Briefly grateful that the things had gone, he bent all efforts to keeping the Mermaid on course in the face of freshening wind. Through the deck he could feel the whine of turbines inexorably slowing down.
"No steerageway, sir," he said finally, as the ship yawed.
Hodge rang the interphone savagely, without result.
"Better see what's wrong," he told Kort. "Wait—take this."
He thrust an electro-gun renewal clip into Kort's hand. With the weapon in hand Kort descended ladder after ladder to the engine deck. Amid disquieting silence something within him grew coldly alert.
The engine room was empty. Giant mercury turbines spun lazily under a pressure head far too low to drive them at normal speed. A chill swept him at the sight of the pressure gauges. In the dim glow of failing fluorescents he headed for the stokehole.
A nameless sense of menace cautioned him. He passed the great bunkers full of kwahna wood, the rich, oily fuel that drove the Mermaid and her kind across the planet's five oceans. In the last bulkhead the stokehole door stood wide, somehow sounding a chill note of warning.
Without entering he called Wellson and Starr. The names echoed hollowly from the dim reaches of the ship, but in response came only the faint roar of a blower left at half speed.
The thought that Wellson and Starr must have gone through that same door determined him against doing so. Instead he climbed to the deck above, coming out on a catwalk above the boilers, from which he could see into the stokehole.
Five men sprawled on the deck plates in the contorted postures of those dead by violence, knees drawn high, arms outflung, fingers bent into claws. By the light of his pocket flash Kort recognized the distorted features of Starr. A reddish glow from an open firebox illumined those of Wellson. The other men were native stokers. When Kort moved the flash beam horror tightened its clutch upon him. The stokehole pit seemed full of sea slugs.