Destiny's Orbit

by Donald A. Wollheim (as David Grinnell)

  They spent many hours in meditation, and in the contemplation of music and poetry. They manufactured some items, doing handwork, while not checking the cargo.

  "At least," said Ajax to the man who was explaining all this, "I didn't land on a convent ship!"

  The man smiled and agreed. It would have been a rather embarrassing predicament all around. "But, still, you are here away from the world . . ."

  Ajax sat up. "I want to talk to Brother Augustus about getting away from here. Has he a radio? What's happening in the space war?"

  The man shook his head. "There is no radio here, brother. We are totally isolated from all news. And none may leave here until we reach Mars. You still have a year to go. Rest, take it easy, think, delve into your true self."

  "What do you mean?" Ajax asked. "I have to get away. Surely I can borrow a ship's tender. You must have a couple of fast rocket craft for emergencies and landings."

  The man shook his head. "There may be such, but only Brother Augustus has access to them, and he will never permit it."

  "I must speak to him," said Ajax, getting to the floor. "Right away!"

  He slipped into the brown smock that had been given him while his own clothes were being laundered, and strode along the narrow passages to find the master of the Nirvanists.

  But Brother Augustus, whom he found supervising some work in a long workroom, where men toiled with hand tools at narrow benches, merely smiled sadly.

  "You must remain our guest," he said. "Until we return to Earth."

  "I've got to be here for four years!" yelped Ajax. "Four blessed, peaceful, soulful years of unchanging bliss. It's Nirvanal" intoned Brother Augustus, rolling his eyes. "It's Gehenna!" exclaimed Ajax.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Brother Augustus arched his eyebrows at Ajax and slowly shook his head. "You will find the peace and calm of our retreat very beneficial. Soon you will lose the tension of your Earthly desires, and find the harmonies of our work beneficial."

  "Oh, no," said Ajax. "I've got to get going! Isn't there some way you can lend me an escape rocket, a landing yacht, or something? Surely I can make it worth your while. Whatever it costs . . ."

  The master of the Nirvanists merely shook his head. "Absolutely not. Abide with us, friend Jack, abide with us in patience."

  Calkins stamped a foot impatiently, but held back from another angry retort. He would have to find some way to get what he wanted. Meanwhile . . . He found himself curious about what the brothers were doing in that workroom.

  In spite of himself, he noticed the odd similarity of their work to old electrical light bulbs, not quite completed— but surely that man was twisting tiny filaments; and that one blowing fragile glass bulbs; and down there, several men were delicately inserting the filaments, twisting and cleverly winding and binding.

  Brother Augustus followed his eyes, smiled. "Yes, they are indeed making light bulbs. We find that there is a great demand back on Earth for old-fashioned bulbs, made by the loving care of devoted hands, and filled with the blessed vacuum of outer space itself.

  "We sell these bulbs to light the altars of lamaseries in distant Tibet and in modem Shasta. Students of the mystic lore find them soothing, with their perfect clear vacuum

  unspoiled by the contamination of machinery and planetary atmospheres."

  Ajax looked at him, but the deep eyes of the man betrayed no emotion. Surely he could not be sincere; then vaguely Calkins recalled an ad here and there in journals for such bulbs as these. Well, he thought, there are crackpots and there are those who fatten on them.

  Which was Brother Augustus? The answer to his problem might well lie in that question.

  For several more days, Ajax found himself unable to do anything but follow the routine of the Nirvanists. It was a monotonous one, one designed to lull the mind and nerves. Several work hours, several hours devoted to quiet meditation, periods of listening to deep music, or listening to taped lectures on peace of mind.

  There was not a hint of the problems of mundane worlds. No newspaper, no news bulletin, no communication to be found anywhere, no books dealing with anything more substantial than philosophy. Ajax wandered the rim of the ionic sailcraft, was allowed everywhere, and learned that the control room was not in the rim, but in the core of the cargo hub—a locked area inaccessible to all save Brother Augustus.

  He went one morning to talk to Brother Augustus and found that worthy sitting quietly in his meditation room listening to a tape of an ancient symphony. As he entered, the bearded master raised a warning finger. Ajax sat down and listened. The tunes of the old instruments ran on, to Ajax's ears, monotonously, but the Brother seemed entranced. Suddenly he flicked a finger in the middle of a bar. The music stopped. Ajax was about to talk, but the tape was run back, and instantly began again where it had been several minutes before.

  They waited. Then the music switched off. Brother Augustus looked up. "Did you hear it? The second violin? It was off, definitely off in the seventh beat of that movement. I have been suspecting this for many months. Finally I have traced it down. And now . . ." He looked at Ajax expectantly.

  Ajax jumped up and dashed angrily out How could you argue with such an abstract man? He stamped down the long hall, past rooms and workchambers, ignoring the disapproving glances of the brothers.

  He came to a series of bedrooms, and realized suddenly that he was in front of Brother Augustus' own private sleeping quarters. In a flash of fury, he tried the door, found it open, slipped in.

  Maybe he could find out something about that bearded man who kept him prisoner so efficiently. There must be a means to cajole him into renting one of the ship's auxiliary rocketcraft!

  It was hardly an ethical act to go through his host's private effects, but Ajax recalled to himself that few of the empire builders of the past would have worried about such a minor detail. In the establishment of a crown, these things were excusable.

  He glanced around the narrow quarters. The bed, the bureau, no. There was a cabinet. He tried it; it was locked. He pressed on it, and found that it was not too tight. Taking his pocketknife out, Ajax went to work with the tip of the blade. In a few seconds, he had the cabinet open, for the lock was not one of the magnetic modern ones. Brother Augustus went in for the old-fashioned too often at the wrong spots.

  There were notebooks, ledgers, piles of papers, some flat boxes. Quickly Ajax thumbed through them. Bills of lading, sailing orders, ledgers of sales, lists of the brothers on this voyage, profits and losses (that was an interesting one-Brother Augustus had acquired quite a neat bank account in the three trips he had already made).

  On the bottom of the pile, Ajax came to a single flat leather folder, worn and old. He slipped it out, unstrapped it, looked in.

  He sat down on the bed with a thud, eyes agleam. Quickly he took out several clippings, some old photos, a worn spaceman's notebook. He skimmed through them rapidly and whistled to himself. Carefully extracting one of the old documents, he put the rest back, replaced the folder, closed the cabinet, and left the room.

  As he walked back to Brother Augustus' music room, he was whistling. He nodded politely to the various recluses he met, and when he reached the music room, he knocked, then opened the door and went in.

  Augustus was still listening to tapes. It sounded to Ajax's ears like the same tape, and the same composition. He sat down and waited.

  Augustus was beating time with one hand and leaning forward. His eyes nickered, he held up a finger, and smiled deeply. He; shut the tape off. "It's that beat," he said.

  "Definitely, absolutely. I've got him now. Oh, what an article I'll write when I get back to Earth. This’ll be a discovery!"

  "Yes, I venture to say it will be," said Ajax smiling, "and I made a little discovery of my own just now also."

  "Indeed," said the master of Nirvana, "I am pleased for you."

  "Perhaps you won't be so pleased," said Ajax in a deceptively calm tone. "And I don't think that the tired businessm
en and student philosophers who signed up on this cruise will be too pleased either, Scat Ward!"

  Brother Augustus stopped rubbing his hands and stared at Ajax, motionless, silent. Then he said slowly, "What did you say?"

  "I said Scat Ward," repeated Ajax. "Surely your piratical ears have not lost their keenness for the delicate nuance so suddenly?"

  Brother Augustus lowered his hands to his lap, stared at him with narrowed eyes. "And what does that mean to me, young man?" he whispered.

  "Perhaps it means the loan of an auxiliary, rocket, eh, Scat, you old buccaneer?" Ajax pursued his query.

  The man known as Brother Augustus looked at him in silence. "How do you know?" he said. In answer, Ajax took the old document from his pocket and passed it in front of the other's eyes. "One good bit of skullduggery deserves another," he remarked. "I think the contents of this little 'wanted' notice, issued by the EMSA police, would un-stabilize this heavenly retreat of yours. Shall I post it on the meditation board, or shall I be leaving shortly by rocket?"

  Brother Augustus' eyes flickered. "The space pirate known as Scat Ward is a thing of the past. I have found true peace in my work here. There is no need for the introduction of turbulent thoughts in our serene atmosphere," he said solemnly. "I am now inclined to feel that your departure from our Retreat would contribute to the general harmony."

  "Ah," said Ajax, "I felt sure that you would see the light, Captain Scat. . . uh, Brother Augustus."

  Not two hours later, Ajax closed the tiny airlock of the trim little landing rocket tender, housed in its snug berth in the gravityless depths of the cargo hub, signaled a grateful farewell to the spacesuited figure of Augustus Ward, ex-space pirate, captain of the ionic freighter Nirvana, and Master of the Order of the Nirvanists, pushed the button for his exiting catapult, shot in his rocket engines, and headed outwards from the sun towards the asteroid belt.

  In a remarkably short time, the huge sailing vessel of space had dwindled to a spot of white, then finally vanished. Behind Ajax was the sun, ahead of him the stars, the faint white spots of larger asteroids, and visible in the clarity of outer space, the planet Saturn, its rings neatly edgewise.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Designed as it was to be used primarily in landing operations from orbit to planet, the small rocketship was a manually operated vehicle. It did however have the proper computers for making long distance flights, and Ajax was able to fit out the coordinates from the standard texts that are operational equipment on all such craft.

  He did not know the exact coordinates for Ajax in its new orbit, but he did have a clear idea of where it had been when he had left it; and he was able to set up and work out an approximate new directional for it on the basis of its previous location and what had happened to it.

  This took time, but the trip back would last a goodly number of days and there would be plenty of time. Once he had set his directions, he would perforce have to spend a good deal of time at the controls himself to watch for the close approach of asteroids not included in his limited calculations.

  The little ship was compact, with but the one living chamber which doubled as control room. He rigged himself a hammock from which he could reach out and grasp the controls should the meteor alarm ring while he was asleep. The ship had a supply of victuals, though it lacked a Calkans system.

  It was therefore about forty or more hours later before Ajax thought to try the general radio receiver in the craft During the whole time he had been an involuntary guest aboard the ionic freighter he had been utterly out of touch with the news of the solar system. If there was a radio aboard that slow vessel, Scat Ward had it hidden quite thoroughly away.

  So now, at last, he tuned in on the news of the inner planets.

  The news was bad.

  The general outlanes system station at the Martian North Pole was still within range and on it he heard of the open war that was now raging between the Saturnians and the Earth-Mars coalition.

  There was a battle shaping up in space somewhere just outside the orbit of Jupiter. There had been preliminary skirmishes of scout ships; there had been some sort of an initial battle between two small forces which had clashed at a point in the Jovian orbit, culminating in the destruction of certain asteroids there.

  Ajax grimaced at that. Indeed, he had supplied the spark; that much he had to concede to Emily Hackenschmidt.

  But now the main EMSA battle fleet in the asteroid region, aided by several vessels released from the docks on Mars, were racing to a rendezvous with what was believed to be the spearhead of a large flotilla from the Ringed Planet. When they met—and the meeting was expected soon—that would be the payoff.

  But such a meeting is not easily arranged, and it was still several days before news began to arrive, this time from Radio Juno, that the two fleets had sighted each other.

  The place was now outside the Jovian orbit, a half-million miles towards Saturn.

  By then Ajax was beginning to cross the orbits of the innermost asteroids. He now spent most of his time seated at the controls, altering and shifting -course to account for the new tiny discs and globes of light which were among the thousands of, tiny worlds that made up this vast belt of planetary wreckage.

  What, he wondered, had happened to the Wuj, abandoned in an artificial world, without power to turn on the full controls? Had he found food? Somewhere there must be some stores, yet could the Wuj find them without a major power control over the robotic planetoid? How long could a Martian spider-type go without food?

  And what of Emily, that trouble-making girl? Ajax scowled at the thought of how she had put it over on him; yet, at the same time, he found himself troubled by curious feelings of pleasure about her. Something about that girl . . . well, dammit, if she wasn't on the opposite side, he'd take to her. He wondered what she was up to now. If she had returned to Ajax to find him gone, perhaps that would be the end of it. Her story would go down in some EMSA file, there to gather dust and be forgotten.

  Or would it?

  EMSA had its hands full now, anyway. The two fleets had clashed. The battle was on, somewhere out there in the blackness of space. Reports coming "in were sketchy. Propaganda claims from Radio Juno, indicating victory, muffling details, no damage reports that could be pinned down specifically. No word from the Saturnians, but that was not surprising.

  The battle apparently raged on. A day, two days passed, without claims becoming any more definite. It didn't look good, although Ajax, as a student of history, realized that in outer space it must be difficult to gather the details of the outcome of a battle that must be fought over a field which might encompass a million cubic miles of trackless emptiness. In it ships might pass each other unseen; ships might go to their doom unnoticed; ships might hunt around looking for an enemy that never could be found. It was only by dint of a vast radar and radio network that such fleets could operate—and with scramblers, atomic explosion static, bits of burst vessels, and so on, the confusion would accumulate tremendously as the struggle went on.

  Ajax bent to his controls as the time came when he must be drawing closer to the planetoid that was Ajax. He should now, he thought, be somewhere in the vicinity of it. He ran readings on the visible planetoids around him, identified them, traced back their orbits to the time he had left Ajax, and thereby tried to line up the whereabouts of his own little kingdom.

  Now, he clung to the controls, checking his radar, watching the slowly changing scene of the stars and worldlets, and tracing down the errant metal world.

  The radio blatted in his ear and most of the time he paid it no attention. The same vagaries, the same guesswork.

  A new glint in the heavens, another asteroid ahead of him. He beamed in on it, and detected the mirrory color of metal. He closed in, trailed after it, catching up. Yes, it was a metallic world, a world of polished silvery metal streaked here and there with traces of black where dirt and rock had once been.

  "Ajax," he whispered, "here I come. The king re
turns to his kingdom."

  Somewhere inside there, on a metal floor near the outer skin, must be lying his flag, his royal flag, brought with him from the old Destiny. And . . . was somewhere there also ... a body? That of his loyal follower, his first true subject?

  He came in for a landing near the point where the outer lock of the hollow planetoid must be. And as he came in, the radio shifted.

  "Radio Juno, to all asteroid stations and listeners. Attention! You are immediately to prepare to abandon all posts and return to regrouping stations previously assigned. Women and children, if any, are to return/without delay to Mars.

  "Radio Juno, calling all listeners. General emergency. Our fleet is withdrawing to a new line of defense at the central perimeter of the asteroids. You are warned, the Saturnians are coming! The Saturn fleet is coming! The Saturn fleet is coming!"

  Ajax almost forgot the landing he was about to make; he felt himself chill a moment, EMSA had been defeated; the Earth-Mars forces had been broken, and were fleeing. He could read between the lines. No such emergency signal would be given if the situation were not the worst

  He twisted the dials, listening; and as he caught a humming, he brought the little rocket down closer and closer, skimmed the surface of the all-metal world that had been hidden from the universe for so long, and finally landed very nearly in the same spot that the Destiny had once occupied.

  He let out the magnetic grippers, secured the ship, and turned again to the radio. The humming increased, a carrier wave. He put on the power. There was a clicking sound, then, faintly, distant, a voice. It was a voice surprisingly like that of Anton Smallways, though it could not be he, but that of some mechanical voice box similar to what Anton must have used.

  "Your friends from Saturn are on their way. Liberty for all. Rejoice, for your friends from Saturn are coming to>