The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “In the morning I made you take a cold shower and took you out for a long walk and a warm breakfast before you showed any signs of being normal. Then you began to talk more like a man should—but, by God, NOW I think you were still drunk then, because here we are and we haven’t got a thimble-full of white metal or yellow metal or anything!”

  Hanson stopped and glared accusingly at the other. Timothy tried to stare back in righteous innocence, but he found it impossible. All he could muster up was a look of stubborn defiance.

  “I wasn’t drunk when I told you about that platinum, Hanson,” he said in a mildly peevish voice. As his companion remained silent as if to hear what more he had to say, Timothy went on a little more confidently. “It’s true, Hanson, every word of it. It’s just like I told you. I went prospecting with four others in a ship that we pooled our money to buy. We scouted around six months and two of the fellows died. One ran out of oxygen and we found him suffocated to death in his vacuum suit. The other got a fever and died aboard the boat. It was the next asteroid after that. We picked up ore samples and the platinum ran through every one of them in gray streaks. We almost went crazy with joy. We stayed long enough to get the limits of the ore bed and took about a ton of rock aboard. I was the only one of the party that could figure the position of the asteroid—that’s why they never let me do any dangerous prospecting—I was too important.”

  Hanson grunted sarcastically but let Timothy finish his story.

  “Well, I figured the position, but something must have been wrong—either the asteroid slipped its orbit a bit or I made a mistake. You know these eyes of mine are kind of . . .”

  “Don’t say poor, ’cause they’re rotten!” burst in Hanson. “No wonder you never found that asteroid again. I don’t think you could recognize white metal if you saw it.”

  This stung the shrinking Timothy to a bit of spirit.

  “I’ll have you know, Hanson,” he piped sharply to the Other’s surprise, “that they wouldn’t have known they had white metal if I hadn’t been along. Why they brought in the stuff and swore at it because it didn’t look good to them. I picked up some lumps and began to yell like a demon. It was a fortune in platinum.

  “But,” he sighed wearily, “when we came back with a government official who was going to plot the claim and enter it in legal records, we couldn’t find the asteroid. My figures were off somehow. The official refused to stay and wait for us to search for it, so we had to go back. It took every cent we got from that ton of ore for fees and fuel and the rest. So there we were with nothing. The other two fellows began to quarrel the last evening we were together in a drink-shop and one of them stabbed the other to death. He was electrocuted. I’m the only one left of the five of us who saw that asteroid and saw the ore . . .”

  “And damn it all, you’ll never see it again, nor will I. What did I do after I believed you? I sold that land I had on earth and drew every cent I had and even that wasn’t enough to finance this. I am ten thousand dollars in debt. Six months we’ve plugged away on these asteroids. Every time you said ‘Ah, that’s it! There it is—that’s the asteroid, I remember that three-cornered rock,’ we landed and broke our backs digging and chopping in the rocks. And what have we got for it? What have we got for it?” he roared at the wincing Timothy.

  “Hanson, don’t get wild . . . it isn’t my fault. I told you before we started that we might never find it; that I knew only its approximate position because of that mistake in my figures. I told you that; how can you blame me?” whined Timothy, for he was getting frightened at the deadly sparkle in the other’s eyes, the nervous clasping and unclasping of those pitifully lacerated hands.

  “Timothy!” said Hanson. His voice was low, but pregnant with ominousness. “Timothy, we haven’t got enough fuel left to do any more scouting around. We’ve got to go back to Mars. But back at Mars they’ve got a debt against me of ten thousand dollars. I have no way of getting that much money except working. It would take the rest of my life to pay it off.

  Hanson looked dolefully at the aluminum tub filled with worthless rock, symbolizing the failure of their prospective venture. Timothy felt a cold panic arise in his heart. Something in Hanson’s voice . . .

  “So I’ve decided, Timothy,” went on Hanson with that timbre of deadliness in his tone, “that there is no use my going back. Nor you coming back! I’m disappointed, disgusted, in debt, and . . . MAD! And Timothy, you remember what I said I liked to do when I was mad? I like to choke somebody . . .”

  Timothy screamed in mortal fear as the burly Hanson, eyes hot coals of insanity, leaped at him. With unwonted, fear-produced agility, the little man evaded the grasping paws and jumped to the engine room, closing the door behind him.

  l Prospecting for precious metals or for precious stones was one of the hardest and most dangerous occupations in the twenty-second century A.D. Any prospector, successful or bankrupt would tell you that if you got him to talk. And yet at the same time it was a fascinating pursuit and could be productive of enormous wealth. The reading matter of the time abounded with the life stories of famous fortune seekers who had come back from the reaches of outer space with the locations of wealth-reeking places.

  Most of these finds were on the asteroids, those little world-like rocks that circle about the sun in between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter; some no bigger than a mountain; some a few hundred miles in greater diameter; all of them irregular in shape and totally barren of life. Such a thing as soil, sand, water or air was unknown on them. They were a personification of lifelessness.

  But they were made of rock and rock often has embedded in it metals that are useful on the civilized worlds nearer the sun. Gold, silver, platinum, beryllium, copper, and various other metals were to be found. Then there were the precious stones—diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and even new ones that were unknown on other worlds. With such possibilities of treasure to lure the more adventurous of men, the asteroids had become a popular field of exploitation. By the thousands the fortune seekers left the inhabited worlds in their little ether boats and scouted snoopingly amongst those cold, airless rocks, seeking those waiting metals and jewels. The public news broadcasts would blare out periodically that so-and-so had returned from the asteroids and was now opulent with the pelf he had wrested from frigid space.

  But it was as dangerous a pursuit as productive. Fully one half of the outgoing adventurers never were heard of again. There were enormous hazards in the venture. Whizzing meteors there were that pierced the ether boats to make them airless, frozen coffins for the occupants. Then it took high skill and a good smattering of celestial mechanics to guide the boats about amongst the asteroids. The prospectors had the everpresent danger of collision with one of them to worry about, for they were often but scant hundreds of miles apart, each with its own peculiar orbit.

  One had to know what to do when one saw a gigantic rock with sharp crags and peaked spires rushing like a demon upon one in black space. The worst of it was that they reflected so little light. Only by the blocking out of stars in the field of vision could one distinguish them when near, for the distant sun—just a little red ruby amongst the pin-point stars—shed very little of his light that far away.

  The process of landing on an asteroid was a story in itself. The pilot had to carefully swing the boat about so that he would parallel the motion of the particular asteroid he wished to visit. Then, by judicious rocket thrusts, he had to gently swing his boat nearer to the object until its feeble gravitation could grasp it and pull it downward like a feather. The pilot had to watch that his hull did not smash directly upon a needle-like spire of rock, or settle into a gully surrounded by elevations, for that would make it hard to get away again. An open stretch of fairly level rock was the ideal landing place.

  Once happily landed, the real work would begin. Into a vacuum suit and out of the boat, equipped with a steel pick and an electric drill; also such necessities as a spare oxygen tank, food tablets (inside the suit), a flash
light hanging on the belt, a battery to run the heating coils, a bag for rock samples strapped on the back, and the miniature radio set, with which last item the wearer could keep in constant touch with someone back in the boat. Any spot would be picked out and then the silent blows of the sharp, leaden-weighted pick would work into the crumbly rock and dislodge samples of it.

  A small number of pieces of rock, each from a spot a few yards apart, would suffice for that one place. These went collectively into a small bag and this into the big bag on his back. Then the prospector would change his locale, moving at least a quarter mile away. Here he repeated the sampling, using the drill if the rock was hard and unyielding. As he moved from place to place, gradually filling the big bag, he had to keep his sense of direction in order, and also had to carefully observe any markings he could, not only to be able to find the place again, but to be able to return to the boat, which would be invisible most of the time. Some prospectors had applied their brains to the task and had simple but effective systems by means of which these important details were consummated.

  Then back to the boat he would go to look over the ore samples. This would consume hours of time for almost every asteroid had a different type of rock and one could easily miss a valuable find if one were careless.

  Thus would the time fly. With the constant going in and out, the air in the boat, which was pleasantly warmed while out in space, would become cool and variable in density, although the automatic heaters and densifiers did a valiant job and kept the lack of comfort within reasonable limits.

  Then the constant confinement in the stuffy suits would tell on the wearer’s health, often precipitating fevers and deadly agues. The work, light by reason of “the small gravitation, was, however, enormous when stretched over periods like six months. Then, although it was easy to swing the pick, it was also proportionately hard to affect the rock with the almost weightless implement. It was the pure muscular strength of the man, operating on the mass of the pick, that split the rock. Then the food, compressed and cold-storage, brought all sorts of ills to the prospectors, so that after a few months of such life, he would be a mass of raw skin, stomach aches and bone aches.

  Then there were other hardships. The awful loneliness of silent space, that could make susceptible minds sink to brooding madness. The possibility of engine failure, shortage of fuel, shortage of the all-important oxygen, burning out of the battery-charging rocket motors, and a host of lesser things.

  CHAPTER II

  The Three-Cornered Rock

  l But the hardships, weighed against the lure of immense wealth that might stare them in the face at some time or another, meant nothing. By the thousands they went out and by the hundreds they came back, some potentially wealthy, others broken in health and fortune, to become dispirited wanderers. But the urge never left them. Back home from a trying trip with nothing to show for it except an empty pocket, they would pester friends and relations for financial help to go back for another try.

  The costs of prospecting in the asteroids were far more than local prospecting on an inhabited planet. The prospector had to buy his own ether boat, fuel, oxygen, implements and food. Then the costs of getting his boat into space were a very big item. Small boats like those were never equipped with the powerful engines that big liners had to leave and land on a planet. The owner had to pay a professional concern a certain sum of money for which they would clamp his little boat onto a huge-engined space tug-boat. This boat would take him about five hundred miles up where the little engine would then have enough power to propel it away from the powerful pull of the planet. On the return trip, the prospector had to stop his ship some thousand or so miles away from the planet and radio for a tugboat to bring him to the ground.

  If the prospector had made a find, he could pay the government officials with the ton or so of ore he had along to get a legal claim filed. A professional claim-filer would go along and use his intricate mathematics to mark the exact place on the exact asteroid for entering in the government records. Needless to say, their fees were high. Then the worst was over. With the ore samples, the prospector could sell out to some professional mining concern, or get sufficient backing to start one himself.

  There was tone other thing in the prospecting pursuit that had to be allowed for. The man or men must be able to find that particular asteroid again amongst the thousands there were. Consequently, one of the members along had to know enough about planetary mechanics to plot an orbit and rate of motion. If the asteroid was listed in the records, all well and good; there would be no further trouble in finding it again. But if it were one of the unknown ones (and there were many of them in those days) it would be necessary to use extreme care in plotting the orbit and motion.

  And it was this latter item that had brought about the trouble between Hanson and Timothy, as their boat rested on a small asteroid. Timothy had insisted he could recognize the asteroid again if only someone would finance a return trip. Hanson, himself a prospector of long standing and indifferent success, had taken the chance. Six months of ceaseless roving, sampling, and drilling had failed to reveal the wealth of platinum “by the three-cornered rock” as Timothy put it. Either Timothy’s memory of the three-cornered rock was badly distorted, or three-cornered rocks such as he had in mind were common, for he yelled “there it is” only too many times for Hanson’s patience and sympathy.

  Now Hanson was in a murdering mood, determined to vent his terrific anger on the little, red-nosed sot who had brought on him this profitless venture. It was not really Timothy’s fault. He had openly admitted in one of his rare sober moments that it was quite a long chance to take, but it was his drunken ravings that so incensed Hanson. For when Timothy was drunk, he could make the other’s eyes bulge and his mouth water, figuratively speaking, with his ceaseless talk about the precious white metal that should be around there somewhere. It irked Hanson all the more to think that even allowing for the error in Timothy’s figures, the find could not be so very far away. Possibly only a few thousand miles away was that bed of platinum ore guarded by the “three-cornered rock” that had infested Hanson’s dreams and flavored Timothy’s drunken speech.

  The door between the engine room and the main room was small protection for the frightened Timothy. Hanson heaved his great hulk against the door and lumbered into the room.

  “Come out here with me, you pickled rat!” ejaculated Hanson. He grabbed the screaming man by arm and leg and dragged him back to the main room.

  But Timothy became possessed with unusual strength as Hanson attempted to clutch his throat to satisfy his insane murder lust, and squirmed out of his hands. Hanson was thrown off balance by Timothy’s foot and flew toward the front wall. Timothy watched him with fearful eyes as he bumped with his shoulders and cavorted around in mid-air a moment trying to get his feet down.

  Hanson shook his eyes clear from the bump and fastened them on the luckless Timothy across the room.

  “Why, you little . . .” he said, filling out the sentence with a flood of harsh epithets. “Got me here. Got me in debt. Drove me crazy with your damned three-cornered rock. Do you think you can stop me?”

  With that he leaped toward Timothy in a long arc. But when he landed, Timothy had scuttled out of his reach with the cunning and agility of a monkey. He was silent for he knew it would be useless to remonstrate against the maddened, degenerate Hanson. But his fear-sharpened mind was working, working to save his miserable life. No one would care that he died. There was not a soul in the universe who would shed a tear to hear of his decease. But the drunkard wanted to live just as strongly as anyone else.

  When Hanson leaped at him again with a torrent of curses and maledictions Timothy had in his hand one of the largest rocks in the vat. There was a crunch as the fat man’s head met the rock. Then Timothy looked a bit dazedly at the still form stretched out on the floor.

  l Timothy had none of his companion’s bestiality in him. He had struck with the rock in pure self-defense. N
ow that it was over, he felt weak and frightened, even more frightened than he had been to see Hanson’s evil, mad eyes glaring at him in blood-lust. He felt dizzy and his wildly-beating heart refused to slow its pace.

  With a shuddering glance at Hanson’s sprawled form, he stepped carefully around it and staggered to the cupboard with weak knees. He looked back at times, wondering what he would do if his companion should suddenly arise, more angered than before. With eager trembling hands, he opened the cupboard door and clutched at the bottle of liquor therein. With long practiced skill, he tipped the half empty bottle to his lips and poured the fiery liquid down his tickling throat.

  Stimulated by the draught, he squared his shoulders somewhat and shook a warning finger at the senseless man.

  “You would try to choke me, you . . . you beast!”

  Timothy, for all his careless life, was not given to cursing.

  “Now see what that got you”—another swig from the bottle—“a good bump on the head. Wouldn’t believe me, huh? Thought that was my imagination or this . . . this drink here . . . but it’s true, every word of it. If I could only see that three-cornered rock from the right angle, I’d know it again. Might have passed it a dozen times for all we know—but it’s so hard to see around these asteroids . . . shadows . . .”

  With which words he finished the bottle and tossed it into the aluminum tub. Just as he did this, Hanson groaned and turned over. Timothy shrank into a corner and stared at him with fearful eyes. But the fat man relaxed again and became still.

  “Got to do something,” muttered Timothy. “He might try that again if I don’t get a chance to argue him out of it.”

  Some ten minutes of rambling thought finally resulted in an idea that caused the now pleasantly inebriated little man to snap his fingers in triumph, or to try to snap his fingers.