The Star Road

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “I mean they haven’t got the industry, the commercial organization—” she faltered before the slightly satirical expression on the doctor’s face. “All right, then, you tell me! If they’ve got everything they need for trade, why don’t they? The Old Worlds did; why don’t you?”

  “In what?”

  She stared at him.

  “But the Confederation of the Old Worlds already has the ships for interworld trade. And they’re glad to ship Colonial products. In fact they do,” she said.

  “So a load of miniaturized surgical power instruments made

  on Asterope in the Pleiades, has to be shipped to Earth and then shipped clear back out to its destination on Electra, also in the Pleiades. Only by the time they get there they’ve doubled or tripled in price, and the difference is in the pockets of Earth shippers.”

  She was silent.

  “It seems to me,” said the doctor, “that girl who was with you mentioned something about your coming from Boston, back in the United States on Earth. Didn’t they have a tea party there once? Followed by a revolution? And didn’t it all have something to do with the fact that England at that time would not allow its colonies to own and operate their own ships for trade—so that it all had to be funneled through England in English ships to the advantage of English merchants?”

  “But why can’t you build your own ships?” she said. Cully felt it was time he got in on the conversation. He cleared his throat, weakly.

  “Hey—” he managed to say. They both looked at him; but he himself was looking only at Lucy.

  “You see,” he said, rolling over and struggling up on one elbow, “the thing is—”

  “Lie down,” said the doctor.

  “Go jump out the air lock,” said Cully. “The thing is, honey, you can’t build spaceships without a lot of expensive equipment and tools, and trained personnel. You need a spaceship-building industry. And you have to get the equipment, tools, and people from somewhere else to start with. You can’t get ’em unless you can trade for ’em. And you can’t trade freely without ships of your own, which the Confederation, by forcing us to ship through them, makes it impossible for us to have.

  “So you see how it works out,” said Cully. “It works out you’ve got to have shipping before you can build shipping. And if people on the outside refuse to let you have it by proper means, simply because they’ve got a good thing going and don’t want to give it up—then some of us just have to break loose and go after it any way we can.”

  “Oh, Cully!”

  Suddenly she was on her knees by the bed and her arms were around him.

  “Of course the Confederation news services have been trying to keep up the illusion we’re sort of half jungle-jims, half wild-west characters,” said the doctor. “Once a person takes a good look at the situation on the New Worlds, though, with his eyes open—” He stopped. They were not listening.

  “I might mention,” he went on, a little more loudly, “while Cully here may not be exactly rich, he does have a rather impressive medal due him, and a commission as Brevet-Admiral in the upcoming New Worlds Space Force. The New Worlds Congress voted him both at their meeting just last week on Asterope, as soon as they’d finished drafting their Statement of Independence—”

  But they were still not listening. It occurred to the doctor then that he had better uses for his time—here on this vessel where he had been Ship’s Doctor ever since she first lifted into space—than to stand around talking to deaf ears.

  He went out, closing the door of the sick bay on the former Princess of Argyle quietly behind him.

  BUILDING ON THE LINE

  I

  Crack-voiced, off-key, in every way like a fingernail drawn across the blackboard of his soul, the song cauterwauled in John Clancy’s helmet earphones:

  . . . Building on the Line, Team. Building on the Line!

  “Building Transmit Stations all along the goddam Line!

  “Light-years out and all alone,

  “We have cannibalized the drone;

  “And there’s no way to go home

  “Till we get the Station working on the goddam Line!”

  Clancy closed his mind to the two thousandth, four hundred and—what? He had even got to the point where he had lost count of the times Arthur Plotchin had sung it. Was that a win, he wondered, suddenly—a point for Plotch, in finally driving him to lose count? Or was it a point for him, in that he had managed to shut out the singing, at least to the point of losing his involuntary count of the times Plotch had sung it?

  A bright light hit him in the faceplate, momentarily blinding him; and the singing broke off.

  “Heads up, Clance!” It was Plotch’s voice, cracking like static now in the earphones. “Keep your mind on your work, dim-bulb! Time to fire the wire!”

  Clancy deliberately did not answer, while he slowly counted off six seconds-“One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi. . .” It was one of the things he could be sure rubbed Plotch the wrong way; even as he knew Plotch was sure by this time that the endless repetition of the Line Song was like sandpaper to Clancy’s raw nerves.

  “What?” Clancy said, at the end of the sixth second.

  “You heard me, you . . .” Plotch choked a little and went silent, in his turn.

  Clancy grinned savagely inside his helmet. With the flash from Plotch’s signal-light blinked out of his eyes, now, he could make out the other’s silver-suited figure with the black rectangle of tinted glass that was its faceplate. Plotch stood holding his wire gun by the other of the last two terminal rods in the almost-completed Star-Point. He was some hundred yards off across the barren rock of this hell-born world, with its two hundred degrees below zero temperature, its atmosphere that was poisonous, and almost non-existent to boot, with its endless rock surface, its red clouds always roiling threateningly overhead and the not-quite-heard gibber of uneasy native spirits always nagging at a man just below the level of his hearing.

  Plotch was trying to turn the deaf treatment back on Clancy. But that was a game Clancy played better than his dark-haired, round-headed teammate. Clancy waited; and, sure enough, after a few moments, Plotch broke first.

  “Don’t you want to get back to the ship, horse’s-head,” shouted Plotch, suddenly. “Don’t you ever want to get home?”

  Was Plotch starting to sound a little hysterical? Or was it Clancy himself, imagining the fact? Maybe it was neither. Maybe it was just the hobgoblins, as Line Team 349 had come to call the native life-form, putting the thought into Clancy’s head.

  For the hobgoblins were real enough. There was no doubt by this time that some form of immaterial life existed in the fugitive flickers of green light among the bare rocks of XN-4010, as this frozen chunk of a world had been officially named. Something was there in the green flickering, alive and inimical; and it had been trying to get at him and Plotch all through the five days they had been out on the job here, setting up Number Sixteen of the twenty-six Star-Points required for a Transmit Receive Line Relay Station. Luckily, one of the few good things about the survival suits they were wearing this trip was that they seemed to screen out at least part of whatever emanations the hobgoblins threw at them.

  Clancy broke off in the middle of his thoughts to switch the living hate within him, for a moment, from Plotch to R. and E.—the Research and Experimental Service, which seemed to be just about taking over the Line Service, nowadays. Thanks to an evident lack of guts on the part of the Line Service Commandant.

  The work on the Line Teams was bad enough. Fifteen men transmitted out to a drone receiver that had been lucky enough to hit a world suitable for a Relay or Terminal Station. Fifteen men, jammed into a transmit ship where every cubic inch of space and ounce of mass was precious because of their construction equipment, was balanced against the weak resolving powers of the drone. Jammed together, blind-transmitted on to a world like this, where you lived and worked in your suit for days on end. That was bad enough.

  Add Plotch
for a partner, and it became unbearable. But then add R. and E. and it went beyond unbearable. It was bad enough five years back, in the beginning, when a fifteen-man Team would be testing perhaps a dozen new items for R. and E. Now Clancy had a dozen new gadgets in his suit alone. He was a walking laboratory of specialized untried gimmicks, dreamed up on comfortable old Earth. Plotch had a dozen entirely different ones; and so did all the others. Though who could keep count.

  Clancy bent ostentatiously to tug once more on the immovable terminal rod he had just spent three hard physical hours of labor in planting six feet deep in XN-4010’s native rock.

  He had in fact been down with the terminal for some minutes before Plotch called. But he had been pretending to be still working, for the sake of making Plotch struggle to get him to finish up. But now it was time to tie in. These terminals were the last two of the nineteen that made up a Star-Point, as the twenty-six Star-Points, spread out over a diameter of eighty miles, would, when finished, make a working Relay Station. Tying in these last two terminals would activate the Star-Point. They could go back to the transmit ship for ten blissful hours outside their suits before they were sent out on the next job. Head down, still tugging at the rod, Clancy grinned bitterly to himself.

  There was usually a closeness between members of a Line Team that was like blood-brotherhood. But in this case, if the hobgoblins were trying to stir up trouble between Plotch and him, they were breaking their immaterial thumbs trying to punch a button that was already stuck in on position. Clancy straightened up from the rod and spoke over his helmet phone to Plotch.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m done.”

  He drew his own wire gun and, resting it in the sighting touch of the terminal rod, aimed it at the rod Plotch had just set up. He saw Plotch’s gun come up, glinting red light from the glowing clouds overhead, and aim in his direction. For a second the pinhole of light that was sighting beam from Plotch’s gun flickered in his eyes. Then, looking at his post, he saw its illumination there, like a small white dot.

  “Ready?” Plotch’s voice sounded in his earphones.

  “Ready!” answered Clancy. “On the count of three, fire together with me. One . . . two . . . three!”

  He pressed the firing button of his wire gun as he spoke the final word. An incredibly thin streak of silver lightning leaped out from the end of his gun through the receptor on the side of the post before him and buried its far end in the receptor on the post beside Plotch. In almost the same second a similar streak of lightning-colored wire joined Plotch’s post in reverse to his. The physical shock of the suddenly activated Star-Point field sent both men stumbling backward awkwardly in their protective suits; and a varicolored aurora of faint light sprang up about the star-shaped area of grounded Relay equipment, enclosed by the twenty rods joined by double lengths of fine wire.

  Number Sixteen Star-Point of the Relay terminal on XN-4010 was in and working. Now they could get back to the ship.

  But then, as if the Star-Point’s completion had been a signal, the low-hung clouds just over them opened up in a sort of hailstorm. Objects came hurtling toward the surface below —objects of all shapes and sizes. They looked like large rocks or small boulders, most of them. But for one weird moment, incredibly, it seemed to Clancy that some of them had the shape of Mark-70 anti-personnel homing missiles; and one of these was headed right for Plotch.

  “Plotch!” shouted Clancy. Plotch whirled and his dark faceplate jerked up to stare at the rain of strange objects arcing down at them. Then he made an effort to throw himself out of the path of whatever was coming at him.

  But he was not quite fast enough. The missile, or whatever it was, struck him a glancing blow high on the shoulder, knocking him to the rock surface underfoot. Clancy himself huddled up on the ground having no place to hide. Something rang hard against his helmet, but the shock of the blow went into his shoulders, as the supporting metal collar of his suit—another of R. and E.’s test gadgets—for once paid its way by keeping the helmet from being driven down onto the top of his head, inside.

  Around him there were heavy thuddings. One more, just beside him. Then silence.

  He got up. There were no more rocks falling from the skies. All around him there was only the silent, shifting, colorful aurora of radiation from the connected terminal rods; and the motionless, spacesuited figure of Plotch was a hundred yards off.

  Clancy scrambled to his feet and began to slog toward the still figure. It did not move as he got closer, in the stumbling run which was the best speed he could manage, wearing his suit.

  II

  When at last he stood over Plotch, he saw his teammate was completely unmoving. Plotch’s suit had a bad dent at the top front of the right shoulder joint; and there was a small, dark, open crack in the suit at the center of the dent. There was only rock nearby; no sign of any missile. But Plotch lay still. With that crack in it, his suit had to have lost air and heat instantly. His faceplate was white now, plainly opaqued on the inside by a thick coat of ice crystals.

  Clancy swore. The gibbering of the hobgoblins, just out beyond the frontiers of his consciousness, seemed to rise in volume triumphantly. He reached down instinctively and tried to straighten out Plotch’s body, for the other man lay half-curled on his side. But the body would not straighten. It was as a figure of cast iron. There was no doubt about it. Within his suit, Plotch was now as rigid as the block of ice that, for all practical purposes, he now was.

  Plotch was frozen. Dead.

  Or was he?

  Clancy abruptly remembered something about the experimental gadgets in Plotch’s suit. Had not one of them been an emergency cryogenic unit of some sort? If that was so, maybe

  it was the unit that had frozen Plotch—working instantly to save him when the suit was pierced.

  If that was so, maybe Plotch was salvagable after all. If it really was so. . . .

  “Calling Duty Lineman at Transmit ship!” Clancy croaked automatically into his helmet phone, activating the longdistance intercom with his tongue. “Calling whoever’s on duty, back on the Xenophon! Come in, Duty Lineman! Emergency! Repeat, Emergency! This is Clancy! Answer me, Duty Lineman. . . .”

  Static—almost but not quite screening out the soundless gibbering of the hobgoblins—answered, roaring alone in Clancy’s earphones. His head, a little dizzy since the rain of rocks, cleared somewhat and he remembered that he should not have expected an answer from this ship. There was interference on XN-4010 that broke communication between a suit transmitter and the mother ship. It cut off, at times, even communication between a Hitter’s more powerful communication unit and the Xenophon. He struggled to his feet and, bending down, took hold of Plotch’s stiff body underneath the armpits of the suit. He began to drag it toward their flitter, just out of sight over a little rise of the rocky ground, a couple of hundred yards away.

  The ground was rough, and Clancy sweated inside his suit. He sweated and swore at his frozen partner, the hobgoblins, the R. and E. Service for its experimenting—and Lief Janssen, the Line Service Commandant, for letting R. and E. do it. The gravity on XN-4010 was roughly .78 of Earth normal, but the rocky surface was so fissured and strewn with stones of all sizes from pebble to boulder that Plotch’s unyielding figure kept getting stuck as it was pulled along. Eventually, Clancy was forced to pick it up clumsily in his arms and try to carry it that way. He made one attempt to put it over his shoulder in a grotesque variation of the fireman’s lift; but the position of the arms, crook-elbowed at the sides prevented the

  bend in the body from balancing on his shoulder. In the end he was forced to carry what was possibly Plotch’s corpse, like an oversized and awkward baby in his arms.

  So weighed down, he staggered along, tripping over rock, detouring to avoid the wider cracks underfoot until he topped the rise that hid the flitter from him. Just below him and less than thirty feet off, it had been waiting—an end and solution to the grisly and muscle-straining business of carrying the frozen a
nd suited figure of Plotch in his arms.

  It was still there.

  —But it was a wreck.

  A boulder nearly two feet in circumference had struck squarely in the midst of the aft repulsor units, and the tough but lightweight hull of the flitter had cracked open like a ceramic eggshell under the impact.

  Clancy halted, swaying, where he stood, still holding Plotch.

  “I don’t believe it,” he muttered into the static-roar of his helmet. “I just don’t believe it. That flitter’s got to fly!”

  For a moment he felt nothing but numb shock. It rose and threatened to overwhelm him. He fought his way up out of it, however; not so much out of determination, as out of a sudden rising panic at the thought of the nearly thirty miles separating him from the transmit ship.

  The flitter could not be wrecked. It could not be true that he was stranded out here alone, with what was left of Plotch. The flitter had to save them.

  Then, suddenly, inspiration came to him. Hastily, he dropped onto one knee and eased Plotch onto a flat area of the rock under foot. Leaving Plotch there, balanced and rocking a little, grotesquely, behind him, Clancy plunged down the rubbled slope to the smashed flitter, crawled over its torn sides into what had been the main cabin and laid hands upon the main control board. He plugged his suit into the board, snatched up the intercom hand phone and punched the call signal for Xenophon.

  “Duty-Lineman!” he shouted into the phone. “Duty-Lineman! Come in, Xenophon! Come in!”

  Suddenly, then, he realized that there were no operating lights glowing at him from the control panel before him. The phone in his hand was a useless weight, and his helmet earphones, which should have linked automatically with the flitter receivers of the intercom sounded only with the ceaseless static and the endless, soundless gibbering.