by Anthology
Nelsen and Ramos left Gimp Hines before he boarded the winged skip-glide rocket that would take him below. Parting words flew back and forth. "See you... Take care... Over the Milky Way, suckers..."
Then they were standing off from Mars and its two moons. During the next several Earth-days of time, they accelerated with all the power that their bubb ionics could wring out of the sunshine, weakened now, with distance. They knew about where to find the Kuzaks. But contact was weeks off. When they were close enough, they could radio safely, checking the exact position of Art's and Joe's supply post. And they knew enough to steer clear of Ceres, the largest Asteroid, which was Tovie-occupied. All the signs were good. They were well-armed and watchful. They should have made the trip without trouble.
Ahead, dim still with distance, but glinting with a pinkish, metallic shine which made it much brighter than it would otherwise have been, was Pallas, which Ramos watched like a beacon.
"Eldorado," he said once, cockily, as if he remembered something from the Spanish part of his background.
They got almost three-quarters across that unimaginable stretch of emptiness before there was a bad sign. It was a catcall--literally--in their helmet phones. "Meow!" It was falsely plaintive and innocuous. It was a maliciously childish promise of trouble.
A little later, there was a chuckle. "Be cavalier, fellas. Watch yourselves. I mean it." The tone had a strange intensity.
Ramos was on lookout, then, with eyes, radar and rifle. But the spoken message had been too brief to get a fix on the direction of its radio waves.
Ramos stiffened. With his phone power turned very low, he said, "Frank--lots of people say 'Be cavalier', nowadays. But that includes one of the old Bunch. The voice might match, too."
"Uh-huh--Tiflin, the S.O.B.," Nelsen growled softly.
For ten hours, nothing else happened. Then there were some tiny radar-blips, which could have indicated meteors. Nelsen and Ramos changed the angle of the ion guides of their ionic motors to move their bubbs from course, slightly, and dodge. During the first hour, they were successful. But then there were more blips, in greater numbers.
Fist-sized chunks flicked through their vehicles almost simultaneously. Air puffed out. Their rings collapsed under them--the sealer was no good for holes of such size. At once, the continued spin of the bubbs wound them, like limp laundry, into knots.
While Nelsen and Ramos were trying to untangle the mess, visible specks appeared in the distance. They fired at them. Then something slammed hard into the fleshy part of Nelsen's hip, penetrating his armor, and passing on out, again. The sealing gum in the Archer's skin worked effectively on the needle-like punctures, but the knockout drug had been delivered.
As his awareness faded, Nelsen fired rapidly, and saw Ramos doing the same--until his hand slapped suddenly at his side...
After that there was nothing, until, for a few seconds, Frank Nelsen regained a blurred consciousness. He was lying, unarmored, inside a bubb--perhaps his own, which had been patched and reinflated. All around him was loud laughter and talk, the gurgle of liquor, the smells of cooked meat, a choking concentration of tobacco smoke. Music blared furiously.
"Busht out shummore!" somebody was hollering. "We got jackpot--the whole fanshy works! I almost think I'm back in Sputtsberg--wherever hell that is... But where's the wimmin? Nothing but dumb, prissy pitchers! Not even good pitchers...!"
There were guys of all sizes, mostly young, some armored, some not. One with a pimply face stumbled near. Frank Nelsen choked down his fury at the vandalism. He had a blurred urge to find a certain face, and almost thought he succeeded. But everything, including his head, was a fuzzy jumble.
"Hey!" the pimply guy gurgled. "Hey--Boss! Our benefactors--they're half awake! You should shleep, baby greenhorns...!"
A large man with shovel teeth ambled over. Frank managed half to rise. He met the blow and gave some of it back. Ramos was doing likewise, gamely. Then Nelsen's head zeroed out again in a pyrotechnic burst...
He awoke to almost absolute silence, and to the turning of the whole universe around him. But of course it was himself that was rotating--boots over head. There was a bad smell of old sweat, and worse.
His hip felt numb from the needle puncture. In all except the most vital areas, those slim missiles would not usually cause death, or even serious injury; but soon the wound would ache naggingly.
First, Frank Nelsen hardly knew where he was. Then he understood that he was drifting free in space, in an armor. He thought it was his own until he failed to recognize the scuffed, grimy interior. Even the workshirt he was wearing wasn't the new blue one he had put on, it seemed only hours ago. It was a greasy grey.
Etched into the scratched plastic of the helmet that covered his head, he saw "Archer III--ser. no. 828211." And casually stuck into the gasketted rim of the collar, was a note, pencilled jaggedly on a scrap of paper:
"Honest, Greenie, your a pal. All that nice stuff. Thanks a 1,000,000! Couple of my boys needed new Archies, bad. Thanks again. You and your buddie are not having so bad a brake. These old threes been all over hell. They will show you all about Asteroid hopping and mining. So will the load-hauling net and tools. Thanks for the little dough, too. Find your space fitness card in shirt pocket. We don't need it. Have lots of fun. Just remember me as The Stinker."
Frank Nelsen was quivering with anger and scare. He saw that a mended steel net, containing a few items, had got wrapped around him with his turning. He groped for the ion-guide of the ancient shoulder-ionic, and touched a control. Slowly his spin was checked. Meanwhile he untangled himself, and saw what must be Ramos, adrift like himself in a battered Archer Three, doing the same.
Gradually they managed to ion glide over to each other. Their eyes met. They were the butts of a prank that no doubt had been the source of many guffaws.
"Did you get a letter, too, Frank?" Ramos asked. For close communication, the old helmet-phones still worked okay.
"I did," Nelsen breathed. "Why didn't they just knock us off? Alive, we might tell on them."
"Not slow and funny enough, maybe," Ramos answered dolefully. "In these broken-down outfits, we might not live to tell. Besides, even with these notes for clues, who'd ever find out who they are, way out here?"
Nelsen figured that all this was probably the truth. In the Belt, life was cheap. Death got to be a joke.
"There was an ox of a guy with big teeth!" he hissed furiously. "Thought I saw Tiflin, too--the S.O.B.! Cripes, do I always land in the soup?"
"The bossman with the teeth, I remember," Ramos grated. "Tiflin I don't know about. Could be... Hell, though--what now? I suppose we're going in about the same direction and at the same speed as before? Have to watch the sun and planets to make sure. Did they leave us any instruments? Meanwhile, we might try to decelerate. I'd like to get out to Pluto sometime, but not equipped like this."
"We'll check everything--see how bad off they left us," Nelsen said.
So that was what they did, after they had set their decrepit shoulder-ionics to slow them down in the direction of the Belt.
Each of their hauling nets contained battered chisels, hammers, saws for metal, a radiation counter, a beaten-up-looking pistol, some old position-finding instruments, including a wristwatch that had seen much better days to be used as a chronometer. There were also two large flasks of water and two month-supply boxes of dehydrated space-gruel--these last items obviously granted them from their own, now vanished stores. Here was weird generosity--or perhaps just more ghoulish fun to give them the feeble hope of survival.
Now they checked each other's Archer Threes as well as they could while they were being worn. No use even to try to communicate over any distance with the worn-out radio transmitters. The nuclear batteries were ninety-percent used up, which still left considerable time--fortunately, because they had to add battery power to the normally sun-energized shoulder-ionics, in order to get any reasonable decelerating effect out of them. Out here, unlike on the
Moon at night, the air-restorers could also take direct solar energy through their windows. They needed current only for their pumps. But the green chlorophane, key to the freshening and re-oxygenation of air, was getting slightly pale. The moisture-reclaimers were--by luck--not as bad as some of the other vital parts.
Ramos touched his needled side. His wry grin showed some of his reckless humor. "It's not utterly awful, yet," he said. "How do you feel?"
Nelsen's hip hurt. And he found that he had an awful hangover from the knockout drug, and the slapping around he had received. "Bad enough," he answered. "Maybe if we ate something..."
They took small, sealed packets of dehydrated food in through their chest airlocks, unsleeved their arms, emptied the packets into plastic squeeze bottles from the utensil racks before them, injected water from the pipettes which led to their shoulder tanks, closed the bottles and let the powdered gruel swell as it reabsorbed moisture. The gruel turned out hot all by itself. For it was a new kind which contained an exothermic ingredient. They ate, in the absence of gravity, by squeezing the bottles.
"Guess we'll have to become asteroid-hoppers--miners--like the slob said," Nelsen growled. "Well--I did want to try everything..."
This was to become the pattern of their lives. But not right away. They still had an incomplete conception of the vast distances. They hurtled on, certainly decelerating considerably, for days, yet, before they were in the Belt. Even that looked like enormous emptiness.
And the brightened speck of Pallas was too far to one side. Tovie Ceres was too near on the other side--left, it would be, if they considered the familiar northern hemisphere stars of Earth as showing "up" position. The old instruments had put them off-course. Still, they had to bear even farther left to try to match the direction and the average orbital speed--about twelve miles per second--of the Belt. Otherwise, small pieces of the old planet, hurtling in another direction--and/or at a different velocity--than themselves, could smash them.
Maybe they thought that they would be located and picked up--the gang that had robbed and dumped them had found them easily enough. But there, again, was a paradox of enormity. Bands might wait for suckers somewhere beyond Mars. Elsewhere, there could be nobody for millions of miles.
They saw their first asteroid--a pitted, mesoderm fragment of nickel-iron from middle-deep in the blasted planet. It was just drifting slightly before them. So they had achieved the correct orbital speed. They ion-glided to the chunk, and began to search clumsily for worthwhile metal. It was fantastic that somebody had been there before them, chiselling and sawing out a greyish material, of which there was a little left that made the needles of their radiation counters swing wildly.
They got a few scraps of the stuff to put into the nets which they were towing.
"For luck," Ramos laughed. "Without it we'll never pay J. John."
"Shut up. Big deal," Nelsen snapped.
"Okay. Shut up it is!" Ramos answered him.
So they stayed silent until they couldn't stand that, either. Everything was getting on their nerves.
Their next asteroids were mere chips a foot long--core fragments of the planet, heavy metals that had sunk deep. No crust material of any normally formed world could ever show such wealth. It gleamed with a pale yellow shine, and made Ramos' sunken eyes light up with an ancient fever, until he remembered, and until Nelsen said:
"Not for the gold, anymore, pal. Common, out here. So it's almost worthless, everywhere. Not much use as an industrial metal. But the osmium and uranium alloyed with it are something else. One hunk for each of our nets. Too bad there isn't more."
The uranium was driving their radiation-counters wild.
"Could we drag it, if there was more?" Ramos growled. "With just sun-power on these lousy shoulder-ionics?"
Everything was going sour, even Ramos. After a long deceleration they were afraid to draw any more power for propulsion from their weakened batteries. They needed the remaining current for the moisture-reclaimers and the pumps of the air-restorers--a relatively much lighter but vital drain. The sunlight was weak way out here. Worse, the solar thermocouples to power the ionics were almost shot. They tried to fix them up, succeeding a little, but using far more time than they had expected. Meanwhile, the changed positions of the various large asteroids, moving in their own individual orbits, lost them any definite idea of where the Kuzaks' supply post was, and the dizzying distance to Pallas, with only half-functioning ionics to get them there, fuddled them in their inexperience.
Soon their big hope was that some reasonable asteroid-hoppers would come within the few thousand mile range of their weakened transmitters. Then they could call, and be picked up.
Mostly to keep themselves occupied, they hunted paymetal, taking only the very best that they could find, to keep the towage mass down. Right from the start they cut their food ration--a good thing, because one month went, and then two, as near as they could figure. Cripes, how much longer could they last?
Often they actually encouraged their minds to create illusions. Frank would hold his body stiff, and look at the stars. After a while he would get the soothing impression that he was swimming on his back in a lake, and was looking up at the night sky.
Mostly, they were out of the regular radio channels. But sometimes, because of the movement of distant bubb clusters that must be kept in touch, they heard music and news briefly, again. They heard ominous reports from the ever more populous Earth. Now it was about areas of ocean to become boundaried and to be "farmed" for food. Territorial disputes were now extending far beyond the land. Once more, the weapons were being uncovered. Of course there were repercussions out here. Ceres Station was beaming pronouncements, too--rattling the saber.
Nelsen and Ramos listened avidly because it was life, because it was contact with lost things, because it was not dead silence.
Their own tribulations deepened.
"Cripes but my feet stink!" Ramos once laughed. "They must be rotten. They're sore, and they itch something awful, and I can't scratch them, or change my socks, even. The fungus, I guess. Just old athlete's foot."
"The stuff is crawling up my legs," Nelsen growled.
They knew that the Kuzaks, maybe Two-and-Two, Reynolds, Gimp, Storey, must be trying to call them. They kept listening in their helmet-phones. But this time Frank Nelsen knew that he'd gotten himself a real haystack of enormity in which to double for a lost needle. The slender beams could comb it futilely and endlessly, in the hope of a fortunate accident. Only once they heard, "Nelsen! Ra..." The beam swept on. It could have been Joe Kuzak's voice. But inevitably, somewhere, there had to be a giving up point for the searchers.
"This is where I came in," Nelsen said bitterly. "Damn these beam systems that are so delicate and important!"
They did pick up the voices of scattered asteroid-hoppers, talking cautiously back and forth to each other, far away. "... Got me pinpointed, Ed? Coming in almost empty, this trip. Not like the last... Stake me to a run into Pallastown...?" Most of such voices sounded regular, friendly.
Once they heard wild laughter, and what could have been a woman's scream. But it could have been other things, too.
On another occasion, they almost believed that they had their rescue made. Even their worn-out direction and distance finders could place the ten or so voices as originating not much over a hundred miles away. But they checked their trembling enthusiasm just in time. That was sheerest luck. The curses, and the savage, frightened snarls were all wrong. "If we don't catch us somebody, soon..."
Out here, the needs could get truly primitive. Oxygen, water, food, repair parts for vital equipment. Cannibalism and blood-drinking could also be part of blunt necessity.
Nelsen and Ramos were fortunate. Twenty miles off was a haze against the stars--a cluster of small mesoderm fragments. Drawing power for their shoulder-ionics from their almost spent nuclear batteries, they glided toward the cluster, and got into its midst, doubling themselves up to look as much like the othe
r chunks as possible. They were like hiding rats for hours, until long after the distant specks moved past.
While he waited, Frank Nelsen's mind fumbled back to the lost phantom of Jarviston, Minnesota, again. To a man named Jig Hollins who had got married, stayed home. Yellow? Hell...! Nelsen imagined the comforts he might have had in the Space Force. He coaxed up a dream girl--blonde, dark, red-headed--with an awful wistfulness. He thought of Nance Codiss, the neighbor kid. He fumbled at the edge of a vast, foggy vision, where the wanderlust and spacelust of a man, and needs of the expanding race, seemed to blend with his home-love and love-love, and to become, impossibly, a balanced unit...
Later--much later--he heard young, green asteroid-hoppers yakking happily about girls and about how magnificent it was, out here.
"Haw-haw," he heard Ramos mock.
"Yeah," Nelsen said thickly. "Lucky for them that they aren't near us--being careless with their beams, that way..."
Frank Nelsen sneered, despising these innocent novices, sure that he could have beaten and robbed them without compunction. That far he had come toward understanding the outlaws, the twisted men of the Belt.
Ramos and he seemed to go on for an indefinite period longer. In a sense, they toughened. But toward the last they seemed to blunder slowly in the mind-shadows of their weakening body forces. They had a little food left, and water from the moisture-reclaimers. At zero-gravity, where physical exertion is slight, men can get along on small quantities of food. The sweetish, starchy liquid that they could suck through a tube from the air-restorers--it was a by-product of the photosynthetic process--might even have sustained them for a considerable interval.
But the steady weakening of their nuclear batteries was another matter. The pumps of their air-restorers and moisture-reclaimers were dependent on current. Gradually the atmosphere they breathed was getting worse. But from reports they had read and TV programs they had seen long ago, they found themselves another faint hope, and worked on it. With only solar power--derived through worn-out thermocouple units--to feed their uncertain ionics, they could change course only very slowly, now.