by Otto Penzler
Poul Anderson
THE SIGNAL WAS picked up when the ship was still a quarter million miles away, and recorded voices summoned the technicians. There was no haste, for the ZX28749, otherwise called the Jane Brackney, was right on schedule; but landing an unmanned spaceship is always a delicate operation. Men and machines prepared to receive her as she came down, but the control crew had the first order of business.
Yamagata, Steinmann, and Ramanowitz were in the GCA tower, with Hollyday standing by for an emergency. If the circuits should fail—they never had, but a thousand tons of cargo and nuclear-powered vessel, crashing into the port, could empty Phobos of human life. So Hollyday watched over a set of spare assemblies, ready to plug in whatever might be required.
Yamagata’s thin fingers danced over the radar dials. His eyes were intent on the screen. “Got her,” he said. Steinmann made a distance reading and Ramanowitz took the velocity off the Dopplerscope. A brief session with a computer showed the figures to be almost as predicted.
“Might as well relax,” said Yamagata, taking out a cigarette. “She won’t be in control range for a while yet.”
His eyes roved over the crowded room and out its window. From the tower he had a view of the spaceport: unimpressive, most of its shops and sheds and living quarters being underground. The smooth concrete field was chopped off by the curvature of the tiny satellite. It always faced Mars, and the station was on the far side, but he could remember how the planet hung enormous over the opposite hemisphere, soft ruddy disc blurred with thin air, hazy greenish-brown mottlings of health and farmland. Though Phobos was clothed in vacuum, you couldn’t see the hard stars of space: the sun and the floodlamps were too bright.
There was a knock on the door. Hollyday went over, almost drifting in the ghostly gravity, and opened it. “Nobody allowed in here during a landing,” he said. Hollyday was a stocky blond man with a pleasant, open countenance, and his tone was less peremptory than his words.
“Police.” The newcomer, muscular, round-faced, and earnest, was in plain clothes, tunic and pajama pants, which was expected; everyone in the tiny settlement knew Inspector Gregg. But he was packing a gun, which was not usual.
Yamagata peered out again and saw the port’s four constables down on the field in official spacesuits, watching the ground crew. They carried weapons. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing…I hope.” Gregg came in and tried to smile. “But the Jane has a very unusual cargo.”
“Hm?” Ramanowitz’s eyes lit up in his broad plump visage. “Why weren’t we told?”
“That was deliberate. Secrecy. The Martian crown jewels are aboard.” Gregg fumbled a cigarette from his tunic.
Hollyday and Steinmann nodded at each other. Yamagata whistled. “On a robot ship?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. A robot ship is the one form of transportation from which they could not be stolen. There were three attempts made when they went to Earth on a regular liner, and I hate to think how many while they were at the British Museum. One guard lost his life. Now my boys are going to remove them before anyone else touches that ship and scoot ’em right down to Sabaeus.”
“How much are they worth?” wondered Ramanowitz.
“Oh…they could be fenced on Earth for maybe half a billion UN dollars,” said Gregg. “But the thief would do better to make the Martians pay to get them back…no, Earth would have to, I suppose, since it’s our responsibility.” He blew nervous clouds. “The jewels were secretly put on the Jane, last thing before she left on her regular run. I wasn’t even told till a special messenger on this week’s liner gave me the word. Not a chance for any thief to know they’re here, till they’re safely back on Mars. And that’ll be safe!”
“Some people did know, all along,” said Yamagata thoughtfully. “I mean the loading crew back at Earth.”
“Uh-huh, there is that.” Gregg smiled. “Several of them have quit since then, the messenger said, but of course, there’s always a big turnover among spacejacks—they’re a restless bunch.” His gaze drifted across Steinmann and Hollyday, both of whom had last worked at Earth Station and come to Mars a few ships back. The liners went on a hyperbolic path and arrived in a couple of weeks; the robot ships followed the more leisurely and economical Hohmann A orbit and needed 258 days. A man who knew what ship was carrying the jewels could leave Earth, get to Mars well ahead of the cargo, and snap up a job there—Phobos was always shorthanded.
“Don’t look at me!” said Steinmann, laughing. “Chuck and I knew about this—of course—but we were under security restrictions. Haven’t told a soul.”
“Yeah. I’d have known it if you had,” nodded Gregg. “Gossip travels fast here. Don’t resent this, please, but I’m here to see that none of you boys leaves this tower till the jewels are aboard our own boat.”
“Oh, well. It’ll mean overtime.”
“If I want to get rich fast, I’ll stick to prospecting,” added Hollyday.
“When are you going to quit running around with that Geiger in your free time?” asked Yamagata. “Phobos is nothing but iron and granite.”
“I have my own ideas about that,” said Hollyday stoutly.
“Hell, everybody needs a hobby on this Godforsaken clod,” declared Ramanowitz. “I might try for those sparklers myself, just for the excitement—” He stopped abruptly, aware of Gregg’s eyes.
“All right,” snapped Yamagata. “Here we go. Inspector, please stand back out of the way, and for your life’s sake don’t interrupt.”
The Jane was drifting in, her velocity on the carefully precalculated orbit almost identical with that of Phobos. Almost, but not quite—there had been the inevitable small disturbing factors, which the remote-controlled jets had to compensate, and then there was the business of landing her. The team got a fix and were frantically busy.
In free fall, the Jane approached within a thousand miles of Phobos—a spheroid five hundred feet in radius, big and massive, but lost against the incredible bulk of the satellite. And yet Phobos is an insignificant airless pill, negligible even beside its seventh-rate planet. Astronomical magnitudes are simply and literally incomprehensible.
When the ship was close enough, the radio directed her gyros to rotate her, very, very gently, until her pickup antenna was pointing directly at the field. Then her jets were cut in, a mere whisper of thrust. She was nearly above the spaceport, her path tangential to the moon’s curvature. After a moment Yamagata slapped the keys hard, and the rockets blasted furiously, a visible red streak up in the sky. He cut them again, checked his data, and gave a milder blast.
“Okay,” he grunted. “Let’s bring her in.”
Her velocity relative to Phobos’s orbit and rotation was now zero, and she was falling. Yamagata slewed her around till the jets were pointing vertically down. Then he sat back and mopped his face while Ramanowitz took over; the job was too nerve-stretching for one man to perform in its entirety. Ramanowitz sweated the awkward mass to within a few yards of the cradle. Steinmann finished the task, easing her into the berth like an egg into a cup. He cut the jets and there was silence.
“Whew! Chuck, how about a drink?” Yamagata held out unsteady fingers.
Hollyday smiled and fetched a bottle. It went happily around. Gregg declined. His eyes were locked to the field, where a technician was checking for radioactivity. The verdict was clean, and he saw his constables come soaring over the concrete, to surround the great ship with guns. One of them went up, opened the manhatch, and slipped inside.
It seemed a very long while before he emerged. Then he came running. Gregg cursed and thumbed the tower’s radio board. “Hey, there! Ybarra! What’s the matter?”
The helmet set shuddered a reply: “Senor…Senor Inspector…the crown jewels are gone.”
—
Sabaeus is, of course, a purely human name for the old city nestled in the Martian tropics, at the juncture of the “canals” Phison and Euphrates. Terrestrial mouths simply cannot form
the syllables of High Chlannach, though rough approximations are possible. Nor did humans ever build a town exclusively of towers broader at the top than the base, or inhabit one for twenty thousand years. If they had, though, they would have encouraged an eager tourist influx; but Martians prefer more dignified ways of making a dollar, even if their parsimonious fame has long replaced that of Scotchmen. The result is that though interplanetary trade is brisk and Phobos a treaty port, a human is still a rare sight in Sabaeus.
Hurrying down the avenues between the stone mushrooms, Gregg felt conspicuous. He was glad the airsuit muffled him. Not that the grave Martians stared; they varkled, which is worse.
The Street of Those Who Prepare Nourishment in Ovens is a quiet one, given over to handicrafters, philosophers, and residential apartments. You won’t see a courtship dance or a parade of the Lesser Halberdiers on it: nothing more exciting than a continuous four-day argument on the relativistic nature of the null class or an occasional gunfight. The latter are due to the planet’s most renowned private detective, who nests here.
Gregg always found it eerie to be on Mars, under the cold deep-blue sky and the shrunken sun, among noises muffled by the thin oxygen-deficient air. But for Syaloch he had a good deal of affection, and when he had gone up the ladder and shaken the rattle outside the second-floor apartment and had been admitted, it was like escaping from nightmare.
“Ah, Krech!” The investigator laid down the stringed instrument on which he had been playing and towered gauntly over his visitor. “An unexbected bleassure to see hyou. Come in, my tear chab, to come in.” He was proud of his English—but simple misspellings will not convey the whistling, clicking Martian accent.
The Inspector felt a cautious way into the high, narrow room. The glowsnakes which illuminated it after dark were coiled asleep on the stone floor, in a litter of papers, specimens, and weapons; rusty sand covered the sills of the Gothic windows. Syaloch was not neat except in his own person. In one corner was a small chemical laboratory. The rest of the walls were taken up with shelves, the criminological literature of three planets—Martian books, Terrestrial micros, Venusian talking stones. At one place, patriotically, the glyphs representing the reigning Nestmother had been punched out with bullets. An Earthling could not sit on the trapezelike native furniture, but Syaloch had courteously provided chairs and tubs as well: his clientele was also triplanetary.
“I take it you are here on official but confidential business,” Syaloch got out a big-bowled pipe. Martians have happily adopted tobacco, though in their atmosphere it must include potassium permanganate.
Gregg started. “How the hell do you know that?”
“Elementary, my dear fellow. Your manner is most agitated, and I know nothing but a crisis in your profession would cause that.”
Gregg laughed wryly.
Syaloch was a seven-foot biped of vaguely storklike appearance. But the lean, crested, red-beaked head at the end of the sinuous neck was too large, the yellow eyes too deep: the white feathers were more like a penguin’s than a flying bird’s, save at the blue-plumed tail: instead of wings there were skinny red arms ending in four-fingered hands. And the overall posture was too erect for a bird.
Gregg jerked back to awareness. God in Heaven! The city lay gray and quiet: the sun was slipping westward over the farmlands of Sinus Sabaeus and the desert of the Aeria: he could just make out the rumble of a treadmill cart passing beneath the windows—and he sat here with a story which could blow the Solar System apart!
His hands, gloved against the chill, twisted together. “Yes, it’s confidential, all right. If you can solve this case, you can just about name your own fee.” The gleam in Syaloch’s eyes made him regret that, but he stumbled on: “One thing, though. Just how do you feel about us Earthlings?”
“I have no prejudices. It is the brain that counts, not whether it is covered by feathers or hair or bony plates.”
“No, I realize that. But some Martians resent us. We do disrupt an old way of life—we can’t help it, if we’re to trade with you—”
“K’teh. The trade is on the whole beneficial. Your fuel and machinery—and tobacco, yesss—for our kantz and snull. Also, we were getting too…stale. And of course space travel has added a whole new dimension to criminology. Yes, I favor Earth.”
“Then you’ll help us? And keep quiet about something which could provoke your planetary federation into kicking us off Phobos?”
The third eyelids closed, making the long-beaked face a mask. “I give no promises yet, Gregg.”
“Well…damn it, all right, I’ll have to take the chance.” The policeman swallowed hard. “You know about your crown jewels.”
“They were lent to Earth for exhibit and scientific study.”
“After years of negotiation. There’s no more priceless relic on all Mars—and you were an old civilization when we were hunting mammoths. All right. They’ve been stolen.”
Syaloch opened his eyes, but his only other movement was to nod.
“They were put on a robot ship at Earth Station. They were gone when that ship reached Phobos. We’ve damn near ripped the boat apart trying to find them—we did take the other cargo to pieces, bit by bit—and they aren’t there!”
Syaloch rekindled his pipe, an elaborate flint-and-steel process on a world where matches won’t burn. Only when it was drawing well did he suggest: “It is possible the ship was boarded en route?”
“No. It isn’t possible. Every spacecraft in the System is registered, and its whereabouts are known at any time. Furthermore, imagine trying to find a speck in hundreds of millions of cubic miles, and match velocities with it…no vessel ever built could carry that much fuel. And mind you, it was never announced that the jewels were going back this way. Only the UN police and the Earth Station crew could know till the ship had actually left—by which time it’d be too late.”
“Most interesting.”
“If word of this gets out,” said Gregg miserably, “you can guess the results. I suppose, we’d still have a few friends left in your Parliament—”
“In the House of Actives, yesss…a few. Not in the House of Philosophers, which is of course the upper chamber.”
“It could mean a twenty-year hiatus in Earth-Mars traffic—maybe a permanent breaking off of relations. Damn it, Syaloch, you’ve got to help me find those stones!”
“Hm-m-m. I pray your pardon. This requires thought.” The Martian picked up his crooked instrument and plucked a few tentative chords. Gregg sighed.
The colorless sunset was past, night had fallen with the unnerving Martian swiftness, and the glowsnakes were emitting blue radiance when Syaloch put down the demifiddle.
“I fear I shall have to visit Phobos in person,” he said. “There are too many unknowns for analysis, and it is never well to theorize before all the data have been gathered.” A bony hand clapped Gregg’s shoulder. “Come, come, old chap. I am really most grateful to you. Life was becoming infernally dull. Now, as my famous Terrestrial predecessor would say, the game’s afoot…and a very big game indeed!”
—
A Martian in an Earthlike atmosphere is not much hampered, needing only an hour in a compression chamber and a filter on his beak to eliminate excess oxygen and moisture. Syaloch walked freely about the port clad in filter, pipe, and tirstokr cap, grumbling to himself at the heat and humidity.
He donned a spacesuit and went out to inspect the Jane Brackney. The vessel had been shunted aside to make room for later arrivals, and stood by a raw crag at the edge of the field, glimmering in the hard spatial sunlight. Gregg and Yamagata were with him.
“I say, you have been thorough,” remarked the detective. “The outer skin is quite stripped off.”
The spheroid resembled an egg which had tangled with a waffle iron: an intersecting grid of girders and braces above a thin aluminum hide. The jets, hatches, and radio mast were the only breaks in the checkerboard pattern, whose depth was about a foot and whose squares were
a yard across at the “equator.”
Yamagata laughed in a strained fashion. “No. The cops fluoroscoped every inch of her, but that’s the way these cargo ships always look. They never land on Earth, you know, or any place where there’s air, so streamlining would be unnecessary. And since nobody is aboard in transit, we don’t have to worry about insulation or air-tightness. Perishables are stowed in sealed compartments.”
“I see. Now where were the crown jewels kept?”
“They were supposed to be in a cupboard near the gyros,” said Gregg. “They were in a locked box, about six inches high, six inches wide, and a foot long.” He shook his head, finding it hard to believe that so small a box could contain so much potential death.
“Ah…but were they placed there?”
“I radioed Earth and got a full account,” said Gregg. “The ship was loaded as usual at the satellite station, then shoved a quarter mile away till it was time for her to leave—to get her out of the way, you understand. She was still in the same free-fall orbit, attached by a light cable—perfectly standard practice. At the last minute, without anyone being told beforehand, the crown jewels were brought up from Earth and stashed aboard.”
“By a special policeman?”
“No. Only licensed technicians are allowed to board a ship in orbit, unless there’s a life-and-death emergency. One of the regular station crew—fellow named Carter—was told where to put them. He was watched by the cops as he pulled himself along the cable and in through the manhatch.” Gregg pointed to a small door near the radio mast. “He came out, closed it, and returned on the cable. The police immediately searched him and his spacesuit, just in case, and he positively did not have the jewels. There was no reason to suspect him of anything—good steady worker—though I’ll admit he’s disappeared since then. The Jane blasted a few minutes later and her jets were watched till they cut off and she went into free fall. And that’s the last anyone saw of her till she got here—without the jewels.”
“And right on orbit,” added Yamagata. “If by some freak she had been boarded, it would have thrown her off enough for us to notice as she came in. Transference of momentum between her and the other ship.”