Operation Interstellar (1950)

by George O. Smith

  There was the whisk of a hand smoothing cloth over skin, and then a quick step. Nora bumped into Paul, and clutched at him. He put his arms around her and held her for a moment, enjoying the warm softness of her against him.

  Then he turned away and led her to the door.

  They met Stacey and Morrow in the downstairs hall. “Okay?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

  “Looks so,” said Morrow.

  “I don’t like it,” said Stacey.

  “Why?”

  “Looks too easy.”

  “Don’t be so everlastingly suspicious,” said Nora.

  “Oh, I’m not the type to admire the denture of a gift horse,” responded Stacey. “Not until later. So let’s get going.”

  Paul opened the door. “This is it!” he snapped. “Run for it!”

  “Wait a minute,” objected Stacey. “Not straight. Head left, you two. We’ll go right. Cut a large circle and don’t run. Just walk as fast as you can and be as quiet as you can. It’s as dark as the Devil’s hip pocket out there, but sooner or later someone will realize that all is not well with the Boys at Home. Now!”

  “Now!”

  They separated. Blind-black outside compared to the lights in the hallways of the house, Paul and Nora picked their way carefully until their eyes became adjusted to the dark. Then they could see the dim lights of the buildings across the plain. They left their former home and swung wide, angling away from the line between the house and the ship. Paul paused once, listening, and heard a faint crackle from some distance; either Morrow or Stacey had stumbled over something.

  They were halfway there before any hue-and-cry was raised. Each pair had gone out in a diamond-shaped course until house and spaceship were almost a ninety-degree angle apart.

  Paul wondered; they were far from the house it was true, but they were almost as far from the spacecraft now as they had been when standing on the front steps of the house. His mathematical mind made a quick computation and he smiled, audibly chuckling.

  “What?” said Nora in a low voice.

  “I was just thinking that we are now point seven zero seven of the original distance from the spaceship.^

  Nora laughed gently. “Some man,” she said. “Has no time to kiss me in my room, but has time to play trigonometry here.”

  Paul patted her gently. “Trig is something I can do without putting all I’ve got into it. No—”

  From a distance there came the faint ringing of a bell.

  “Nice man,” said Nora. “I forgive you—until later.”

  Lights went on across the plain, men stormed out of the big building and leaped into a command-car parked on the road in front of it. The command car roared into life and started across the plain toward the dormitory.

  “Now!” said Paul. “Down!”

  They hit the dirt side by side as the headlights swung around. Then the beams of light were gone and Nora and Paul were upright once more and running.

  Noise meant nothing in face of the roar from the jeep’s engine; the car was careening across the plain madly, and Paul knew that no one aboard the car would be able to keep a sharp lookout for any running figures. About all they could do was to hang onto the racketing jeep.

  The spacecraft loomed larger before them. The roar of the jeep died as the car reached the dormitory, and Paul looked back over his shoulder to watch the men pile out of the car and head into the building on a dead run.

  “Faster!” he breathed.

  The ship was a hundred yards away—and Paul could see Stacey and Morrow running in from the other side—when there was the roar of the engine again. The headlights swung around to catch them, but this time they did not care. It was run for it; no time to play cat and mouse. The engine whined high, Paul put on more speed, running away from Nora.

  “Paul—”

  “Come on,” he snapped over his shoulder. “Don’t talk—run—”

  He raced away from her, outdistanced her; the jeep’s roar coming louder and louder.

  Paul reached the spacelock and fumbled with the outside controls. Ponderously the lock opened, swinging aside just as Stacey and Morrow came panting up.

  “In!” snapped Paul. Then he turned, caught Nora’s hand, and hurled her headlong through the opening. He leaped in after her, tripped over her sprawling ankle, caught the flipper switch to the door as he fell, and scrambled to his feet as the spacelock door started to close.

  The roar of the engine still came through the closing slit, a shot pinged against the steel hull. Paul forgot about the spacelock and headed up the runway to the control room.

  He hit the control panel with both hands; flipped the warm-up switch and the low-drive at the same time. It would be a ragged take-off, with the ship rising as the driving generators warmed up instead of taking off with a hot drive. He waited with one hand on the high drive switch, waited and waited and waited. Another shot pinged against the hull, one glanced from the view-dome but it was at such an angle that it merely nicked the ultra-hard glass but did not crack it. It sang off high into the air.

  Stacey and Morrow came into the control room, panting, and half-carrying Nora between them.

  “What are we waiting for?” snapped Stacey.

  “Getting up steam.”

  “What is this, a Stanley Steamer?”

  “Just takes as long,” grunted Paul. Then the low drive took hold. The ship lifted uncertainly, awkwardly, quaveringly, and slowly. Not the quick rush-upwards of the well-prepared ship. But as the seconds passed the ship steadied, the controls got less mushy, and the drive became more certain. A light flashed in through the port, their erstwhile jailers had aimed a spotlight on the ship, and with the light there came the pattering of gunshot. A flat bark came from below and Paul braced himself for the impact that did not come. A miss!

  Then he snapped the high drive and the floor leaped upward under them. Chair cushions flattened, and then filled out again as the hydraulic compensators went to work. Behind them the planet diminished in size visibly, and then, at once, the viewport just became black and featureless outside.

  Paul leaned back in the pilot’s chair.

  “Wow!” he yelped.

  “Made it!” said Stacey.

  Paul got up and went over to Nora. “I wasn’t running away from you,” he said plaintively. “It takes time to get the door open—”

  “I forgive you,” said Nora with a smile.

  Back below them, Westlake said: “You’re sure you missed?”

  “I’m a master gunner,” said the other. “It takes a good gunner to miss a ship that big when it is that close. I missed all right.” Westlake smiled. “We sure made that look good. But God what a job of timing! I thought we were going to have to blow out a tire to keep from catching them!”

  CHAPTER 15

  Once in space and safely away—Paul gloated that the former captors were without spacecraft now—he stopped the flight of the ship and spent a couple of hours making some course-calculations. The return to Latham’s Triplets was jerky because he was uncertain of the distance and so they made it in five approximations, ending up finally with only a few hours to go for landing.

  Paul’s first interest was his laboratory set-up. There had been plenty of time for the three-way hookup to be established, and for all he knew the boys he had set to checking it might have completed the connection, proved in the Z-wave, and gone home to Neoterra with the glad news in their hands.

  He entered the laboratory on Latham Beta III, and his face fell. Dust covered the equipment, the pilot lamps were out, and obviously nothing had been done for weeks, if not months. It was untenanted and untended.

  Paul went to the supervisor of the botanical set up.

  “I don’t know,” he said with a certain disinterest. “Your boys fooled around for a couple of weeks after you left and then decided that you’d gone for good. They might have sent word back to Neoterra, but it seemed a better idea to pick up and go home; so they did.”

  Pau
l went back to the laboratory. Nora said, “Paul, let’s go to Neoterra.”

  “Why?”

  “I want Huston to know I’m all right.”

  Paul looked at her blankly, “They might have left the radio beacons on,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  He told her again.

  “But we’d best get to Neoterra,““

  Paul shook his head. “Nora, Latham’s Triplets is one of the best places to test this Z-wave in the system. I’ve got to stay and check it.”

  Nora shook her head. “Paul—”

  Paul looked at her. “Nora,” he said soberly, “we’re at cross-purposes again. Two things are important in my life. One of them is Nora and one of them is my work. My girl and my work do not agree—or let’s say that my girl does not agree with my work. Until I get a chance to prove my work, there will always be this conflict. Since it takes such a short time to prove my work, why not wait?”

  Nora looked up at him. “I’ll wait,” she said simply.

  “Will you marry me—now?”

  Nora smiled. “Yes. If you don’t mind a wife with literally nothing to wear. Everything I own is on me right now. But won’t we have to go to Neoterra?”

  “Here we go again,” growled Paul.

  Nora laughed and kissed him. “Do you want to wait three months for the radio beams to cross Latham’s Triplets?” she asked him.

  “I—wait a minute!”

  “What, Paul?”

  “It is barely possible that—” his voice trailed away as he eyed a dusty calendar on one of the desks. lie went to it and began flipping pages. “It’s barely possible that my gang did not turn off the radio beacons for a couple of weeks after I got caught by Westlake,” muttered Paul. “Just barely possible—”

  He went to the beacon receiver and turned it on. Impatiently he waited for it to warm up.

  It came to life and Paul tuned carefully through the band where he expected the beacons to come through. There was silence. He ran the dial far to one side, and then to the other. At one point he picked up some ‘side splash’ from the big interstellar beacon on Latham Alpha IV, leakage from the tight beam.

  He sat up stiffly.

  “Nora, will you wait a week?”

  “Week?”

  “I’ve caught some of the radiation leakage from the big transmitter. We can use that.”

  “And if you fail?”

  “I won’t fail.”

  “Then if you succeed?”

  “Nora, if I succeed, I’ll ask you to wait another three months. Because if I succeed, I’ll want to wait until the Galactic Survey link between Latham Alpha IV and Old Baldy comes in. Then—”

  “How are you going to check between here and Alpha IV?”

  “Stacey and Morrow and you and I—” he said. His voice trailed away for a moment, and then he forgot what he was going to say because he was busy with the instrument panel.

  Albert Donatti had been editor of the Neoterra News through three changes of policy. The News, claiming to be politically neutral, was definitely neutral on the coalition side, presenting the autonomy party in less than favorable light, while tending to gloss over any missteps taken by the coalitionists.

  Like the other newspapers, the Neoterra News subscribed to the Neosol Wire Service, and so A1 Donatti got the same news that the other subscribers did.

  A1 had been sitting at his desk all morning trying to think up something bright and brilliant to say about Huston and his plans, or something bright and derogatory to say about Hoagland’s gang. Even Donatti had become tired of making the same veiled remarks regarding the possibility of furnishing Terran and Solarian news before it was ten months old, but he knew that the one way to hold the home tie was to keep on offering hope.

  The virtual disappearance (for Hoagland was not inclined to give out his plans) of Paul Grayson had put a crimp in the schedule, tor they never knew when they said one thing whether the other side would be able to come up with incontrovertible truth to the contrary. With a few less facets to play upon, the editorializing of Huston and the Z-wave was almost reduced to the constant harping on a single subject—which is tiring even to the most ardent enthusiast. Even a faithful believer wants some shred of proof.

  So the coalition party was in the same state as a prize fighter who has trained too fine; who has reached the pinnacle of physical perfection some time before the fray. The additional newscopy that would have been furnished by Paul Grayson’s presence among the coalition group had been diminished. That additional space would have kept the campaign rising upward.

  It had been a long dry stretch, even for an imaginative editor with a bill of goods to sell. Manufacturing news is one of the hardest things in the world after the process has gone on for month after month. Donatti was reaching the end of the string, and there were still months to go.

  Donatti groaned, and then looked up to see a copy boy approaching, waving a reel of recording tape in one hand.

  “Yes—?”

  “Z-wave! Z-wave!” said the copy boy breathlessly.

  “So what—?” grunted Donatti, taking the reel and slipping it into his playback.

  It started: “Neosol Wire Service. Neovenus, Four August. Archaeologists today discovered the traces of a crude civilization dating at least seven thous—”

  Donatti groaned. That would make page eighteen, sandwiched between an ad and the local theatre column.

  “—and years old. No trace of this civilization remains today. Crude pottery and some stone arrowheads—”

  “Crude pottery and stone arrowheads,” snapped Donatti. “So what? What’s this Z-wave business?”

  “—were found among buried sub-humanoid bones. It has been an elementary principle among archaeologists that proper burial of the dead is an indication of intell— “Hell!” exploded Donatti. “Z-wave! So this thing came Z-wave from Neovenus. They all do!”

  “—igence. The arrowheads bear a remarkable resemblance to prehistoric arrowheads found on Terra. However no connection between the stellar planets can be assumed, since arrowheads are a natural bit of design among primitive peoples and—”

  Here there came another voice! Superimposed upon the dry voice of the commentator for Neosol Wire, the whole was almost impossible to decode and separate: “—like the lever as the basic simple machine which would be “Stacey, Morrow! Can you hear me? I’m on the air.” “Yes, discovered as soon as the first man discovered how to use a by all that’s holy, we hear you! Or at least I do! Morrow? This stick of wood as a means of prying a large boulder aside from is Stacey on Latham, Alpha IV, can you hear us on Latham the opening of a likely cave, the similar use of a lever some Gamma VI?” “This is Toby Morrow, fellers. Both of your sta- where else in the galaxy would not mean that some cultural tions are coming in like a ton of bricks.” Nora, now will you connection had ever existed between the distant cultures. How- believe me?” “Paul, I do want to believe you, but isn’t this a ever it is of basic interest to know that there was a civilized rather short distance as interstellar distances go? Three light culture in the galaxy other than Solarium Humankind. Doubt- months is not anywhere near as far as several light years.” less as the galaxy is explored, other cultures and civilizations “But this is fust the beginning! Can I bring you the rest?” will be discovered. It is more than likely that other civiliza- “Do that, my dear and you will have forever proven your tions will be found which are still thriving. In fact it is not place.” “With you?” “With me? No, Paul, I mean with the unlikely that our technical perfection may be overshadowed worlds of science and men. You should know your place with by some greater culture whose history of development may me.” “Should I?” “You should, Paul.” “Where?” “You wouldn’t extend back earlier than the history of Mankind. want me to say this over the air?” “Not hardly.”

  Donatti listened to the unmistakable sounds of ardent osculation with a saccharine expression on his face. Then the fatuous look died to be replaced by
sudden excitement. With one hand he stopped the playback and with the other he grabbed the telephone.

  “Get me Huston!” he roared.

  “What do you need a telephone for?” asked the operator.

  The connection was made in a hurry.

  “Huston! The Z-wave is in!”

  “In?”

  “It’s in, goddammit and I’ve got proof!”

  “Proof?”

  “Don’t stand there gabbing. Get over here!”

  “You’re sure?”

  Donatti laughed. “I’ve just heard Nora kissing Grayson via Z-wave!”

  “You’ve—what—?”

  “You heard me—”

  The phone clicked.

  Donatti reached for the intercom. “Stop everything!” he roared. “Break down the first page and set up for Bright red ink! Seven-slug banner: Z-WAVE! across the top in red. Get that started and we’ll write the story on the lino. Morgan! Get over here and do something about it! You can run a lino; don’t bother to script it first, go down and set it up! Timmy! Bust out a picture of Grayson and Nora Phillips if you can. Jones? Start a Page Three blast against Haedaecker and his goddammed ‘Haedaecker’s Theory.’ Jason? Make a repro of this tape. Lewiston! Bust into the soap opera just before the grand climax with a ‘special announcement.* Brief and not too informative, details later, you know. Forhan, see if you can get a statement—as if we need one, but it’ll do no harm—from Senator Beaumont. Morganser, do the same with Representative Horace. We’ll print ’em side by side. Carol, go out to Dirty Joe’s and bring me back a gallon of black coffee,”

  The News office was ticking like a time bomb about to go off when Huston came in. His first words were: “Did anybody have the brains to try calling ’em back?”