by Jerry
THE CAIN I hadn’t been spaceborne for more than an hour when I ran into the girl. I remembered that I hadn’t locked my cabin door and it isn’t a good idea for an incognito patrolman to leave, his belongings where any steward or passenger can wander in and examine them. I dashed down the short corridor to the right-angled axial junction when I gave an “oof!” and the oncoming girl bounced off me into a heap.
“Pardon me,” I said stupidly, “I wasn’t watching where I was going.” I helped the girl to her feet and I could see she was a beauty. This was my chance to be charming—I thought. She’d make a nice dinner companion, although you wouldn’t get much eating dories. I opened my mouth to start talking—and-it stayed open like a gasping fish out of water.
“Fool!”, she said viciously, and for a moment I’d have sworn there was pure hate in her eyes. Before I could recover my aplomb she turned and walked quickly away. I shrugged and silently consoled myself that I was lucky at that. She was really nasty. I had an uneasy feeling that there was something wrong with that girl, though. Long space trips aren’t so exciting that you can afford to ignore your fellow passengers. I lit a cigarette and went back to my cabin.
For the next few days I watched for the girl. I found her name was Dell Armand but there were no other vital statistics available. She didn’t appear at mess at all. Then I saw her a second time.
She was walking rapidly toward her cabin and there was a twisted look of pain on her face. Beads of perspiration stood out on her forehead, and it was apparent she was in agony. I noticed also that she walked with a limp. As I drew abreast of her I asked: “Are you well? Can I help you?”
She shook her head mutely but with a savage abruptness that made me wonder and she hurried on. Then I noticed something else. In the brief glimpse I’d gotten of her eyes I noticed—I thought—a yellowish glint in the pupils. And that meant everything to me. That girl was a ziller or my name wasn’t Smith! I should know, too, because I’d just come off the Martian patrol where we spent nine tenths of our time tracking down the damned zillers and their suppliers. Zilleen is the System’s most savage and insidious drug! This girl was either a peddler or smuggler and certainly a user.
I moved fast then.
I waited until the girl left her cabin again. It was the work of a minute to force the lock. I searched the loom from top to bottom, but there wasn’t a trace of zilleen. The room, was clean. Yet I knew something was wrong.
I decided to brazen it out. There was a large clothes rack in one corner of the room. I hid myself behind it, selected a position where I could see the room clearly, and waited. I had a long wait, but finally the girl came into the room. There was that same look of pain on her face that I’d seen before. Ignoring everything, she fumbled into a box in the handbag she was carrying and withdrew, a long hypodermic needle. I watched, puzzled. Zilleen isn’t injected—ordinarily it’s taken by mouth. She lifted her skirt, exposing an attractive length of thigh. Without hesitation, she gritted her teeth and plunged the needle into her bared skin. In a moment the look of pain left her face.
“And what was the idea of that? Zillers don’t use needles!”
She whirled and faced me. A little pistol appeared, as if by magic, in her hand and she fired, at the same time dashing for the door. The-shot caught me in the arm, but I was after her in a flash. She moved fast and disappeared down the corridor.
She was-gone. The red light on the lifeboat locker was glowing and I couldn’t force the door against atmospheric pressure.
“She had taken a lifeboat and was gone, but she couldn’t get far.
I went to Control and described the incident. The ship’s officers were already aware that a boat had taken off. They immediately sent out pulse messages and I knew the girl would be picked up in a matter of hours. Certainly her confederates would be waiting in space. She was attempting-to get to Earth.
Patrol did pick her up and I learned that what I had suspected when she used the hypo was true. It was loaded with novocaine. She was carrying a small tantalum cylinder embedded in her thigh, using a local anesthetic to cut the pain. The cylinder was loaded with zilleen concentrate!
Terran Treachery Trips Luna
Charles Recour
I THREW the last shovel-full into the aluminum cart and straightened up. I had an intolerable urge to scratch an itch developing on the tip of my nose, but you can’t pull your arm out of the. sleeve of a tight-fitting. Mark III spacesuit. I ignored it—the only thing to do. You can go batty thinking about and the imaginary itches that exist when you’re in a “can.”
The chronometer said four. I’d been out two hours. That was long, enough, especially since the cart was fun. I hardly glanced at it; it doesn’t take long to get used to crystal-clear diamonds by the hundreds of kilograms—they’re as common as coal almost out they still bring fancy prices; industry eats ‘em up. Barrett and I were due to make a killing Jus trip and God knows we deserved to. The preceding trip hadn’t garnered us ten kilos.
That reminded me. “Hey, Barrett!” I called into cue built-in mike, “I’m comin’ in. How about you?” There was no answer. And that was odd, because we’re supposed to be on open circuit at all times. The dark side of Luna is no place to fool around.
“Hey, Barrett,” I repeated, “if your radio’s dead, use the signal rocket.”
No answer. I moved fast. I loaded the tools in the cart on top of the heap of glistening baubles. I made sure the aluminum marker standard was fastened tight and erect. I’d be coming back here and I wanted to find the spot. There were plenty of credits to be taken out of the place yet.
The aluminum was built line an old-fashioned children’s wagon. I grabbed the tongue and started for the rocket. It was a good five kilometers away and r couldn’t see it from here, because Moon “terrain” isn’t exactly smooth. It wasn’t too hard going, though. I moved fast, and in a little while I’d covered two kilometers, rounded the rise directly before the ship, and in a minute I could clearly see the slim cylinder of metal, its nose pointed skyward. It lay on a wide flat plain with nothing around it—or was there?
Something was moving a half kilo away.
It was Barrett. He too was tugging at the tongue of his cart and he was headed straight for the ship. I called once more into the mike but there was no answer. He didn’t look around. It seemed mighty funny to me that a radio would go dead. Those things were as faithful as dogs.
An uneasy feeling gripped me. For some reason I sensed everything wasn’t all right. I trusted Barrett, but after all I didn’t really knew him well and we were making a mighty big haul this trip. The nasty thought that he might decide to skitter, leaving me to die, crossed my mind but I didn’t want to think it. I had a signal pistol. This would answer my doubts.
I arced a beautiful red and white flare for “attention” a hundred meters in front of him. I could see him jerk his head as he spotted it. He turned, saw the dot that was me. But instead of waving or stopping, he broke into a run—if you can call the hopping skip of a bounce on the Moon a run—and headed straight for. the ship a half kilo-away. He dropped the tongue of the cart he was driving.
There was no question about this. The devil was going to take off. He was a half kilo from the ship. I had a full kilo to run. But I was fired, with that mad desperation that overtakes anyone when death is at his heels. I no longer ran. I bounced in huge mad leaps, exerting every effort, heedless of my pounding heart, of the stifling sweat-filled space suit.
Barrett ran too. But he was a lot heavier anymore awkward than I was. He saw that I was gaining. He stopped, turned and whipped a shot from his signal gun at me. My speed prevented me from getting it but the shot was too close for comfort. I fired once, twice, while on the move. That was enough to send him rolling on.
But he had lost precious seconds and my effort was now super-human. I wasn’t far away arid there was a good chance I’d make the lock at the same time as he. He realized this and stopped. This time he took careful aim. I realized
that he’d nail me if I got any closer; it was a matter of only a hundred meters or. so. In desperation I snapped two more shots at him.
I was lucky. One of them caught his. leg—at least, ripped fabric. I could see him forget all about shooting. He doubled, over and grasped with frantic haste at his suit.
In minutes I had him aboard—this time trussed like a chicken. He glared at me through sullen eyes but I didn’t care I’d make damned sure next time that I partnered with a friend, not a treacherous Moon-hound!
The Battle of the Buccaneers
E. Bruce Yaches
A “fantastic” vignette
BEING a patrolman in the Asteroid Belt is not the System’s most glamorous job.
I push my vessel, little bigger than a commercial liner’s lifeboat, on routine courses, checking on a radar-pulse beacons, occasion ally help out a miner, like running a sick man into Ceres I—and in general do little necessary jobs like that. The awesomeness of space wears off fast and the only thing left to do is study—at the rate I’m going I’ll be an expert in everything.
I was moving along at maybe ten centimeters’ acceleration when I first saw the damaged lifeboat. I braked away my kinetic energy with a nose blast and pulled up to lock to the stricken craft. It was a wreck. It looked as if it had badly sheered itself in passing through an air-lock and the stern was riddled with holes suspiciously like those made with an automatic gun of some sort.
You don’t expect to find life aboard something like that, so my eyes nearly popped out of my head when I opened the lock and stepped aboard. A spacesuit was all that kept the girl alive, for the air was gone and through the helmet I could see she’d taken a nasty bump on the head. I hustled her aboard the patroller and got the suit off her. She came around quickly enough. The initial fright left her face when she learned she was aboard a patroller. Her name was Elena Graff and she was a stewardess aboard the freighter-liner Cain. Holding a cigarette in her still trembling fingers she told me what had happened.
“. . . They boarded us after a big shoot-up, lieutenant,” she said, “and you know how those things go.” Momentarily her eyes dropped to her torn uniform—where mine had been all the time—and she went on. “I suppose they’re after the uxan ore and whatever drugs the ship carried. We had half a dozen women besides myself aboard.” She shuddered. “I still don’t know how I managed to tear away from that monster. I got into a boat and nearly wrecked it getting away. They almost caught me, as you saw. But somehow . . .”
“This couldn’t have happened more than a half hour ago,” I said. “That gives me time to do something. I won’t break radio silence, just in case they’re monitoring. But we’ll give them a shoot they won’t forget.”
Watching my scanner closely and with the help of the vectors of the escaped lifeboat I plotted a course. It was only a matter of minutes before we were on them. The freighter-liner was cut up badly about the stern tubes and three small pirate vessels lay alongside. I could clearly see the transfer of containers going on.
I beamed ’em a surrender call. There was no answer for a moment, just a lot of bustling around and then a rifle in a turret aboard one of the pirates swung in our direction. That was foolish. I was glancing down the sight and I had the ship lined up. Running axially down my boat was a hundred-millimeter cannon with recoil blocker. I pressed the firing key. There was a flash of light and the explosive projectile blew the turret neatly from the pirate.
In quick succession I dumped a half dozen shells into the clustered pirate ships. Before they were wrecked they managed to put a light shell through my hull, but we could do without air momentarily; spacesuits take care of that. My transmitter had already contacted base and it would be only a short time before a cruiser would come out and pick us all up. All I had to do was sit tight and prevent any boats from escaping. And they wouldn’t be likely to try it with a hundred-millimeter targeting on them.
“Elena,” I said to the girl watching the quick fray breathlessly, “that’s it. This’ll mean an Ionian visit for the next few days—arraignment and reports, et cetera. I’ll have time on my hands too.”
“Then we both won’t have any to waste.” I placed a spacesuited hand over hers. . . .
Some Day I’ll Do it Again
Charles Recour
A fantastic vignette
I AGED ten years in that minute.
The realization, that the ship wasn’t there came over me. slowly, it seemed. One minute it was there and the next, it wasn’t, but it seemed as though a long time elapsed between the two perceptions. Around me the last hunks of asteroidal rock rode in their calm perpetual orbits.
It’s hard to capture that feeling in words. One minute you’re part of a naming exploration party, working an asteroidal clump. You’ve been out an hour. The next minute you’re a single human being isolated amid the bleak vastness of empty space, accompanied only by a cluster of rock.
I could feel the sweat burst out on my forehead and my armpits were icy. For a minute panic swept over me and I screamed madly into the mike, but only the hissing of background noise responded in the earphones. “All right, you fool,” I told myself aloud, “relax—you’re in a bad situation, but they’ll miss you in a short while and then they’ll come back.” That sounded sensible and I wanted to believe it, but I knew I couldn’t. I was a human being, and alone in the Asteroid Belt. My ship-bright now—was blasting, away.
By sheer will I forced myself to think. What could I do? A relieved, almost hysterical laugh came from my lips. I unhitched. the emergency pulser from the back of my suit and clutched it to me as though I would never let it go—and I wouldn’t. This was my one possible link with living. If it didn’t work I could imagine .myself dying. For another six hours there’d be enough air. Oh, I wouldn’t have to worry. But then the carbon dioxide would start to thicken and my breath-would come faster and I’d breathe hard and heavily and no air would come and I’d choke and scream—and then I’d quiet down and my oxygen-starved brain would finally find peace. I shuddered and shook my head.
I almost hated to push the button on the pulser. Once I set it working it would send out high-energy, high-frequency pulses which could be picked up by a radar scanner for almost a million miles. More with a more sensitive receiver. It would do that for ten minutes and then the batteries would slowly die and there’d be silence and that would be the cutting of my final link.
But every moment that passed meant that the ship was getting farther away. I pushed the button. I slid my tuner to the edge of the pulse’s frequency and caught it—it was working! Now all I could do was wait and hope that the radar, watch wouldn’t miss the tiny blip my pulser would be creating on the screen. All I had to do was wait. . . .
A pulser isn’t like a bonfire—in appearance at least. You can’t see anything happen—rail you know is that the invisible radio waves are going, out. You can’t warm yourself at them and you don’t have the leaping flames, not in outer space you don’t. But your mind converts the pulser into a mental bonfire and you warm yourself at the imaginary waves. I stared around me and watched until my eyes ached for the faintest flicker of a reddish flame, and after a while the strain was so great that I just shut my eyes and hoped.
They picked me up twenty minutes later. When I got aboard I passed out, and for days I wouldn’t look put a port into that infinite vastness. The doctor says he doubts if I’ll ever get into a spacesuit again, but I don’t believe him. I know I will—someday. . . .
He Lived . . . To Die
E. Bruce Yaches
A fantastic vignette
THE KID closed the control-room door quietly as he went out.
MacGregor looked at me. “That punk gives me the creeps,” he said viciously, “always beating his gums about theory. Theory, hell! This ship runs on facts. What do they teach these kids at Nuc-Eng—nothing but theory? I tell you, Skipper, if I have to serve much longer with that smart aleck, I’m gonna get a transfer to Base.”
“Wait a
minute, Mac,” I cautioned. “You’ve got him tagged wrong. Jannings is a good boy. You’ve been riding him too hard. Remember this is his first deep space run. He’s doing his job. Let him alone, Mac—and that’s an order.”
And I meant it, too. I could see from the way Mac’s lip curled, he didn’t like the mild chewing out, but I ran a taut craft and, with thirty million creds of Venusian drugs aboard, I didn’t want any kind of trouble. Mac ordinarily was a good sport, but ever since we’d shipped Jannings, just out of nuclear rocket engineering school and full of enthusiasm, Mac had taken to riding him. As an assistant chief engineer, Jannings couldn’t be forced to do the dirty work on controls, but Mac gave him the business in plenty of other nasty ways. I didn’t like it, but to avoid an open break with Mac I didn’t stop it soon enough. The result was that Mac was driving the kid batty, although I’ll admit he took it more graciously than I’d expected him to.
Mac was old-time, Jannings new. The mixture doesn’t sit well and, in spite of the rigid discipline of spacemen, things can get out of hand. I clamped down on Mac, but I realized that there were a thousand different little ways in which Mac could make life annoying aboard the Canopus for Jannings. Make him do two eight-hour watches in a row, for example, make him run a double-cycle check on the feeders—oh, there were plenty of ways.
Then, mercifully, Mac came down with a virus throat infection, a pick-up from Venusport, no doubt, and the kid had peace. As senior assistant he took over Engineering and, as far as I was concerned, everything ran smoothly. He knew his stuff most of the time we ran on automatics anyhow—and all the way around we had no trouble. I got to know Jannings better and found out that, as usual, he was just a star-struck kid with the spacemen’s lust in his bones. He’d come through Nuc-Eng from an Iowa farm, but he wasn’t a farmer when it came to rocket engineering. He knew, before we were a week out, every single nut and bolt in the Canopus, and that’s a job!