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 

 Prev. P 5/19 next