by Jerry
Bill grinned and shook his head in wonder. “My lord, what persistence! I got an idea any visiting would not be entirely social. Somewhere along the line business would rear its shaggy head. Okay, how about dinner at the Wedgewood Room tomorrow night?”
“Wonderful!”
Later at his own floor to his surprise he found Tom pacing the corridor. In a strained voice he said, “The clerk said a gentleman—”
Tom came back in a conciliatory tone, “And I don’t fit the description, eh? Well, anyway, Bill, we got things to talk over. How about it?”
Bill shrugged noncommittally, unlocked his door and the two entered. Perched on the arm of a chair, Bill lighted a cigarette and pulled deeply of it.
“Well, what is it?” He glanced coolly at his brother sitting with his left leg dangling over the arm of his chair.
Tom cleared his throat and said, “I—er, came to see how we’re stacking up, Bill. After all we got a big show on our hands and the whole world is waiting for the curtain to go up. But we can’t be squabbling between ourselves when we go on stage. Let’s settle matters now and get on with our job—after all we both got a lot at stake in the company.”
Bill studied the end of his cigarette a long moment. “I guess you might as well count me out, Tom. I’m quitting the show.”
Furrows appeared above Tom’s brows. “Quitting! And after all you’ve put into the venture? Bill, have you gone nuts?” He stopped a moment. Then he said, “Oh, I guess I see the light. Christy, eh? Well, Bill, honest—and I really mean this—you can have all the profits of the trip if I’m guilty of trying to take Christy away from you. You’ve got the wrong slant on things.”
Bill shrugged, saying, “It’s not that—and I still am not convinced—it’s just that I’m considering another proposition.”
Tom got to his feet in agitation, looking down at Bill incredulously. “My God, Bill, you sure have changed! What about all those bull sessions we had reading and rereading the George Staker philosophy of free enterprise? The world needs an object lesson to show how far it has strayed from those first wonderful days of the Atomic Age. We are heirs, Bill by special franchise, Old George saw the shape of things to come pretty clearly, and it’s up to us to carry out his vision of things as they should be.”
Bill ground out his cigarette in a tray. His underlip crowded out stubbornly. “I’m not going.”
For a moment Tom stared hard at Bill, and a heavy singing silence lay between them. Then Tom strode to the door and opened it. “All right, Bill—you and I are through!”
The door slammed. For awhile Bill sat looking at it, wondering why the slammed door reminded him of looking at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and telling himself “I’m scared—scared as hell. And if I don’t get hold of myself, I’m through—washed up!”
THE NEXT day when he was busily dressing, the ultrafax popped out the breakfast edition.
“Space Bird takes off for Beta Quadrant. Tom Staker gambles all.”
Bill stared at the pictures of the rocket climbing savagely at the head of a column of fire. The crazy, stubborn fool. Going it alone, risking his neck and everybody else’s aboard. Well, let him go out there and break his blasted neck on the Asteroid Belt.
For the next three days Bill saw much of Margo. She was the most exciting thing he had ever discovered, and he indulged her laughingly when she took to speaking of his position in Intercontinental Lines as an accomplished fact.
On the third day he took Margo to lunch, a Margo with shining eyes, for this was Bill’s day of decision. She had done her work well.
He ordered for them, and added, “Also a bottle of champagne.”
The waiter brought the champagne first. There was no doubt on Margo’s features what this was about, even though it had always been “if”, “maybe”, “possibly” in Bill’s discussions with her about the new job.
In the midst of picking up his glass and proposing a toast, “Here’s to my new—” Bill stopped. The ultrafax had popped out a sheet. Carefully putting the glass down, he said, “That’s a special bulletin.”
Picking it up he read aloud, “Staker Rocket in serious trouble. Home field reports damage by small meteor. Crew on emergency air bottles. Mysterious emanations blind radar scope and disrupt communication with Earth.”
Tom—and the others, out there fighting for their lives against suffocation and intense cold. Their quarrel seemed like the antics of teenagers now. He had to get out to the field, see if he could help.
“What are you going to do?” Margo was watching him intently, the knuckles of her small hands white.
“I’m going to the field.”
“But—but what about that toast you were making to your new—job, that’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?” Her eyes were intense spots of jet.
“I guess that’ll have to wait, Margo,” he told her. “I can’t stand by when Tom needs help.”
Margo clutched his hands convulsively. “Bill, don’t take a rocket up or you’ll die in the same trap he’s dying in!” The words rushed out as if through a trapdoor she could not control.
Bill glanced at her with sharp, new interest. “How do you know it’s a trap, and how do you know he’s going to die?”
Tears began to well up in her large eyes. “All I can tell you is don’t go out there, Bill. I don’t want to lose you—now.”
Dawning realization filled Bill with horror. “Margo—Margo, for God’s sake, what kind of a game have you been playing with me!”
Margo’s shoulders sagged, and she began to sob out her story. “Bill, please, please believe me. I love you. That was not my part of the agreement with Asteroid Mining—to fall in love with you. Yes. I was hired to separate you and your brother, break up your company.”
Before Bill could snarl an answer to that, a hotel service clerk came with a portable phone.
“Call for you, sir.”
With his eyes fixed steadily on Margo, he spoke into the transmitter, “Captain Staker.”
Christy’s strained and tearful voice came over the wire. “Bill, oh, Bill, we’re getting terrible news here at the field. Tom’s ship is losing oxygen!”
“Yes, I know,” he answered. “I just got the Ultra on it. I’ll be right out, Christy.”
As he replaced the phone he looked at Margo with a grim, loathing expression. “A female trick as old as the universe and I had to fall for it. You and your innocent questions about our Quadrant trajectory! What a sucker I was!” He drew back his hand to slap her but decided against it. She was crying when he left.
On the way to the field the familiar but forgotten black tide of fear rose up like a spectre once more to scatter his gathering ideas for helping Tom. Resigning himself to its power and pulling over to the roadside, he sat still, gripping the wheel. Yes, he told himself tensely, here I sit while Tom and the others drift in space needing help. The realization of their need slowly gave him a greater objective clarity than he had ever had before. He began to see himself now for what he was—a cringing weakling stripped naked of all manliness at the first show of evil. Though he perhaps had been worse than the average, this was the trouble with his whole security minded generation. They never dreamed great dreams like George Staker and his era which wrested atomic power from the treasure house of nature. No, this generation carefully followed safe, charted paths in the world of ideas. It had given up its freedom to a world of government controlled monopolies. And Tom, taking up the torch left by their creatively imaginative ancestor, was trying to recapture a small facet of that golden age.
WITH THE dawning in him of Mid-Twentieth Century mind, Bill felt a thrilling sense of freedom as the black tide receded over the horizon of his inner world. He took a new firm grip on the wheel, and took off again at high speed.
Christy was at the field office waiting outside. As he stepped out of the car, she threw her arms around him.
“Oh, Bill, what can you do for Tom now?”
He said gently
, “I’ll bring him back for you.”
She drew back her head to look at him incredulously, “You still think—! Oh, Bill, you foolish guy, you’re the one I love, the one I’ve always loved.”
For a moment he searched her eyes and saw only a revelation of honest feeling. A surging gladness flooded through him, releasing an unconscious hard ball of tension inside.
“Christy, what a knothead I’ve been!” He gathered her up to kiss her fervently. “So long, Christy. Old Staker was a piker at dreaming compared to what I’m dreaming for you and me!”
The field men had the rocket fueled up and provisioned to go. “This’ll be no picnic, but there’s a prize out there if we want it bad enough. You’ll all have a share in it, instead of handing it all over to the government. Are you with Tom and me?”
“Sure, Bill. Let’s go!”
“Yeah, let’s open ‘er wide up!”
They all clambered up the ship’s access ladder in high spirits. In a moment a warning red signal rocket shot into the sky and burst, warning all local aircraft. Another five minutes and the rocket leapt off the Earth with a long, shattering roar.
Bill kept the fissioning metals pouring through the atomic explosive after-chambers until the men screamed at the acceleration. Finally he eased it off to free flight and the Space Dragon followed the trajectory of the Space Bird.
All the way he hovered over the radar scope. Then after long hours of fatiguing watching he crawled into his bunk.
Later he woke up to Radarman Jones’ voice in his ear.
“Captain—wake up. We’ve picked up a ship on the scope!”
Bill piled out and forced his floating feet to magnetic contact with the steel deck. He followed Jones down the short corridor to the communications cabin.
At the radar scope Bill studied the ship, then gave orders decelerating the Space Dragon.
“There’s another ship!” Jones exclaimed, pointing at the edge of the scope.
Bill peered at the new ship, studying its characteristics. Then he nodded his head. “It’s the Space Bird all right. But that first one—I got an idea it must be an Asteroid Mining ship. Margo must have transmitted the Space Bird trajectory to Asteroid Mining. I don’t see how anybody would know where to find us in such immense distances as Beta Quadrant.”
Stepping over to the communications panel he called the Space Bird. No answer, and though he kept calling he could not raise the ship.
Then he called Staker Field on Earth.
“Caxton?”
The field came back. “Staker Field. Go ahead.”
“Caxton, we’ve found the Space Bird but can’t speak to them, so I’m cutting you in on communications with an Asteroid Mining ship that’s hanging around. Tape pictures and sound—the whole works.”
“Okay.”
Flipping another switch, Bill called the strange ship on the all-interplanetary frequency.
Suddenly after long minutes of silence the dark screen lighted up with the impassive features of a round faced, cold eyed man.
“Yeah? This is the Pluton. What d’you want—and who are you?”
“This is the Space Dragon—sister ship to the Space Bird there in your vicinity. What’s the matter with our ship?”
The man’s eyes darkened and his jaws tightened. “There’s plenty wrong with it, Space Dragon. And the same thing’s going to be wrong with your ship, too. A ‘meteor’ is going to hit your ship the same as hit the Space Bird. Asteroid Mining doesn’t like competitors horning in their business!”
Bill shot back grimly, “I’m glad to hear your views on competition, Mister. The whole world is interested in our Project Venture, and when they hear what you said there’s going to be hell to pay. Because, you see, everything you say and how you look saying it is being recorded back at Staker Field on Earth!”
The other man’s impassive face suddenly turned into a ludicrous mask of a man burning his fingers on hot chestnuts. The two way hook-up abruptly ended. On the scope Bill and Jones watched the image of the Pluton begin to move across the scope and finally out of range in the opposite direction toward Asteroid Mining’s Omega Quadrant.
Hours later the Space Dragon made physical contact with Tom’s ship. Bill was the first one through the communicating airlock.
Tom, his face drawn and haggard, met him as he emerged in the ship. The rest of the crew were lying still to conserve air.
“Hi, Bill. Boy, are we glad to see you. That ‘meteor’ they threw at us confined us on air bottles in the forward compartments.”
Bill shook his hand warmly. “We got enough air for all of us. After we patch things up here, let’s start carving us a chunk of private enterprise.”
Tom’s tired eyes lighted up. “Hm, say, you’re so right! Our geigers have found enough floating ore in Beta Quadrant already to make a big nick in Asteroid’s business.”
Bill gave him a mock salute, “Okay, skipper. You’ve earned the title of Head Dreamer, and I’ll help make your dreams come true!”
———— THE END ————
THOU GOOD AND FAITHFUL
John Brunner
When Man starts exploring other planets, he must expect to meet alien beings. Some, of course, will be friendly; some violently hostile; some utterly uninterested. And some may be far ahead of us in development. The explorers need caution!
The big ship eased leisurely out of hyperspace, solidified into reality, and settled with a few prim puffs from its steering jets into an orbit around the planet.
“There it is, captain,” said Deeley with pardonable pride.
The captain nodded, pipe clenched between his teeth, and said, “I wonder what we’ll find here.”
In seventy years of wandering he had grown to expect the unexpected.
Around him in the big cabin that tradition insisted on calling the bridge the four senior officers under his command sat at their control desks, from which each co-ordinated the information provided by his particular department. Officially, Deeley’s title was Nav; Spinelli’s, Engines; Engelhart, Personnel; Adhem, Biological, and Keston, Observation. In practice, these names were pretty elastic.
The planet filled nearly half of the direct viewport with blue-green radiance, dimmed in patches by the presence of two atmosphereless moons which lay like dark stones in a shallow shining pool. Beyond it hung the curtain of ten million stars—a mass of dusky gold, the very center of the galaxy.
It didn’t yet seem right that there should be stars packed so thick in any planet’s sky.
The captain’s name was Chang—a good terrestrial name—but he had been raised on New Earth, Alpha Centauri IV, way out towards the rim of the galaxy, where the stars were no more than occasional flecks of gold in the dark velvet of the sky. Here in the neighborhood of the Hub it was different. Here it was the black that pitted the bright.
The world below looked to be a good world, though it was maybe twice as old as Earth. This was an older part of the universe. There were a few brilliant clouds in its atmosphere, and there were wide seas, but not so wide as Earth’s, being less than half the surface of the planet. And chlorophyll green shone bright on the spectroscopes.
There were no deserts and no ice-packs.
Behind him, Keston of Observation cleared his throat and said, “Captain, here’s the data on the planet.”
“Let’s have,” said Chang.
“Density, mass and surface grav are so close to Earth normal we can’t differentiate them. Air’s a little thin—about thirteen point six pounds at sea level, I guess—and high on C02 and low on oxygen, but only about a per cent each way. Plenty of water vapor—in short, breathable. Forty-five per cent of the surface is ocean. Has a twenty-nine-hour day and about an eleven-month year. It’s an older world than Earth, and the pull of the moons and the sun have respectively lengthened the day and shortened the year.”
Chang nodded, said, “Is that all?”
“Just about. We haven’t made out any evidence of habitation y
et, but that’ll come if it exists. There’s a lot of vegetation—chlorophyll vegetation—both in and out of the sea.”
Chang took his pipe out of his mouth and blew smoke. He said, “Good. Tell me if you get anything else, will you.”
“Right, sir.”
He sucked on his pipe ruminatively, relaxing in his chair before the viewport. A planet matching Earth this close was a find in a million, literally, for an oxygen-high atmosphere was the second most unstable of all possible atmospheres and rarely survived, whereas chlorine-high, hydrogen-high and methane-high were all too common. It could mean retirement and ease for them when the colonists came. They could ask their own price for an acre of ground.
Assuming it was uninhabited and theirs by right of prior discovery, that was, and he felt it might be. This close to the Hub, where the ships that had been so far might be numbered on your fingers, a previous discovery was unlikely, and as for indigenous races, oxygen reactions seemed to build unstable life forms which died quickly. A world twice as old as Earth might once have been inhabited—
But he was basing his judgments on data gathered far away. Too far away. Here, everything might very well be new.
From behind him, Keston said: “Sir, Sandiman thinks he’s found signs of habitation on the inner moon.”
“Indigenous or planted?” said Chang.
“Can’t tell, sir, but I’d advise investigation.”
“We’ll take a look at it, then,” said Chang with decision. “Engines!”
“Sir?” said a quiet voice with a lilting Romance accent. Spinelli had inherited that from an ancestor more than half a millennium ago, back in the days before the races merged.
“Shift us over to the nearer moon,” said Chang.
“Sir,” said Spinelli.
The viewport changed. For an instant there was the golden glory of stars. Then the barren, airless, pitted face of the inner moon began to show clearly, lit by the reflected light of its primary, and at last hung steady, almost filling the viewport, while they played off its attraction against an antigrav beam. Chang looking it over, said, “Keston, have someone put a ’scope on this port, will you?”