Milk Run — Key Ideas to Explore

Warren was so high on narcol he couldn't read his own manifest. Not unusual on this milk run. After two hours inside of minus point, his sober gray cells were functioning like blaster tubes--but by then, it was too late. The skags had taken over control of the ship._

--_Charlie Guhn's Log._

The Star Rover, a rusty freighter that shuttled between Rigel and the home system, hovered above a transfer station some two million miles out from Rigel's twelfth planet, awaiting port clearance. Every crewman knew the skipper was oiled, but they knew the entropy barrier would set him back a full day, shocking him into cold alertness.

Second Officer Charles Guhn knocked at the captain's cabin, entered and saluted: "Sir, cargo's loaded and customs cleared."

The skipper, his face bagged like the Coal Sack, his blood-cracked eyes possessing chilling steel-blue irises that could blister a super-cargo's hide at fifty paces, was unable to focus on the papers handed him. He growled, "Blast off, Mr. Guhn! Blast off!"

"Aye aye, sir," Guhn paused, then reported: "I thought you should know, Captain. We just brought on some skags. Some archeology outfit's shipping the things to Earth for further study."

"Blasted mummies. Next, we'll be hauling heathen idols." Captain Warren glanced at his chronometer. "Shove-off time, is it? Go to the bridge and tell Mr. Caldwell I said to make her grunt."

This was his final utterance. His massive head slumped back into narcol stupor, his sotted brain dreaming of days when every space lane was a new frontier and adventure lurked on all unknown planets.

On his way up to the bow, Charlie Guhn poked his head into the wardroom, thinking it possible First Officer Mark Caldwell might be getting off one last message to the brunette on Rigel. But no one was in the lounge. Guhn followed the catwalk over the pulsing auxiliaries and mounted the starboard companionway to the bridge. There, he found the astrogator, pouring over a set of star charts.

"The old man says shove off," Guhn greeted him. "Got your DS done?"

Caldwell grinned, without looking up from his desk: "A DS is just a formality the rule book says you've got to enter in the log. Hyperspace's too slinky to obey normal laws. That's why we cut it in fifty parsec slices--to see how far we've drifted."

"You brain boys and your double talk."

"Not at all. Normal Einstein space is curved. Hyperspace isn't. Very simple."

"Simple like wombat chess, huh?"

"You can politely remove yourself to the deck," Caldwell replied. "I've got to get our junk pile coasting through the midnight black. Any women on board?"

"None your speed, Romeo ... unless you like skags." A split second dodge through the hatchway eluded the waste basket hurled at him.

After his calculations looked satisfactory, Caldwell unhinged his solar plane compass. Its needle pointed not to Earth, but to that vast imaginary plane in the galaxy to which the home system was horizontal and to which a line drawn through the sun and Polaris was nearly perpendicular. Once a heading was determined, it was possible by quadrangulation to arrive at an effective course.

The transparent stardome that enveloped the bridge admitted the light of a thousand molten suns from this crowded corner of space. The astrogator looked at the clusters and thought how glad he was to leave the hot dry climate of Rigel's dusty barren worlds, not to mention the primitive women. Now, Arcturus was an exciting run, he'd heard. A spaceman's Paradise, with an exotic native culture and a nitrogen-major atmosphere. Not like the damned helium envelope of the Rigellian system, in which a man's voice rose to female pitch.

Caldwell rang the engine room: "Prepare to blast."

"Aye aye, sir. Curium piles on 40 plus."

"Attention, deck. Close all ports."

Throughout the vessel, shutters descended to screen out the cosmic radiations that would bathe the hull as light speed approached. Alarm bells rang. The astrogator's slender hands caressed a set of blue-sheened knobs, while a dozen dials glowed with sudden green light. Bulbs dimmed as power from the auxiliaries added their load to the direct blasters. The Star Rover shuddered violently and bulkheads screamed as tortured metal leaped forward through the void.

And in the hold, the skags still slept.