Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  “The Tethys project seems to be to develop the satellite as a sort of resort, a low-gravity pleasure planet. I don’t need to remind you that that kind of investment, when successful, gives many times the return of any other. Look at Lanz’s Selenopolis—over half a million paid admissions to the Lunar Ballet alone last year—”

  “However,” said Ilena coldly, “it seems unlikely that the settlements around Saturn will be ready to disgorge hordes of idle pleasure-seekers any time within the next century.”

  Linforth moved restlessly to flick an invisible speck of dust from the sleeve of his coat, while he weighed his answer. He was scowling, behind the mask of his face.

  Harry Burk came back from the phone nook. His footsteps, muffled by the heavy carpet, had the sound of haste in them.

  Leoce looked up, making her manner casual, but letting the Earth travel film she’d been viewing (Medieval Marketplaces in Asia) roll on unheeded.

  As always, she was mostly conscious not of any detail, but only of the total effect of his presence, his impact on her, the aura of adventure and glory in which for her he moved. His springy walk was a part of that, and the way his hands swung at his sides, casually but as if ready for action. When he glanced toward her, his eyes glinted with a luminosity as of rocket gases burning in space, red dust of battles in the Martian hinterlands. . . .

  She was seventeen and she knew that it was wrong to love another woman’s husband—but, Leoce told herself fiercely, even before this cruise began she had seen how that woman treated him, that dark cold woman whose only thought was scraping and keeping money for her father’s Company. . . . Oh, she could see through Ilena. She hadn’t married Harry because she wanted him, but because the Company needed a man. The Company! Half-consciously Leoce gave the word an inflection like that which her father sometimes used when, in his own family, he spoke with precise bitterness of the Jordan Enterprises.

  Harry’s face wore a curious expression; an excitement that was touched with pleasure. His eyes were narrowed and he smiled a little grimly at the others.

  “I’ve just been talking to Captain McKeown,” he said briskly. “He tells me—rather reluctantly—that something’s wrong. The meteor avoidance system has blown an important condenser or something like that, and we’ve been running blind for the last quarter hour. As close as we are to the Belt!”

  Leoce sat petrified. At the moment it seemed unimportant whether anyone noticed her staring at Harry or not, even if they read what must be written in her eyes. . . . She heard a yip of fright from Mrs. Jordan, saw her own mother turn paler than usual, saw her father bite his lip. But what Leoce felt was more a reflection of the half-amused, stimulated look in Harry Burk’s face. He looked . . . he looked as if he were tasting some familiar, long-missed sweetness. The sweetness of danger.

  “The electrician’s been rigging some kind of emergency circuit. He ought to be about finished by now. Anyway, the chances of our hitting anything, even here, are millions to one.”

  He said more, repetitively, in response to Mrs. Jordan’s babble of questions. Leoce hardly heard; she was wishing that this moment, the moment of peril, would stretch out indefinitely. She could see that Harry gloried in it, amused by his own superiority to these timid ones. Well, let him look at her; he’d see that she too was unafraid.

  She recalled a magazine story that she’d liked—a story of two lovers, trapped in a space ship out of control and falling into the Sun. The final scene had been so beautiful it almost made her cry. . . . But this was hardly the same; with a pang, she realized that if they did strike a meteor, they would be snuffed out instantly, with no time for goodbyes. And she couldn’t say to him now: “Harry”—interpolating the name without conscious effort—“Harry, there’s no use in pretending any more. Harry—”

  Charles Linforth said, chewing his underlip, “This is a pretty big ship as space craft go. Mightn’t it absorb an ordinary meteor and survive?”

  Harry nodded. “With luck, depending on the point of impact. The Morgan has approximately the tonnage of a third-class warship, but she’s not armored. And a rock the size of your fist can rip open an armored dreadnought if you overrun it at the speed we’re traveling.”

  “I understand that rocks the size of your fist are quite rare,” said Linforth.

  “Not around the Belt.”

  Leoce understood him, his knowledge, his fearlessness, even his cruelty that made him vaunt the other qualities without shame. She watched him with eyes alight, but he didn’t seem to notice her.

  Overpoweringly moved to say something, she asked, “What—what would happen if we hit a really big one?”

  He looked at her, then; a faint smile twitched the corners of his mouth. “Then,” he said, and a hand clutched at her heart as he seemed to echo her own thoughts, “we wouldn’t even have time to say, ‘So long, here we go!’ So we might as well not worry about it.”

  And in that same second the ship struck a meteoroid.

  It was against the probabilities; but that was no argument against the thing of iron and stone that came flashing out of the vacuum to heat the Morgan le Fay. A mere pebble as cosmic bodies go, it was a small asteroid, a million tons of mass. For perhaps a billion years, since the breakup of the primeval fifth planet, it had wandered in an eccentric orbit outside the major asteroid paths.

  There was the beginning of a wild swerve; the vessel’s electronic senses were dead and human reaction times were far too slow to avoid the impact. But the ship struck sidelong, glancingly.

  It was all over in the merest fraction of an instant. Then widening miles of emptiness separated the stray asteroid, traveling almost undisturbed on its way, and what remained of the Morgan, where automatic emergency mechanisms were acting in a feverish battle for survival.

  II

  Cool dampness pressed against Leoce’s aching forehead; she made a painful effort, and opened her eyes. The dark face of Ilena Burk swam out of indistinctness above her, and when Leoce brought it into focus she saw a purpling bruise on one of Ilena’s high cheek bones. She became conscious that her body was stiff and sore, and that her head throbbed.

  But she remembered everything, up to when some resistless force had snatched her up and flung her helplessly through the air. . . . Still, she was not surprised to find herself alive. She was used to being alive.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t try to sit up right away,” said Ilena matter-of-factly.

  But Leoce sat up, though it made her head spin. She was on the floor of the salon; things looked fairly normal, because all the furniture was bolted down and still in place, but everything loose had been thrown hither and yon. The carpet was wet with spilled liquor from a decanter that still lay where it had rolled, two or three books were sprawled in a corner, a deck of playing cards covered the floor like autumn leaves, and looked as if they had been walked over.

  “Where—” Leoce began. Then she saw Mrs. Jordan, slumped in one of the armchairs. The old woman’s face was a sick color, and she was breathing hoarsely. Her clothing was disarranged, but she had no visible hurts.

  Ilena glanced at her in response to the girl’s look, and Mrs. Jordan caught her eye and made a pleading gesture with one limp, puffy hand.

  “Ilena, dear,” she begged in a wheeze. “I need some more of my medicine. If I don’t have some more medicine my heart’s going to stop. You’ve got to give it to me.”

  The younger woman straightened her back as if it hurt, and shook her head. “You’ve had two doses in twenty minutes, Mother. That’s too much already.”

  “Where—” faltered Leoce again. Ilena turned back to her quickly.

  “Harry and your father have gone down to the engine room. They think perhaps they can control the ship from there . . . or Harry does. He’s the only one who knows anything about rockets.”

  “Control the ship?”

  “Whatever we hit, we didn’t hit it dead-on, or we wouldn’t be here. But the front end of the ship is gone, just sheared away. T
he bridge is gone and with it Captain McKeown, the pilot, the navigator, and I guess the engineer—he must have gone up for some reason before it happened, because the elevator was up there and it’s gone too. We found the electrician dead in the emergency shaft—electrocuted by some of his own wires—” For a moment Ilena paused in her recital, but she recovered herself swiftly. “It comes to this: We’re out of control, without a crew or even a radio to call for help, and we don’t know where we’re headed.”

  “Oh,” said Leoce. She was still sitting on the floor with her legs flung out at ungainly angles, tangled in her skirt. She pushed her blond hair out of her eyes and gazed up at Ilena. For the moment she had forgotten to hate Harry Burk’s wife.

  But with the mention of Harry—down there in the engine room now, coping heroically with the problem of how to fly half a ship—she began coming back to normal.

  She clutched at the floor, gathered her feet under her, and stood. She felt all right now, save for the headache. It came to her that she had been sprawled on the floor like that, disheveled and unconscious, for perhaps half an hour—and Harry had been in this room, walking around her as if she were an inanimate object. She didn’t mind that; she wouldn’t, she thought, have minded even if he’d stepped right on her; but the thought of how she must have looked froze her. She smoothed her skirt.

  Standing up had called her attention to something else—she groped for the impression and pinned it down. “But we’ve still got gravity! How—”

  “The engines never stopped,” said Ilena. “What’s left of the Morgan is still under way, under the same acceleration as before. But we’re off course. Harry is going to try to rig some instruments; he’s afraid we might be heading right into the Belt.”

  “Ilena!” gasped Mrs. Jordan from the depths of the big chair. “My heart!”

  Her daughter replied only with a weary headshake, turned away toward the open door of the emergency shaft. “I’m going down and see how they’re getting along. You rest a bit, Leoce, and look after Mother—but don’t let her have any more of that dope.”

  She was at the door when Leoce cried out—her voice suddenly that of a lost little girl: “My mother! Where is she?”

  She knew even before she saw Ilena’s eyes shift to look past her, before she turned and saw the figure that lay motionless on a couch against the wall, covered from head to foot with one of Mrs. Jordan’s fine tablecloths.

  “Oh,” she said stifledly, and again, “Oh . . .” Then without turning her head she knew that Ilena had slipped silently out into the emergency shaft and was gone, leaving Leoce alone with her mother’s body; Mrs. Jordan, wheezing petulantly in her chair, didn’t count.

  Leoce walked across the room and stood looking down at the slight, still figure under the ample shroud. She considered lifting the cloth, thought better of it.

  Strange thoughts whirled round and round in her aching head. She had a sense of lightness that was not merely the aftermath of being stunned. She remembered her mother alive—a retiring, ordinary woman, without ideas, without—so Leoce had felt for some years—any remaining hold or influence on her child. . . . But now Leoce realized that she’d been deceiving herself; for her mother was dead, and she felt free.

  That was wrong . . . but what did it matter, here in a wrecked ship plunging through space toward possible further disaster and death? What did anything matter, except . . .

  She raised her head; in imagination she saw her own blond young loveliness, and beside it the gaunt dark face of Ilena Burk, with cool eyes always questioning.

  Those were not eyes, she thought, into which a man would want to look at a time like this. He would want someone as warm as space and death are cold. . . .

  “Watch out, Ilena,” she whispered fiercely to the image in her mind.

  Ilena Burk went down the steel ladder swiftly, her skirt billowing out around her. Near the bottom it was warmer, and in the engine room, just above the still vibrant might of the rockets, it was hot.

  Down here was another world. Sixty feet overhead, or forward as you thought of it, was the salon, a cradle of luxury straight from any of the big cities on Earth or Mars. Here you stepped from the ladder into mechanized Inferno.

  Ilena had seen the engine room before, but never when the rockets were firing. Most of it was occupied by the crouching dull metal mass of compound breech, whose flanks rose sloping from floor to ceiling. That was the genius of the drive, which mixed atomic fuel and reaction mass, injected the mixture into the six-inch wolfram tubes and exploded it there with neutron bullets. It had labored on uncaringly through the collision which had left it only half a ship to propel, and it still labored. . . . The room was filled with the perpetual strong drone of a billion horsepower obediently at work.

  Ilena’s bare feet curled away from the warm metal plates of the engine room flooring—she had kicked off her shoes at the top of the ladder for better footing—and she had a sudden vertiginous consciousness of where she was, out in deep space, where even her weight was an illusion because really the floor under her was being lifted constantly toward her by the thrust of the flaming drive below. Her weight was greater than it had been, for the drive was the same while a third of the Morgan’s mass had been wiped out.

  Around the walls, and around the breech with its pier-like projections that were the beginnings of feeders to the injectors beneath, were subsidiary devices, indicators, controls, servo-checkers, servicing mechanisms, some glowing with signal lights, others dark. Air-pumps throbbed, adding to the noise; though the automatically sealing doors had saved most of the ship’s atmosphere, it was still losing some through sprung seams.

  Ilena’s eyes sought in the tangle and found Charles Linforth where he knelt beside the auxiliary control board. The main control panel had of course gone into limbo along with the Morgan s bridge.

  He looked up when Ilena called. Sweat glistened on his high white forehead; his glasses had been broken in the smash, and his eyes looked weak and naked. He let fall the pair of pliers he held, and said over the bone-shaking drone:

  “I can’t get to those leads. If you catch up with Burk, tell him I don’t think we can get to them without cutting. And I can’t handle the torch with one hand.” His left arm hung in a sling—again improvised from one of Mrs. Jordan’s best tablecloths; the gold embroidered fringe was incongruous.

  “Where is Harry?”

  “He’s up above,” said Linforth. “He went up to the starboard gallery to try to determine our course by the stars. We found an emergency kit with some navigation instruments. So your husband went up to look at the stars, and left me here—” Linforth’s voice shook, and he fell silent. Ilena stared at him, wondering how close he was to hysteria. His eyes wandered, he smoothed back his thinning hair with his good hand and picked up the pliers again, turning them nervously in his fingers.

  “You seem to have run into trouble,” she remarked, intentionally inane.

  She could see Linforth striving to keep himself under control. “Quite,” he said after a moment’s silence. “Those leads—It seems, Mrs. Burk, that when the meteor hit us, this control board was dead as a matter of standard practice, since the panel on the bridge was in use. When a switch is opened there—I have this from your husband, who could explain it better—a relay operates somewhere to send current through this board. The bridge and the switch are both gone, of course, but the vital circuit is still closed—welded closed, somewhere in the wreckage forward. So we have to find the leads down here, and cut them; then perhaps we’ll be able to steer the ship with the remaining directional rockets.”

  “I see,” said Ilena, though she wasn’t sure that she saw. She turned back to the ladder. “I’m going up and look for Harry; I’ll tell him what you said.”

  Linforth nodded abstractedly and seated himself morosely on the metal hooding of a machine. As Ilena left he was still sitting there, staring down limply at the dirty fingernails of his good hand; his well-cut clothing was torn and smu
dged.

  As Ilena went up the ladder, she gave a little distracted thought to Linforth. Something in his manner had made her uneasy—a hint of impending explosion, her feeling that he bitterly resented the accident and that somehow she, personally, was a target for his resentment.

  But mostly her mind strayed back to thinking about Harry. She passed determinedly over the impulse to analyze her need to see him now; after all, she had legitimate reasons for seeking him out—to deliver Linforth’s message, and because at this moment it was Harry, if anyone, who would know what their chances were. . . .

  In the glassed-in observation gallery, Harry was bent over a begadgeted tripod, absorbed in twisting a vernier. The unbreakable glass here had flexed and buckled, and in spots was spattered with gummy black antileak. But countless stars still looked in, the brilliant stars of space.

  However, something was wrong with the stars. They blurred and twinkled a little, waxed and waned momentarily in brightness.

  Harry looked up, and perceived her bewilderment at the phenomenon. He explained negligently, with the irritating hint of amusement in his tone: “The ship hit sidelong and pin wheeled. When the automatic stabilizers lined its axis up with the line of flight again, it happened to be traveling tail-first—running through its own exhaust gases, which have been playing merry hell with my observations.”

  “Mr. Linforth asked me to tell you,” said Ilena, “that he can’t find the wires you had him looking for. He thinks you’ll have to use the cutting torch.”

  “I didn’t think he’d find them,” said Harry calmly. “I’ve got to get back down there anyway—feed these bearings to the auxiliary computer. Praise be, it isn’t on the control board circuit.” Competently he began dismantling the instruments and stowing the parts in their case. He seemed undisturbed by the revelation that he was the only one left on board who knew how to do anything.