Rocket Jockey

by Philip St John

  "You ungrateful whelp! Dick spent years working the asteroids for you, so you could go off to that sissy school—and now you pull thisl" He spat out his Venus gum, his face turning brick red. "Every cent Dick has is in this race, and you go chicken! The asteroid—pfui! It's played out! I'm not going—" His words chopped off as Dick pulled him back.

  Jerry swung to his brother. "Is it true, Dick?"

  "It's true," the big man admitted reluctantly. "The asteroid wasn't as rich as we thought—the vein ended a year ago, and I've been freighting cargo for others, until Sun Fuels agreed to back me. I suppose that's why Term kicked you out of the Institute—I was behind on the payments. Sorry, kid!"

  Jerry stared at die floor, realizing that he should have guessed. But he'd thought the platinum asteroid was solid ore and would last forever.

  "Thanks, Tod," he said, at last. "We'd better get in and start in on the tests. They'll take too much time, even if I can pass them."

  With the Martians to watch, he knew they would be tough. And as they stood there, there was the deep rumble through the floor that indicated a take-off. Already, some of the ships diat had qualified were beginning the jump toward Mars.

  Chapter 3 Mars —and Trouble

  f

  HE tests were worse than Jerry had thought. He made landings and take-offs, flew the ship down narrow passes of imaginary obstacles, calculated orbits, and did everything that the Martian observer appointed by the Commission could get the Venusan observer to permit. Between runs, he was forced to answer all the questions that a first-class pilot and a first-class navigator might find on his tests. Some of those, of course, he failed.

  But it was his asteroid experience that pulled hirn through; no trickier training ground existed than threading a ship through the crazy little hunks of rocks that circled the sun between Mars and Jupiter, and Jerry had helped Dick there since he was ten.

  The final test was the one that even the most experienced pilots might dread—bringing the ship in, holding it up, and then landing on a tilted surface, without using his steering tubes.

  For twelve solid hours, it continued. And at last, even the Martian nodded, and stamped approval on his test. There was no way of failing him. The Commissioner from Earth gave him his certification.

  "You've passed—you slipped through by the skin of your teeth, young man, and some of your knowledge leaves a lot to be desired. But you know how to handle a ship. Good luck!"

  Dick clapped him on the back, while Tod grinned grudging approval. Then they put him into his hammock to catch a little rest while the ship was again refueled with supplies Sun Fuels had rushed up by fast freighter from Earth.

  It was two o'clock Thursday afternoon when they woke him for the take-off. They'd spent eighteen hours on the Moon, when they had expected to leave two hours after the qualifying landing. That left sixteen hours to be made up, and meant that all the other seven ships were well on their way. The Commission had refused Dick's request that time spent in the tests shouldn't be counted as racing time.

  He was still tired, but he felt better as he saw that the damage to Dick's eyes seemed to be gone. "How's the seeing?"

  "Fine, Captain," Dick answered. "We're ready." It hit him then—the sole responsibility from now on would be his. Legally, Dick couldn't make decisions, since Dick was only the crewman Jerry had been— and Jerry was official pilot.

  He glanced down at his crumpled uniform. Then his eyes went back to the field, where the all-clear signal was going up as the top of the litde dome split for him to leave.

  "Two gravities all the way, if we're to make up time," he decided, and was grateful for Dick's approving nod.

  He glanced over Dick's calculations for the course, initialed them, and set the controls. His hand found the buttons, and the Last Hope lifted, with the prayers of all Earth behind it.

  The pressure came on, sickening after the Moon's light gravity. Jerry swallowed, forcing himself to steady down. In the rear tele-panel, the Moon began to shrink, while the speed built up. Mars was not in the most favorable position, and the trip would cover some seventy million miles. With a steady two gees of acceleration, the Last Hope would be speeding along at nearly four million miles an hour by the time they reached midway and began to slow her.

  But half an hour out from the Moon, there was nothing left to do but switch on the automatic controls and wait.

  Dick pulled out the course sheets. Each pilot was free to choose his own course, provided he touched on all the inhabited worlds before returning to Earth. Figuring out the best way meant careful calculation of where each planet would be at the end of a run.

  "Mars, of course," Dick said. "Some will swing down to Venus then, and some will head out to Jupiter. We'll try for Jupiter. The four Jovian worlds around the big fellow will have to be hit according to when we arrive. I'd figured it out that we hit Io, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto, in that order. Now it depends on whether we can make up time. Then Venus, Mercury, and back to Earth. It's based on a little less than nineteen days for the trip!"

  "But the record is twenty-six days!" Jerry checked the figures and accelerations used, but it still seemed incredible.

  "Records are always broken—that's the idea of the Classic."

  Jerry estimated quickly. "We can make up better than four hours getting to Mars. That leaves about fifteen to make up on the Jupiter run. At full two gees we should be able to do it. Okay."

  He initialed it, feeling foolish as he realized that he was in a position where his little knowledge had to be put against the years of experience Dick had.

  Then they went on regular schedule, one sleeping while the other two watched. Jerry was awake again at midway, and he turned the ship on its side tubes. In empty space, with nothing around them, they couldn't use the vanes that would steer them in atmosphere. Even the cartoonists had finally given up the idea that space ships could move in long curves that would change their direction without losing speed. An airplane could, but a space ship had to build up speed and then turn over painfully to work just as hard killing that speed.

  Turning was a matter of giving the ship a side thrust, letting it swing through 180°, and then exactly counterbalancing the first thrust. It was tricky, and frequently a number of small blasts were needed, slowly correcting errors.

  Now they were falling toward Mars, while the hours ticked on. The new calculations called for forty-three and a half hours from the Moon to the fourth planet. And they were right on schedule.

  This time, as they drew near the reddish surface, there was an atmosphere to help. Mars was an old world, and there was only a trace of air there; the planet had been too small to hold more than traces. But at rocket speed, even that little was enough for the steering vanes to shape their course. They came down at a long slant that slowed them against atmospheric friction, and waited until they were over the city of Eros, in the big section known as the Mare Cimmerium, before they began dropping downward on the thrust of the rockets.

  Eros had one of the biggest rocket ports in the Solar System, since its ships had been increasing in commerce ever since Mars began to win the Classics. The landing space for the Last Hope was clearly marked, and there were no other racing ships there. The others had already landed and taken off again!

  "Way at the end of the field!" Dick said bitterly. "We drew our positions by lot, but Mars always wins, and Earth loses! Now we've got the whole field to cover when we bring up fuel and supplies from the sheds over there."

  The ship dropped down smoothly onto the field. It was a bit rougher this time, as Jerry was less f amiliar with landing where gravity was stronger than on the asteroids or the Moon. Mars was over a third as strong as Earth. He made it well enough, though, and entered the official time. Right on the new schedule! It was 9:30 in the morning, Saturday, by Earth time. As pilot, he climbed down to the portable receiving station the Martians had brought up, and got into a Mars suit, to take his papers to the local office of the Commission. Tod and
Dick would supervise loading.

  The Mars suit was an airtight plastic coverall with a light transparent helmet, something like a flimsy space suit. It had a little motor device behind the head that compressed the local air until it was heavy enough for breathing.

  He had never been to Eros, but he'd landed on Mars with Dick before, and he was used to the suit.

  The field was at the outskirts of the city, and he had a good look at Mars as the little taxi drew toward the city proper. No helicopters or planes could operate in the thin air, but the flat sandy wastes were an ever-present road for the caterpillar-tracked little cars.

  Nearly all of Mars was a reddish, sandy desert. During some seasons, the wastes were covered with a thin, greenish growth of cactus-like plants, but there was neither a mountain nor a sea on the whole surface. Water was so scarce that only delicate tests could reveal traces of it, and the cities baked their own moisture out of elements in the soil.

  The canals were still a mystery. They were as sandy and flat as the rest of the planet, but great twenty-milewide strips that ran in long straight lines for thousands of miles were of a sand that differed in color. Plants seemed to grow somewhat thicker in the "canals," but there was no evidence that any animal life had ever existed on the little planet, half the size of Earth.

  Jerry spotted one of the sandstorms off in the distance, a red haze in the air. But the thin wind was blowing away from Eros, and there would be no danger from that. The farms were uncovered in the diin light of the distant sun. Mars plants were cultivated now, supplied with a trickle of moisture more than they had ever known. The temperature was almost fifty degrees, but the sub-zero nights, even in summer, made growing Earth plants a matter for enclosed hydroponic gardens, where Earth conditions could be maintained artificially.

  These farms at the outskirts of the city were the chief riches of Mars, since they produced strange foods and drugs that could be found nowhere else in the system.

  Unlike most worlds, Mars did not enclose its cities any more. Each building was airtight, and the streets between were also enclosed, or buried under the surface. Men who went outside closed their helmets and breathed with the aid of the supercharges on the suits. Inside the cities, most of them still wore the suits with the helmets thrown back, though a few moved about in the hard-leather undergarments that were universal.

  It was a stern, rough people who had developed here from the first colonies. Any race of humans who could wear those hard garments had to be tough, Jerry thought.

  He found suspicion and dislike at the Commission office, but nothing to which he could object. They read his papers carefully and stamped them properly. He hadn't expected any courtesy, and he got none. Even the taxi driver had refused to speak to him.

  Mars had no use for outsiders. The human population here reminded him of the grim, forbidding hillbillies he'd read about in the old books about Earth. They were scientifically advanced enough, but they were grim and unpleasant, with no use for fripperies or anything not completely practical.

  He was glad to be back on the rocket field again, until he saw Dick's face. Then his heart dropped.

  Dick shrugged unhappily. "Nothing we shouldn't have expected, kid. Nobody here knows anything about our fueli"

  "But we have to have fuel—we can't make the Jupiter run on quarter tanks!"

  "That's right." Dick stared at the warehouses, where Tod was scurrying about franctically. "I've radioed Earth, and Sun Fuel says our fuel was delivered a week ago, landed and stacked in Number Six warehouse. They've got signed receipts. But all the men who did the storing seem to be sick! And nobody knows where it could have gone!"

  Jerry grunted. He was finding out why Earthmen were so eager to beat Mars in the race—and why Mars had won the last three Classics. "Didn't we have someone here to watch it? Or is he sick, too?"

  "He's sick, all right—with a busted head, in the hospital. I've claimed violation to the Commission; they say they'll investigate. But that will take weeks. All we can do now is investigate all the sheds. The Commission ordered them to let us do that."

  There were over fifty of the big warehouses at the edge of the field. Dick, Tod and Jerry began searching, each taking one warehouse at a time. A stain on the floor showed where the fuel had been stored in Number Six—there was no mistaking the peculiar odor of the fuel, though the Martians claimed it was probably some other fuel shipment. But no other evidence could be seen.

  The Martians offered no real trouble, but they gave no assistance, claiming all the men were busy with normal work. Doors were found locked, and it took time to find the keys. And a thousand delays were on every side of the three searchers. In the afternoon, about a dozen Earthmen who were on Mars on some business tried to join the search, but the Martians claimed and proved that the Commission had empowered only the crew of the Last Hope to investigate.

  Night fell, without results. The sky turned jet black, and millions of stars shone overhead. The air was so cold now that it began to draw the heat out of their bodies, even through the suits.

  Jerry knew that they would eventually find where the Martians had mislaid the fuel—but it would take three more days, if they had to search every warehouse. He went back to the Last Hope for coffee, begrudging the time, but knowing he needed it.

  From the control cabin, the city of Eros had taken on a strange beauty, with its fights forming a pattern against the black of the sky. Even the farms around added to it, since the plants had a dim phosphorescent gleam.

  Then he dropped the cup onto the control board, and let out a cry. Dick came up quickly.

  "Dick, don't those plants need ultraviolet light to shine? Isn't it fluorescence under u.v. lamps?"

  Dick caught the idea at once. "You're right. The fuel does fluoresce! And we've got authority enough to make them pull down one of those lamps, or supply us with an ultraviolet lantern! Let's go."

  It took time to get one of the lights. With the coming of night, the Martians had sent all but one watchman home, and he had to do a vast amount of telephoning to get permission. But they finally went back to the warehouse where the fuel had first been stored.

  Under the rays of the light, invisible to the men, the spots of fuel on the floor broke into a greenish blaze of light. Hundreds of compounds did that under such fight—but the color of this was unusual in its depth, and the brilliance was typical of nothing except their fuel.

  Dick went ahead, throwing the light about to spot other traces. Any spilled fuel had been carefully wiped away, but some had sunk into the sand, and now it glowed back at them. They followed the marks slowly, often having to circle and scout for others, since sometimes fifty feet separated the traces.

  The trail led them around to the back of the warehouses, and finally under the loading platform at the rear of one they had already searched. There was a litter of debris there, but it came away, to reveal the round drums of fuel!

  The watchman shrugged. He muttered something about it being very careless, but they'd been cleaning the warehouses. He did put through the calls for loac -ing men, though.

  And eventually, men began showing up. It was to 3 late for the Martians to stall now. Once the fuel was located, they had to seem eager to get it on the Lent Hope, for fear that the Commission might disqualify their world from the race.

  It was midnight by ship's time when the fuel was found, and one in the morning before the loading actually got under way. All the crew pitched in to help, and the Martians seemed to work with a will. But th
  Jerry got on the phone and began calling the Com mission representative. Calls must have gone through from Luna Center, too, because the Martian lost no time in coming out to certify their new departure time

  "If you'll sign a waiver of all claims against Man for this
unfortunate delay," he suggested blandly. "Oi course, you don't have to. But we should check your ship to make sure that you have no contraband drug* —there's been smuggling to the Jovian worlds lately Seems to me a little mutual trust and friendship is better than all this formality, though."

  He held out the waiver together with the certificate. Je ry started to throw it back at him, and thought better of it. For a Martian, the man was smooth, but he probably could enforce the search. Jerry signed, and accepted the proper certification.

  From landing to take-off should have taken no more thin four hours, but it had actually used up over eight-ee i hours. The clock now indicated four in the morning, Sunday. They were now twenty-six hours behind their schedule.

  It was cold comfort to realize that Mars* spies must have decided their ship was the most serious danger to Mars' victory. The twenty-six hours probably gave M irs more than enough margin to win—if nothing else came up.

  After the trouble, though, Jerry was sure of one th ng. He no longer considered the race unimportant —ixid even the money involved didn't matter.

  Somehow, he had to beat Mars!

  He caught the all-clear signal,' and his fingers bit down savagely on the controls, rocketing the Last Hope up toward Jupiter. Two gees was all he could us 3 safely, but he wasn't going to use less for even a second of the jump!

  Chapter 4- Emergency Return

  upiter, the largest planet in the system, lay over four hundred and eighty million miles away from the I sun—three hundred and forty millions of miles bi-l yond the orbit of Mars. But it was farther than tint from the location of Mars now—the planets were scattered about, instead of lying in the straight line thit would have made for the shortest possible course.

  They would never touch the giant planet. It lay under thousands of miles of atmosphere—methane ar.d ammonia, mostly—in a cold where liquid oxygen probably ran down cliffs of frozen carbon dioxide; in th it atmosphere, the Last Hope would have been crushed flat at once. Even if not, it would have floated miles