"Too late," came back Benton's report. "They're acting like crazy men — but how was I to know? I couldn't smell and I thought it was all part of the game. Only now — "
"Only now what?" snapped Bullard, his heart sinking.
"Well," reported Benton, hesitant to quote so august a personage as the Commander of the Jovian Patrol Force when the latter was in an uninhibited mood, "the admiral came dancing in and slapped our captain on the back and said, 'Let's make it a good party,' and Captain Mike said, 'Sure! You've overlooked a lot of bets — '"
Bullard groaned. The stuff must have seeped into the wardroom, too.
"Then they all laughed like hell and began busting things."
Bullard listened dully as Benton recited the list of outrages. Cables had been torn out bodily, others crazily connected and short-circuited; controls were smashed and the needles on gauges twisted to weird angles; in short, they had raised hell generally. The hilarious victims of the gas had made everyone — and more — of the invented casualties a grim reality. Now the ship was out of control.
"Keep shooting the oxygen to them," yelled Bullard. "I'm on my way up."
Benton had not overstated the case. The CC, Plot, subplot and the engine spaces suggested the wake of a terrestrial typhoon. The decks were cluttered with controller handles, broken dials and tattered paper. They had even torn up the astragational tables and the log. From the bulkheads dangled the stray ends of leads and bashed-in indicators. The place was an unholy mess. And all about sat the drooping officers who had done it, too groggy by then to do more, but still staring about with imbecilic expressions.
There was no use crying over spilt milk. Outside was the threat of Jupiter, more ominous than before, and Bullard was reminded of it as he felt the thrust when the six old-fashioned liquid-fuel tubes fired their first blast. Good old Benton! Despite the madhouse raging about him, he had persevered with the task assigned and had got them to firing. The ship lurched in reaction and with the lurch many of the dizzy observers were flung to the nearest bulkhead. The busy hospital corpsmen, darting among them with their first aid kits, had a fresh problem to cope with. Some of their patients were doubly unconscious.
Bullard might have been more concerned with the comfort of his stricken seniors, but hard on the heels of the success in getting the tubes to blasting came a new casually, and an utterly unforeseen one. A strange throb shivered through the ship and she began to tilt unaccountably, and with it came a violent side-wise oscillation that made the skin crawl. A still conscious umpire huddled in a corner gave way frankly to his nausea; dangling wreckage battered against the bulkheads while the rubbish strewn about the decks shifted back and forward like the tides of the sea. The din and clatter of it was unbearable.
Above it all rose the shrilling whine of runaway motors. As the wild and sickening oscillations increased in amplitude it became painfully apparent that something was happening to the massive whirling gyros at the heart of the vessel. Bullard fought his way toward them, clinging to such projections his hands could reach and dodging the missiles of debris flung about by the bucking ship. In time, he reached the armored door of the gyro housing and by then he had gained an inkling of what had gone wrong, but the remedy for it was not so obvious.
In their drunken orgy of devastation, the umpires had broken the leads feeding the motor field coils, and the gyros were running away — but at unequal rates, probably due to the inequalities of their own bearing frictions. Bullard knew, of course, that he could cut off the armature current, but if he did that the acceleration would shortly be reversed. Should the gyros be slowed rapidly, their rotational momentum would be transferred to the ship and force it into a dizzy whirling, a condition the crew could not endure. Bullard had scant hope of being able to restore the field current. Finding the breaks among the tangle of wreckage would take hours, whereas he had only minutes available, and not many of those.
"Send me a man and plenty of stray cable," he called to Benton, "and I want juice up to the gyro housing from the batteries."
Bullard was looking at the steel columns that held the bearings of the gyro axles — six of them, in pairs, each pair at right angles to the others. What he could not do by electrical resistance he would do by friction. If he could regulate the bearing thrust, he could keep the speed of the gyros under control. It had looked hopeless to him at first, for there was no way to insert the huge jacks they had on board, but he had thought of a way that was at least worth a trial.
"Throw the end of that cable around there," he directed, "and make a coil — a helix — around that bearing column. I intend to magnetize it."
The man — one of Fraser's — did as he was told, but the unbelief in his face was easy to read. What difference did it make whether the thrust columns were magnetic or not?
"That's well!" shouted Bullard, when the last of the six had been wound. Then he ordered current — a weak current, but under his instant control by means of the rheostats he had had inserted in the lines. It had been a tough job, getting that far, for all the while they had been flung this way and that as the whirling masses of metal fought to take charge of the battered cruiser. But Bullard and his helpers had hung on, and now was to come the test.
He was rewarded, after a little, by the halting of the steadily rising crescendo of the motor wail. At least he had stopped the acceleration. Now all he had to do was bring the three into harmony.
"You've got the idea," he said to the principal electrician who had been helping him. "Keep monkeying with them until they are all together. The bearings will get hot, but we can't help that. Flood 'em with oil, and if that don't do it, send down for some liquid air. Whatever you do, don't let 'em freeze, or we'll be flung clear out of the System."
"Aye, aye, sir," said the man, "but how did we do it?"
"Magnetostriction," Bullard explained, as he prepared to slip from the compartment. "A little magnetism makes steel expand, that's all. If your bearings get too tight, give 'em either more juice or less, and you'll shorten those columns."
Bullard slid out of the housing and picked his way aft. He wondered where they were by now and whether they would win their fight with Jupiter. He could feel the surge of the ship as the six flaming tubes drove it, and knew from his sense of weight that they were pulling out — but how fast?
Benton looked worried. His tubes were behaving wonderfully, but they lacked power for the job imposed. The Pollux was checked in her fall, and that was all. She needed more kick to escape, and Benton did not dare apply it. Bullard came and looked.
"Can't be helped," he muttered, "give 'er the works."
"They'll melt," warned Benton.
"Let 'em," said the youthful acting captain, with grim finality. "We can't be any worse off."
Benton shrugged, and began the doubling of his fuel lines. Others of his men scurried off to storerooms and presently came back, lugging spare injectors. Those, after a few minutes of frenzied work, were coupled with improvised super-chargers and inserted into the new fuel into the laboring tubes, the Pollux's wake bloomed from a mere meteoric streak of ruddy fire to the whitely dazzling fan of a Grade A comet. Her determined masters piled gravity after gravity onto her acceleration, building her up until her men could stand no more, despite copious injections of gravonol. Harried hospital corpsmen had been pulled off their work of salvaging the unhappy "dead" and the Castorian umpires long enough to administer those precautionary shots.
Presently