Rogue in Space

by Fredric Brown

  “However, no difficulty is anticipated in making the landing. All factors are known there. The biggest question mark is the atmosphere. Will it be breathable as is, or will we have to set up atmosphere plants as we have on Mars and Venus and under the Callisto domes? Spectographic analysis—the only analysis we can make until we get there—is encouraging. Oxygen is present in approximately the same proportion as in the atmosphere of Earth; so is carbon dioxide. Atmospheric density is a little less than that of Earth, but only slightly so; Kaperhorn estimates that its density at sea level is approximately that of Earth’s at an altitude of one mile, the altitude of, say, Albuquerque or Denver.

  “The element of uncertainty lies in the fact that there are certain trace elements which we have been unable to analyze completely at a distance, and there is of course the possibility that one of these trace elements may be poisonous. The scoutship has no chemical laboratory aboard, but does have cages of canaries and other small experimental animals, the use of which will enable Captain Burke to decide whether, for a short period, it will be safe to leave the ship without suits.

  “But with or without suits they will explore the area immediately around their landing point—”

  Crag made a rude noise. “Another woji, Gardin?”

  Gardin nodded and Crag went to the bar, opened and brought back two fresh bottles. The sphere of the new planet was still on the screen but the voice of the Admiral had been supplanted by soft music. “What gives?” Crag asked. “Did he run out of crap to talk about?”

  “Guess so. They’re filling in until a report comes from the scoutship. Just a few minutes; it’s nearing the top of the atmosphere now.” Gardin glanced down at the money on the floor between them. “Crag, what was the crazy idea of making that ridiculous bet? You’re practically giving me a grand.”

  “Maybe,” Crag said.

  “Unless you’ve got inside dope, and I don’t see how you could have, but…you suggested the bet. I’m a sucker to bet a man at his own game.”

  Crag grinned at him. “Want to call it off? I’ll give you a chance now, before the scoutship comes on.”

  Gardin hesitated a moment, then shook his head. “No, leave it lay.” He took a long pull from his bottle.

  The music stopped and the video spoke again with a human voice. “Lieutenant Laidlaw speaking from the scoutship. Captain Burke is at the controls. We are descending slowly, just entering the upper atmosphere of Cragon. That is, our instruments show a detectable pressure, although still not much above a laboratory vacuum. We are approximately fifty miles high and at the moment we are descending at the rate of five miles a minute, although we shall slow that rate of descent within a few minutes to avoid overheating the hull from atmospheric friction.

  “Forty-five miles. We can see from here—I think with certainty—that the dark green areas of land of the surface really are forests. At least they give very much the same appearance as a dense Earth forest gives from the same height.

  “We’re thirty miles high now, almost into the stratosphere. But—Captain Burke is stopping our descent; we are holding position at this height, motionless. What’s wrong, Captain?”

  In the moment of silence Crag asked, “Want to double that bet?”

  Gardin shook his head. “But how the hell—?”

  “Never mind how the hell. Maybe I do have inside information. If you don’t want to double it, I’ll give you one last chance to call it off.”

  Gardin didn’t hesitate. He scooped up the handful of bills, handed Crag his thousand and stuffed the ten hundreds into his own pocket. Crag grinned. “Now we’ll see how he’s going to work it.”

  “How who’s going to work what?”

  “Shhh,” said Crag, as a different voice sounded from the video.

  “Captain Burke taking the mike. And apologizing for the fact that the Lieutenant and I have been talking off mike for a moment. This is not an emergency, but something that must be investigated before we descend any lower. Something seems to be wrong with our air-conditioning system.

  “At the point at which I stopped our descent I happened to glance at the cage in which we have three canaries—the use of which the Lieutenant explained to you a few minutes ago. And noticed that one of them is lying on the bottom of the cage and the other two seemed to be—well, in trouble.

  “Obviously something has gone wrong with our air-conditioning system and we should not complete the descent until we have fixed it. The Lieutenant, who is more familiar than I with that part of the mechanism of the ship, is now investigating. I’ll have his report—or give him back the microphone—in just a moment.”

  Just a moment passed. The Captain’s voice spoke again. “Something strange here. Lieutenant Laidlaw reports that he can find nothing wrong with the equipment, that the indicators show proper proportion of oxygen and fail to indicate the presence of any foreign gas, and yet two of the canaries are now dead and the other apparently dying. The hamsters and the white rats are huddling together and breathing hard, showing signs of discomfort.

  “And he and I seem to smell, very faintly, a foreign odor. I haven’t checked with the lieutenant on this but I would classify it as something vaguely like sulphuric acid—but sweetish, as well. If you can imagine a mixture of sulphuric acid and gardenias—well, that’s the way I’d describe it.

  “Yet this ship is airtight—we are bringing in, even for processing purposes, nothing of the atmosphere outside, tenuous as it is at a height of thirty miles. It must be something wrong right here in the ship itself. There is no way it can conceivably concern the planet we are near. There is no way—”

  “Captain Burke!” It was the voice of the bulldog-faced admiral aboard the flagship. “Raise ship at once. Completely outside that atmosphere.”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “Keep reporting.”

  “Yes, Admiral…We’re rising now. Thirty-three miles now, thirty-five. Lieutenant Laidlaw is staggering across the cabin toward me but he seems to be all right, maybe just off balance. And my headache—I didn’t have time to mention it—is going away. Forty miles. I think we’re out of it now, sir. Or our air-conditioning system is functioning properly again. Shall we try again, sir?”

  “Report back to the fleet at once. Before we make another attempt, with a live or a drone ship, we want to check yours thoroughly. As well as your air-conditioning system, we want to check you and the Lieutenant, and those canaries.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gardin looked at Crag, and Crag laughed. He had, Crag realized, laughed more in the last half hour than he had for a long time.

  “Bet you the drone ship doesn’t land there either,” Crag said.

  “No bet.” Gardin went over and shut off the video. “No use keeping on watching now. It’ll be at least another day before they get a drone rigged up. Crag, what’s it all about?”

  Crag shook his head slowly. “Sorry. To tell you that I’d have to tell you too much about other things.”

  “It isn’t something we can cash in on?”

  Crag shook his head again. “Game of gin, to kill some time?”

  Gardin stood up. “Sorry, I’ve got business. You might not be seeing me so much for a while, Crag. That thousand of mine you almost took—and thanks for calling off the bet, since you must have known it was a sure thing—was getting near rock bottom. I’m going to have to scrape up some more.”

  “Good luck,” Crag told him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  CRAG didn’t see Gardin for longer than a week, although he continued to frequent the same places where he and Gardin had gone together. He didn’t go to Gardin’s hotel for two reasons; one, he knew that if Gardin was still there and wanted to see him, Gardin would do the looking up, and two, that Gardin might have left the hotel but left his woman there to wait for him. And he didn’t want to see Gardin’s brassy blonde without Gardin around. Preferably not even then.

  He found himself following the newscasts about the new planet. None of
them, after the fiasco of the would-be first landing, were telecast; they were merely reports. The space fleet couldn’t hold back the facts, but they could avoid making fools of themselves by letting the public watch the failures.

  No alien gas had been found in the hull of the scoutship that had been recalled from the first attempt. The only concrete evidence found in it was the bodies of the two dead canaries and the fact that the third canary had been very ill. So had the hamsters, the mice and the two humans. The Captain and the Lieutenant had spent hours after their return recovering from nausea.

  The air-conditioning equipment had been found to be functioning perfectly and autopsies on the dead canaries had given no indication whatsoever of the cause of death.

  The only conclusion the investigating scientists could draw was that there must be a hitherto unknown ingredient in the atmosphere of Cragon, one so deadly that even in the rarefied atmosphere thirty miles above the surface it could penetrate the solid hull of a spaceship, possibly by some process akin to osmosis, and kill or injure the occupants. Space suits seemed to offer no answer; anything that can penetrate the foot-thick hull of a ship can certainly penetrate the airtight fabric of a space suit.

  Two days after the initial failure at landing, a drone ship was sent down to land. Since the manned ship had brought back no sample of the deadly gas—only of its effects—it was assumed that it had leaked out again on the return trip across space and that the same thing would happen to any that the drone ship picked up, in whatever type container. So instead of containers, the drone was packed with chemical testing equipment, some of it automatic and some operable by remote control, that would make many and delicate tests in situ, while the drone rested on the surface of the planet, and record the results for later analysis.

  The only trouble was that the drone ship never landed. Never, in fact, got into even the most tenuous upper reaches of the atmosphere. Cragon changed tactics. Well over two hundred miles above the surface of the planet the drone ship—bounced.

  It had hit an impenetrable force field.

  Not even unmanned rockets were welcome to land on Cragon.

  Crag chuckled to himself.

  That ended the official telecasts of the attempts to land on Cragon. The admiralty made a very carefully worded announcement to explain the news blackout that indicated that the admiralty was scared stiff.

  “It now seems possible if not probable that the solar system has been invaded by a race of aliens. The formation of a new planet from the debris of the solar system was too strange and too sudden to be accounted for by any theory of astrophysics known to man; it is therefore considered possible that it was accomplished deliberately by an alien race from outside the system.

  “That the intention of this race is not friendly is strongly indicated by the fact that they have refused peaceable contact, which could have been established had they let us land freely. A force field is not known in nature and must therefore be artificial. So must a poisonous gas which penetrates the solid hull of a ship, but which vanishes completely when that ship is outside the atmosphere.

  “While the planet Cragon has, to our Knowledge, committed no overt act against the rest of the solar system, and while therefore a state of war need not be assumed, a state of emergency must be declared. A state of protective emergency. Since it is possible that advance spies of the race of Cragonians are already among us, this will require henceforth a strict censorship of…”

  The Solar Council immediately decreed a state of emergency, and doubled taxes on low incomes (and increased them slightly on high incomes) to finance whatever plans they were making. Which, of course, could not be made public because of the possibility of Cragonian spies.

  But rumors were rife, especially in the spacemen’s quarter, where rumors, especially concerning matters in space, were uncannily accurate. Although there was strict security on any reports from the asteroid belt that could have reached Marsfleet headquarters from the vicinity of Cragon, somehow the contents of those reports became known around the quarter almost within minutes of the time they could have been received. And known, Crag knew, correctly.

  The second drone ship hadn’t tried gentle descent on antigrav; it had blasted down at the surface with all rockets flaring; it had bounced off just the same—because of its tremendous speed crumpled into a single massive ingot of incandescent metal. Rockets with atomic warheads exploded on contact with the force field and subsequent telescopic-spectroscopic examination of the planet under the point of contact indicated that not even any of their radiation had penetrated that field to reach the atmosphere under it.

  Cragon was off bounds.

  And the spy scare grew. The military didn’t know whether Cragon was populated or not or, if it was, what its inhabitants looked like—but the military was afraid and because it couldn’t reach Cragon, it was looking for something it could reach, and that meant spies. Transients, other people who couldn’t explain themselves readily, were picked up for questioning, and if their answers weren’t ready and provable, they were questioned further, under drugs or otherwise.

  The fact was something for Crag to think about; even though the rich who stayed at the luxury hotels were never bothered by the police—most of them, even if they were vacationing under aliases, were too powerful for the police to risk exposing—he realized that the military might overlook that obstacle. They might figure that a Cragonian spy would deliberately pose as a wealthy debauchee for that very reason. And the military were less susceptible to intimidation and bribery than the police, especially if they thought they might be dealing with an alien enemy spy.

  So Crag took a precaution he hadn’t bothered with before; he visited the best forger-printer in Mars and had papers made that gave him a complete false identity and history back to birth. They wouldn’t stand up under a full-scale investigation, of course, but they’d cover him in case of any spot check or other casual inquiry.

  Afterwards he wondered if he hadn’t wasted the time and money, because they wouldn’t protect him against any serious suspicion, and he’d already laid himself open to serious suspicion—if Gardin talked about him. He hadn’t anticipated the spy-scare angle the day he and Gardin had watched the video of that first attempt at a landing on Cragon. He’d put himself in Gardin’s hands by offering that bet of a thousand dollars at even odds that the scoutship wouldn’t successfully land and take off again. How could he have known that, the military would want to know. Sure, he could tell them the truth—and admit to having killed Olliver, among other crimes.

  Gardin himself might be suspicious, and if Gardin was, Crag couldn’t blame him for reporting the incident. But Crag shrugged the thought off. After all, he had to take some chances. Did he want to live forever?

  Which reminded him that he’d been taking too few chances to keep life interesting and that evening he let himself drink just a little more than usual in one of the toughest dives in the quarter and got into a fight. There’s never difficulty in getting into a fight in the quarter.

  He let himself be drawn into an argument, that was all, with four husky cargo handlers from the port. He didn’t really know what he was arguing about but they didn’t either. He let himself get argumentative about whatever it was and suddenly there was a fist coming at his face. He deflected it with his left hand and sank his right hand into the belly of the fist-thrower, who folded up like an accordion and started retching.

  Crag stepped back from the bar and the other three of them came at him. He stepped under a haymaker and landed a light left to the solar plexus of the leading one, and then there were only two, but one of those two caught him a wallop on the side of the head that staggered him almost to the doorway. He came back, coming in low and using both fists like pistons and suddenly there was only one of them still interested. He was the biggest one, though, and Crag made him last a little longer by using only his right.

  It had all happened so suddenly that Crag was scarcely breathing hard, although h
is ears rang from the one hard blow he’d taken. He walked back to the bar to pick up his drink again. The bartender, a sizable club clenched tightly in his hand and his face a bit pale, backed away.

  Crag nodded at him reassuringly. “It’s okay,” he said. “Nobody hurt, no damage done. And you don’t have to join the party unless you want to.”

  The bartender relaxed. Crag took the final gulp of his drink and put a bill on the bar. “Give ’em each a drink on me when they come around,” he said. And left.

  It had been fun while it lasted, but—

  He wondered where Gardin was, what kind of a job he was casing or doing. He wondered whether if he, Crag, had been getting low on funds too, Gardin would have asked him in the deal. And whether he’d have accepted, if Gardin had. He thought he’d trust Gardin enough, but…

  But he was a long way from being near enough broke to give him excuse to plan another job. He still had well over nine-tenths of that damned half million. Half a million dollars was a lot of money, too much money. Damn money.

  Or, more accurately, he thought, damn a man who couldn’t find pleasure in the spending of it.

  Back in his suite, too early, he opened the doors of the big video screen and flicked it on. Not because, if there was any new news about the new planet, he’d get it here, but he was curious about what kind of a stall the government was giving the people; they’d have to allow the newscasters to feed the public something, whether true or not.

  But the screen flashed into the picture of a handsome gray-haired commercial announcer. His smile was so disgustingly sincere that Crag waited to see what he was going to say. And stepped closer to the screen because he knew what was going to happen when he heard it.

  “Are you a necrophile? All your problems are solved. General Plastics now brings on the market a simulacrum that is almost completely undetectable, except for the fact that it does not deteriorate, from a real dead body. Available in models of either sex, it sells for a low, low price. Or can be rented if, like most nonfetishist necrophiles, you prefer a change from time to time in the object of—”