Luckily we were in the same ship, and when Vane passed out, I took the controls. No one knew about that incident. Only I realized that deep in Vane’s mind was a shuddering, horrible phobia—a fear of Cerberus, the asteroid where he had left part of his courage. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t fight that lurking terror. Spaceshock leaves its traces . . .
We shook hands; that was all. No need for explanations. We carried the unconscious Corson out of the spaceport office and got him into an air taxi. Hurtling northward, we talked.
“It’s a cooperative job,” Vane said. “A gang of bums trying to come back. Even Helsing’s a bum now. He’s been on the Hollywood skids for years. Once a man starts going down there, nobody’ll give him a job. But Dan Helsing’s still a damn good director. His space epics used to raise my hair.”
“Mine, too,” I said. “But I don’t get the angles. Why did Corson blast off like that?”
Vane’s lips tightened. “Because we’ve been working on a shoestring. Thirty of us, ex-pilots, war veterans. All we know is space flying—and not technospace, either! We got together with Helsing. Formed a company. We barnstormed, raised the money somehow and anted up. Helsing Co-op Productions. We’re making a pic called Sky Thunder. If it goes over, we can make more films. Our troubles will be over. This is the right time for an epic about the war, and the money will pour in. Only trouble is, we’re working on a shoestring. None of us draws any pay. The dough goes for equipment. And now—”
He shrugged.
“I put my foot in it.”
“You didn’t know it. Shooting a pic in space is expensive as the very devil. We couldn’t afford it. We’ve been grinding cameras on Earth, cutting corners wherever we could. Now the government’s kicking us off the grounds. Pro bono publico!”
“Hell,” I said, “we’re just vets. We don’t know piloting. What were we doing during the Mars scrap—deep-sea diving?”
Vane grinned. “Other times, other customs. I left Helsing televising all over the country, trying to make loans. I hope he managed it. This is pretty much of a last chance, Greg. Thirty ex-pilots, risking their necks in space stunting, hoping to high heaven they’ll get a good picture. One that’ll make Helsing Co-op. It’s pretty important to the boys.”
“It’s pretty important to you, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yeah. I’ve been riding the rods, too. Now—well, there’s a girl working with us. Judy Wentworth. If things pan out—”
“I get it. Luck!”
“Thanks,” Vane said. “Here’s the location unit. How about throwing in with us, Greg?”
“I’m broke,” I said.
“We need all the pilots we can get. That’s just as important as money. And now that Corson’s laid up, we’re short a man. Anyhow, we can always use more. There’s no pay, but you’ll have grub, a cot and a swell chance to break your neck.”
“What more could a guy ask?” I grunted.
THE air taxi dropped. After a while I found myself in an office with Vane and a fat, bald man with the face of a worried bulldog. His pale blue eyes stabbed into mine.
“Have a chair, Mr. Greg Lash,” he said in a harsh voice. “You too, Vane. Why the devil didn’t you keep Corson out of trouble?”
I sensed tension between the two men—and something more. Hatred, maybe. Later I knew why—Judy Wentworth.
Vane puffed at a cigarette and grinned mockingly. “Can’t help the jets fusing. It’s spilled milk, anyway. Did you get the money?”
“Sure,” Dan Helsing said. “Not enough. Not nearly enough. We’re going out to the Asteroid Belt, find a location with atmosphere and finish Sky Thunder with skimpy equipment and mortgages on the old farm. But we’re going to have plenty of fuel and ammunition, if we have to go hungry.”
“I’m not kicking,” Vane told him. “The picture’s the important thing.”
Helsing swung toward me. “First of all, Lash, you’re a damn fool. If you’d brought that Mazie in here, where we could have clamped down the hush-hush—”
“How was he supposed to know that?” Vane demanded.
Helsing ignored him. “Okay. You’re hired. We need stuntmen. We’ve got thirty—”
“Twenty-nine, pro tern,” Vane murmured.
“—but they’re risking their lives all the time. They can be replaced easier than we can. get more money.”
“Glad to get the job,” I said.
He bit the end off a cigar. “You don’t know the job. We need men who aren’t afraid of tearing the guts out of their ships and themselves to give the public a thrill. Know what used to make my pictures big box office? I didn’t use models or process shots. Pilots died. Smashed into pulp, sometimes. Red mincemeat, Mr. Greg Lash. We’ve got rickety crates, salvaged from the junk heap. The only thing that keeps ’em flying is nerve.”
Vane said softly, “That’s right, Greg. Wait till you’re diving at a spacewreck, head-on, and you’ve got half a second to pull out. That’s when you’ll hear Helsing televising you, ‘Keep going, there’s plenty of time! Aim right at it, damn your yellow hide.’ ” He laughed. “Which means that Sky Thunder will pay off in yellow chips—to the survivors.”
Helsing said, “Get out of here. I’ve got to locate an asteroid we can use—one with atmosphere.”
“You’ve got a bad habit of giving orders,” Vane told him. “Save it till we’re shooting.”
The director flushed, but didn’t answer. We went out, heading for a low plastic building not far away.
“You’ll want to meet the boys,” Vane told me. “Here’s the recreation room. The only recreations are drinking and fighting.”
I could tell that, by the tension that hung over the place. Twenty or more men were there, veterans, showing the marks of war and what came after the war. Tough, hard, kicked in the face by life till they’d lost all faith in God and man. Well, they’d had a raw deal—all of them. I didn’t much blame them for refusing to drink with me . . .
It was Corson who did it. He’d been telling them about me. And he’d been pouring raw bourbon down his throat plenty fast. I could tell that by his eyes.
“Who hired that lug?” he asked Vane.
“Helsing. And me. So what?”
Corson glared at me. “This is supposed to be a cooperative outfit. We don’t want the louse.”
I said, “That suits me,” and started to turn. Vane stopped me.
“Listen, Corson,” he said, almost whispering. “We’re here to make a picture. Half the time you guys are at each other’s throats, and the other half you’re stunting. Okay. We need every pilot we can get. If you kicked out every man you didn’t like, we’d be decimated. Know what that means?”
Corson’s lips drew back, showing his teeth. “You—”
A slim man with a scarred face said, “Vane’s right. We’re supposed to be making Sky Thunder. If this kiwi can help, that’s the big thing.”
Corson grimaced. “Okay. But I’ll do my drinking alone.” He turned away. Vane drew me out into the night.
“WE’LL hoist a bottle in my office,” he said wryly. “It takes a while to get acquainted with the boys.”
“What’s wrong with ’em?” I asked, though I knew the answer. They had lost faith in everything. All that mattered now was the struggle for existence. Ideals—yeah!
They’d lost those after the war.
Vane didn’t reply. In his office, we drank brandy and talked about old times. I didn’t mention the Cerberus incident, since Vane didn’t bring it up.
A girl came in, a small, pretty brunette with a harassed air and a bundle of papers in her hand. Ignoring me, she kissed Vane soundly. Then she saw me and said “Oh-h!” in a startled voice.
“This is Greg Lash, honey,” Vane said. “Judy Wentworth.”
We shook hands. “Greg?” she said. “I know all about you. Bruce told me. On a visit?”
“A permanent one,” I said. “I’m joining the outfit.”
“Sucker!” Judy said. “But it’s sw
ell meeting you. We’re leaving at dawn, by the way. Helsing’s located an asteroid. The only one available right now, with an atmosphere.” She dropped a flimsy on Vane’s desk, kissed him again, and went out.
“Nice kid,” I said.
Vane didn’t answer. I looked at him sharply and saw the blood draining slowly from his cheeks.
I picked up the paper.
“Cerberus,” I said.
Vane looked at me.
Our destination.—Cerberus. I saw a ship, falling helplessly, jets jammed, driving down to the jagged surface of the asteroid. A freezing wind blew out of the past.
“You can’t stunt on Cerberus, Bruce,” I said.
Vane didn’t answer. After a moment he said, “I’d better show you your quarters, Greg. There isn’t much time if we take off at dawn. I’ve got to charter a freighter to take us out.”
“Listen—”
“Forget it,” he said.
I swung him around to face me. “An you chartered to do any crash diving on Cerberus?”
“What if I am?”
“I’m as good a pilot as you are.”
“You can’t handle a Bullet,” Vane told me grimly. “I’m the only man in this outfit who knows how to fly a Martian ship. And the script calls for a crash-dive in a Bullet. That’s my job.”
So that was it. Few pilots had ever mastered the intricate, complicated controls of a Martian ship. It took years to learn. Which meant that Bruce Vane was slated to take a Bullet screaming down into the atmosphere of the asteroid that had wrecked his nerve.
And I knew what spaceshock meant. It strikes suddenly. It tightens a man’s muscles and paralyzes him, so that he cannot even retard his velocity. It turns him into a motionless statue. If Bruce Vane found himself once more thundering down toward Cerberus—
I felt a little sick.
CHAPTER THREE
Planets at War!
IN a chartered freighter we took off at dawn, destination Klystra, a small, airless asteroid near Cerberus. The Mazies and the Bullet were stored in the hold; freighters are big. I expected a fairly dull trip. But the ship buzzed with activity from the moment of take-off.
The alteration in plans meant, it seemed, a thorough reshuffling of the production unit. Cameras suitable for atmospheric work on Earth would not do for Cerberus. With its chlorinated air—screens were necessary. And space shooting, I learned, required special filters to handle the violent contrasts between light and dark. Powerful telescopic lenses, with complicated focusers and followers, were rolled out. Wire-tape had to be substituted for raw film, which couldn’t take cosmic rays.
And the men—each with his stake in the company—chafed, waiting for the opportunity to do the only jobs they could—stunting. The technicians, hired on salary, had work to do. The pilots could only wait.
Veterans, all of them. They knew space, and they knew ships. But this was different from wartime. In those red, roaring days death hadn’t mattered much. The important thing was to win.
They’d won—and were scrapped. This was their last chance. If it failed, they’d be lost, as I’d been—homeless, useless, unfitted for any productive work. Most of them wanted to forget the war—a higher adventure than anything Helsing had ever filmed.
But he went through the ship like a hurricane. He was the catalyst, a driving, elemental, electric force that spurred the men, keeping them tuned to high pitch, supervising their activities and giving them hell when they got tight. Sky
Thunder couldn’t be merely a big picture. It had to be an epic. And the pilots had to keep in condition. He worked exhaustively with us on charts and figures, replanning the stunts . . .
We hated him. He wasn’t flying himself, you see.
And it was anything for a thrill! Though it meant ripping a ship’s guts out and killing or crippling the pilot.
“Any damn technopilot could make that three-point dive, man!” he snarled at me. “Get it in closer. Shave that ship! Here—” He seized a stylo and recharted the course on paper, bringing it impossibly close to another vessel. “Think you can do that without having hysterics? You can get closer than a hundred miles to the thing, after all. Don’t forget we’re shooting a space picture. That means thrills. We’re not trying to put the audience to sleep!”
I began to realize why Dan Helsing’s films had drawn S.R.O. signs. He knew picture-making—and his tongue was plenty caustic.
“Let me handle that job,” Paul Corson put in. His head was still bandaged, but he was getting along pretty well. Well enough to clash with me at every opportunity.
“You’ll have your own work to do soon enough.”
“I can do mine and Lash’s too,” Corson told Helsing. “We want a good picture, don’t we?”
“Oh, quit quarreling,” Judy said, bringing coffee and playing her usual role of peacemaker. “We’ll land on Klystra pretty soon. Then there won’t be so much mischief for idle hands to do.”
The taut atmosphere passed briefly, but it returned. There was too much hatred on the ship. The men. had forgotten how to laugh. They didn’t work as a unit, really. Under the abnormal conditions, they blazed up like tinder at the least provocation.
I didn’t blame them. I was like that too.
In the war, I had ranked them all, and that chafed on some of them, perhaps. Not that my bars had cut much ice while I was riding the monorails! But—oh, well. Corson, I knew, resented me savagely.
I didn’t like him, either.
Then Helsing and Vane. The rivalry between the two flared now and then, but mostly it smoldered underground. Judy tried to smooth it over—a difficult job. Thirty-odd spacemen, racing against time, battling furiously against a crushing fate, without hope or ideals or faith. We were the damned, building a ladder to lift us—maybe—out of hell.
WE reached Klystra. I was a little sorry. It had felt good to be in space again, watching the familiar pattern of the stars. I’d been Earth-bound for too many years. A space-pilot is at home only between the worlds; the planets are merely way-stations for him.
On Klystra—we worked! Good Lord, how we worked! Every man fell to, building airtight plastic quarters first of all. The freighter had gone on, after unloading our equipment, and we were on our own. Not even a radio strong enough to bridge the interplanetary gap. Space is big, and televisors work only at distances of a few hundred miles. Even radio—well, we could get in touch with the Earth station, the big guard post that kept a watchful eye on the Gap, but that was about all.
I haven’t mentioned the Gap. Spacemen know it. It’s one of the passes through the Asteroid Belt. It was fairly dangerous, and most transports and freighters used other openings, but it was one of the ways of getting through that vast, tumbling chaos of shattered worlds that ring the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The Belt is wide. That’s why ships prefer to use the passes, instead of making the long detour above or below the plane of the ecliptic.
On Gap Station was the giant radio powerful enough to communicate with all the planets. Remember that.
So we worked, as I said. Meteor cameras. handled by remote control, were placed in the right locations—lens-studded globes loaded with raw wire-tape film, orbits carefully planned, their tiny rocket jets ready to correct any errors. The transparent camera ship was checked and rechecked. Fuel was stored. Ammunition—real torps and blastershot, for spectacular scenes—were piled up.
But we were ready for shooting at last. And, as bad luck would have it, the first job was the crash-dive to Cerberus. I got plenty worried about that. I was the only man who knew that Vane was afraid of Cerberus, and he told me to keep my mouth shut. The thing had to be done—that was all there was to it.
We planted cameras on Cerberus and in orbits around the asteroid. After that, a gang of us went up in the transparent ship to watch, though the job was Vane’s alone. I watched him maneuver the tricky Martian Bullet alongside. On. the televisor screen I could see his face, hard, strained and set.
Judy called, “Make
it good, Bruce. I’ll keep my eye on you.”
He heard her on his own televisor. His grin wasn’t quite natural.
“This is a cinch, kid. Watch my rockets.”
“It had better be good,” Corson muttered. “We’re days behind schedule already. If we wait long enough, the Martian crisis will blow over and nobody’ll pay a cent to see a picture about the war.”
“Maybe,” I said. “We haven’t heard any news for quite a while, though. Anything may be happening.”
“Except a war,” Judy said. “We’d hear about that quick enough!”
I leaned over the televisor. “How’s it going, Bruce?” I said softly.
He met my eyes. “Okay, Greg.”
“Then take it easy.”
“Easy, hell,” Dan Helsing snapped, shoving me away. He put his face down close to the screen. “Go in hard and fast, Vane. Don’t pull out till I tell you. Take a jolt with the tractor beams at the last minute, if you have to. But give the audience a thrill. The orbital and ground cameras will catch you. Just aim at that peak we located. Ready?”
Vane’s lips were white. “Ready.” Helsing turned, shouted. “Cameras! Roll ’em! Open up, Vane! Knock the hell out of that asteroid!”
I looked toward a port and saw the Bullet fall away. I went to the window. The Martian ship was dropping, dropping in a fast, swooping dive toward the jagged globe that hung in space beneath us. The flare of Vane’s rockets blazed out like crimson lightning.
My nails were digging into my palms. I looked at Judy’s excited face. She wasn’t worried. She’d seen Bruce stunt before. And, of course, she didn’t know what Cerberus meant to him.
Helsing was shouting into the televisor, telling Vane to open up. “All rockets—all stern rockets! You’re hitting atmosphere! Make the hull glow, man. Go in fast. I said fast! Keep her on center—”
I wanted to plant my fist in his bulldog face. On the screen I could see Vane, his eyes narrowed, his teeth clenched. And through the port I could see a red flame thundering down to Cerberus . . .
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