“I say you’re a fool, Ackerman Boone!” one of the enlisted men rasped at the leader of the mutiny. “I say now we’ve lost our last chance. Now it’s too late to get into the lifeboats even if we wanted to. Now all we can do is—die!”
There were still ten conscious men in the subspace room. The others had fallen before heat prostration and lay strewn about the floor, wringing wet and oddly flaccid as if all the moisture had been wrung from their bodies except for the sweat which covered their skins.
“All right,” Ackerman Boone admitted. “All right, so none of us knows how to work the subspace mechanism. You think that would have helped? It would have killed us all, I tell you.”
“It was a chance, Boone. Our last chance and you—”
“Just shut up!” Boone snarled. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking we ought to let them officers and Secret Servicemen to ram home the subspace drive. But use your head, man. Probably they’ll kill us all, but if they don’t—”
“Then you admit there’s a chance!”
“Yeah. All right, a chance. But if they don’t kill us all, if they save us by ramming home the subspacer, what happens? We’re all taken in on a mutiny charge. It’s a capital offense, you fool!”
“Well, it’s better than sure death,” the man said, and moved toward the door.
“Allister, wait!” Boone cried. “Wait, I’m warning you. Any man who tries to open that door—”