor’s being supplanted by electronic machines. But we must accept it. It’s the trend of this civilization.”

  “And so I’m to ride as a sort of mascot,” I said bitterly.

  “You’re to ride because the Prime Minister has so ordered it,” snapped Marley. “The nature of your duties I shall explain to you tomorrow. Be at my house at three in the afternoon—the address is twenty-three, Elm Gardens, Chelsea. Make sure you’re on time, Brunei.”

  “Captain Brunei,” I emphasized.

  He presented me with his back view again. It was no thing of beauty, but I preferred it to the frontal aspect. He began talking to Thomson in little more than a whisper. This palaver was finished as far as I was concerned.

  I walked over to the hangar doors. Zignawitsch followed leisurely, one pace to every two of my short legs. He was keen to see me off the premises.

  At the doors I glanced back. My three prospective fellow travelers to the moon were still grouped under the sawn-off cone of the HAPU.

  Marley. Thomson. Pettigue.

  I wondered how we should fare together. I anticipated a certain amount of unpleasantness. But at that moment I certainly had no premonition that two of them would never come back from the moon alive.

  Or dead.

  A moment later I was outside the doors, and NO ADMITANCE came together with a bang, as if it really meant it. By now I suspected that it did.

  chapter two

  Elm Gardens was near Sloane Square. It looked as though a playful giant had set a hand at either end of the thoroughfare and compressed it, shortening it and squashing the terraced houses until they became tall and thin.

  I peeped through the iron railings into the basement of twenty-three. There were a couple of uniformed maids playing cards at a table, for all the world as though it were still the golden age of Queen Victoria. Servants, I’d begun to think, belonged almost entirely to the B.A. era: Before Automation.

  I rang. Half a minute later one of the maids opened the door, breathless and a little resentful.

  “Sorry to interrupt the game just when you were holding all the trumps,” I said, “but Colonel Marley is expecting me. I’m Captain Brunei.”

  “The colonel ain’t back yet, sir.”

  I glanced at my watch. Three o’clock, within seconds.

  “Probably his watch is an hour slow. I find that common among people of his kind. Odd, but there you are.”

  A door opened somewhere down the long hall and a Girton College voice called, “If that’s Captain Brunei, Teresa, send him along.”

  “Very good, Miss Marley,” answered Teresa, and sent me along. These houses, I realized, were much larger than they seemed from without. It was quite a walk to the far end of the hall where the door stood ajar.

  I tapped.

  “Come right in, Captain,” said the cultured voice.

  I stepped in and sank almost to my ankles in the Oxford-blue carpet.

  I knew nothing about Marley’s family. Was “Miss Marley” his sister or his daughter? She had her back to me and was bending over a tape player. All I saw was a pair of black jeans too amply filled. Miss Marley’s posterior would have delighted Velasquez. In this day and age it would have been better concealed than revealed.

  His sister, I decided.

  She straightened up and turned, to soft music from the player.

  My mistake. A man of sixty was unlikely to have a sister of under thirty—even though maybe only a couple of years under. This was Marley’s daughter.

  “I’m Lou. Daddy told me to expect you around this time. I’m to entertain you till he comes. He shouldn’t be long—he’s such a busy man, you know.”

  I nodded, attempted a smile, and wished I could lose the misanthropic streak that seldom failed to make me dislike each new acquaintance on sight. I disapproved of fat females in their late twenties who still referred to their fathers as “Daddy,” prevalent though the habit might be in this upper social stratum.

  A generous man would have said Miss Marley was merely plump. Right then I didn’t feel like a generous man. She had shining black hair and shining black eyes. Her nose was straight and her chin might have looked good, too, if it weren’t for the other one supporting it. At one time, probably, she had been really good-looking. But she’d let herself run to fat.

  Maybe someone had told her black made you look slimmer. If so, she’d taken it to heart. She was wearing a black blouse, belt, and slippers, as well as the black jeans. In toto, they did nothing for her.

  I suppose I looked her up and down too obviously.

  “Do you know why I dress all in black?” she asked suddenly.

  “Because it doesn’t show the dirt?”

  “No.” She struck a mock-tragic pose. “Because I’m in mourning for my life.”

  Masha’s line from The Seagull, and tlie only one I could recall,

  for it occurs in the first few minutes, and I’d dozed off after that. “Do you like Chekhov?” pursued Miss Marley.

  “No.”

  “I don’t think you like anybody very much,” she remarked shrewdly. “Have a choc?”

  She picked up one of three boxes lying around and proffered it. “No, thanks.”

  She scrutinized the contents, murmuring to herself, “Lou, you’re going to find it hard to entertain Captain Brunei.”

  She selected the largest of the chocolates and popped it into her mouth. It was quite a firm mouth, I noticed.

  “I’m sorry about that, Miss Marley.”

  “Call me Lou,” she said indistinctly; she’d picked a caramel.

  “Is that the diminutive for Louise or Louisa?”

  “Could be. But my name is Lou. There’s no more to it. I’m the lady that’s known as Lou.”

  I looked blank.

  “She’s in ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew,’ ” she explained.

  “Yes, I know. All the same, I just don’t get it.”

  “It was I who got it,” she said wryly. “Daddy gave it to me.”

  “But why—”

  “You don’t know Daddy very well, do you?” she cut in.

  “Hardly at all.”

  “You’ll soon leam why,” she said cryptically.

  I was in no hurry and knew as much as I cared to of Marley. I looked casually around the room. It was big. There were rows of open bookshelves, a monster TV set, and a sofa almost hidden by a multitude of carelessly heaped cushions. I never saw so many cushions in one room. They made bright islands everywhere on the dark blue sea of the carpet. On one of them a fat black cat was curled up asleep.

  Also scattered around the floor were bowls of fruit and nuts and all kinds of candy.

  The window opened onto the back yard, a tiny patio containing just enough space to stack the gardening implements that weren’t needed.

  “You don’t like Lou’s room either, do you, Captain?”

  “A bit too sybaritic for my taste.”

  “Lou likes comfort.” She sat cross-legged beside the cat and began to stroke it gently. I sighed inwardly. A good education had been wasted on a plain case of arrested emotional development. I began to wish Marley would hurry up and come, say his piece, and I could escape.

  Lou crooned to the cat, which didn’t bother to prick up an ear. Languorous music from the Mother Goose Suite drifted from the tape player. I shuffled impatiently. There were no hard chairs, nothing I could sit on without some loss of dignity; the massed eiderdown of the sofa ensemble would, I felt, suck me into it like quicksand.

  I eyed the array of confectionery. “Throwing a children’s party?” “I beg your pardon?”

  I gestured. “All that sweet stuff.”

  “Lou likes candy. Don’t you, Captain?”

  “Not much.”

  She whispered to the cat, “The captain doesn’t like candy, Mack. Do you think he likes cats? No, of course he doesn’t. He doesn’t like anybody or anything. He doesn’t even like Lou.” Exasperation comes easily to me, and it came then.

  I snapped, “Even Lou doesn’t like Lou.”

  She looked up sharply and her black eyes glinted. “What makes you say that, Captain Brunei?”

  “People who habitually refer to themselves in the third person are trying to stand apart from themselves, because they don’t like themselves very much.”

  Her gaze dropped. She scratched behind one of the cat’s unresponsive ears. “Hey, Mack, we’ve got to watch out. This fellow’s as sharp as your claws. And he says what he thinks too. Daddy won’t like that, will he?”

  The ear pricked up suddenly.

  “Yes, that’s Daddy,” Lou murmured. “No more sleep for you now, Mack.”

  I hadn’t heard the front door open, but in a moment I felt as well as heard the heavy footfalls coming along the hall. The door was flung open and Marley, all beef, bounce, and shark’s grin, made a stage entrance. The room seemed to fill at once with his cheap, overpowering personality.

  Mack made an equally sudden exit, passing Marley at a rapid trot with his tail in the air.

  “Daddy!” Buxom Lou hurled herself at her massive father, hugged him and kissed him. He responded with enthusiasm. All rather distasteful.

  When it was over, Marley asked her, as though I were all of a hundred miles away, “And what do you think of our little captain?”

  “Well, I’ll say this: he knows his own mind. But I’d hate to say it was worth knowing.”

  “You don’t like him either then?”

  “That’s beside the point, Daddy. It’s better to have a captain who knows his own mind than a ditherer always in two minds.”

  “So long as his mind doesn’t conflict with mine,” said Marley, and looked at me grimly over her shoulder.

  “I’m sure we’ll get along fine,” I said. “Sure as today’s Tuesday.”

  “It’s Wednesday,” he said after a pause.

  I shrugged.

  Lou laughed. In contrast to the college voice, which inevitably struck me as affected, although I was aware it was unconsciously acquired, her laugh was easy, deep, natural. Most surprising of all, sexy. Why should I think that, who’d never associated sex and laughter before?

  “Watch your step, Daddy. He bites.”

  “H’m.” Marley regarded me thoughtfully. “Like a drink?”

  “I always did.”

  “The bar’s upstairs,” he said abruptly. “This way.”

  He turned and strode out. As he turned, I noticed for the first time a long, thin scar across the right side of his neck. It was as straight as a sword cut. It had long since healed, but when it happened the vultures must have had high hopes. Marley, surely, was too full of life and conceit ever to attempt suicide? I’d never read of any homicidal attack on him, but I could have missed it. Out in space, one gets out of contact with the workaday world of murder, rape, robbery, and brutality. Maybe that was why I elected to go out in space… .