“—so I had to hold up the rocks with my back while the rescue crew pulled the others out of the tunnel by crawling between my legs. Finally, they got some steel beams down there to take the load off, and I could let go. I was in the hospital for a week,” he finished.
Parks was nodding vaguely. Clayton looked up at the clock above the bar and realized that they had been talking for better than an hour. Parks was buying another round.
Parks was a hell of a nice fellow.
There was, Clayton found, only one trouble with Parks. He got to talking so loud that the bartender refused to serve either one of them anymore.
* * * *
The bartender said Clayton was getting loud, too, but it was just because he had to talk loud to make Parks hear him.
Clayton helped Parks put his mask and parka on and they walked out into the cold night.
Parks began to sing Green Hills. About halfway through, he stopped and turned to Clayton.
“I’m from Indiana.”
Clayton had already spotted him as an American by his accent.
“Indiana? That’s nice. Real nice.”
“Yeah. You talk about green hills, we got green hills in Indiana. What time is it?”
Clayton told him.
“Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship takes off in an hour. Ought to have one more drink first.”
Clayton realized he didn’t like Parks. But maybe he’d buy a bottle.
Sharkie Johnson worked in Fuels Section, and he made a nice little sideline of stealing alcohol, cutting it, and selling it. He thought it was real funny to call it Martian Gin.
Clayton said: “Let’s go over to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell us a bottle.”
“Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll get a bottle. That’s what we need: a bottle.”
It was quite a walk to the Shark’s place. It was so cold that even Parks was beginning to sober up a little. He was laughing like hell when Clayton started to sing.
“We’re going over to the Shark’s
To buy a jug of gin for Parks!
Hi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”
One thing about a few drinks; you didn’t get so cold. You didn’t feel it too much, anyway.
* * * *
The Shark still had his light on when they arrived. Clayton whispered to Parks: “I’ll go in. He knows me. He wouldn’t sell it if you were around. You got eight credits?”
“Sure I got eight credits. Just a minute, and I’ll give you eight credits.” He fished around for a minute inside his parka, and pulled out his notecase. His gloved fingers were a little clumsy, but he managed to get out a five and three ones and hand them to Clayton.
“You wait out here,” Clayton said.
He went in through the outer door and knocked on the inner one. He should have asked for ten credits. Sharkie only charged five, and that would leave him three for himself. But he could have got ten—maybe more.
When he came out with the bottle, Parks was sitting on a rock, shivering.
“Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s cold out here. Let’s get to someplace where it’s warm.”
“Sure. I got the bottle. Want a drink?”
Parks took the bottle, opened it, and took a good belt out of it.
“Hooh!” he breathed. “Pretty smooth.”
As Clayton drank, Parks said: “Hey! I better get back to the field! I know! We can go to the men’s room and finish the bottle before the ship takes off! Isn’t that a good idea? It’s warm there.”
They started back down the street toward the spacefield.
“Yep, I’m from Indiana. Southern part, down around Bloomington,” Parks said. “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington, Illinois—Bloomington, Indiana. We really got green hills down there.” He drank, and handed the bottle back to Clayton. “Pers-nally, I don’t see why anybody’d stay on Mars. Here y’are, practic’ly on the equator in the middle of the summer, and it’s colder than hell. Brrr!
“Now if you was smart, you’d go home, where it’s warm. Mars wasn’t built for people to live on, anyhow. I don’t see how you stand it.”
That was when Clayton decided he really hated Parks.
And when Parks said: “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t you go home?” Clayton kicked him in the stomach, hard.
“And that, that—” Clayton said as Parks doubled over.
He said it again as he kicked him in the head. And in the ribs. Parks was gasping as he writhed on the ground, but he soon lay still.
Then Clayton saw why. Parks’ nose tube had come off when Clayton’s foot struck his head.
Parks was breathing heavily, but he wasn’t getting any oxygen.
That was when the Big Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a nosepiece on like that, you couldn’t tell who a man was. He took another drink from the jug and then began to take Parks’ clothes off.
The uniform fit Clayton fine, and so did the nose mask. He dumped his own clothing on top of Parks’ nearly nude body, adjusted the little oxygen tank so that the gas would flow properly through the mask, took the first deep breath of good air he’d had in fifteen years, and walked toward the spacefield.
* * * *
He went into the men’s room at the Port Building, took a drink, and felt in the pockets of the uniform for Parks’ identification. He found it and opened the booklet. It read:
PARKINSON, HERBERT J.
Steward 2nd Class, STS
Above it was a photo, and a set of fingerprints.
Clayton grinned. They’d never know it wasn’t Parks getting on the ship.
Parks was a steward, too. A cook’s helper. That was good. If he’d been a jetman or something like that, the crew might wonder why he wasn’t on duty at takeoff. But a steward was different.
Clayton sat for several minutes, looking through the booklet and drinking from the bottle. He emptied it just before the warning sirens keened through the thin air.
Clayton got up and went outside toward the ship.
“Wake up! Hey, you! Wake up!”
Somebody was slapping his cheeks. Clayton opened his eyes and looked at the blurred face over his own.
From a distance, another voice said: “Who is it?”
The blurred face said: “I don’t know. He was asleep behind these cases. I think he’s drunk.”
Clayton wasn’t drunk—he was sick. His head felt like hell. Where the devil was he?
“Get up, bud. Come on, get up!”
Clayton pulled himself up by holding to the man’s arm. The effort made him dizzy and nauseated.
The other man said: “Take him down to sick bay, Casey. Get some thiamin into him.”
Clayton didn’t struggle as they led him down to the sick bay. He was trying to clear his head. Where was he? He must have been pretty drunk last night.
He remembered meeting Parks. And getting thrown out by the bartender. Then what?
Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the Shark’s for a bottle. From there on, it was mostly gone. He remembered a fight or something, but that was all that registered.
The medic in the sick bay fired two shots from a hypo-gun into both arms, but Clayton ignored the slight sting.
“Where am I?”
“Real original. Here, take these.” He handed Clayton a couple of capsules, and gave him a glass of water to wash them down with.
When the water hit his stomach, there was an immediate reaction.
“Oh, Christ!” the medic said. “Get a mop, somebody. Here, bud; heave into this.” He put a basin on the table in front of Clayton.
It took them the better part of an hour to get Clayton awake enough to realize what was going on and where he was. Even then, he was plenty groggy.
* * * *
It was the First Officer of the STS-52 who finally got the story straight. As soon as Clayton was in condition, the medic and the quartermaster officer who had found him took him up to the First Officer’s compartment.
“I was checking through the stores this morning when I found this man. He was asleep, dead dru
nk, behind the crates.”
“He was drunk, all right,” supplied the medic. “I found this in his pocket.” He flipped a booklet to the First Officer.
The First was a young man, not older than twenty-eight with tough-looking gray eyes. He looked over the booklet.
“Where did you get Parkinson’s ID booklet? And his uniform?”
Clayton looked down at his clothes in wonder. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? That’s a hell of an answer.”
“Well, I was drunk,” Clayton said defensively. “A man doesn’t know what he’s doing when he’s drunk.” He frowned in concentration. He knew he’d have to think up some story.
“I kind of remember we made a bet. I bet him I could get on the ship. Sure—I remember, now. That’s what happened; I bet him I could get on the ship and we traded clothes.”
“Where is he now?”
“At my place, sleeping it off, I guess.”
“Without his oxy-mask?”
“Oh, I gave him my oxidation pills for the mask.”
The First shook his head. “That sounds like the kind of trick Parkinson would pull, all right. I’ll have to write it up and turn you both in to the authorities when we hit Earth.” He eyed Clayton. “What’s your name?”
“Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,” Clayton said without batting an eye.
“Volunteer or convicted colonist?”
“Volunteer.”
The First looked at him for a long moment, disbelief in his eyes.
It didn’t matter. Volunteer or convict, there was no place Clayton could go. From the officer’s viewpoint, he was as safely imprisoned in the spaceship as he would be on Mars or a prison on Earth.
* * * *
The First wrote in the log book, and then said: “Well, we’re one man short in the kitchen. You wanted to take Parkinson’s place; brother, you’ve got it—without pay.” He paused for a moment.
“You know, of course,” he said judiciously, “that you’ll be shipped back to Mars immediately. And you’ll have to work out your passage both ways—it will be deducted from your pay.”
Clayton nodded. “I know.”
“I don’t know what else will happen. If there’s a conviction, you may lose your volunteer status on Mars. And there may be fines taken out of your pay, too.
“Well, that’s all, Cartwright. You can report to Kissman in the kitchen.”
The First pressed a button on his desk and spoke into the intercom. “Who was on duty at the airlock when the crew came aboard last night? Send him up. I want to talk to him.”
Then the quartermaster officer led Clayton out the door and took him to the kitchen.
The ship’s driver tubes were pushing it along at a steady five hundred centimeters per second squared acceleration, pushing her steadily closer to Earth with a little more than half a gravity of drive.
* * * *
There wasn’t much for Clayton to do, really. He helped to select the foods that went into the automatics, and he cleaned them out after each meal was cooked. Once every day, he had to partially dismantle them for a really thorough going-over.
And all the time, he was thinking.
Parkinson must be dead; he knew that. That meant the Chamber. And even if he wasn’t, they’d send Clayton back to Mars. Luckily, there was no way for either planet to communicate with the ship; it was hard enough to keep a beam trained on a planet without trying to hit such a comparatively small thing as a ship.
But they would know about it on Earth by now. They would pick him up the instant the ship landed. And the best he could hope for was a return to Mars.
No, by God! He wouldn’t go back to that frozen mud-ball! He’d stay on Earth, where it was warm and comfortable and a man could live where he was meant to live. Where there was plenty of air to breathe and plenty of water to drink. Where the beer tasted like beer and not like slop. Earth. Good green hills, the like of which exists nowhere else.
Slowly, over the days, he evolved a plan. He watched and waited and checked each little detail to make sure nothing would go wrong. It couldn’t go wrong. He didn’t want to die, and he didn’t want to go back to Mars.
Nobody on the ship liked him; they couldn’t appreciate his position. He hadn’t done anything to them, but they just didn’t like him. He didn’t know why; he’d tried to get along with them. Well, if they didn’t like him, the hell with them.
If things worked out the way he figured, they’d be damned sorry.
He was very clever about the whole plan. When turn-over came, he pretended to get violently spacesick. That gave him an opportunity to steal a bottle of chloral hydrate from the medic’s locker.
And, while he worked in the kitchen, he spent a great deal of time sharpening a big carving knife.
Once, during his off time, he managed to disable one of the ship’s two lifeboats. He was saving the other for himself.
The ship was eight hours out from Earth and still decelerating when Clayton pulled his getaway.
* * * *
It was surprisingly easy. He was supposed to be asleep when he sneaked down to the drive compartment with the knife. He pushed open the door, looked in, and grinned like an ape.
The Engineer and the two jetmen were out cold from the chloral hydrate in the coffee from the kitchen.
Moving rapidly, he went to the spares locker and began methodically to smash every replacement part for the drivers. Then he took three of the signal bombs from the emergency kit, set them for five minutes, and placed them around the driver circuits.
He looked at the three sleeping men. What if they woke up before the bombs went off? He didn’t want to kill them though. He wanted them to know what had happened and who had done it.
He grinned. There was a way. He simply had to drag them outside and jam the door lock. He took the key from the Engineer, inserted it, turned it, and snapped off the head, leaving the body of the key still in the lock. Nobody would unjam it in the next four minutes.
Then he began to run up the stairwell toward the good lifeboat.
He was panting and out of breath when he arrived, but no one had stopped him. No one had even seen him.
He clambered into the lifeboat, made everything ready, and waited.
The signal bombs were not heavy charges; their main purpose was to make a flare bright enough to be seen for thousands of miles in space. Fluorine and magnesium made plenty of light—and heat.
Quite suddenly, there was no gravity. He had felt nothing, but he knew that the bombs had exploded. He punched the LAUNCH switch on the control board of the lifeboat, and the little ship leaped out from the side of the greater one.
Then he turned on the drive, set it at half gee, and watched the STS-52 drop behind him. It was no longer decelerating, so it would miss Earth and drift on into space. On the other hand, the lifeship would come down very neatly within a few hundred miles of the spaceport in Utah, the destination of the STS-52.
Landing the lifeship would be the only difficult part of the maneuver, but they were designed to be handled by beginners. Full instructions were printed on the simplified control board.
Clayton studied them for a while, then set the alarm to waken him in seven hours and dozed off to sleep.
He dreamed of Indiana. It was full of nice, green hills and leafy woods, and Parkinson was inviting him over to his mother’s house for chicken and whiskey. And all for free.
Beneath the dream was the calm assurance that they would never catch him and send him back. When the STS-52 failed to show up, they would think he had been lost with it. They would never look for him.
When the alarm rang, Earth was a mottled globe looming hugely beneath the ship. Clayton watched the dials on the board, and began to follow the instructions on the landing sheet.
He wasn’t too good at it. The accelerometer climbed higher and higher, and he felt as though he could hardly move his hands to the proper switches.
He was less than fifteen feet off t
he ground when his hand slipped. The ship, out of control, shifted, spun, and toppled over on its side, smashing a great hole in the cabin.
Clayton shook his head and tried to stand up in the wreckage. He got to his hands and knees, dizzy but unhurt, and took a deep breath of the fresh air that was blowing in through the hole in the cabin.
It felt just like home.
Bureau of Criminal Investigation
Regional Headquarters
Cheyenne, Wyoming
20 January 2102
To: Space Transport Service
Subject: Lifeship 2, STS-52
Attention Mr. P. D. Latimer
Dear Paul,
I have on hand the copies of your reports on the rescue of the men on the disabled STS-52. It is fortunate that the Lunar radar stations could compute their orbit.
The detailed official report will follow, but briefly, this is what happened:
The lifeship landed—or, rather, crashed—several miles west of Cheyenne, as you know, but it was impossible to find the man who was piloting it until yesterday because of the weather.
He has been identified as Ronald Watkins Clayton, exiled to Mars fifteen years ago.
Evidently, he didn’t realize that fifteen years of Martian gravity had so weakened his muscles that he could hardly walk under the pull of a full Earth gee.
As it was, he could only crawl about a hundred yards from the wrecked lifeship before he collapsed.
Well, I hope this clears up everything.
I hope you’re not getting the snow storms up there like we’ve been getting them.
John B. Remley
Captain, CBI
THE JUDAS VALLEY (1956)
Peter Wayne took the letter out of the machine, broke the seal, and examined it curiously. It was an official communication from the Interstellar Exploration Service. It read:
FROM: Lieutenant General Martin Scarborough, I.E.S.
TO: Captain Peter Wayne, Preliminary Survey Corps
Report immediately to this office for assignment to I.E.S. Lord Nelson. Full briefing will be held at 2200 hours, 14 April 2103.
By order of the Fleet Commandant.
The Randall Garrett Megapack Page 4