Call it a moral victory—I’ve never done better work.
I finally bought one, precision made and embedded in plastic, from the same firm that sold me the crystal. Like the suit it was made for, it was obsolete and I paid a price so low that I merely screamed. By then I would have mortgaged my soul—I wanted that suit to work.
The only thing that complicated the rest of the electrical gear was that everything had to be either “failsafe” or “no-fail”; a man in a space suit can’t pull into the next garage if something goes wrong—the stuff has to keep on working or he becomes a vital statistic. That was why the helmet had twin headlights; the second cut in if the first failed—even the peanut lights for the dials over my head were twins. I didn’t take short cuts; every duplicate circuit I kept duplicate and tested to make sure that automatic changeover always worked.
Mr. Charton insisted on filling the manual’s list on those items a drugstore stocks—maltose and dextrose and amino tablets, vitamins, dexedrine, dramamine, aspirin, antibiotics, antihistamines, codeine, almost any pill a man can take to help him past a hump that might kill him. He got Doc Kennedy to write prescriptions so that I could stock Oscar without breaking laws.
When I got through Oscar was in as good shape as he had ever been in Satellite Two. It had been more fun than the time I helped Jake Bixby turn his heap into a hotrod.
But summer was ending and it was time I pulled out of my daydream. I still did not know where I was going to school, or how—or if. I had saved money but it wasn’t nearly enough. I had spent a little on postage and soap wrappers but I got that back and more by one fifteen-minute appearance on television and I hadn’t spent a dime on girls since March—too busy. Oscar cost surprisingly little; repairing Oscar had been mostly sweat and screwdriver. Seven dollars out of every ten I had earned was sitting in the money basket.
But it wasn’t enough.
I realized glumly that I was going to have to sell Oscar to get through the first semester. But how would I get through the rest of the year? Joe Valiant the all-American boy always shows up on the campus with fifty cents and a heart of gold, then in the last chapter is tapped for Skull-and-Bones and has money in the bank. But I wasn’t Joe Valiant, not by eight decimal places. Did it make sense to start if I was going to have to drop out about Christmas? Wouldn’t it be smarter to stay out a year and get acquainted with a pick and shovel?
Did I have a choice? The only school I was sure of was State U.—and there was a row about professors being fired and talk that State U. might lose its accredited standing. Wouldn’t it be comical to spend years slaving for a degree and then have it be worthless because your school wasn’t recognized?
State U. wasn’t better than a “B” school in engineering even before this fracas.
Rensselaer and CalTech turned me down the same day—one with a printed form, the other with a polite letter saying it was impossible to accept all qualified applicants.
Little things were getting my goat, too. The only virtue of that television show was the fifty bucks. A person looks foolish wearing a space suit in a television studio and our announcer milked it for laughs, rapping the helmet and asking me if I was still in there. Very funny. He asked me what I wanted with a space suit and when I tried to answer he switched off the mike in my suit and patched in a tape with nonsense about space pirates and flying saucers. Half the people in town thought it was my voice.
It wouldn’t have been hard to live down if Ace Quiggle hadn’t turned up. He had been missing all summer, in jail maybe, but the day after the show he took a seat at the fountain, stared at me and said in a loud whisper, “Say, ain’t you the famous space pirate and television star?”
I said, “What’ll you have, Ace?”
“Gosh! Could I have your autograph? I ain’t never seen a real live space pirate before!”
“Give me your order, Ace. Or let someone else use that stool.”
“A choc malt, Commodore—and leave out the soap.”
Ace’s “wit” went on every time he showed up. It was a dreadfully hot summer and easy to get tempery. The Friday before Labor Day weekend the store’s cooling system went sour, we couldn’t get a repairman and I spent three bad hours fixing it, ruining my second-best pants and getting myself reeking. I was back at the fountain and wishing I could go home for a bath when Ace swaggered in, greeted me loudly with “Why, if it isn’t Commander Comet, the Scourge of the Spaceways! Where’s your blaster gun, Commander? Ain’t you afraid the Galactic Emperor will make you stay in after school for running around bare-nekkid? Yuk yuk yukkity yuk!”
A couple of girls at the fountain giggled.
“Lay off, Ace,” I said wearily. “It’s a hot day.”
“That why you’re not wearing your rubber underwear?” The girls giggled again.
Ace smirked. He went on: “Junior, seein’ you got that clown suit, why don’t you put it to work? Run an ad in the Clarion: ‘Have Space Suit—Will Travel.’ Yukkity yuk! Or you could hire out as a scarecrow.”
The girls snickered. I counted ten, then again in Spanish, and in Latin, and said tensely, “Ace, just tell me what you’ll have.”
“My usual. And snap it up—I’ve got a date on Mars.”
Mr. Charton came out from behind his counter, sat down and asked me to mix him a lime cooler, so I served him first. It stopped the flow of wit and probably saved Ace’s life.
The boss and I were alone shortly after. He said quietly, “Kip, a reverence for life does not require a man to respect Nature’s obvious mistakes.”
“Sir?”
“You need not serve Quiggle again. I don’t want his trade.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. He’s harmless.”
“I wonder how harmless such people are? To what extent civilization is retarded by the laughing jackasses, the empty-minded belittlers? Go home; you’ll want to make an early start tomorrow.”
I had been invited to the Lake of the Forest for the long Labor Day weekend by Jake Bixby’s parents. I wanted to go, not only to get away from the heat but also to chew things over with Jake. But I answered, “Shucks, Mr. Charton, I ought not to leave you stuck.”
“The town will be deserted over the holiday; I may not open the fountain. Enjoy yourself. This summer has worn you a bit fine, Kip.”
I let myself be persuaded but I stayed until closing and swept up. Then I walked home, doing some hard thinking.
The party was over and it was time to put away my toys. Even the village half-wit knew that I had no sensible excuse to have a space suit. Not that I cared what Ace thought…but I did have no use for it—and I needed money. Even if Stanford and M.I.T. and Carnegie and the rest turned me down, I was going to start this semester. State U. wasn’t the best—but neither was I and I had learned that more depended on the student than on the school.
Mother had gone to bed and Dad was reading. I said hello and went to the barn, intending to strip my gear off Oscar, pack him into his case, address it, and in the morning phone the express office to pick it up. He’d be gone before I was back from the Lake of the Forest. Quick and clean.
He was hanging on his rack and it seemed to me that he grinned hello. Nonsense, of course. I went over and patted his shoulder. “Well, old fellow, you’ve been a real chum and it’s been nice knowing you. See you on the Moon—I hope.”
But Oscar wasn’t going to the Moon. Oscar was going to Akron, Ohio, to “Salvage.” They were going to unscrew parts they could use and throw the rest of him on the junk pile.
My mouth felt dry.
(“It’s okay, pal,” Oscar answered.)
See that? Out of my silly head! Oscar didn’t really speak; I had let my imagination run wild too long. So I quit patting him, hauled the crate out and took a wrench from his belt to remove the gas bottles.
I stopped.
Both bottles were charged, one with oxygen, one with oxy-helium. I had wasted money to do so because I wanted, just once, to try a spaceman’s mix.
; The batteries were fresh and power packs were charged.
“Oscar,” I said softly, “we’re going to take a last walk together. Okay?”
(“Swell!”)
I made it a dress rehearsal—water in the drinking tank, pill dispensers loaded, first-aid kit inside, vacuum-proof duplicate (I hoped it was vacuum-proof) in an outside pocket. All tools on belt, all lanyards tied so that tools wouldn’t float away in free fall. Everything.
Then I heated up a circuit that the F.C.C. would have squelched had they noticed, a radio link I had salvaged out of my effort to build a radio for Oscar, and had modified as a test rig for Oscar’s ears and to let me check the aiming of the directional antenna. It was hooked in with an echo circuit that would answer back if I called it—a thing I had bread-boarded out of an old Webcor wire recorder, vintage 1950.
Then I climbed into Oscar and buttoned up. “Tight?”
(“Tight!”)
I glanced at the reflected dials, noticed the blood-color reading, reduced pressure until Oscar almost collapsed. At nearly sea-level pressure I was in no danger from hypoxia; the trick was to avoid too much oxygen.
We started to leave when I remembered something. “Just a second, Oscar.” I wrote a note to my folks, telling them that I was going to get up early and catch the first bus to the lake. I could write while suited up now, I could even thread a needle. I stuck the note under the kitchen door.
Then we crossed the creek into the pasture. I didn’t stumble in wading; I was used to Oscar now, sure-footed as a goat.
Out in the field I keyed my talkie and said, “Junebug, calling Peewee. Come in, Peewee.”
Seconds later my recorded voice came back: “‘Junebug, calling Peewee. Come in, Peewee.’”
I shifted to the horn antenna and tried again. It wasn’t easy to aim in the dark but it was okay. Then I shifted back to spike antenna and went on calling Peewee while moving across the pasture and pretending that I was on Venus and had to stay in touch with base because it was unknown terrain and unbreathable atmosphere. Everything worked perfectly and if it had been Venus, I would have been all right.
Two lights moved across the southern sky, planes I thought, or maybe helis. Just the sort of thing yokels like to report as “flying saucers.” I watched them, then moved behind a little rise that would tend to spoil reception and called Peewee. Peewee answered and I shut up; it gets dull talking to an idiot circuit which can only echo what you say to it.
Then I heard: “Peewee to Junebug! Answer!”
I thought I had been monitored and was in trouble—then decided that some ham had picked me up. “Junebug here. I read you. Who are you?”
The test rig echoed my words.
Then the new voice shrilled, “Peewee here! Home me in!”
This was silly. But I found myself saying, “Junebug to Peewee, shift to directional frequency at one centimeter—and keep talking, keep talking!” I shifted to the horn antenna.
“Junebug, I read you. Fix me. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—”
“You’re due south of me, up about forty degrees. Who are you?”
It must be one of those lights. It had to be. But I didn’t have time to figure it out. A space ship almost landed on me.
Chapter 4
I said “space ship,” not “rocket ship.” It made no noise but a whoosh and there weren’t any flaming jets—it seemed to move by clean living and righteous thoughts.
I was too busy keeping from being squashed to worry about details. A space suit in one gravity is no track suit; it’s a good thing I had practiced. The ship sat down where I had just been, occupying more than its share of pasture, a big black shape.
The other one whooshed down, too, just as a door opened in the first. Light poured through the door; two figures spilled out and started to run. One moved like a cat; the other moved clumsily and slowly—handicapped by a space suit. S’help me, a person in a space suit does look silly. This one was less than five feet tall and looked like the Gingerbread Man.
A big trouble with a suit is your limited angle of vision. I was trying to watch both of them and did not see the second ship open. The first figure stopped, waiting for the one in the space suit to catch up, then suddenly collapsed—just a gasping sound, “Eeeah!”—and clunk.
You can tell the sound of pain. I ran to the spot at a lumbering dogtrot, leaned over and tried to see what was wrong, tilting my helmet to bring the beam of my headlight onto the ground. A bug-eyed monster—
That’s not fair but it was my first thought. I couldn’t believe it and would have pinched myself except that it isn’t practical when suited up.
An unprejudiced mind (which mine wasn’t) would have said that this monster was rather pretty. It was small, not more than half my size, and its curves were graceful, not as a girl is but more like a leopard, although it wasn’t shaped like either one. I couldn’t grasp its shape—I didn’t have any pattern to fit it to; it wouldn’t add up.
But I could see that it was hurt. Its body was quivering like a frightened rabbit. It had enormous eyes, open but milky and featureless, as if nictitating membranes were across them. What appeared to be its mouth—
That’s as far as I got. Something hit me in the spine, right between the gas bottles.
I woke up on a bare floor, staring at a ceiling. It took several moments to recall what had happened and then I shied away because it was so darn silly. I had been out for a walk in Oscar…and then a space ship had landed…and a bug-eyed—
I sat up suddenly as I realized that Oscar was gone. A light cheerful voice said, “Hi, there!”
I snapped my head around. A kid about ten years old was seated on the floor, leaning against a wall. He—I corrected myself. Boys don’t usually clutch rag dolls. This kid was the age when the difference doesn’t show much and was dressed in shirt, shorts and dirty tennis shoes, and had short hair, so I didn’t have much to go on but the rag dolly.
“Hi, yourself,” I answered. “What are we doing here?”
“I’m surviving. I don’t know about you.”
“Huh?”
“Surviving. Pushing my breath in and out. Conserving my strength. There’s nothing else to do at the moment; they’ve got us locked in.”
I looked around. The room was about ten feet across, four-sided but wedge-shaped, and nothing in it but us. I couldn’t see a door; if we weren’t locked, we might as well be. “Who locked us in?”
“Them. Space pirates. And him.”
“Space pirates? Don’t be silly!”
The kid shrugged. “Just my name for them. But better not think they’re silly if you want to keep on surviving. Are you ‘Junebug’?”
“Huh? You sound like a junebug yourself. Space pirates, my aunt!” I was worried and very confused and this nonsense didn’t help. Where was Oscar? And where was I?
“No, no, not a junebug but ‘Junebug’—a radio call. You see, I’m Peewee.”
I said to myself, Kip old pal, walk slowly to the nearest hospital and give yourself up. When a radio rig you wired yourself starts looking like a skinny little girl with a rag doll, you’ve flipped. It’s going to be wet packs and tranquilizers and no excitement for you—you’ve blown every fuse. “You’re ‘Peewee’?”
“That’s what I’m called—I’m relaxed about it. You see, I heard, ‘Junebug, calling Peewee,’ and decided that Daddy had found out about the spot I was in and had alerted people to help me land. But if you aren’t ‘Junebug,’ you wouldn’t know about that. Who are you?”
“Wait a minute, I am ‘Junebug.’ I mean I was using that call. But I’m Clifford Russell—‘Kip’ they call me.”
“How do you do, Kip?” she said politely.
“And howdy to you, Peewee. Uh, are you a boy or a girl?”
Peewee looked disgusted. “I’ll make you regret that remark. I realize I am undersized for my age but I’m actually eleven, going on twelve. There’s no need to be rude. In another five years I expect to be quite a
dish—you’ll probably beg me for every dance.”
At the moment I would as soon have danced with a kitchen stool, but I had things on my mind and didn’t want a useless argument. “Sorry, Peewee. I’m still groggy. You mean you were in that first ship?”
Again she looked miffed. “I was piloting it.”
Sedation every night and a long course of psychoanalysis. At my age. “You were—piloting?”
“You surely don’t think the Mother Thing could? She wouldn’t fit their controls. She curled up beside me and coached. But if you think it’s easy, when you’ve never piloted anything but a Cessna with your Daddy at your elbow and never made any kind of landing, then think again. I did very well!—and your landing instructions weren’t too specific. What have they done with the Mother Thing?”
“The what?”
“You don’t know? Oh, dear!”
“Wait a minute, Peewee. Let’s get on the same frequency. I’m ‘Junebug’ all right and I homed you in—and if you think that’s easy, to have a voice out of nowhere demand emergency landing instructions, you better think again, too. Anyhow, a ship landed and another ship landed right after it and a door opened in the first ship and a guy in a space suit jumped out—”
“That was I.”
“—and something else jumped out—”
“The Mother Thing.”
“Only she didn’t get far. She gave a screech and flopped. I went to see what the trouble was and something hit me. The next thing I know you’re saying, ‘Hi, there.’” I wondered if I ought to tell her that the rest, including her, was likely a morphine dream because I was probably lying in a hospital with my spine in a cast.
Peewee nodded thoughtfully. “They must have blasted you at low power, or you wouldn’t be here. Well, they caught you and they caught me, so they almost certainly caught her. Oh, dear! I do hope they didn’t hurt her.”
Have Space Suit—Will Travel Page 4