Hellflower

by George O. Smith

The air-break on the topside was open, and Farradyne closed it. He fretted at the seconds necessary to equalize the pressure, and to check the workings of the space-suit. He also located the cause of the air-leakage; normally the air-break doors were airtight. A sliver of wool or cotton string lay in the rubber gasket and produced a channel for the escape of some of the air into the pile-bay. Farradyne stopped, his attention attracted by this trifle of evidence. It was neither wool nor cotton, but a match torn from a giveaway book and used to light a cigarette for Mrs. Logan a good many hours before.

He threw it aside and went in, his attention once more on the important business before him. He ran along the curved corridor. And there, a figure in a space-suit was quietly levering one of the control rods out of its slot and preparing to hurl it into the void.

Farradyne understood the whole act in that one glance; it was the sort of thing that he would do if sabotage were his intention. The single scuttle-port had been opened first by hand. Then the saboteur had scuttled the stock of spare control rods, and since the Lancaster was reasonably new, there had been quite a batch of them. Furthermore they were long, unwieldy, heavy things that took time to handle. Naturally this was the first act, because the next act would cause the ship's acceleration to rise. The rise in acceleration would make the rods too heavy to carry and would also cause investigation as soon as people became aware of the increasing pressure.

Then the working rods would be hurled out, leaving the ship heading toward some anonymous star at about eight gravities of acceleration. The passengers and crew would be helpless—and dead long before they got within any appreciable fraction of a distance to any planet.

Maybe two or three of the rods had been scuttled already. The rest, functioning on the automatic, would have been shoved in farther to compensate; Farradyne could feel no change in the acceleration pressure. But once the working rods were all the way home, the removal of the next would cause the ship to take off, literally with the throttle tied down. Farradyne was willing to bet the rest of his life that the safety-valve that furnished the water-mass to the pile was either welded open or damaged in such a way that the supply could not be stopped.

Then—and Farradyne had to admire the vandal's precautions—he would make his way to the escape hatch and let the helpless passengers go on ... and on....

Victims of another case of "Lost in Space."

The saboteur was well prepared. His suit was a high efficiency job capable of maintaining a man alive for a long time in space. It had a little radio for calling and a small and expensive chemical motor for mild maneuvering, even though it would not be strong enough to permit planetary landing. The man had friends, obviously, lying in wait out there, who would pick him up.

A parcel of ice-cold-blooded murderers.

Farradyne saw the man through a red haze that clouded down over his eyes. His evaluation of the act was made in a glance, and in the bare instant that it took for Farradyne to see the man he got his feet in motion. He plunged forward with a bellow that hurt his own ears.