Walt & Leigh Richmond

by Phoenix Ship

  At the gesture a man at a nearby table looked up.

  "Where's the hiring hall? Here or on Earth?" Stan asked him abruptly.

  The man, hard-faced, hard-muscled, in rumpled coveralls, looked Stan up and down—the soft student's hands; the quiet student's face; the crisply cut hair; the cloak. . . .

  "It's up here. Level five, quadrant three," he said disdainfully. "But a fat lot of good it will do the likes of you."

  Stan nodded his thanks curtly. "You might be surprised, sir," he said, and was himself surprised at the title he'd given the surly spacer, though he felt justified in giving it.

  The hiring hall turned out to be in a much lighter G area, a barn of a room filled with figures of every description: uniformed and coveralled; neat and slovenly; none cloaked. All had what Stan had come to think of as the spaceman's look, a hard, almost blank expression. An inner absorption, or just blankness?

  High on the walls, constantly shifting lights listed the names of ships in dock, their destinations and their needs in the way of personnel. Occasionally a loudspeaker called a name and an office number, and a figure would rise and make its way to one of the cubicles.

  "Where do you sign up?" Stan asked the nearest figure, a small man with a wizened face and sharp eyes that surveyed him again disdainfully.

  "Application boxes there," the man told him after the survey, nodding toward a series of booths against the wall behind him that closely resembled the test cubicle in which he'd spent so many hours at school.

  Inside it was nearly the same—a seat, a desk, a scanner; except that the seat was of air-support plastic; the desk a harder plastic; and instead of a keyboard into which you punched your answers, there was a glass plate on which you wrote, on which you pressed your fingers for printing; a scanner for retináis.

  Name and number.Fingerprints. Retináis. Main area of training. Stan thought a minute, then entered: Engineering. Preferred destination. Without hesitation Stan wrote: Belt City. That was all.

  There was a pause, then the screen cleared and a metallic voice came to him through a tiny speaker: "Take a seat in the hiring hall. You will be called."

  He found a scat near the application booths and waited. From this part of the spincenter there were no view-screens. He watched the crowd. He slept. He woke and watched the crowd again. He grew hungry, but he ignored the hunger.

  He was asleep again when his own name, coming from the loudspeaker, woke him. "S.T.A.R. Dustin," the voice was chanting. "Report to office seventeen."

  The office he entered was tiny and bare except for a desk and two plastic puff chairs. Behind the desk sat a heavy man, erect even in the sagging softness of the pneu-mochair. His face held a hauteur that spoke of authority. He was cloaked, but the hood was back. Stan was relieved. At least his own cloak—he had thought of discarding it but had lacked the courage—wouldn't be held against him.

  Tm Stan Dustin," he introduced himself.

  The man looked him over carefully. "I gather you want to work your way to the Belt?"

  Stan nodded and remained silent, standing.

  "Sit down, sit down." The man gestured to the chair by the desk. "I'd have recognized you even if your identity hadn't been checked quite thoroughly," he said. "You resemble your late uncle Trevor Dustin quite remarkably." Stan started but remained silent. T gather your decision to go to the Belt is irrevocable? Have you notified your parent?"

  1 haven't notified anyone," Stan said, his heart sinking.

  "I rather thought I'd let my father know after I was gone. I hope it won't be necessaiy to your hiring—"

  "Probably wise from your point of view," the man interrupted. "I assume that any sane family would discourage you."

  "I hope that it's not to discourage you, sir, from—" The man looked at him quizzically. "It is not my business to be encouraged or discouraged," he said. "I have the quite dubious honor of representing your late uncle. Did you think I was a hiring hand?" Stan nodded, crestfallen.

  The lawyer shook his head in annoyance. "A lack of perception that will not get you far," he said cruelly. "However, that is not my purview. Young man, your uncle left instructions that if you decided, quite on your own, to go to the Belt, and initiated action in that direction, I was to see to it that you got there. So I've taken passage for you on a Mars freighter that raises within the hour. Naturally, you can't go to the Belt directly, relations being what they are, but Mars is a free port. At Mars you will transfer to a Belt freighter. I have the passages here."

  Stan found that he was both pleased and disappointed. Why disappointed? he asked himself. Was he trying to prove something?

  The lawyer looked at him distastefully, as though he could read the other's thoughts. "Perhaps you could sign on as a member of a ship's crew. Probably not. But most certainly the technicalities of signing on would alert your family and any others that might be interested in delaying or preventing you. Which is why," he went on dryly, "I have seen fit to drop everything, charter a space taxi, and get here, preferably before you kft Orbdock, for the privilege of seeing you off at the earliest possible moment and before you involved yourself in some mess from which I must extract you. However I may feel personally, I am professionally charged with getting you to your destination, and I should prefer that the charge did not involve us together in legal technicalities that might associate our names for years."

  Stan said stiffly, "I did not mean to seem ungrateful, sir. I-"

  "But you wanted to run away on your own? Well, it's a fine fat attitude with little that is practical to recommend it. However," he went on before Stan could interrupt, "I am quite sure that I am not doing you a favor in assisting you in getting to the Belt.

  "You will have to leave your Earth credit balance as it stands. If you draw it down to zero, or even draw heavily on it while at Orbdock, the computers will automatically be alerted and start an investigation, which will delay you. When you get to the Belt you will find that Belters are an intolerant breed, not given to lightly accepting gifts, such as yourself, from Mother Earth. Neither is Earth apt to accept you back lightly, should you fail in the Belt. You will be very much on your own. Do you still wish to go?"

  "I'll take my chances," said Stan defiantly.

  The lawyer harrumped. "Well, traitor's blood is traitor's blood, and you are like your uncle in looks as well as actions."

  Stan flushed and started to speak angrily, but the lawyer gestured him silent. "This business is as unpleasant for me as for you. Let us get it over and done with. There is also a bequest here for a thousand shares in a small Belt enterprise which your uncle founded. Whether it still exists, I do not know, but I do not think you should build any hopes on it. Your uncle's death left the corporation in the hands of two partners who may or may not be surviving themselves; and it is an enterprise which may or may not have survived. The shares are yours, for what they may be worth. The corporation is called Astro Technology."

  Having finished his business, the lawyer abruptly hooded himself and left the room without a farewell.

  Stan stood gazing at the passage vouchers and the shares of stock lying on the small desk. Then he pulled his travel-case from the greatpocket of his cloak and stuffed the papers inside, zippering it carfully.

  It was as he started to put the case back into the great-pocket that the realization came.

  The Belt, he thought. Tm going to he a Belter now.

  A grin came over his face; his chin lifted; and with a huge shrug he dropped the cloak from his shoulders, letting it fall to the floor; stepping over it as he walked out of the office.

  IV

  STAN REACHED Orbdock, Mars, still preoccupied with his own chaotic emotions and the changing vectors of a lifetime of habitual thinking and reaction. The change had been accelerated and made easier by the fact of being in space, and by the new sensations and information that his senses were absorbing; but his real attention had been on finding out just what his own basic precepts were, or could be; and the expe
rience and the information flowed by, almost unnoticed to his preoccupations.

  Spincenter at the Mars Orbdock was small compared to Earth's, the doughnut a mere two hundred feet in diameter, the gravity at the rim only .15 G; but Stan, who'd been in a tenth G acceleration all the way, was used to it by now and stepped confidently from the pneumocar when they reached the rim.

  It was more barren here than on Earth, although the walls were clear plastic and showed the same aquarium beyond.

  Beyond the usual restaurant he could see what must be the information center sloping sharply up from him, a big board on its wall with changing names and numbers on it. He turned in that direction to see a man coming toward him in red skintights with matching red lad slippers; his waist was belted in gold worked in the pattern of a snake.

  The outfit fascinated Stan, and he found his eyes returning again to the figure as he made his way toward the big board in the distance. To his surprise, the man was approaching him.

  "You Dustin?"

  He was larger than Stan, blond, and apparently of about the same are. Perhaps a little older. Heavy in the shoulders, slender of waist, and lithe in his movements as he approached. His face looked puzzled.

  "Yes, but how did you know?"

  "Well, your ship's in, and I've been waiting for you. You're not Mars-clad, but you're not Earth-clad either. It was a guess. I understand you were from Earth?"

  Stan felt minutely proud of his gold-tinged gray tunic and trousers, which were more in the nature of the red-suited man's clothing than either Earth or Mars style.

  "I'm Dustin," he reaffirmed. "Stan Dustin."

  "I'm Paulsen. Skipper of the Sassy Lassie. I reckon you're my passenger for Belt City. I've been waiting for you, ready to scat, for the past three hours. You ready? That all your duffel?" He nodded at the travelcase Stan was carrying.

  "That's all of it," Stan answered.

  "If you have a yen to look over Marsport, you'll have to catch the next freighter. The Marjorie is due in a couple of days. You want to wait for her and see the sights?"

  Stan grinned. There was an air of defiance in Paulsen's attitude. Or perhaps intolerance? Whatever it was, he was obviously prepared to shake Stan at the slightest excuse.

  "I'm ready," he said quietly.

  "Okay. I'm tied up "at Tube 109."

  Paulsen turned and strode swiftly to the pneumocar that Stan had just left. Stan entered in time to see him punch out a destination on the controls, and the car started accelerating up through the doughnut, through its spoke to the hub, then angling off on an increasing acceleration toward the tip of the tube where Paulsen's ship would be anchored, some six miles away. Deceleration caueht him unexpectedly, and he found himself swaying forward in his seat.

  The pneumocar stopped, and Stan was floating in null G. Grasping the seat ahead of him he pulled himself behind Paulsen to the opening of the car which was locked onto the Sassy Lassie's air lock.

  He saw Paulsen pause a second, then push himself through the opening, and as the skipper moved from before him, he could see two extra figures in the air lock, each hand-held into place from one of the straps on the cylindrical walls. Stan pushed himself in, carrying his travelcase, to join them.

  The situation seemed eerie and unreal to senses schooled to gravity; but the two grim-faced men in the lock with them were veiy real indeed.

  "This Dustin?" one of the two asked Paulsen.

  "Yep."

  "You just Rst a passenger. He's wanted on Earth."

  Finding a handhold, Stan held himself immobile, watching Paulsen, v/ho glanced at him briefly, glanced at his belt, then turned back to the other two.

  "Charges serious?" Paulsen asked.

  "How should I know? Some school on Earth sent orders."

  "School? Dnstin, what's the problem?"

  Stan found himself answering in normal, unhurried tones: "I guess the school I left doesn't like the idea that I prefer the Belt," he said quietly.

  "Still want to go?"

  "Yes."

  Paulsen turned his head again to the other two and his voice was grim. "You interfering with a Belter in the normal pursuit of his business?" he asked.

  "Dustin's no Belter."

  "He's my passenger."

  Stan grinned to himself. Then, releasing his travelcase, which continued to float inconspicuously at his side, he said pleasantly, "I sure wouldn't want to cause you unnecessary trouble. Skipper. Come on, boys." And with that he pushed back through the entrance to the pneumocar.

  Just inside, ho held himself out of the way so that the two following him could reach the control panel. Then, turning his head, he noticed the travelcase still floating in the air lock.

  "Oh. Mv duffel," he said happily, and pushed himself into the air lock again, angling his motion toward a large red handle marked EMERGENCY PRESSURE RELEASE.

  His fingers grasped the handle before anyone could react, and he used it as a lever to set his feet against the side of the lock and pull against his own leverage.

  Abruptly the air spilled from the lock, and with a thwummp, the tube bulkhead closed. Stan, timing the lowering of pressure by a feeling of internal expansion, had just released the handle when Paulsen reached him.

  "Get your hands off that dump switch. You'll have us in vacuum," he said with a snarl.

  Stan pushed away to the bulkhead handle, tested it. It refused to budge.

  "But they're on the other side and the pressure's triple out there."

  Paulsen looked at him in complete disbelief, then a smile crept over his face. "Well, there's not enough pressure in here for comfort very long," he said, and began cycling them through into the ship proper.

  The trip to Mars hadn't prepared Stan for the control cabin of the Sassy Lassie. It was clean, but it had a used and battered look. It had been repaired and re-repaired, and it very definitely had the feel of being lived in. There were two decks for living quarters beneath this cabin before you got to the ion-drive tube, Stan realized; but it was normally a one-man ship and the skipper probably spent most of his time up here.

  The freight doughnut around the ship below was useless to them except in spacesuits. It was vacuum and unshielded; so that this thirty-five foot tall, approximately twenty foot wide extension of the rocket tube was the "ship" as far as people were concerned; and of that space, the hull shielding left only a cylinder twenty-three feet tall and with an eight foot radius for living quarters.

  Stan pulled himself over to the acceleration chair beside the pilot's without waiting to be told, and strapped himself in. Paulsen was already busy releasing the ship from the docking tube so that it would drift off, "Before we get boarders," he said lightly.

  "Thanks for the backing, Skipper," Stan said carefully in reply.

  Paulsen answered, "Your air dump used up a lot of air. Since we don't want to stop for it here, I'm traveling at low pressure, just to be on the safe side of our emergency supplies."

  There was silence then as Paulsen warmed the motors, nursed small pulsed thrusts to give them distance, and finally cut in power to the drive to give them the normal one-tenth G acceleration. Then he pulled the log toward him and began to write.

  Stan let his eyes wander around the control cabin, and a sense of familiarity tugged at him. His interest was so intense, though, that it triggered the study habits he'd lived by for so many years, rather than the quiz habits; and the more he concentrated the more the familiarity faded, to be replaced by a need to leam, to discover each dial individually, each effect of the ship's motion as a separate effect.

  With a start he recognized the symptoms and forced himself to relax, to let his eyes wander over the dials without any conscious attempt to interpret them, to let his senses absorb the small cabin and its smells and feels and informations.

  This was a Kinco Sixty freighter, better known as a K-class, its capacity about half that of the big Earth-Mars freighters. It wasn't a question. It was a fact that he knew.

  The circula
r wall of the tiny control cabin was a checkerboard of insulation squares, except that most of them were covered by instruments. These ships didn't spin to give their crews gravity; thrust was the only gravity they offered. So the river system of hull-shielding which gave Earth ships their spin-gravity could be replaced by com-compartmentalized shielding in hull sections. The squares would give individual access to the many sections of shielding behind.

  The air lock was directly behind Stan and Paulsen as they sat in the acceleration chair-couches that could be lowered nearly to the horizontal for high-G thrust. Between the couches and the air lock was the tiny well that gave access to the decks below; and in a small opening built into the wall above the air lock bulkhead was the emergency medical kit.

  The instruments before them were plainly visible from both seats, and the controls were double so that either he or Paulsen could maneuver the ship. Their tenth-G acceleration would continue for half the trip, and would build them to tremendous velocities on an exponential curve; then they'd start decelerating for the second half of the trip, to come into relative morion with the asteroid that was known as Belt City.

  Paulsen con'd, of course, accelerate the doughnut into a Hohmann orbit, then drop it and take them at higher accelerations and decelerations to their destination; but since he was shepherding this load and would probably pick it up himself, the chances were he wouldn't bother. But he could. And that brought up the possibility—the probability—that the Sassy Lassie had been one of the ships of the Belt Uprising. Had Paulsen . . .

  Excitedly Stan turned to the skipper, but his thoughts were cut off by a thunderclap which hammered his body. Instantly the explosion was followed by a high-pitched whining scream that echoed on each nerve, and the internal feeling of bursting that meant rapidly falling atmospheric pressure. Instinctively he opened his mouth and yelled, expelling the pressure from his lungs.

  Paulsen's hps were moving, his fingers reaching out to a control—the control that would cut the motors, Stan realized, even as he released the straps and pushed his own body out of the deep seat beneath it, twisting with the push to bring his hands into line with the small opening in the wall above and behind their seats. His fingers found the opening and began groping, since his eyes refused to focus. The scream was fading, then cut off abruptly just as his fingers found the syrettes they were seeking, grasped two, and reached one toward Paulsen.