The Tenth Planet Read Online Free PDF

in one piece.”
    “Captain, may I say something?” Orlando’s voice was hard, determined. “None of us has had any sleep for nearly twenty-five hours; and during that time you have been exhausting yourself tramping about outside. You know as well as I do that pep pills don’t pay off for ever. You are driving yourself into the deck. Sure, we can all take more pills and go on another twenty-five hours. But we’ll be out on our feet, and you know it. And that’s when we start to make mistakes. In this business, little errors have a habit of turning into big ones.”
    Idris gave a sigh and rubbed at his bloodshot eyes. “Orlando, you are bloody right. We’ll take three hours sleep, then back to business. We are no good as walking zombies … The trouble is, I know something is wrong, but I don’t know how I know. Just too damned tired to remember.”
    Suzy yawned. “Three hours. That’s a real vacation.”
    They were the last words Idris Hamilton ever heard her say.

6
    I DRIS WOKE UP sweating, shaking. He switched on his cabin light. The keys on the magnetic panel over his bunk were in the wrong order. There were ten keys altogether; but the only keys that had been replaced in the wrong position were the ones to the engine room and the navigation deck.
    He cursed himself for a fool. He must have noticed the different sequence subconsciously many hours ago. That would account for his persistent conviction that something was wrong. But how could anyone have got at the keys? He had kept his cabin door locked, whenever he was not occupying it, all the time the
Dag
had been grounded at Woomera.
    There had been the sleep-walking incident; and he had been too disturbed to notice how long he had been out of his cabin. Someone could have seized the opportunity—yes, someone could! But this was no time for a post-mortem.
    He pressed the intercom button, held the speaker to his mouth and woke Orlando.
    “Have a heart, skipper,” complained Orlando. “I have only just got my head down. What’s the problem?”
    “No time for explanations. Emergency. Be on the navigation deck in ten seconds.”
    “Shall I wake Suzy?”
    Idris thought for a moment. “No. She’s not familiar with instrumentation. If she pulled the wrong lever, we’d be in trouble. Hurry!”
    “Yes, sir.”
    On the navigation deck, Idris said: “Get the sleep out of your eyes. We are looking for something that shouldn’t be here. You check panels, floor, lockers, furniture, manual scopes. I’ll take the computer lay-out, control console, radio-communications. Let’s move … No matter what it looks like, if it shouldn’t be here, don’t touch it.”
    They moved. Orlando looked all over the bond-fuzz first. It was clean. Then he rolled back the shutters and inspected the observation panel frames. Meanwhile, Idris began unclipping the inspection panels from the command computer.
    “Why the panic, Idris? Neither of us are in good shape. Wouldn’t it have waited till we’d had our rest?”
    “Maybe, maybe not. The keys in my cabin were in the wrong order—the nav deck key and the engine-room key. I’m very particular about the order in which I hang them on the panel. Somebody used them.”
    “How could they?” Orlando was now methodically going over the chart table and its shallow drawers.
    “I don’t know, but I can guess. Maybe some bright boy seized his opportunity when I did my sleep-walking act.” He replaced the computer inspection panels and turned his attention to the control console.
    Orlando was now working on the contour-berths. “You think some groundling was clairvoyant and knew you were going to step out to pick up non-existent daisies?”
    Idris went to work on the control console. “It doesn’t have to be like that. He, she or they could have had a surprise present ready, just waiting for a chance to deliver … And it doesn’t have to look like the thing Leo found on the torus. In fact, it probably won’t look like that