Saturn Run

by Stanley Salmons

  As an afterthought he flipped the switch for the communication channel again.

  “The weather in Veracruz is lovely,” he said brightly. “There’s some light cloud and the temperature on the ground is seventy-nine degrees. Have a nice day.”

  Still grinning mischievously, he flipped off the communication channel and put in a call to home base to tell them what was happening. He was doing everything by the book. Now it was time to report his new height.

  “Vera-radar, maintaining flight level Eight-Zero. November-Six-One-Victor.”

  “November-Six-One-Victor. Roger. Wind Three-Zero-Five, ten…”

  The wind was off-shore at ten knots. The winds were invariably on-shore or off-shore at these coastal runways. There would be very little crosswind on Runway 33. It continued:

  “…steer Three-Zero-Zero to intercept the glide path, make Two-Five-Zero knots. Runway Three-Three.”

  Veracruz wanted him in the landing pattern now. He set the heading for three hundred degrees and reduced speed to two hundred and fifty knots.

  The Steelpoint circled over the water.

  “November-Six-One-Victor, you are cleared straight-in approach, Runway Three-Three left, call Tower One-Two-Nine Decimal Three.”

  “Tower One-Two-Nine Decimal Three, November-Six-One-Victor. Good-day.”

  He punched in ‘129.3’ on the navcom and flipped the toggle switch to communicate with the Control Tower on the new frequency.

  “Vera-tower, November-Six-One-Victor, inbound.”

  The response came: “November-Six-One-Victor, continue approach.”

  He banked the Steelpoint and started the final descent. He was now eight miles off the runway. Time to call in again.

  “Vera-tower, November-Six-One-Victor. Eight miles finals. Three greens to land.”

  “November-Six-One-Victor, you are cleared to land, Three-Three left.”

  “Cleared to land, November-Six-One-Victor.”

  He brought the Steelpoint in low over the water. As he flew over the threshold of Runway 33 he vectored in the downthrust and did a pin-accurate air-cushion landing. He knew he was being watched closely by the traffic coordinators and it seemed like a good idea to give them a reassuring display of his flying skills. The Control Tower crackled into life again.

  “November-Six-One-Victor, vacate right, use Taxiway Alpha, Follow-Me to Stand Quebec Four-Two.”

  “Vacate right, Wilco, November-Six-One-Victor.”

  The Follow-Me truck was waiting for him at the holding point, and led him to stand Q42.

  He switched off the engines, and as their multiple notes slowly descended he took one last look at the cabin monitor and the grey faces of his three limp passengers. He drew a deep breath.

  “Sorry, Kelly,” he said between his teeth. “It was the best I could do.”

  *

  When he got back he asked the others how Kelly was but nobody knew. It seemed he was the only one who’d been to see her in hospital. He tried to visit her again but she’d already been transferred.

  “She seemed to think her life was in danger,” the doctor said. “I don’t know whether it was true or not but that was her perception and that’s all that mattered so far as we were concerned. We set the fracture and patched up the other facial injuries, and then we transferred her to another hospital to let her calm down and make a nice uneventful recovery. We’re not telling anyone where except for her next of kin and according to her she doesn’t have any.”

  Dan nodded, thanked him for all he’d done, and left. He was just glad she was out of harm’s way. Wherever she was, he hoped she could make a new start.

  He never saw her again.

  *

  When he looked back on what he’d done to Braggazzi and his two friends he felt no remorse, nor any great feeling of satisfaction. The opportunity had dropped into his lap to level the scores to some degree for Kelly and he had taken it, it was as simple as that. He knew that if he was presented with the same situation he wouldn’t hesitate to do the same again. Of course it would have been more satisfying if he could have said to them at the end of the flight, “By the way, gentlemen, Kelly says hallo” so they knew what it was all about. They do stuff like that in the movies but he was living in the real world. The whole point of setting it up the way he had was not to give them any target to aim at. They’d simply been the unfortunate victims of acts of Nature and blowing someone’s head off, which was their usual solution to a problem, wasn’t going to solve anything for them this time around.

  Gradually, though, the full implications of what he’d done sank in. It had been drilled into them at the Academy that every craft, from a street skimmer to a spaceliner, had been painstakingly designed, tested, and honed to perform to a detailed specification. Their job, as pilots, was to make sure the craft and all its systems performed to that precise specification and to fly the thing well within its intended design envelope. What he’d done was nothing less than to jettison the whole doctrine. He no longer subscribed to the notion that his sole purpose in life was to convey his passengers to their destination in safety and comfort. He’d learned that there could be situations in which the goals of the designer or the employer might not coincide fully with his own as a pilot and, presented with such a situation, he’d shown he could use his own judgment and respond as an individual, not a machine. It gave him a feeling of lightness and freedom that was hard to describe. He had taken a giant step and life was never going to be quite the same again.

  *

  The bill came through from Veracruz maintenance section, who’d examined the Steelpoint for possible damage sustained in a tropical storm. There wasn’t any. No one attached any blame to Dan for diverting the flight; people seemed to view it as a reasonable measure taken by a prudent pilot. No one said anything about what had happened to Braggazzi and his bodyguards, and there were no repercussions from his organization.

  27

  The frenetic period of activity triggered by Virgilius’s dealings with Hernandez was now over and things went very quiet. It was a slack time for Ted and Ferris too, and there was little for the three of them to do except get together in the Casino bar. They weren’t the most stimulating company in the world, and Dan became increasingly restless.

  Ted liked to gamble a little. He thought it made him look more macho to the girls. He was careful about it, though; when he’d reached his self-imposed limit he’d return to the bar. Unfortunately that destroyed the devil-may-care impression he was trying to create. Several times he’d tried to get Dan to play the tables with him but Dan wasn’t interested. Finally, with time weighing heavily on his hands, Dan said he’d join him for a while. He figured it couldn’t be worse than the guy’s conversation.

  Actually it was a whole lot better. After being in a state of limbo for so long, waiting to ferry non-existent passengers around, this was exciting. More to the point, he was winning. He started to think that this would be a good way of putting some money aside. It would certainly be useful to have something to fall back on if the lull in activity continued and they decided to dispense with his services altogether.

  For a while it seemed as if his winning streak would last for ever. Then he lost some money and he started to gamble more heavily to get it back. He lost a whole lot more. Ted left him to get on with it; Dan was in too deep for him. The losses piled up. Every time Dan won something back he’d follow it up by losing twice as much. The Casino bank extended him credit so that he could carry on gambling. He arranged to make regular payments from his salary to pay off the debts.

  His anxieties were sky high by now. The first time he asked Manny for a whisky Manny raised his eyebrows.

  “Are you sure, Dan?” he said. “Suppose you’re needed?”

  “I won’t be needed. I haven’t had to fly for weeks. There’s nothing happening right now. Come on, Manny, I’m on a roll. I need a little help here.”

  Manny shrugged and pushed the drink across the bar. “Okay, Dan. It’s
your call.”

  Before long it was noticeable that Dan was drinking heavily. The more he lost the more he gambled, and the more he gambled the more he drank.

  Ted and Ferris tried to say something to him, especially about the drinking, but Dan wasn’t listening. No one else paid any attention. It wasn’t that kind of outfit. People didn’t look out for each other – that much was obvious from their reaction to what happened to Kelly – they did their jobs and didn’t poke their noses into things that didn’t concern them. So Dan carried on unchecked, drinking and gambling like a man possessed.

  It went on for weeks. He wasn’t an alcoholic but he was getting within a whisper of becoming one. And then, in the middle of one of these drinking and gambling binges, Rudi Meyer came looking for him and found him in the Casino.

  “Leave that now, will you, Dan?” he said. “We need you for a hypersonic to Australia.”

  Dan turned unsteadily and his bleary countenance registered dismay. Meyer froze, then he grabbed Dan by the collar and marched him straight up to Raymond Virgilius. Virgilius took in the situation at a glance. He went white with anger.

  “What’s the matter with you, Larssen?” he demanded. “I employ you so we can fly our people at a moment’s notice. Is that too much to ask? Have I been unfair to you? Don’t we pay you enough?”

  “I’m very sorry, Mr Virgilius,” Dan said thickly. “You’ve always been very fair to me. It’s just that I’ve been on standby for weeks now. I had no idea you needed me tonight.”

  “Christ, Larssen, it’s not your job to second guess when you may be needed. It’s your job to be ready at all times, fit to fly, which clearly you are not.”

  For the first time in his life Dan felt shame. Virgilius was being brutal but he was absolutely right.

  “I’m really very sorry, Mr Virgilius. It won’t happen again.”

  “You’re damned right it won’t, Larssen, because you’re finished! Clear your room and get out of this building. I don’t ever want to see your face again.”

  There was no point in arguing. Dan packed some bits and pieces in a suitcase and went downstairs to say goodbye to Ted and Ferris and Manny. They were sorry to see him go, especially Ferris.

  “You got some place to go, Danny?”

  “Well, no, actually.”

  “There’s an old buddy of mine you could stay with. It’s a dump but it’ll get you off the street while you’re looking for something else.”

  “Well thanks, Ferris, that would be great, but I can’t actually, er…”

  “Nah, he won’t mind if you can’t pay anything, he ain’t like that. Get your stuff, I’ll take you in the skimmer.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  *

  His name was Ralph Fenby. He had bad teeth and he spent most of his time hanging around in a dirty singlet. He was happy enough to put Dan up, said he’d be glad of the company. It turned out he used to be a racing driver himself. Then he’d had a bad crash, which explained why he walked with a marked limp.

  “M’leg bones were broke in about thirty places,” he explained. “M’racing days were over. But ya know how it is? Once ya have that smell of high-nineties fuel in yer nostrils…” he inhaled deeply at the memory. “I used to hang around the pits, fetching and carrying and doing the odd errand. That’s how I met young Ferris. Real fast driver, Ferris. Around that time he was winning everything in sight. I’d o’ done anything for him, and he was real good to me. Then a couple of his buddies got killed and he chucked it in, bang, just like that. I tried to carry on at the circuit for a bit but nobody else had any time fer me. I quit trying. It ain’t nice when nobody wants ya around.”

  Ralph lived in a small apartment at the lowest level of the city. Here, at the base of the canyons, the streets were never swept or washed other than by the occasional downpour of rain, which would flush some of the rubbish into open drains. Water vapour emissions from the skimmer traffic in the lanes overhead built up at ground level and remained there, unstirred by so much as a breath of wind, and the fetid, humid air sucked up the stink of the detritus of this forgotten society: the litter, the rotting refuse, the excrement, the bloated corpses of dead rats. Initially it hit Dan like a wall and his stomach rebelled; in time his twitching nostrils accommodated the stench.

  Ralph was a pretty disgusting sight and so was his apartment but that was nothing to the disgust Dan felt for himself. After that painful interview with Virgilius he never wanted to look at anything intoxicating again. He went out into the foul, clammy embrace of the streets for long runs twice a day. He was taking a risk but he didn’t think Rostov’s personal friends would come looking for him down here, and such was his state of mind that he no longer cared. He would return to Ralph’s equally humid apartment, where he did press-ups and sit-ups and lifted furniture. The sweat poured from him and that was what he wanted. He felt like he was driving the last vestiges of alcohol from his system.

  Ralph didn’t have a job but he’d mastered the art of survival and what little he had he shared with Dan. Of course, it was never enough, because the exercise gave Dan a tremendous appetite, so he was constantly hungry. He didn’t mind. He felt he deserved to be punished so he pushed himself even harder. Surplus weight rolled off him, his body became hard and lean. He reached a new peak of fitness and in the process he was worried he’d drive poor old Ralph mad. But Ralph was an easy-going guy and he rode it out.

  “Shee-it!” he’d say. “I never seed anybody so enthoosed about keeping fit as you, Danny boy!”

  The feelings of self-loathing gradually receded and the instincts for self-preservation crept back. With them came the realization that he had major problems. First, he didn’t have a job. Second, he was still in serious danger of being whacked by Rostov’s friends. Third, he was deep in debt to Virgilius’s Casino bank, and as he was no longer drawing a salary he was no longer making the regular payments. Sooner or later Virgilius’s enforcers would start looking for him. So far his friends downstairs in the Casino had been good to him; they hadn’t let on where he was. That wasn’t going to last for ever. Before long there’d be two mobs on his tail – and an excellent chance of ending up like Marco Zoltan.

  Physically he was in great shape but his life was a total mess.

  28

  “This is amazing.”

  They were sitting at adjacent monitors in a cyber for the unemployed. Ralph had introduced Dan to these establishments. It wasn’t possible to access much apart from job opportunities but it didn’t cost them anything, it helped to pass the time, and you never knew what might show up.

  Dan turned his head. “What’s amazing?”

  “Company called SpaceFreight here are advertisin’ for a pilot. One mission, long-distance, carrying freight. Christ, look what they’re paying! And – oh Jesus! – you get six weeks’ holiday in Hedon afterwards. Oh man, do I ever wish I could fly things! Hey, Danny boy, wasn’t you a pilot or somethin’?”

  “Here, let me take a look at that.”

  Dan scanned the screen. As if the pay on completion wasn’t enough by itself, on appointment the company would wipe out existing debts. Then there was Hedon. Some people would settle for that on its own; the pleasure city had been built on an artificial island in the Indian Ocean and only the richest people in the world could afford to go there. He read the piece through again but nowhere did they say anything about the destination.

  I’ll bet it’s dangerous with a package like that on offer. But more dangerous than having two mobs after you?

  “Get a print-out of that one, would you, Ralph?

  *

  “Come on, Danny boy, we’re late. If we don’t leave now there won’t be nothing left!”

  On Thursdays there was an old-fashioned open market about a mile-and-a-half from Ralph’s apartment, where he picked up tired vegetables and over-ripe fruit left at the end of the day for next to nothing. It was one of Ralph’s handy little strategies for survival and the least Dan could do was lend him a han
d on these trips.

  They ventured out, Ralph leading the way into the dim, vapour-laden, rubbish-strewn streets. As usual they had first stripped themselves of anything of value; these were hard places. Despite the limp, Ralph managed a brisk pace. After about a mile he darted left down a narrow street. Dan hurried after him.

  “You don’t normally come this way, Ralph.”

  “Usual way’s safer but it’s longer and we’re in a hurry. I don’t like comin’ through here on my own but it’ll be okay with two of us.”

  Dan soon saw what he was talking about. They were walking under an old bridge supported by a series of arches, and in the uncertain misty light he could see shadowy figures, alone and in small groups. They moved around in an eerie silence punctuated only by some sort of distant jabbering. He was startled by an agonized scream, then silence descended again. Quite suddenly a man lurched out of a doorway and caught at his sleeve.

  “They’re here!” he cried. It was a cadaverous face in which the wildly staring eyes looked enormous.

  Dan jerked back, bewildered. “Who are?”

  “They are! Can’t you see them? Everywhere!” He ducked and raised an arm as if to shield himself. Then he tried to cover his head and ears with his folded arms. “The noise!” he moaned. “The noise!” He raced back into the doorway and disappeared from view.

  Another man emerged like a ghost out of the misty air. He was walking purposefully towards them rubbing his upper arm with one hand, his eyes strangely pale and vacant. Before he reached them he turned abruptly and walked with equal resolve in the opposite direction.