as soon as he learned that for the duration of the tests, Pete Roswell of the Castor, would be at his elbow, watching and noting everything he did, and that rating for rating, every man in the black gang would be matched by his opposite number from the sister cruiser. "Let 'em come. Let 'em watch. They'll learn something. Who cares what they see? My uranium consumption, acceleration for acceleration, is the lowest in the whole star-spangled fleet. We haven't had a breakdown of an auxiliary in more than a year, and that's a record for any man's service."
"That is just it," observed Beckley pointedly. "You're too good. It makes you cocky and you take too much for granted. What would you do if you did have a breakdown — cut in your reserve generators, I suppose?"
"Sure — always have. They work, too. Both sets."
"And if those went on the blink?"
"Well — there are the selenium units on the hull, only — "
"Quite so. Only there isn't much sun power out here by Jupiter and you haven't run a test on them since we left Venutian Station. But suppose you did hook 'em up and could get a little juice out of them and then they went out, what?"
"For the love of — Why, storage batteries, of course."
"'Storage batteries' is good," snapped the exec. "In the last quarterly report, if my memory is correct, they were listed as being in 404D, your space storeroom. How many amps do you think you could pull from there?"
Chinnery lapsed into a glum silence. He had never seen the exec in this mood. Beckley turned to Fraser and asked abruptly:
"What do we do if the intership phone goes out?"
"Shift to telescribes."
"And after that?"
"The annunciator and telegraph system."
"And after that?"
Fraser looked puzzled. "If we lose the juice on the annunciators they can be operated by hand." He shrugged. "After that, if you insist on it, there are always messengers."
"Why not voice tubes?" queried Beckley, cocking an eyebrow.
"Voice tubes?" echoed several. The others laughed. The admiralty had gone primitive.
"That is what I said. Believe it or not, gentlemen, but the Pollux is equipped with a complete system of voice tubes, gas-tight covers, and all. Yet not one of you knows it. You have probably painted them over, or stuffed them with old socks or love letters. Now get out of here, all of you, and inspect your parts of the ship. Come back at midnight and I will tell you more about this inspection and what we have to do to get ready for it."
The group of officers returned to the wardroom at twelve, not greatly enlightened by their inspection. They knew what the commander was driving at, but most of them felt they already knew the answers. On a warship there are always many alternative ways of doing the same thing, for in the heat of action things go wrong and there is no time for repairs. But most of them were already familiar with what they had to deal with, except Bullard, of course, who was new. He was the only one of them who had the slightest doubt of his readiness for any test that might be put to him.
Cracking jokes, but at the same time slightly mystified by the slant the executive had taken, they assembled. Commander Beckley entered and tossed the reprinted early-American document on the wardroom table. Moore crossed the room and fingered it, noting its title. It was "Chief Umpire's Report, Battle Efficiency Inspection U.S.S. Alaska, Spring, 1940."
"I have told you we are to be inspected by the Castor," began Beckley. "What I didn't tell you is that later on, we inspect them."
"Whee!" yelled Fraser. "I've always wanted to know how they puttied up that main condenser. It is nothing short of a miracle how it hangs together."
A look of smug satisfaction flitted across Chinnery's face. In his estimation, Pete Roswell, engineer of the Castor, was a stuffed shirt.
Moore was smiling, too, the contented smile of a cat contemplating a canary. Freddy McCaskey, navigator and senior watch of the rival ship, was also his rival for the hand of a certain young lady residing in Ursapolis. His brilliant take-offs and landings in the sky port there had long annoyed Moore, for Moore knew, even if the admiral did not, that they were made possible by certain nonreg gadgets bolted to the underside of the Castor's chart rack. They were nonreg for the reason that they were unreliable — they could not be counted upon to stand up under the shock of action. Moore itched to be in a position officially, to expose them, and by doing it burst the bubble of McCaskey's vaunted superiority as a ship handler.
There were others present who had similar designs calculated to upset the peace of mind and complacency of their friendly enemies, judging by the ripple of anticipatory grins that swept the room.
Beckley's eye roved the group, missing the reaction of no one.
"Ah," he breathed, "so that's the way you feel? Well, let me tell you this — so do the Castor Beans. And don't ever forget, they inspect us first.
"But don't misunderstand me. There will be no cutthroat competition about this. Friendly rivalry, such as we enjoy with the Castor, or outright malice, if it were present, makes very little difference. The men from the Castor do not inspect us in the sense of passing judgment; they merely observe and record the data. It is the admiral who does the judging. But you can bet your bottom dollar they won't miss anything. They live and work in a ship the exact twin of ours, and they follow the same routine. They know our weak spots and how we go about covering them up, for they have the same spots and, I daresay, use the same tricks. We might fool the old man, but never a Castor Bean.
"As I said before, they will all be here, from Captain Allyn down to the landsman for cook's helper, and every man jack of them will have a stop watch and a notebook. We will be covered, station for station, all over the ship.
"Leaving out the preliminaries, such as looking at the bright work and haircuts and all that sort of thing — which worries none of us — the first thing that happens to us will be the emergency drills. Those are going to be different. The American doctrine was that the real test of an emergency organization is an emergency, and one peculiarity of emergencies is that they come when you least expect them. Moreover, the people on watch at the time are the ones who will have to handle them. That means we cannot hand-pick our best and most experienced men to do the drilling."
"It will be worked this way. The admiral will ask to see our watch list. He'll run down through the names and pick one at random. It might even be Bullard, here — "
Bullard winced. He did not like that "even," though he was only three days in the ship.
"And he will say, 'Send Lieutenant Bullard in.' Bullard will have to relieve the deck. We may cruise along an hour after that, not knowing what is coming, when suddenly the chief umpire will announce, 'Fire in the lower magazine,' or 'Penetrating collision,' or whatever emergency they have picked. Every Castor man starts his stop watch, licks his pencil, and looks at the man he's umpiring. The test will be not only of Bullard, but of the whole organization. As for Bullard, he is in sole charge, and neither Captain Dongan nor I can advise him, and the rest of you can only execute what orders he gives. Whatever he does, whether the right thing, or the wrong thing, or nothing at all, goes down in the notebooks, and also the manner of its execution.
"Let us say the conditions announced are that a small meteorite has penetrated
