To the Tombaugh Station

by Wilson Tucker

  The two ships orbited together for nearly three hours, making the bucket ready for the long jump.

  Minutes before departure the launch returned with the new tapes, alloting him one thousand, two hundred and twenty-six hours to reach the Tombaugh. Webb snatched the tapes and fitted them into his auto pilot, completing the job and turning to begin some other task before he realized that the launch had also brought him two newcomers. They stood just inside the hatch, looking at him.

  Webb exploded with rage. “I told you to get the hell off ship!” he yelled at Kate Bristol. And to the man beside her, “Who are you? What the hell you doing here?”

  “My name is Abraham Calkins, sir. May we come aboard?” He flourished a calling card and handed it to Webb.

  “You are aboard—now get off!” Webb read the card. “A jackleg, a damned jackleg!”

  A shadow passed over Calkins’ face but his voice remained smooth. “A brief moment, sir, and I shall be on my way. I realize you are facing a deadline of some few minutes, but I represent Miss Bristol in this matter.”

  “I’m hauling out of here when those tapes fire,” Webb retorted. “I’ve got to catch the Tombaugh—I’m not going to go chasing a dirty ball of ice along the rim of the solar system,” He blinked. “What matter ?”

  “Miss Bristol’s passage, sir. The matter of the original charter.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I shall make it clear. Miss Bristol chartered this vessel at Toronto for a sum of money agreed upon in advance. The sum was paid and her acceptance is now a matter of record. It was her desire to engage transportation to one of the Outer Moons, and you agreed to lend your vessel for that purpose. You reserved the right to select the ultimate destination, subject to cargo demands, and she agreed to the reservation. All this is correct, is it not?”

  “Keep talking—fast.”

  “Very well. Now then, in due course you took on cargo which was consigned to the Tombaugh Station, on Pluto. Miss Bristol did not cancel the charter upon learning that information, nor did you. There was no refund of monies. Therefore the verbal contract between you, augmented by the written records on file at Toronto, remained in effect when you left that port. The contract is still binding, sir. The lady still retains charter on this vessel.”

  “Bully! Are we all going to the Tombaugh? This bucket is jumping orbit pretty damned quick.”

  “I am sorry, sir, but your vessel will not leave orbit without fulfilling the contract.” He displayed a legal form in blue binding. “I have here a writ of legal attachment on this vessel. A law enforcement officer is waiting in the launch. Unless I release you, the writ will be served and the launch will stand by to make sure you remain in orbit.”

  “Damn you, you can’t hold me here!”

  “I can and will, sir, with the assistance of the officer and the launch.” The attorney shrugged. “But you have your legal rights, of course. You are free to contest our claim in the courts. You may return to the Promised Land with us now, if you wish, and I am sure the case can be heard within two or three days.”

  “I can’t wait two or three days,” Webb bellowed. “I’m jumping in two or three minutes! Get clear!”

  “No, sir.”

  “Damn you, I’m going to Pluto. I only agreed to take her to one of the moons.”

  Calkins smiled in satisfaction as if he had been waiting for that. “Mr. Webb, surely you know that

  Pluto is a satellite, an escaped satellite. It is not impossible that a court of law might define it as an “outer moon” within the context of the contract. It has been clearly established that Pluto was once a satellite of Neptune. Well, Mr. Webb?”

  Webb fumed. He whirled to read the chronometer and realized that time was running out. “I’ve got government cargo for the Tombaugh. They want it delivered!”

  “Yes, sir, you have exactly that. And I daresay, you did not see fit, to notify your government agency that you had already accepted a charter, prior to accepting their cargo. Nor did you cancel the agreement with my client after you accepted the cargo.” The attorney smirked. “I believe a conflict of interest exists there, and it may prove an interesting point in the courts. And another several days, of course.”

  “I can’t wait several days.” Webb was sweating. “If I don’t jump this damned orbit in the next minute or so I’ll lose the Tombaugh. I can’t chase it around the sun!”

  “Precisely. And so we agree?”

  “Dammit, she hasn’t any business out there.”

  “That is not for you or me to say.”

  An ominous warning sounded in the bowels of the auto pilot and Webb whirled in desperation to punch the safety switch. “Move!” he snapped at the jackleg. “It’s ready to fire.”

  “My client, sir?”

  “Your client can rot in space for all I care. Move!”

  “Are you agreeing to complete the charter, sir?”

  “I don’t care what she does—you get off the ship.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” The attorney turned quickly to shake Bristol’s hand. “May I wish you a pleasant voyage?” he jumped for the hatch and the ladder beyond. “This has been most rewarding, sir.”

  “Get out!” Webb watched the chronometer and counted the seconds. “Hurry, damn you, run!” he shouted after the fleeing man. A moment later the airlock closed and the transfer tube was broken. Webb groaned. “Fifty seconds late.” He lifted his hand from the safety switch and methane exploded from the nozzles, tearing the Xanthus from orbit. Webb was holding onto the auto pilot for support, knowing what was to come, but the sudden thrust hurled his passenger against the after bulkhead.

  He refused to speak to her for more than three hundred hours.

  “I had a lovely bath at the guesthouse,” Kate said when the silence became unbearable. “Do I smell nice?”

  Webb sulked and made doodles in his log . . .

  And later, “I forgot to take my suitcase with me when I quit the ship. Had you noticed that?” Webb squatted by the galley fixing himself a meal . . .

  Much later, “It isn’t as warm as it was at first. Is that because we are so far away from the sun?” Webb read old messages on the teletypewriter . . .

  After uncounted hours, “You don’t have to like it, Mr. Webb, but at least we can be civilized.”

  Webb lay in his bunk, studying the curved underside of the bunk above him. She was in it and causing the curve. He reached out a finger and let the nail trace an imaginary line along the posterior silhouette.

  After interminable days—or weeks—she asked, “Will it be possible to see the new planet on the radar?”

  That one caused a spark. Webb glanced up from the unit and said, “The screen is clear now.”

  “Well,” she exclaimed, “welcome back to the land of the living! I suppose the ghost got tired and just went away.”

  “Troubles don’t just go away,” Webb retorted moodily.

  “Tell me, will it be possible to catch a glimpse of X? A new planet is a fascinating thing, isn’t it? Will we see it on the radar?”

  “Maybe, if the wind is right.”

  “What wind?”

  “Oh—the wind. I’ve seen it a couple of times.”

  “Really? What was it like?”

  “Fascinating,” he said shortly. “Now, please, let’s not quarrel. Tell me about the Tombaugh Station. What is it like?”

  Webb allowed his wandering gaze to drift along the topographical contours of her body. The tight clothing irked him. “Rocks, ice, methane. The same old stuff. Downright dismal place—the seas are frozen methane with little rocky islands sticking up through them. Frozen gas hanging on the rocks that looks like snow.”

  “But what about the observatory?”

  “Well, it’s a building,” Webb said carelessly. “A little building hanging on the side of a mountain. Inside is the star-peeps’ gear—telescopes and stuff. Downstairs are the living quarters and the communications rig. And outside,
nearby, is the radio telescope. And beyond that is a plateau we use for a landing field.”

  “It doesn’t sound very impressive as you tell it.”

  “Pimple on a mountainside,” Webb grunted. “A frozen pimple on a frozen mountainside, with a bunch of half-frozen guys inside sitting around taking pictures. The Tombaugh ain’t much, and Pluto is less than that.”

  “Have you seen the new planet in their telescope?”

  “Those jokers won’t allow that. You’ve got to have a union card or be from Cambridge.”

  “What do the astronomers do there?”

  “Work. And sit.”

  “I mean when they aren’t working?”

  “I can’t say—I never stayed around to watch them,” Webb answered testily. “I set out my cargo and run.”

  “But isn’t it frustrating to be so near X and not be allowed to look at it?”

  “Nope. I haven’t lost anything out yonder.” He turned to the star map on the forward bulkhead and looked at the arc representing the orbit of X. Someone had added a marginal notation: mean 51 A.U. “That thing will be making its perihelion passage in another hundred years or so, and somebody will try for it. It will be one hell of a long jump but some hero will try it. The system is crawling with witless heroes.”

  She offered some remark to keep the conversation going but Webb was already lost, sinking into introspection. His attention was drawn to the now faultlessly operating radar. What would Jimmy Cross have made of that?

  When the bucket reached the half mark—six hundred and thirteen hours after jumping Titan’s orbit—Webb was immersed in paper work. Using blank pages from the now almost useless log book, he was busily engaged in toting up the profits of the voyage beginning with the money Bristol had paid for passage and ending with the reward someone in Amarillo would pay for recovering the courier and his little black box. Webb didn’t know exactly how much the reward would be, but in his mind he caused it to be a generous figure and accordingly added a generous figure into the column. On the debit side he deducted the costs of tapes, fuel, provisions, and the renting of the hot brick from the AEC. He liked profits. The end sum was a happy amount. (And still unaccounted for was the pay-off from Singleton’s insurance, plus money from the sale of the house.)

  Nice. Very nice. Let the bucket rot on Pluto. All this amounted to break-off money. He could quit.

  A hundred hours later he was again dwelling on the damnable puzzle of the derelict. Webb was able to recreate sharp mental images of every corner of that sleek ship, and now he probed the images for faults. There was a fault there, somewhere. The conviction was too strong to ignore.

  And sixty hours after that he was watching Bristol moping about the cabin, and wondering what lay beneath the skin-tight cream-colored coveralls. What was she hiding?

  And a hundred and fifteen hours after that Webb again cursed the auto pilot because the tapes and the engines paused for the briefest moment—they were decelerating—and then went into action with nothing more than a strangled gasp of sound meant to be the prior warnings. The bucket was overdue for the junkpile. (And he found the woman watching him narrowly. Now, why?)

  Some eighty hours later Webb pulled and scratched at his itching beard and dozed over the radar. He was impatient for Pluto to show itself.

  The courier had worn a beard.

  Webb blinked and sat up.

  The courier had worn a beard. Once more he pawed through the mental images of that derelict because it would not let him rest, would not permit peace of mind. In his imagination he turned over and examined again each item as he had first seen it, turned over every rock and stared at the thing which crawled away. The open lock, the blinking light, the first cabin and then the next, the soft beds, the manacled courier and his beard, the pilot’s hutch, the broken tapes, the key, the fallen plastic, the radar, the teletypewriter—Bristol had sent a message from the Xanthus while he was visiting the derelict. And he had booted her off ship while orbiting Titan, but she had bounced right back with that damned jackleg. And somewhere along there his radar unit had rid itself of the ghost.

  The whole of it was absurd.

  Webb closed his eyes, the better to picture in vivid detail that couriers cabin. And the pilot’s cubicle.

  He worried those two images for fifteen or twenty minutes of frowning study, until at last his exclamation broke the silence of the cabin.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!”

  The floater had revealed two flaws, not one.

  Those tapes had been broken—or cut—while the auto pilot was at rest not while they were in motion and driving the engines. They had stopped in an unnatural manner. If the piercing had snapped them in mid-flight those two upper reels would have continued to turn under their own momentum, would have spilled loose tape down onto the base of the mechanism or out onto the deck. But he hadn’t found them that way. He had discovered the tapes still neatly coiled on their upper reels, tightly wound. They had been stopped first—and then cut, or broken. The derelict was a fraud.

  And the courier had overlooked a tidy detail to his story. His beard was the proper length but the chains to the manacles were not—they did not permit the man to reach the galley, or the doorway, or the toilet. Yet his sheets were clean and his clothing immaculate. (And the missing pilot had probably not gone overboard—he was probably hiding somewhere below decks, perhaps in that never inspected engine room.)

  The derelict was a fraud, the pilot was in hiding and the courier had been a feeble liar. Webb roundly cursed himself for a stupid fool.

  Kate said lazily, “And then the second pirate spat out a foul oath.

  I seem to be getting used to it.” Webb shot down the length of the aisle, rummaged in his locker and found the teletype message Kate had sent.

  “Still unhappy?” he asked sarcastically, and dangled the paper in her face.

  She read the danger signs and sat upright in her bunk, bracing her back against the wall. “You told me to advise Torcon you were investigating the floater.”

  “I didn’t tell you to add this bilge. But it worked, didn’t it? That jackleg met the launch and figured out a way to keep you on board—you want to play tourist, you want to see Pluto.”

  “This may be my only opportunity,” she answered mildly. “We will all be dead when the planet comes around again.”

  “Some of us might be dead this time.” Webb stopped talking and listened intently, seeking the source of a muted sound within the ship. It did not come again and Webb opened his fingers to let the paper fall away. He rested his hands on the railing of the upper bunk.

  “That floater was a fraud.”

  “Oh, was it?” Kate asked politely.

  “You know it was—you knew it for a fake long before I did. Calkins or that courier told you. Amarillo rigged that ship to resemble a derelict and sent it up to intercept me; somebody behind Amarillo wanted to put the courier on board this bucket. Somebody wanted him on board as desperately as you wanted on, back there in Toronto. As desperately as you worked to get back on while I was orbiting.” His mocking grin was entirely devoid of mirth. “This old tub turns out to be pretty popular, like it was a pot of gold or something.”

  “I find it an interesting ship.”

  “I find it a rusty one. Why did you want on board?”

  “To visit the Tombaugh.”

  “You didn’t know where I was going. Bull!”

  “That is a most vulgar habit, Mr. Webb.”

  “I have lots of vulgar habits—like this one.”

  Bristol saw it coming but it wasn’t at all what she expected and the questing hand caught her off guard. Webb reached out carefully, unbelligerently, to touch her body. The gentle hand explored her breasts.

  She jerked away from him. “I will grant any man that first pass, Webb. You’ve just had it. Don’t touch me again.”

  He nodded with tough satisfaction. “Good! Now were down to bedrock—let’s keep it that way. That wasn’t a pass, Bri
stol. I wanted to see where you hid it.”

  “Hid what?”

  “The telemeter gimmick—the thing that loused up my radar.”

  “I have no telemeter gimmick, whatever that may be.”

  “You had one until the courier took it.”

  “You are mistaken.”

  “I wasn’t mistaken about that fouled screen—Torcon wasn’t mistaken about theirs. You had a telemeter.”

  “I did not.” She saw his fingers curling on the bunk railing and knew the culmination was coming. It could no longer be avoided.

  Webb said bleakly, “You are a police agent.”

  “I am not.”

  “You’re a police agent,” he repeated with naked hatred. “You can’t pin a murder rap on Jimmy Cross so you’re trying to pin it on me. You refuse to believe that stupid kid killed himself and now you want me to hang for it.”

  “I am not a police agent.”

  “Liar!” Webb leaped at her. The auto pilot echoed his shout with a soft burning sound as the tapes eased off and stopped, killing the drive. The Xanthus went into free fall as Webb leaped, catching him by wild surprise. He realized too late what the muted, unidentified sound had been.

  Webb shot over the rim of the bunk, unable to control his trajectory and his head butted the woman in the stomach. Bristol gasped with pain and parted her lips to suck in air. She twisted from beneath his thrashing body and managed to sit up. The movement shoved him backward. Webb threw out both hands to catch himself, caught the railing and then climbed into the bunk with her, clawing at the concealing cloth.

  “Let’s see what you’re hiding, sister!”

  She put a hard fist into his face and pushed, but he rolled away and lunged again, intent on the open neckline of the creamy coveralls. Bristol swung with an uppercut, laying open the side of his jaw. Webb’s bellow thundered about the cabin. The blow had propelled him backward but as his flying body shot away his fingers caught at the cloth, tearing open her suit to the waistline. Bristol’s carefully simulated skin disease was revealed to his startled gaze.