Hellflower

by George O. Smith

Coldly and calmly Farradyne scanned the skies. Providing they had not travelled more than forty or fifty light years, the constellations before and behind the direct line of flight should be reasonably undistorted, except for those stars that would have been bypassed en route. This would only add a star or two to a constellation behind and subtract the same from a constellation dead ahead. The ones to the side of the line of flight would be misshapen and warped.

It would have been easier if he could have viewed the entire sky, but he had to be content with one hemisphere. If he could find an undistorted constellation with a few stars missing he had come in that direction and, conversely, if there were stars added, he had gone away from it past some of the stars between Sol and this enemy system.

He tried to recall visits to the big stellartarium in New York where the lecturer displayed the skies as seen from various well known stars that were within half a hundred light years of Sol. Certain sky-marks and their displacement would be very helpful, if he could remember them. But he found that he had not been as visually attentive as he might have been, or that he had seen and been entertained and then discarded the data as interesting but useless in a scientific culture that firmly believed in the limiting velocity of light.

Finally he gave up hoping to establish his whereabouts by visual inspection. He found a small pad of paper and began to make layouts of the familiar constellations as he saw them. Someone among the planets of Sol would be able to measure the angles and changes and come up with the right answer within a few light years, and stars were sufficiently separated so that the chances were good for a reasonable identification.

He put a dozen small pages in his pocket and then took his first look at the control room. He could see nothing changed at first, but then he found a small auxiliary panel beside the pilot's seat which contained a bar-topped toggle switch and three pilot lamps that were different in appearance from the rest of the Lancaster's standard equipment.

He felt an urge to try the toggle, but fought it down. It was too much like playing with toy building blocks made of sub-critical masses of plutonium, and Farradyne wanted to stay alive long enough to watch the downfall of the enemy, not participate in the explosion. Curbing his human curiosity to fiddle with strange gadgets, Farradyne turned away from the board and went to the cupboard where he took out his binoculars.

He was astonished to find out how far away the starship really was, and how big it was when it leaped into closer view in the glasses. It was still as dark as an untenanted building except for that one lighted porthole, but the angle into the cabin beyond was too steep. Farradyne could see nothing more than the corner between the opposite wall and the ceiling. He toyed with the idea of trying to lift himself to the top of the dome, but gave it up because he realized, once he removed the binoculars from his eyes, that the additional few feet of height would not change the distant angle enough to make it worth his while.

The question of what to do next perplexed him. Obviously there was no answer. There could be no plan. He would have to play it by ear again, with the other guy calling the moves. He grunted unhappily; he could not even smoke because he feared to show even the smallest light. But—

Farradyne went down to his galley and opened a can of mixed space rations which he shovelled in cold. It filled him adequately but not tastily and he realized that the best of fine food would have been stowed away in a frenzy of nervous listening for the inevitable sounds of the enemy's return. With haste, Farradyne cleaned up the evidence of his presence, thinking how ridiculous it was to be stealing from his own spacecraft.

He was finishing up this job when the faint glint of a distant flash of light caught his eye. He hurried to the porthole from which the glint had come, and peered out. A large caravan of heavy trucks was snaking around the corner of a distant building and turning onto the spacefield. Their headlamps cut forward like scythes of light, cutting a brilliant path toward the Lancaster.