Part 2

"S ... p ... a ... r ... k ... s," Lancelot Biggs was left-righting to me, "g ... o ... t t ... o b ... e b ... r ... i ... e ... f. Power limited. Tell Chief line inner hull posi-charge steel lining, throw nega-circuit through outer. Have Todd revise course to following trajectory...."

I'll spare you the rest. It was all technical. So technical, in fact, that I couldn't make head or tail of it. There wasn't a man aboard the _Saturn_ who could. It was, furthermore, absolute proof that we were dealing with no spook, but with L. Biggs himself. For this was typical "Biggsian" mathematics.

And he was right in saying his time was short. He was beginning to fade before he had completed the algebraic and mechanical formulæ he wigwagged to me. Toward the end I had to strain my eyes to find out which hand he was wiggling. But I caught the last waves.

"Follow instructions blindly," he signaled, "and we'll soon be together again. Luck! My love ... Diane...."

Then he was gone.

* * * * *

Boy, now, I'll tell you the following hours were hectic. Our normal complement is a twenty-men crew, of which only six men are engineers or engine-room helpers. And the job Biggs had laid out for us was weighty enough to stagger the resources of a Patrol repairship.

But Hanson turned on the heat, and when the Old Man shoots the juice, things hop! We drafted everyone on board. Staff, crew, engine-room, Ordinaries--even Slops and the mess boy burned blisters on the pinkies performing the task Biggs had assigned us.

Most of us bent to our labors eagerly. Myself, for instance--I didn't know what Biggs had in mind, or what the final result of our efforts would be. But I knew damned well that Biggs never gave purposeless orders. Some good would be the end of this fantastic webwork of plates, wires and coils we were weaving through, in and about the _Saturn_.

Diane, despite the fact that her hands soon became raw and sore, insisted on doing a share of the manual labor.

"I must, Sparks!" she declared. "I'd never respect myself again if I didn't help in some small way. Because he promised this would bring us together again. Where, I don't know--" She straightened, staring at me speculatively. "I don't know!" she whispered. "Sparks--he never told us where he is!"

"He didn't have time," I reassured her. "His power was limited, he said. But everything's going to be O.Q."

But later, Dick Todd raised the same point, when I spoke to him in the control-turret. He had been checking the course Biggs had designated. Now, frowning, he laid his computations before me.

"You see what this means, Bert?"

"Yeah," I said, looking at the rumpled sheet. "It means you ought to wash your hands more often. Well, what?"

"This course," said Todd nervously, "sets a direct trajectory to--_Jupiter_!"

I said, "O.Q. So it sets a direct traj--_What did you say?_"

"Jupiter!" repeated Todd miserably. "I've checked and rechecked it. I can't be wrong." He stared at me, small dancing lights of fear in his eyes. "Sparks," he whispered, "that _was_ Biggs we saw, wasn't it?"

"If it wasn't," I told him, "I'm a ring-tailed baboon. And no cracks!"

"But everyone seems to be taking it for granted he is still _alive_." Todd fidgeted nervously. "That his orders will help us, somehow. Suppose--suppose, Sparks, our _first_ hunch was right, after all? That Biggs is really dead? And that it _was_ his ghost we saw?"

I wet my suddenly dry lips. "Go on!" I said.

"They say the dead are lonely," husked Todd. "And Biggs, who died in the loneliness of negative space might be doubly so. Suppose he wants company. After all, he didn't promise us success. He only said, 'We'll soon be together.' But where, Sparks--where? In this world, or--"

I shook myself savagely. I couldn't deny that his words had given me a bad case of icicles on the vertebræ. I knew something else, though, too. That Lancelot Biggs, alive or dead, had never yet given me a bum steer. And that I, for one, meant to see this thing through--or bust!

Bust! I didn't like that word, either. Not when I thought of our new course, and us blasting hell-for-leather toward massive, crushing Jupiter.

* * * * *

Then somehow twenty-four hours, Earth standard, had passed. And by labors verging on the miraculous, we had completed the task set before us. And now, with the second part of Biggs' instruction before us, we were standing in the control turret of the weirdly altered _Saturn_, watching the small hand of the chronometer creep toward the thin black mark that represented our deadline.

Cap Hanson, who had been a bulwark of strength when there was work to do, was as squirmy as a hen on a cactus egg now that all we had to do was wait. He paced anxiously back and forth between the control-banks and the visiplate. Once he squinted through the perilens and turned to me nervously.

"You're _sure_ you got that message right, Bert?" he demanded for maybe the thousandth time. "You couldn't have made a mistake."

"I could have," I reassured him, "but I'll bet you my pension I didn't. I've been pushing keys for too long not to get my did-da-dits straight, Skipper."

"We're awfully close to Jupiter," scowled the Old Man. "_Awfully_ close. I--I don't like it. Not only that--but we're running away from Europa as fast as we can. If the Corporation ever finds out about this--"

"They can't miss," I said. "They know how long it should have taken us to get to Europa. Matter of fact, Cap, we should be landing there right now. We're going to lose a little time in establishing those claims. But if by losing a little time we can find Lanse Biggs again, why--"

"_Awfully_ close!" complained the skipper. He turned to Todd suddenly. "Dick--we can't risk it! There must be a mistake somewhere. Jupiter fills all space before us. If we get caught in its gravitational power, we'll all be killed.

"We've got to turn back. Send the message down to the engine-room. Reverse motors and lift!"

Diane cried, "Daddy! But Lanse--"

"I'm sorry, honey. But we can't risk twenty lives and a quarter million credits' worth of Corporation property on the hazard of finding one man. Give the order, Mr. Todd!"

Todd said willingly, "Aye, sir!" and reached out to push the audio stud. My heart sank. The needle was almost upon the split second that should have seen us putting Biggs' mysterious plan into operation. I yelled, "Skipper, _please_!"

"Give the order, Todd!" repeated Hanson regretfully.

But Todd's hand never reached the button. For just then there came a terrific, straining lunge of the ship; the floor seemed to slip beneath my feet, I toppled headlong to my knees. Plates groaned and creaked in metal agony. I felt a sensation of wild acceleration, a dizzying sense of speed intensified, plunging us forward--downward--

And Todd cried, "Too late! Too late, Skipper! God help us--we're falling onto Jupiter!"

* * * * *

I told you folks say I'm hard-boiled. People also claim I'm a wingding. They say lots of things about me--none of them nice. But I'll say this one thing for myself in self-defense. That once in a million times I show a good streak of common sense.

This was one of those times. While everyone else was wailing and hollering and going off the top of their buds, I got smart and carried on.

I roared, "Dammit all, Lanse _knew_ this was going to happen, and planned for it. Depress that No. 3 lever, Todd! Shoot the juice through those coils we've been building!"

And Todd was so rattled that he obeyed me. Like I told you before, we'd created a wild-looking network of wires all over the framework of the _Saturn_. We had even constructed a whole new inner hull, juicing it according to some diagram that didn't appear to make sense.

Now rheostats rheostated and condensers condense and the air got so full of electricity that my teeth began to hum like bees in a bathtub. And it got hot in the control-turret. But--

But our frightful plunging motion ceased! Not just like _that_, you know; I don't mean we stopped stock-still and hung motionless in space. But we drifted into an easy glide. A gentle, leaf-in-the-breeze sort of motion.

Cap Hanson's jaw fell down to his fourth button. A gasp worked its way up out of his lumbar region. "It--it's impossible!" he said. "I--I don't believe it!"

I didn't either. For what we were seeing mirrored on the turret visiplate was something no man in the universe had ever seen before--and lived to tell about it. We were seeing the troposphere, the stratosphere, the surface atmosphere of the massive planet Jupiter at easy visual range. And we were drifting to solid ground so gently that we were in no more danger than a parachutist approaching a field full of sofa cushions!

It didn't even occur to me, then, to notice how far off the scientists had been in attributing fantastic characteristics to unstudied Jupiter. Because its density was so much less than Earth's, they had envisioned it as a gaseous or semi-liquid planet. Which was so much hogwash. It was a normal-sized core surrounded by blankets, thousands of miles deep, of atmosphere. It was lush, luxuriant, green. Steamy with vapors, riotous with vegetable life. Protected by its swaddling clothes, it was the most likely abode of life Man had ever found outside his native Earth!

But as I say, I scarcely noticed this at first. I was conscious only of my own pulse-numbing astonishment, of the casual, lazy motion of our ship, of Captain Hanson gasping beside me in a cracked, incredulous voice, "Anti-gravitation! _He's found it!_"

Our task was not yet done. The instructions called for the lifting and depression of a dozen more studs. But by now, Dick Todd--who is a damn sight better navigator than he is a mental giant--was hunched over his controls playing the intricate keys like a master organist.

In three hours that sped by like as many minutes we had gained the surface of Jupiter. We sought the declension points Biggs' ghost had set forth to us. We hovered over the juncture ... spotted a small, glistening mote of silver beneath us ... lowered on our amazing anti-gravitational beam. It was a perfect landing. Less than an eighth of a mile from the lean, gangling, radiant, unspace-suited figure who came racing across the field toward us--

* * * * *

Afterward, when everyone had stopped trying to talk at once, and a modicum of coherence worked its way into our glad reunion, I pressed Biggs for explanations. He grinned in that amiable, modest way of his.

"Why, it wasn't much, really, Sparks," he protested. "I never was lost in hyper-space, of negative space, at all! You see, when I cut myself loose in the life-skiff from the 'infinite mass' of the _Saturn_, in order to reestablish the ship's finiteness, I also made my _own_ craft finite again. Which is pure common sense. Anything less than infinite is necessarily finite--"

"Comes the dawn," I groaned. "And I like to think I've got brains. But go on!"

"Well, by sheer accident, the spot in space where I became finite again happened to be here. On the surface of Jupiter. I was pretty much surprised, as you can guess, to learn that this is a definitely habitable planet. Good air, plenty of food and water--no handicaps but its tremendous bulk." He sobered momentarily. "None of the others who ever crashed here survived, I guess," he said. "I've found three or four spaceships, broken to bits--

"Well, anyway--I realized that the only way for me to ever get away was to find some method of counteracting the planet's terrific gravity. And it suddenly occurred to me that the answer lay in a laboratory curiosity created way back in the 20th Century. A piece of magnetized steel that floated within upright supports above a counter-magnetized plate.

"I adapted this principle and gave it a few refinements of my own. The instructions I gave you created a dual-magnet hull for the _Saturn_. Inner hull positively charged, outer hull negative. Counterbalance, you see. The outside of the ship repelled the gravitational attraction of Jupiter so strongly that it could never have landed. The inner hull tempered the effect of the outer so that an easy, drifting motion was obtained. You could vary the speed of this simply by altering the amount of E.M.F. running through the coils--"

"We discovered that," interrupted the Old Man. "But you still haven't told us, son, about your 'ghost.' You like to scared the almighty hell out of all of us. How--"

Lance grinned shyly.

"Well, I can't take credit for that, Skipper. You see, it was sheer accident. I found a deposit of some strange new substance here on Jupiter with the most peculiar properties. The stuff seems to polarize light at its source--and reorganize it into a tri-dimensional image at a distance which can be controlled by electric power.

"When I discovered that my own life-skiff couldn't make the long trip to Europa or Io, I decided to project my image out into space in the hope I'd find someone. The telekaleidoscopic rays--I guess we can call 'em that till we get a better name--are naturally attracted to metals. This cut down the haphazardness of the attempt.

"It was sheer chance, though, that you should be my rescuers. Though I might have known you wouldn't abandon me without a long search. I--I'm mighty grateful to you, sir."

His words struck Hanson like a thunder-clap. And the Old Man groaned.

"_Omigawd!_"

"What's wrong, Skipper?"

"I just remembered--we was supposed to be on Europa twenty-four hours ago! By this time, all the available claims will be gobbled up. When the Corporation learns about this, we're all going to be sunk!"

Diane said indignantly, "Ridiculous! You've made the first landing on Jupiter, Daddy. Surely that should be enough glory for them."

"That's glory," admitted Hanson dolefully, "but it ain't enough glory for _them_. I know this outfit, honey. I been working for them, man and boy, for nigh onto forty years. Their motto is: Get all you can and then some!

"It ain't going to matter to them that we found our lost First, discovered anti-grav, and made the first landing on a new planet. No sirree! They sent us out to find polarium deposits, and if we don't come home with the best claim--"

Biggs said, "Polarium? Did you say polarium, Cap?"

"That's what I said," groaned the skipper. "Now be a good boy, Lanse. Go 'way and let me suffer in peace."

"Why," grinned Biggs, "I don't believe there's any reason to suffer, Captain. Because, you see, that strange new substance I mentioned--the one out of which I constructed my telekaleidoscope--is polarium! There are tremendous deposits of it here on Jupiter. Why not? This is the mother planet of Europa--"

* * * * *

So--there you are! That's Lancelot Biggs for you. Screwball, genius, wizard and luck-box extraordinary. Toss him in a mud puddle and he'll come up clutching a diamond every time. Not once in a while. Every time.

And I guess it was just about now that the Old Man slipped me the high-sign to drag hips out of there.

"Look, Sparks," he suggested, "how about you and me take a little walk and explore this here new planet?"

I said, "Oh, I'm quite comfortable here, Cap--"

He jabbed an elbow into my ribs ferociously. "Are you coming peaceable?" he hissed, "or do I have to pull off your leg and beat you over the head with the bloody stump?"

I got it then. Diane and Biggs. They were eyeing each other like two marshmallows ready to melt. So I said, "Well, all right, Skipper. If you want to. 'Bye, folks!"

And do you know--they never even heard me?