Rogue in Space

by Fredric Brown

Olliver met him alone in the main room of the big suite he’d taken for himself and Judeth. He said, “The news is good. Crag. Eisen’s on Earth, in the middle of a month’s holiday. You’ll have two weeks before he gets back. Maybe it’ll be easier for you with the cat away.”

  “Who does the hiring while Eisen’s gone?”

  “Nobody hires technicians, but the head guard, man named Knutson, is authorized to hire guards. Wasn’t able to find out how they’re staffed at the moment but the chances are good; they’re usually one or two guards under their quota.”

  Crag said, “I’d rather run into Knutson in the town. Can you tell me how I’ll know him if I do?”

  “Yes, I met him myself when I visited Menlo six months ago. He’s a big man with red hair, diagonal scar on one cheek—forget which. Surly, struck me as being a bully. Need any more money, Crag?”

  “I could use a couple of hundred. I’ve got enough to get there all right, but I might not be able to get a job right away.”

  Olliver counted out two hundred dollars for him.

  Judeth, in a robe, came in as he was putting it into his wallet, about to leave. She put out her hand to him. “Good-by, Crag. Good luck.”

  Crag wondered why her hand seemed to burn his as he took it. He got out quickly.

  The little town of Pranger, population twelve hundred, which was Menlo’s only link with civilization (except that, in a sense, Menlo was civilization) was in a high valley in the Syrtis Mountains. There were no direct flights between it and Mars City, so Crag had to make his journey in stages and didn’t get there until early afternoon. He registered at the inn and had lunch there, then wandered out to see the town.

  Not that there was much town to see. Besides two rough-looking taverns and a few stores, it was all miners’ cabins. It was a molybdenum mining town and everyone living in it, except those who ran the stores and taverns, worked at the nearby mine. A poor, squalid town. If it was the only place accessible to workers and guards at Menlo, it was no wonder that few cared to work there. But still he didn’t want to go directly to the place and apply for a job; that way all his chances would be killed if he were turned down. He’d have no logical excuse to hang around and try again. It would be far better to meet Knutson accidentally and to lay himself open to an offer of a job without having to ask for one. Then his chances wouldn’t be ended by a refusal, for he couldn’t be refused something he hadn’t asked for.

  It was early evening when he saw a tall red-haired man passing the inn, and hurried out to follow. He hadn’t been able to make out the scar at that distance but the man he was following was better dressed than the miners and he felt sure it would turn out to be Knutson. And when he followed the man into one of the two taverns and was able to see the scar, he knew he was right. And he knew, too, that the big redhead was even more of a bully than Oliver had taken him for, and that meant there was an easy way to make friends with him. If letting oneself get beaten up is easy.

  Crag stepped in beside Knutson at the bar and managed to slip and fall against Knutson, spilling part of the drink the man was already holding. But Crag apologized quickly; he had to be careful because he would later have to reveal his psycher certificate to Knutson and meanwhile must do nothing that would make that certificate suspect. A recently psyched man can defend himself if attacked, or, if he is a guard, can attack others in line of duty, but he is not naturally aggressive or on the prod.

  But a moment later, again seemingly inadvertently, he again jostled Knutson and made him spill more of the drink. And this time Crag didn’t have to apologize because there was no time for it. He managed to ride with the punch in his face so as to let it carry him back away from the bar, but kept from falling. He caught his balance and came in swinging. But with his right hand; he only feinted with his left. He made it look like a good fight, although he could have ended it with a single blow, even of his right hand, almost any time he wanted to. But he made it a good fight and a long fight and let himself be defeated only slowly and far from ignominiously. But finally he was down.

  And Knutson, grinning a bloody grin, was helping him up and saying, “Man, you put up a good scrap, for a guy your size. Damn near beat me. Let me buy you a drink.”

  So he grinned back and let Knutson lead him to a table and order drinks for both of them. And a few minutes later, after he’d answered Knutson’s question as to what he was doing in Pranger, Knutson said, “Man, you don’t want to work in a moly mine, a guy that can fight like you can. How’d you like to work at Menlo?”

  And, it turned out, Crag would very much like to work at Menlo, for his new-found friend. Checking antecedents, Knutson whooped when Crag showed him the psycher certificate. “Man, that’s really good. Only two weeks old. We can skip investigating anything about you before that and you can’t have got in much trouble in two weeks. What you been doing?”

  Crag explained that, and the head guard said he’d phone Olliver at the Phobos in Mars City early the next morning for a reference. And then, if Crag’s prints matched those on the psycher certificate, he was in and could start work as soon as he wanted to. “Don’t pay any more than a mine job,” Knutson told him, “but it’s clean, easy work. Mostly loafing, in fact, as long as you stay awake and alert while you loaf. You on?”

  Crag was on.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HE COULD have got on simply by going and applying for the job, of course, but it was far better the way he’d done it; he was a friend of Knutson’s. The quickest way to make friends with a bully is to get into a fight with him and let him beat you, but after such a tough fight and by so narrow a margin that he respects you. Beat him and he’ll hate you; go down easily and he’ll be contemptuous of you. And as a friend of Knutson’s, Crag got the shift he wanted to start with, the roving night shift that patrolled the interior of Menlo, not the periphery. He got to know every room of the place, except Eisen’s private office and laboratory, kept closed and locked while he was away. More than locked, he decided; it must have been well booby-trapped as well. Not even Knutson or Cambridge, the head technician and the man closest to Eisen, knew how to enter it. No one but Eisen ever did enter it, except at his invitation when he was present.

  Crag spent three nights and days doing nothing but learning the ropes, the position of every guard at every time, the obvious checks and safeguards, the routine, the layout. A lucky find solved one major future problem for him in advance; on the third floor was a small museum of primitive weapons from Earth. One of them—he’d decide which when the time came—would be just what he needed when the time came for him to get the disintegrator out of Menlo.

  The next evening at dinner in the dining room, Knutson asked Crag, “Like fights? Boxing, I mean.”

  “Sure,” Crag said.

  “Damn good one on tonight from Mars City, welters. Want to come to my room and watch it on tele?”

  “Sure,” Crag said.

  “It’s on at seven. Drop up to my room then and we’ll watch it. If you get there before I do, make yourself at home.”

  Crag made a careful point of getting there early and making himself at home. He loosened a vacuum tube in the teleset. When Knutson came in a few minutes later and turned it on, nothing happened. Knutson fiddled with the dials and swore.

  Crag said, “I’m pretty good at fixing one of those things. Nobody’s working in the main lab now; let’s run down there and I’ll see if I can get this thing going.”

  In the lab, he got it out of the case and started fooling with it. But by a few minutes after seven Knutson got restless. “We’re missing the fight, Crag. Let’s go to the main lounge and catch it on the big set. You can fix that later.”

  “You go ahead, Knut. I’m so close to getting this fixed I’d really rather stay with it. I’ll probably join you there before the fight’s over.”

  He did join Knutson before the fight was over and he had Knutson’s teleset working. Also he had several small items in his pockets; a tiny atomic flashlight and a c
ircuit detector, both jury rigged but small and efficient, and a few other things that might be needful.

  The next night he settled for going over the outer door of Eisen’s office with the flash and the circuit detector and working out the circuits of three separate alarms—or death-traps; it didn’t matter which—and that was all he did. He didn’t enter the room; he wanted a full night ahead of him for doing that, a night when he didn’t have to punch check buttons at various places in the buildings at various times. The next day he talked Knutson into putting him on a day shift.

  And the night after that, as early as was safe, he canceled out the three circuits in the door and let himself into Eisen’s office, with five hours ahead of him. He spent the first of those hours very carefully going over the office and the laboratory behind it for further alarms or traps. He found and disconnected three. Then he turned his attention to the blank durasteel door of the vault.

  It was right beside Eisen’s desk and an article lying on the latter gave him a hunch that saved him a lot of time and experimenting. It was a little horseshoe magnet, a toy, that was apparently used as a paperweight. But what if it was more than that? Why couldn’t it be the key to a magnetic lock?

  He examined the surface of the vault’s door inch by careful inch. It being durasteel there were no accidental scratches on it to confuse him. There was only an almost imperceptible flyspeck about a foot to the right of the center door. But flyspecks scrape off and this mark didn’t—and besides, there are no flies on Mars. He tried the magnet in various positions about the speck and when he tried holding it with both poles pointing upward and the speck exactly between them the door swung open. Inside were hundreds of drawers of various sizes, each numbered.

  Crag turned back to Eisen’s desk and in the little card file on a corner of it looked under the code designation Olliver had given him and found the drawer number. A moment later the disintegrator was in his hand. There was no mistaking it, from Olliver’s description. It looked for all the world like a tiny pocket flashlight, even smaller than the standard atomic one Crag had stolen from the main laboratory. Except for the lens, which was emerald green and was not transparent. Crag closed the drawer and started to close the vault door and then stopped. He had time to fabricate a dummy duplicate and he might as well follow Olliver’s suggestion that he leave a substitute. True, if Eisen ever tried to use the device he’d discover the substitution, but if he made periodic checkups just to make sure that nothing was missing, he’d simply look at the duplicate and not check its workings. And the longer before he might discover the theft, the better.

  He carried the thing into the private laboratory and went to work there. Eisen couldn’t possibly have provided better equipment for a burglar who wanted to leave a duplicate of whatever small object he stole. Given time, Crag could probably have taken the thing apart and made an actual working duplicate. But he settled for a really good outward duplicate and when he had finished it, he made sure there was not even the slightest sign left that he had used the workbench or moved a single tool. He placed the duplicate in the drawer and closed the vault, reconnected the alarms or traps except those at the door, and then waited quietly in darkness until he heard the guard pass on a round. Ten minutes later, the door again a deathtrap, he was safely back in his room. In office and workshop, there was no trace of his having visited there—unless Eisen tried to work the disintegrator or had a careful inventory of all the scrap metal in the workshop’s junk bins. The several other things he had to do could wait till tomorrow, and he got two hours of sleep.

  Getting the disintegrator safely out of the place was the most important thing the next day, and the easiest. The third-floor primitive weapons museum room was on his rounds. He picked the stoutest bow, a relatively modern twentieth century hunting bow, and a heavy hunting arrow. He taped the little disintegrator on the arrow just behind the steel head. Shot through the window it carried far over the electrified fence and down into a gully out of sight from any point in Menlo. Unless it had broken in the arrow’s landing—and he had wrapped it in cloth against that contingency—the disintegrator was now safe for him to recover at leisure. A quick stop in the main workshop while the technicians were at lunch enabled him to replace the atomic flashlight and to throw in the scrap bins the parts of the circuit detector, which he had already disassembled, and to get rid of the few other small things he had taken.

  But he didn’t want to arouse suspicion by quitting suddenly. Or, worse, getting himself fired, which he could do only by conduct that would be suspiciously out of character for a psyched man. He took the safe way. The following morning he reported himself as having a severe headache and feeling dizzy. Knutson took him to the dispensary and left him there to find the technician who ran it and who had a lay knowledge of medicine. Crag took advantage of the temporary solitude by making free use of two drugs, one of them belladonna and the other a quick-acting cathartic, he found in the supply cabinet.

  “Looks like rill fever,” said the technician, examining Crag’s contracting pupils. “Ever had it before?”

  Crag grinned wryly. “I wouldn’t remember. It might be on my record.”

  The technician looked at Knutson. “If it is, he’ll have diarrhea starting within a few hours. And if it is, he’d better get to Mars City for treatment. I can’t take care of him here, or even make a biopsy to make sure that’s what it is.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t wait,” Knutson said. “I can run him into Mars City and make sure.”

  “He’s better off if he doesn’t travel till this first attack is over. If that’s what it is, he’ll be all right by tomorrow and it’s always several days at least before there’s a second attack. As long as he gets a checkup—and treatment if that’s what it is—before a second attack, he’ll be all right.”

  Crag got worse and the expected diarrhea lasted most of the afternoon, but in the morning he felt better, much better. Knutson got his pay for him and even offered to forego searching Crag and his luggage to save time, but Crag insisted on the search, saying he didn’t want to be suspected in case, at a later date, anything at Menlo turned out to be missing. He also turned down Knutson’s offer of a lift into Pranger by heli insisting that the walk would make him feel better. Well out of sight of Menlo, he hid his suitcases along the path and circled around to the gulley where the arrow had landed and recovered it. He pocketed the disintegrator and buried the arrow in the sand.

  He didn’t try out the disintegrator so near Menlo for Olliver had not happened to mention whether or not its operation was silent; quite possibly it wasn’t. He waited until he was back near his luggage and then took it from his pocket, aimed it at a bush half a dozen feet away and pushed the thumb slide. Nothing happened until, gradually, he moved it nearer to the bush. When he was within a few inches of two feet away the outlines of the bush became misty and then it was no longer there, nor was there any trace of the bush left on the sand from which it had grown. Olliver had not lied about the nature of the device nor about the limitation of its range. It might be of value to a criminal in disposing of a dead body, but almost any other weapon, even a knife, was more efficient in killing. It didn’t look worth a million dollars to Crag, but that was Olliver’s business.

  That afternoon in Mars City he made his first business following through on his alibi for quitting the job, just in case. He went to a clinic and waited while a biopsy was made and checked. He was told he did not have rill fever and that the symptoms must have been something else. He promised to return for a full-scale checkup if the symptoms returned.

  And he called Knutson to give him the news, as he’d promised. If he didn’t Knutson might wonder, and anyway there was no use closing that door. He didn’t have the million yet and if he got it, it might not last forever. It would be handy to be able to go back to Menlo and work there again any time he might want to. Knutson tried to talk him into coming back then, but Crag said that even though it wasn’t rill fever he’d had, it had been
something and he’d rather, for a while, work in Mars City so he’d be near a clinic if there was a recurrence.

  He called Olliver’s hotel and got him on the phone.

  “Crag speaking,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

  “Wonderful, Crag! Can you come right around?”

  “Have you got your end of it, there in the room?”

  “Here? Of course not. It’ll take me until tomorrow afternoon to—”

  “I’ll phone you tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Wait, Crag. Where are you—?”

  Crag hung up.

  It was late the following afternoon when he called. Olliver said, “Crag, don’t hang up! Listen to me. That much money in cash is hard to raise. Most of my investments are on Earth, and I’m trying—”

  “How much have you got, there in the hotel?”

  “Half. And it’ll take me at least a few days more to raise the rest.”

  “All right,” Crag said. “If you’ve got half I’ll trust you for the rest. Is anyone else there now?”

  “Just Judeth. Can you come right away?”

  Crag said that he would, and got there in five minutes.

  Oliver, his face tense with eagerness, let him in. “You brought it?”

  Crag nodded and looked around. Judeth, dressed even more revealingly than she had been the first time he had seen her at Olliver’s house in Albuquerque on Earth, lounged on a brocaded sofa staring at him with an unreadable expression.

  Olliver turned to her. “We’ll take his word that he has it. Get him the money, dear.”

  Judeth went into an adjoining room of the suite and came back with an inch-thick sheaf of money. She held it out to Crag. “Five hundred thousand, all there. Count it.”

  Crag thrust it into a pocket. “If I’m trusting you for the second half of the million I might as well take your count on the first half. All right. Olliver, here’s your toy.”

  Olliver’s hand trembled slightly as he took it. “Good boy, Crag. And you don’t think they’ll miss anything from Menlo?”