Operation Interstellar (1950)

by George O. Smith

  So in the next few hours Paul ransacked his spacecraft in complete futility. He was trapped on Harrigan’s Horror. Had Paul been ten times as proficient as he was with tools and calculations, the BurAst P. G. 1. still would have remained where it stood snuggled down in the heat-eroded ground of Harrigan’s Horror. His spacesuit—the one they left him—was nothing to wear while wandering around on the sunside of a close-in planet. He doubted whether he could cross the distance between the BurAst P. G. 1. and the relay station even had he the air to spare.

  Of course he had quite a bit of air, both bottled and revitalized from the greenery in the hold. But the greenery was none too healthy and the bottled goods was almost gone. His compressor could have been made to work and Paul could have made it to the station, but for what? To stand there and die? Or to die along the route in a leaky suit? Breaking into a fort was no more problem than breaching a relay station from the ground. They had been built to last for years against wind, erosion, burglars, pirates, and/or the pressures of the inner air against airless planets such as this.

  But Paul’s problem was not merely escape. He might have tried to make the relay station if this place offered any hope.

  Even then, Paul might have been able as a last-ditch measure, to break into the relay station somehow.

  Assuming that he could break into the station, that would let the air out. The only way one could break into such a station without letting the air out would be through the airlock, and breaking into that sort of bank-vault construction was no easier than cracking the wall without letting the air out.

  The nearest radio receiving set was five light years away at Neosol, and if he could beam the radio call, it would take five years—

  He looked at the Z-wave equipment and thought. Could it—?

  Whatever the rest of the universe thought about Paul Grayson and his idea about the Z-wave, Paul still had faith. Furthermore he knew as much about Z-wave gear as any other man alive, up to and including Haedaecker himself. Evans said that the Z-wave wouldn’t work; how bad could they foul Z-wave equipment? Could they foul the junk so bad that Paul wouldn’t be able to make repair? Or would they—

  Paul tried the radio. Naturally it was silent. But it was not dead. It gave a rattle of cosmic static.

  Four thundering blasts came in across the ultra-short wave band, four of the beacon’s outgoing transmitters unmodulated, directed at other stations across space to the nearer stars. He tried listening along the frequencies of the local oscillators of the receiving sets set to collect any incoming beacons but he realized that they would not be turned on yet; there was point in keeping the transmitters on, but there was no use in turning on a receiver four or five years before the signal got there. He hit another transmitter and as he listened to the unmodulated signal, it began to pip in a timing-signal sequence that some technician would use five to fifteen—or more—years from now when it arrived at some other star-station.

  They had not fouled the radio. But that was like letting a’ prisoner on Antarctica keep his hearing-aid. Not worth a damn for helping him escape.

  Paul then tried the Z-wave. It was not dead, so far as Paul could tell. It did not crackle with cosmic static, but there was a faint hiss. Paul wondered about the connection to the station across the plain. They must have some sort of connection otherwise the flanged-up evidence would not ring true.

  Paul began to tune the Z-wave receiver, just partly in hope and partly for lack of something to do.

  “Damn!” he swore.

  “Grayson! Grayson! That you?”

  Paul blinked. Hearing things—?

  “Grayson! Paul Grayson! Is that you?”

  Paul grabbed the microphone like a drowning man clutching a straw. “Hello! Hello Neoterra. This is Paul Grayson marooned on Harrigan’s Horror with a low air supply. I’m about two miles from the radio beac—”

  “Grayson! Forget it. I know where you are. This isn’t Neoterra. This is your old friend Evans waiting around in space until you stop trying things. For all we know, you might be able to figure a way out. Take it easy, pal. Such energy takes a lot of air—and you haven’t much left….”

  CHAPTER 12

  Nine days had passed according to the Solar clock on Paul’s instrument panel. Nine days with the air slowly becoming stale. It was beginning to smell a bit, now. Paul did not notice it particularly, but someone just in from a planetary atmosphere would say that the air reeked to high heaven. His senses were beginning to numb. This was not a fast death, but slow and sordid. Paul yawned constantly, and took deep heaving gulps of air only to try again.

  Paul fought sleep. He fought it because he knew that he might drift off to sleep never to awaken. But he had no recourse. Most of his time he spent a-sprawl on the cot in the instrument room because he had too little energy to be up and around and when he fought himself to get erect, there was nothing to do but to curse at the inert machinery. He had tried everything. He had considered everything, even up to and including the start of a diary in the hope that someday someone might find it.

  But it was a fruitless task. Sort of like putting a daily account on the bottom of a cave in the hope that someone, someday, might investigate the cave and find out what happened.

  He did not know the periodicity of Harrigan’s Horror. But the sun—still a catalog number—was running lower along the horizon. The beacon had been placed near enough to the South Pole of rotation so that it could always look at the distant stars to and from which the radio beacons ran. This was a nice job of latitude selection regarding the plane of the planet’s ecliptic and rotation for the Galactic Survey beams.

  But Paul was dully uninterested in facts. He slept more than he knew, and was awake much less than he believed. His dreams were vivid enough to make him believe that he was awake, excepting those that dealt with Nora Phillips and John Stacey, neither of whom could have been there.

  He was asleep, dreaming fitfully, when the spacecraft dropped down in a landing that would have made the air on any normal planet scream. It came down at nearly five gravities, its deceleration calculated to a fine degree of precision so that the zero-velocity moment of its computation coincided with the instant of contact. The drivers ceased and the ship settled into the gritty ground of Harrigan’s Horror.

  He did not hear the swift manipulation of the airlock from the outside controls.

  “Grayson” came the cry. .“Paul Grayson!”

  Paul looked up dazedly, sitting up. He was weak, and dizzy. But Paul pulled himself erect with the determination that he would not let them see how badly off he was. The very deliberate attempt showed them—showed them a man whose cheeks were hollow, whose lips were a bit blue, eyes glazed and whose mind was dull.

  He believed that he greeted them blithely, but what came from his mouth was a dry croak. Then he went to sleep again, sitting up on the cot, complete with a five day beard, and a shot-to-hell nervous system.

  But they wasted no time. Bundling him into a spacesuit, they let the air out of the BurAst P. G.l. with a blast and hurried him to their own ship. Then they took off at six gravities, a force that bent them all into their cushions. It did not touch Paul. He was dead to the world in the first pleasant, honest, comfortable sleep he had since the air began to go foul.

  And once again there were a couple of days of timelessness. It was very pleasant to have someone massage your muscles, to be steamed to the boiled-lobster point and then quick-frozen in a cold shower, followed by the ministrations of three dozen professional wrestlers. Gallons of cold water and miles of fresh air, a daily shave with a hot towel and a facial massage, good food and boiling tea, a pipe of aromatic tobacco, forty-eight hours of deep sleep—

  And Paul, dressed in clean shirt and slacks and once more back to normal, was facing an elderly gentleman that looked like Santa Claus.

  “I’ll come to the point,” said the elderly gentleman. “I am Franklin Huston. I am one of a group of men whose desire is completely political. This time
it is also a bit personal. Perhaps you are one of the few men we can talk to who knows something about Nora Phillips.”

  “I have met Nora Phillips.”

  “We know.”

  “I’d like to meet Miss Phillips again.”

  “That all depends.”

  “On what?”

  Huston spread his hands. “Possibly upon whether she is still alive.”

  “Alive! ” roared Paul.

  “Yes. Alive.”

  Paul shook his head. “If they killed Stacey, they would not stop at—”

  There was a moment of silence. “Stacey was killed?”

  Paul looked up. “Almost a year ago. Of course, it is barely possible that the news would be here by now. We took off very shortly afterwards in a fast ship, and the official news might be still on the way.”

  Huston hit his palm with his other fist. “We need something faster than ten months communication-time!” he cried. “Hell! We’re no better off than the Pilgrims, hoping for some news from England. Grayson, what happened?”

  Grayson started to explain, but half way through he stopped thoughtfully. “I’ve missed a point,” he said. “I don’t know that Stacey was killed. After all, the men that arrested me weren’t officers. Just henchmen of that guy Hoagland.”

  “Quite! Now, while there is a school that seems to apply logic to human motives, or tries to, there is another school that claims that the way people do things are entirely dependent upon their point of view and no one can catalog human nature. Grayson, I’ve known Hoagland a long time and spent most of that time fighting him one way or another. He is as cold-blooded about murder as a snake. But he is a sort of ‘string-saver’ as well. Anyone who has a bare chance of chipping in something toward the furthering of Hoagland’s plans he will keep alive—and it is no great problem to keep them sequestered off somewhere away from contact until he needs ’em.

  “For instance, Hoagland would be disinclined to kill Nora Phillips because in some way she might be useful to him—if only as a hostage. John Stacey is another item; Stacey might be kept alive for some reason. This is a big-time game, Grayson.” Paul grunted unhappily. “A year ago I was a man hopeful of trying out an idea. I’ve spent the last year being harassed, threatened, kidnaped, and shoved around. It looks’ like a big game to me but I don’t know what the rules are or what the prize is to the winning side.”

  “You don’t?”

  “It revolves around me. I can see any number of reasons why people would go to bat for a system that will lead to communications across the galaxy. But for the life of me I can’t see why anybody would prefer isolation.”

  “Paul, as a student, how did your history compare with your math?”

  “None too well.”

  “Why did the Puritans leave England in the first place?”

  “Something about their religion.”

  “The books call it religious freedom. The fact is more likely that they did not like the way things were being run in England. Well, forget that and tell me why the American Revolution was fought?”

  “Because of taxation.”

  “Balderdash. That was just an excuse. I’ve heard that roar about ‘Taxation without representation’ every Fourth of July since I was a kid. Sure it was that, but why? Why? Well, because it took months for anything to cross the ocean, letter, information, data, anything. A representative would always be some months behind the demands of his job, and his people would be months behind him. The upshot was that people were being ruled—note that I said ruled—from a distance in time and space.

  “Neoterra is being ruled by Terra, remote in time and space. At this moment, Grayson, Neoterra can go in one of two ways. I should say Neoterra and the whole galaxy. This is the crossroads, the fork, the place where one single decision or act will dictate for the future the entire history of mankind among the stars.

  “One way is to have each stellar system set up its own autonomous government, an entity in itself, until at. long last we have a million stars with its own set of rules and regulations and customs. Then someday someone may discover some means of cutting down the flight-time between the stars, and then we shall have a fine millennium of galactic wars for this reason or that, until the galaxy is settled down to some form of integrated government.

  “The second course, Grayson, is to start this thing off with a solidarity. Let mankind spread through the galaxy, but let each new stellar system recognize that it must be a part of the whole, and not a world in itself with no outside interference.

  “Remember, strife between men ended with The community, strife between communities ended with the state; while strife between states ended with the country. Finally strife between countries ended with the unification of Terra. But in this unification there is plenty of self-government. Eventually strife between worlds must end with the galactic government—unless we can bypass the colonization, growing into autonomy, and then formenting strife—and this faction on Neoterra hopes that this time mankind will get off on the right foot.

  “And the way to do it is to let people know on Neoterra what happened on Terra yesterday and not next year!”

  “The Z-wave—”

  Huston smiled. “Serene in your own little Terra, you do not even know of the wrangle we are now going through. Of course it takes ten months for a fast ship, and the news is so remote and far away. The President of Neoterra will be elected in a year. We have already two vigorous candidates, one of which is speaking vigorously for autonomy and freedom from Terran intervention. The other is for continued harmony. Promise the people something positive and they will vote for you. But we have nothing to promise—save the interstellar link of the Z-wave. A damned poor offering.”

  “I’d say it was damned good.”

  Huston eyed Paul sharply. “How do you know?”

  Paul opened his mouth and then closed it again. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I think—”

  “Not good enough. Not by far.”

  “But I’ve been circumvented and frustrated and I—”

  Huston slammed a fist down on the desk. “Grayson, we found you and slid you out from under Hoagland’s watchful eye for one reason only. You stand as a symbol to the people of Neoterra. You are a possible symbol of communications. With Paul Grayson free to work on the interstellar Z-wave, the political campaign will get a transfusion of new blood.”

  “When do I start?”

  Huston nodded. “Now. But not here. We will have no damned nonsense. The fate of this political campaign rests upon your work.”

  “I see that.”

  “Four months flight time from Neoterra there is an equilateral trinary—”

  “Latham Triplets. One of the network beacons is on Latham Alpha IV.”

  “You will go to Latham Beta III where we have an extra-terran botanical research outfit. You can set up a laboratory there and go to work.”

  “But why not go back to Harrigan’s Horror and pick up the radio beacon when it gets there? We can save a lot of time.”

  “Grayson, you are a symbol. You may be a tin God with feet of clay for all we know. So far all you’ve done is to create a ruckus, hollering against Haedaecker’s Theory which you have not substantiated by any shred of evidence. Faith is a wonderful thing—I wish I had more of it than I have—but hardly a bulwark against the slings and arrows of life. So we’ll not dicker with a proposition that may go wrong.”

  “But if I am to work—”

  Huston smiled serenely. “I’ve often wondered why they call it ‘Political Science’ when the main idea is to get your point across whether it is true or not. We’ll have no part of any experiments that may deal in failure. You’ll go and work on Latham Beta III where reports of progress can be made without having a lot of curious people around to watch the answers.”

  Paul scowled. “And it isn’t going to take more than a week following the initial announcement of success before someone is going to try it from Harrigan’s Horror to Neoterr
a, or from Proxima I to Terra itself. Then what—?’’

  Huston put the forefingers of his hands tip to tip. “Well, you see, it is not quite as easy as you first imagined. It takes quite a bit of specialized equipment, and therefore the simple test will not work. You’d be glad to make a demonstration, but you are far too busy making a set-up that will ultimately bring a voice-to-ear communication between Terra and Neoterra, which is of course, the final touch. Why bother going through a lot of piddling little demonstrations to prove what you already know?”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime, Grayson, you’re going to have to work like the very devil to keep your research even with the reports we are making about your progress.”

  Paul eyed Huston coldly. “I suppose that was the main idea behind that flanged-up conversation I caught on Proxima I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nora Phillips has been very helpful, hasn’t she?”

  “You recognized her voice?”

  “Yes.”

  Huston looked at Paul sympathetically. “I hope for your sake—as well as hers—that she is alive.”

  Paul grunted. “I’ve been a sucker.”

  Huston laughed at him. “And you’ll be a sucker again, Paul. Forget it, for the moment. We’re all suckers. It makes life interesting that way. You get going and see what you can do. Remember, I’ll not hamper any progress. But we will most certainly see to it that any negative reports are multiplied by Minus One before they are made public.”

  “So—”

  “Get what you need for experimentation and see that you make an ostentatious show of it. Drop a few hints about the Galactic Network and make a long-range prediction that within a year or two people can pick up a telephone and talk to friends on Terra.” Paul eyed Huston. “That won’t be hard. I’m convinced—”

  “Just be properly vague and unspecific. If you’ve got to talk at length, take a verbal swing at Haedaecker. Leave the political angle out of it; this is strictly science and you’re a scientist and not a politician. Besides you’ve spent so much time a-space that you’ve lost voting residence anyway. This is at least a free chance for you to work, Grayson.”