What Sturgess had on his record would be his own punishment for as long as he lived, and brass be damned if I was going to let it punish me. Even though I was the fair-haired cadet those twenty years ago who had turned him in. No, he wouldn't have forgotten. And right now the brass wasn't forgetting, either.

The milk run was at the bottom of it of course—it's the bottom of everything, and that's what I told the brass when they put me back on it for another hitch. The assignment order was plastered with a lot of nice words like “maximum efficiency” and “commendable command ability and discipline” but I wasn't having any—not any longer, and I told them that, too.

“You may resign if you wish, Captain Logan,” they told me. “But—unfortunately, there are no exploration commands available at present. It is strongly urged that you give further consideration to such a step. In view of your retirement status—” and that's how it went. The milk run. Stuck with it, and stuck with Sturgess to boot. All for a bunch of boobs who get the urge to be pioneers about two hundred years too late. Every trip, five thousand new ones, “Mars or bust” written all over their faces in one way or another. I suppose a fair percentage of them are always sincere enough about the colonization angle—the “bright new world” routine —but only a few, the way I saw it. And the rest? God only knew. But there's always a full five hundred of 'em, every trip. . . .

EARTH to Mars, Mars to Earth—it's enough when you look at it that way. Every other captain in the service carries a hull full of nice, manageable exploration gear, maintenance equipment or at the worst just general supplies to a million places in Deep Space where things worth a man's while are going on. But on the milk run you've got a cargo of everything from frustrated dime-store salesgirls to tired ex‑newsmen with ulcers, and you have to wet-nurse 'em for ten months at a stretch, for only forty million miles.

Mars or bust. Come hell or damnation—your job: Get 'em there.

Sturgess buzzed me in the bank room and I pressed a sono-switch that would unlock the hatch and let him in. My second officer—young Adrian—had the main control bank and things were running pretty smoothly all things considered, so I had the time if not the inclination to see what Sturgess was after. Putting him in charge of my stewards had seemed the best way to keep him out of trouble, but then, with five thousand human beings in any kind of close proximity, you never can tell.

“Report for the third week, sir.” He still looked like a cadet of seventeen to me—maybe some people would take him for his middle twenties, but not anyway for a guy pushing forty. There was still that just-scrubbed face look about him —that bright-eyed look that went more with fuzzy cheeks than with the just-visible, tight little wrinkles at the edges of the thin-lipped mouth, and the slender leanness of body that belies a lot of time on space-decks. Steady, cold blue eyes—they'd look straight inside you, and the brain behind them would know every time you'd pulled a boner. And you had the feeling that it laughed silently, telling itself how damn ridiculous people are who always stick with the regulations. A troublesome, rebellious brain that liked people too well and had an undefinable contempt for the laws they made.

And to Sturgess I wasn't a person. I was a law.

I took the, report from him and kept him standing there at attention while I scanned through it. Neat. Orderly. Defiantly perfect. It was Sturgess to the letter.

“Did you check this group in Section 83-L with Registration?”

“Which group is that, sir?”

“Smith, Jones, Brown, Edwards … all of the men who are in the thirty to thirty-five age group. All together.”

“No sir. There seems to be no more than the median index of restlessness for eighty-seven percent of the group, with the remaining thirteen percent pretty much split but falling well inside safety margin. I—”

“Occur to you that you've got five thousand people out there—all kinds of crazy people who are running away from Earth for one reason or another —money, business, politics or what-have-you—and for every one there's always some half-baked motive cooking to do God knows what? That's a group of names there, Sturgess. Common names. Too common to be all together that way. Smith, Jones, Brown. . .”

“There's no departure from behavior expectancy statistics. I've checked carefully. Each file's been run through the machines twice.”

“You just do what I tell you. Keep an eye on that section.”

“I'll record them and do their psycho-met analyses personally, sir.”

“All right, see that you do. Now how about 43-M?”

“Just youngsters, sir. They—”

“Cut the goddam excuses! You know the rules in Space, Sturgess! Ship's surgeons'll have plenty of important things to keep 'em busy when these people get their first taste of the sickness —those kids'll have all the time they need for that kind of monkey business when they get where they're going. See that they stay in their compartments where they belong. Separately!”

“Yes sir.”

I kept going through the thing page by page, laying it on good, but it was actually as Sturgess had said. Nothing really out of line. Nothing I wouldn't have let pass if the first officer had been anybody but Sturgess. As long as comparative statistics said the round pegs were in the round holes I didn't give a damn. When they started in acting as though they were home on Earth I got tough, but most of 'em usually stayed where they belonged and kept quiet, and the stat-checks kept me on top of the heap. But you never can tell when some screwy idea is getting ready to pop—and if the milk run ever has anything, it has a pot-full of screwy ideas. And when they begin to pop their seams, it shows on the stat sheets, and the stewards get busy. On some trips they're always busy. On most they're just along for the ride. But you never can tell, and I've never tried to. I know better.

“This one who just keeps watching through the port all the time. Get him away from it.”

“That would be the philosopher chap. He's quite happy that way—”

“I said get him away from it. I don't care if he's happy or dead. I just want him to keep all his marbles till we tie up. Keep that in mind about all of 'em. O.K. you're excused, Sturgess. And it's a fair report.”

“Yes sir.”

He turned, hesitated, then turned back to me.

“Captain Logan.”

“I'm busy, Sturgess.”

“I think you can spare me a moment, Captain.” Those eyes of his bored into me, maybe looking for a conscience. I looked back into his and they stopped me cold. “You haven't asked to examine my honorable reinstatement papers, Captain, and I've brought them with me. There is a regulation, you know. I have to show them to you.” He handed me a long plastic envelope, and I took it, opened it. I scanned the contents, and everything was there ...

A brief outline of the cadet incident, the way Sturgess had gone against my orders when I'd been the cadet officer of the day, and the way I'd had him bounced from the Academy.

IN SMALL type it told about the two hundred men on the training mission outside Pluto, and how a stray meteor had slipped our screens and caught us with our pants down. It told in detail about what happened to our oxygen and fuel supply, and how half the two hundred could have been brought back safely if the other half were sacrificed. It quoted my order to Sturgess as second in command, and described the way he'd walloped me with the butt of an R-gun and then tried to save the whole shebang.

Sturgess lost all except a handful of men including the two of us who made it back, and I saw to it that he got the boot. The Academy had to see it my way—one hundred men alive are better than two hundred dead.

But—and now the papers switched to bigger print—upon consideration of his appeal and the “admittedly commendable, if misguided, motives which caused Cadet Sturgess to act against his orders as herein brought forth,” he had been, after a five-year suspension, awarded a reinstatement. It said in bigger print yet that all commanders were supposed to “be thus advised, and be duly made aware” of Sturgess' readmission to the service, with full commission, on honorable status.

That was the story, and I knew Sturgess would have pushed the damn envelope in my face regulations or not. He wanted to watch me squirm. Me, you see—the law.

I handed the stuff back to him.

“All you have to do is remember who's captain,” I told him, and turned back to the main control bank.

STURGESS remembered. Scrupulously. If there was some seething resentment smouldering underneath that cold-eyed mask of his it was either perfectly disguised or I was imagining it. He was behaving like a first-class automaton—it was like feeding orders into a battery of the machines and having them executed exactly as they had been fed, no more, no less. I didn't get it at first, but there wasn't time to worry about it. The way it added up to me was that instead of finding a time-bomb planted under my pillow I was finding a busted rebel instead. “Yes sir, no sir” was all the cold-eyed mask would say, and that's just the way I wanted it.

We got through the sickness all right. In fact, better than on most trips. Only about half came down with it, and only about twenty percent of them had it bad, so I was without the usual overcrowded ship's hospital headache. The chief ship's surgeon told me that space-sick preventatives were getting better all the time, just the way my second officer tried to make me believe that these colonizers were getting more serious all the time.

Adrian was a youngster and still believed all the stuff they'd taught him in his humanities term at the Academy. He was a bright young kid and I liked him. You know the type—well-educated, eager to make the grade, high-minded and all ready to give the universe a whirl on its major axis.

“Sir, I'm not exactly sure I agree with you,” he told me. “I think the Conestoga and her passengers are pretty important. That's why I signed on her.”

We were about half-way out, the sickness had been taken care of as I said, and there wasn't a hell of a lot to do until we crossed approach ecliptic in a month or so. Our engines were damped down to a half, and we were on the part of the trip where if anything is going to be serene at all, this was it. I had talked to Adrian between the routine duties before, and I guess I did get sort of a kick out of listening to him. Took me back twenty years.

“Think it's pretty important, do you?”

“Yes sir, I do. Look through the port, sir, and maybe you'll see what I mean.” So serious, these kids. I'd seen more Space in the last two years than he had in all his life. “It's big, Captain Logan—awful damn big. It makes an ocean look like a—a saucer with spilled tea in it. The Conestoga makes one of the old sailing ships look like a child's toy in a bathtub. Out there you can go in any direction for all eternity, and travel what might as well be an inch or so....”

“You'll be star-happy before you know it, young fella!”

“No, but you get me, don't you, Captain? We've learned how to build ships that really amount to something. We aren't tied down any longer to just one of those millions of tiny bright lights out there ... we can get to any of 'em—all of 'em, if we want—'

I DECIDED to change the subject because he was beginning to get at me where it hurt. I knew we could get to “any of 'em, all of 'em” if we wanted. “We” meaning other guys. But not Logan. I was just as trapped as if I'd been pushing one of those water-going barges Adrian talked about.

“Sure,” I said. “But you're on the milk run, sonny.” Instead of shutting him up, it pulled the cork further out.

“Maybe you call it that, sir.” He seemed as though he was talking only half to me, and half to somebody or something else. His clean-cut, young face even looked a little older for a minute. “But expeditionary ships don't conquer universes, Captain. People do. Lots of people, no longer Earthbound, whose scientific expeditions into Space say that they've licked it—and whose presence, not just in ships, but on other planets, proves it. Someday it'll be more than just Mars, Captain Logan. Someday there'll be fleets of Conestogas.”

I made a funny sounding laugh which I guess was supposed to get across the idea that one milk run was one too many as things stood, and Adrian just smiled. “Don't have to worry about your second officer, though, Captain. If I was star-happy I'd be talking out of the other side of my mouth. The macropsychotics want people out of the picture entirely. Get a great urge to purify the universe and all that ...”

“I'm not worried,” I said. “If anybody's going star-happy aboard this tank it's me. Sometimes I think if people just plain dropped dead it wouldn't be such a bad idea—”

He laughed, a mass-indicator buzzed and he checked on it. He was cross-compensating a trajectory variation when Sturgess buzzed and I let him come in. “Captain Logan, sir—”

“Oh for God's sake cut it out, Sturgess. What's on your mind?”

Something was. Sturgess looked different. His face was the same, but something in those eyes of his—different.

“I'd appreciate it if you'd go over a stat-check with me, sir.”

“Think I'm qualified, Sturgess?”

“By your leave, sir—” He stood there at attention, rubbing it in. And he was making me do what he wanted me to—and he knew it. But that look in his eyes said that maybe it was more than that. It said there was a chance that somehow Sturgess had gotten himself too deep into something and needed a way out and fast.

“What's your trouble?”

“The specific areas you instructed me to keep under close observation, Captain. I've checked the individual files on each five times. Each one checks out at plus or minus .5 norm—well inside the requisite stability margin. But it's the group check—”

“What about the group check?” I got to my feet.

“I don't know, sir. According to the stat sheets we've got a—they're all—all crazy as bed-bugs, sir.”

“They're what?”

And Sturgess was right. I checked with him. The banks of machines whirred and hummed in that conceited way they had, and each time the master file got tossed out with a reading of plus twenty-seven for the whole damned bunch—so far outside allowable behavior expectancy margin that if the computers were right I had a whole tank-full of lunatics aboard ready to split the Conestoga apart at the seams.

But that wasn't the way it was.

I had Sturgess, assemble the whole hundred-man staff of stewards in an emergency pow-wow and got fast individual reports. No sir, they all said. Everybody quiet—some a little depressed and reading old-fashioned westerns instead of the science-fiction classics—but beyond that, everybody happy. Everything swell. Not a groan in a light-year. Happy ... happy . . . happy.

I looked at the stewards' faces, and by now they were scared faces. I looked into Sturgess' and it was eniginatic again, some hidden I-told-you-so sneaking just beneath the surface where I couldn't see it.

“What are your orders, Captain?” Sturgess said. Like a little machine. What are my orders, Captain—what do the rule-books say, Captain? There wasn't any answer for this in the rulebooks and Sturgess knew it. I'll say he knew it. He was willing to die laughing as long as it was at me.

“Sir—”

It was Adrian. I hadn't known he'd left the bank room, hadn't known he'd heard any of it.

“Yes, what is it?” I was watching Sturgess. No, the machines hadn't been tampered with. I knew, I'd looked. Fast; but with a damn well practiced eye—you've got to know your stat-comps when you're lugging a mob of potential Ward Eights year in and year out. No, it would have taken the kick out of it for Sturgess. It would have to be the real thing—a trumped-up Waterloo wouldn't come close to satisfying the passion he had to see me cook. That's why no time-bomb routine the way it is in stories. That's why the robot routine instead. Waiting . . . waiting for it had to be real—and he'd been lucky with the luck of the damned. He hadn't had to wait long.

“Sir, I've got a theory about the statcomps. If I may have your permission to try something—” It was Adrian. I could hear him talking, but I wasn't listening.

“All right, go ahead,” I said. “And when you're done you can throw the pieces away. You, Sturgess!”

“Yes sir!”

“Quarantine Procedure, and you've got just thirty minutes!”

“Yes sir!” Sturgess turned sharply and went to execute his orders.

ONLY ten minutes after that Adrian found me in communications. The radio crew was already busy knocking out an A-priority SOS on every Patrol wave length on the band, and I invoked the regulation that says a captain can strap on his ship's only R-gun at his own discretion.

One is all you need. A single blast and you can knock a hole in the side of a ship big enough to roll Jupiter through. Raw power.

I strapped the thing on and adjusted the trigger for a half-ounce pressure. Raw power they wanted, raw power they'd get.

“You won't need that, sir.” It was Adrian, and there was a flush in his young face.

“You tell me when people run out of respect for a blaster, sonny, and I'll tell you when they're worth their freight.”

“No sir—I've found the trouble. My theory, sir—I've 'got 'em pin-pointed I think.”

“Trouble? Theory—hurry up Adrian, I'm busy . . . you, sergeant, make any contacts yet?” The com-sergeant shook his head and .I turned back to Adrian. He looked as if he was getting ready to bust wide open.

“It wasn't the comps, sir. It's the people themselves. People have machines beat a mile, sir—and the machines can't keep up, that's all. Machines are a lousy substitute—”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“My theory, sir—that people's attitudes are constantly changing—maturing, if you want to call it that. The machines were set to analyse the standard of psychological values that were valid when colonization first began fifty years ago. The values changed—slowly, but they do change—and the machines don't.”

I didn't get what he was driving at, but I let him rattle it out. Sturgess had fourteen minutes yet, and I had the R-gun ready.

“When the first real move toward Mars started, Captain, it was like—well, like years ago in the nineteenth century, in a move toward a place they called California and the Barbary Coast. They were first, they were new, and when they hacked out a place to live they used big strokes. Sometimes too big. But after they were through hacking they eventually started the more tedious job of trimming and molding and perfecting. To an extent, at least within the framework of their own back yards, they grew up. The people who came after them didn't come to hack—they came to help perfect. Like these people you've got on board now, Captain. Just like these. Only these people are working on more than a back yard. This one doesn't have any fences. . . .”

“We went all over this once before, Adrian. Now—”

“Let me finish, sir. Because the machines were working on a pretty flexible behavior-constant, the change—and it's been gradual, you see, just bit by bit—the change didn't register until it got big enough to actually invalidate the constant as a whole. Well, it just did.”

“Just did what, man?”

“Invalidated the fifty-year-old behavior-constant one hundred per cent, sir. Broke its back! The behavior-change got built up to the point where the old constant just couldn't handle it any longer—simply passed its differential limits. So the mass file reading was haywire. The individual ones were too, but it just happened that they looked normal. They could have looked any old way.”

“Then the three individual files Sturgess had me help him recheck—”

“Two are adolescent cases, sir—the change hasn't affected them yet. The boy and the girl, and the group of men with suspiciously similar names. Kids are kids, and the fast-money people never grow up. It's the third one, sir.”

“The philosopher joker, staring out the port.”

“Gone, sir. Star-happy as they come ...”

I got going. Sturgess would be able to pin-point the old gaffer for me before he was able to do any real damage, and we'd just confine him until we lit on Old Red. And while I was at it, I'd be able to countermand the quarantine order—it's a bad enough order to have to give in the first place, and I wanted to kill it before it did any damage. A hell of a note if I panicked 'em all now. Adrian and his theories be damned, a tank-load of humans could be a powder-keg, and it wouldn't take much to set 'em off. Funny at that, I was figuring, when a kid with a kid's theory can be right just the same. ...

IT WAS about then that my own private hell broke loose. I had made it almost back to the bank room so I could buzz Sturgess when the old duck with the blown fuses popped out in front of me, an old-fashioned slug-tosser in his thin fist—and pointed right at my head. And the way he held it I knew he meant business from start to finish. Where he'd gotten it, or how he'd gotten it aboard, I didn't know—but right then it hardly mattered.

“Stop! Stop, Captain Logan!” The cracked voice made him sound even crazier than he looked, and the film of sweat that glistened on his neck above a high white collar and on the bony places in his face made him look even more like something resurrected from a grave dug a century ago. The black cloak he wore might have been used to bury him in.

I stopped. I wouldn't have gone for the R-gun, even if the cannon-like barrel of the slug-tosser had been shaking. It couldn't have shaken less in the jaws of a vise.

“I am taking control of your ship, Captain! Yes, yes I am! I want you to press the button by the port and make them open it! Then you must make them come out here, and I will go inside! I mean it, Captain Logan, yes I do, I mean it!”

Those eyes of his were pools of blood on fire.

“You haven't a chance, pop,” I told him. “My officers will be reporting back here any minute.”

“Let 'em, Captain Logan! If they budge an inch toward me I'll shoot you right in the head! You and them too and everybody! I'm going to kill everybody, Captain. I'm going to take this horrible dirty ship into the sun as fast as it will go! Press that button, Captain!”

His trigger-finger was white with pressure at the knuckle, just like in one of those old-fashioned westerns. If I didn't signal my three non-coms he'd just blow my head off and signal them himself. But this way it was better. This way he had a hostage and five slugs was enough for one man. He didn't know how many men there were inside.

But it added up to the same thing so I pressed the button.

The lock buzzed and clicked.

“Push it open, Captain—push it open, and order them all to come out!”

I pushed it, and I was trying to think but I didn't have any answers. He was cagey and he kept far enough from me so that I couldn't jump him—I'd be a cold mackerel before I laid a finger on him. The port swung open.

“Go on! Call them out! All of them! When I go in I'll kill whoever is left!”

He had me stymied there too, so I did what he said.

“Johnston! Gates! Steinhammer! Out here on the double!”

They came. By the time each one saw what was going on it was too late to do anything, and the old joker was starting his move for the bank room.

Half inside the open port he stopped and sort of grinned at me.

“I'm not the only one, Captain! Oh, no! Space hates you too! Space doesn't want you and your horrible ships full of people trampling through it, spoiling it . . . people are horrid, Captain, and shouldn't try to pollute the beautiful purity of the Universe with their little, filthy souls! No, they shouldn't try, Captain— Space is their enemy and so am I! So am I! And when these die in the Sun, others will be afraid to come....”

THERE was the sudden sound of running boots coming from the A-deck ramp and I expected him to shoot the four of us down where we stood. But he didn't. He waited, because he had more to say and I guess he figured the bigger the audience the better.

Sturgess and Adrian just stopped in their tracks.

“Move another inch, gentlemen, and I will blow your captain's head off! Now listen to me—I've got more to tell you—”

Sturgess looked at me and I looked back at him.

No, the old goon wouldn't be fast enough on the trigger to get two men at once. Me, he could get. And then Sturgess would have him before he could move another muscle.

I couldn't tell what Sturgess was thinking.

“My first officer's coming to disarm you,” I said. “You won't have time for both of us. Mr. Sturgess! Get him!”

And the old goat turned tail and bolted into the bank room!

“Only one man can get through the port at a time!” he was shrieking. “Try to get me and I'll blast you one at a time!”

“Christ, he didn't even shut the port!” Sturgess growled. “Cap—”

But I wasn't waiting to figure the ifs and buts of how lunatics think.

“Life boats are the only chance,” I said. “Sturgess, you and Adrian—” Sturgess just stood there.

“Nuts,” he said. There was still that icy look in his eyes and I knew he'd caught me second-guessing again.

“That's an order!”

“You should see what's happened to the life-boats, Logan, and you'd forget about your precious orders. We've seen 'em—Adrian and me—that's what all the running was about. Out of fifty boats, the old coot had time to get to all but five. Forty-five boats, so much junk, Logan.”

“Then we'll use five! We can at least save five hundred of the damned fools anyway—”

I heard Adrian's voice. It was thin and nervous. “And leave forty-five hundred to—to burn, sir? In the sun. . .”

I looked at Sturgess and this time I could read something in his face. It said well here we are again and how was I going to play it this time?

Regulations. Forty-five hundred “pioneers.” Adrian and his nervous voice. Sturgess, looking straight through me.

I looked at the open port and started running, reaching for my R-gun.

And Adrian was in front of me, blocking me;

“Not you, sir! Ships need men like you! I'll do—”

I saw the swinging spanner wrench glance off Adrian's head first but there wasn't time to duck it because we were too close. A hell of a pain, and then I folded to the deck like a cruiser with blown jets. . . .

When one of the non-coms finally brought me around, Sturgess was gone and I could see Johnston working over Adrian.

I slammed my hand to my thigh, and the cumbersome R-gun just wasn't there any longer.

“Easy sir. You'll be all right, and so will Lieutenant Adrian.”

“Easy! For God's sake man—” And then I saw it. The bank room port. Shut, sealed.

“It was Sturgess, sir. He grabbed the spanner off the bulkhead there and clouted the two of you. Then he grabbed your R-gun. He was yelling like hell and none of us—we just couldn't move, sir. He was just like he'd gone crazy!”

“Come on, come on!” I tried to make it up on one elbow, fell back.

“It was all so fast, sir. He ran through the port and hauled it closed with one arm, carrying the R-gun in the other, not even aiming it. We heard the sound of a shot—and the R-gun, both together. He must've been blasting away even when the old guy's bullet drilled him, sir.”

“But did he get him, did he get—”

“He didn't have to, sir. He knew he'd never have time for a second blast, so he must've just let go at the hull itself. When the air in there left it sounded like a—a banshee straight out of hell, Captain ...”

“When the air. . . .”

“Yes sir. We'll have it patched as soon as Steinhammer gets some of the maintenance crew with suits up here.”

I felt dizzy. Dizzy all over. “He yelled, you say....”

“Yes sir. He hollered—said to tell you Lieutenant Adrian had a point, but if you still wanted to be a—a damn cynic, sir, you could go to the—go to the devil.”

Gates got me up and then helped me to my feet. I looked over at Adrian, and he was beginning to come out of it. I told Johnston I'd take it from there.

I guess I wanted to tell the kid what happened myself.

I wanted to tell him about the milk run. About people and about Space—or maybe he'd be telling me.

But anyway, Mars or bust, I'd tell him. Mars or bust, that's their motto, come hell or damnation. . . .

Our job: Get 'em there.