Blow the Man Down — A Closer Reading

There was a brief silence.

"The only thing I can figure is that you've gone space happy," said Carrel at last. "Albrekt, you're no spaceman. You can't have known what you were doing when you switched on the jets."

Albrekt did not answer.

"Look," said Carrel, "it'll take several days to figure out what sort of orbit that blast threw us into, and I'm not sure we have enough fuel to correct it. You'd better let us in."

"We may as well understand each other," said Albrekt. "I'm no spaceman, but some very good spacemen figured out that blast tape--and the other one I'm going to use later. I'm a captain in the Flanjo military, and I've taken this ship and its cargo over, to deliver them to the Flanjo patrol. None of you will be hurt if you cause no trouble."

"So that's it!" snorted Carrel. "Damned pirate high-jacker! My advice to you, Albrekt, is to come out of there and let me put you under arrest, because if you don't we'll be coming in after you."

"Try it, and I'll burn you," retorted Albrekt.

After sleeping several times, Albrekt was ready to concede it was not going to be as cozy in the control room as he had thought at 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 chair, his eyelids getting heavier and heavier. His head was beginning to ache a little. He slept by the clock and awoke by the clock. He should not be sleepy for hours yet.

Rousing himself with an effort, he swung bleary eyes around the control room, anxiously. He could see nothing out of order. But how would one detect something that made one abnormally sleepy? What could it be?

If there were harmful bacteria aboard the ship, they should have struck many days ago. There was no disease in space itself.

If such ships as the _By Jove!_ carried any sort of gas, Albrekt didn't know about it. He had been briefed on the weapons he might face. Surely gas would have been mentioned.