Walt & Leigh Richmond

by Phoenix Ship

  The skipper was almost beside him, a hazy figure, and Stan groped for his hand, forcing one of the syrettes into it.

  Now Stan brought the remaining syrette to his leg with a slap that forced the needle in and injected its contents into his system. Pulling the syrette carefully out, he pinned it to his tunic, his eyes now barely making out the most gross objects in the cabin swinging lazily about him as he spun slowly in free fall.

  The dioxo solution from the syrette spread a warm glow through him. Stan opened his mouth wide and expelled the last of the air that was doing its best to strain out of his lungs. The pressure in his ears let go with a loud pop. The cloudy look of things before him and the burning sensation in his eyes caused him to squeeze his eyes tight shut, and as he did so, pain shot through them, tiny crystals of ice grating across the tender surfaces; and as this was followed by a sensation of cold, he realized that the boiling tears would freeze in the vacuum around him and freeze the lids shut.

  Something grasped him, and he struggled momentarily, then realized it was Paulsen and slacked off. There was a feeling as though someone was trying to stuff him into a bag, but no sound.

  Then he felt drawstrings pull tight at the shoulders and across his chest, and suddenly there was pressure around his face again. The bag was then slid quickly down over

  Stan's arms and tied at each joint; then down over the torso with a repeated lacing. Blinded by the tears, he opened his eyes nevertheless to see clear plastic standing only inches ahead; and, as he began to breathe again, Paulsen's voice came to him over a tiny speaker somewhere in the hood.

  "That's right, Dustin. Work your jaws and the swallowing mechanisms. Keep blinking your eyes."

  As Stan became more aware of his surroundings, he saw that he was in a loosely fitting plastic bag, tightly belted at each joint.

  The tingly sensation in his throat came to his attention, and he realized that the "air" he was breathing was not air but carbon dioxide quickly developed from a small plastic pack of acid and soda. It was a device that could not have been used except for the diox which would supply his oxygen requirements for the next hour.

  The pressures removed, Stan found a handhold and turned himself toward the control panel.

  Paulsen was in his seat now, checking the space around the ship for enemy craft—and the guy wasn't in a spacesuit. Unbelieving, Stan stared. Paulsen had on a hood, but just that, over his regular red pilot's suit. But of course. That pilot's suit was a gas-proof spacesuit; and the hood that had obviously been unzipped from a pocket at the back of the pilot's suit collar had a similar pressure gas generator packet.

  Stan sighed his relief, then let his attention wander to the deep hole in the checkerboard wall centered above the control paneL

  The hole was a full two-foot square that had blown through to the outside hull and was now crushed there, a mess of metal and foam plastic insulation, at the bottom of what seemed to be a square tunnel into the hull structure. The water shielding from the compartment had obviously been blown on through into space, followed by the air from the control cabin; but the hole through which they had blown could not be seen past the mess of metal and plastic.

  Paulsen was through with his check now, and his face looked puzzled, but he only said, "I'm going to put us under drive to get gravity, then well see what the damage is."

  The return of even the light tenth-G gravity was grateful to Stan's senses, and the cabin reoriented quickly a-round him.

  "If we can work fast," Paulsen's voice came to him abruptly over the tiny intercom, "we can save having to pressurize the bunk area to get you into a tightsuit. I've got plug-in compartments aboard, of course, so it shouldn't take more than half an hour to clear up this mess. Do you think you can take the bag for that long?"

  Experimentally, Stan flexed his arm and found that it responded stiffly. The veins that had been standing out like cords against the taut skin were beginning to recede. The rapid breath induced by the one hundred percent carbon dioxide atmosphere was exchanging nitrogen out of the blood at a rapid rate, and pressure was equalizing between himself and the suit.

  "Seems okay," he said. "A little stiff and a few cramps, but yeah, I can work like my life depended on it."

  Paulsen chuckled, then without another word crawled into the tight tunnel.

  It was several minutes, while his squirming legs were the only indication of motion within, before his voice reached Stan again.

  "I think I've got it more or less in one piece. Pull me out, but slow and easy."

  Stan took h~ld of the ankles, braced himself against the pilot's seat, and started the slow tug, following instructions as he pulled, unable to tell what was going on.

  "Harder. Oops. Hold it. All right, pull. Damn it, lost it. Push me back an inch. Not more than an inch."

  It only took about ten minutes, but they seemed long. Finally, shoulders past the edge now, Paulsen pulled his head out. "You can hook on and get it the rest of the way," he said. "My muscles are cramping."

  Stan reached his arms, head and shoulders in, and felt around until he got the positioning of the package of crushed metal and foam plastic, found jagged handholds, and began to inch the mess out. Then, with a jerk, the wreckage let go its final hold and dropped him, jagged package in his lap, into the pilot's seat. He sat there a minute, panting, then looked around.

  He was alone in the cabin.

  For a minute he stared in panic around the small room, then the skipper's voice came to him: "You all right?"

  "The wreckage fell and sat me down in the pilot's chair," Stan said.

  "Don't touch anything," was the only answer.

  Stan was suddenly amused. "Don't touch anything," the man says. I whop back into the pilot's seat, carrying a package that spills onto anything and everything around, that would have knocked anything fragile in spite of me, and he says don't touch anything.

  Before he could do much cautious maneuvering there was a thump as something was levered up from the cabin below; and the skipper's voice said, "Wait" A minute later Paulsen was at his side, carefully lifting the wreckage from his lap.

  "Stay right there. Ill be back," he said, taking the wreckage into the freightnut access lock.

  Stan relaxed, content to be the inept passenger for whom the skipper must care. Twisting his head he could see the plug-in unit Paulsen had brought—a ten-foot plastic bag filled with water and what looked like white noodles.

  He turned back to the square tunnel before him. By craning his neck he could see down the six-foot tunnel to the hull at its far end, and he easily located the hole by which the water and air had escaped—a circular hole, about two inches across and bulging smoothly outward.

  Paulsen had patching material in his hand when he returned and, Stan estimated, they had about ten minutes left to do a patching job. Without pausing, Paulsen wriggled into the tunnel and was busy for several minutes. When he had wriggled back out, he reached for the plug-in unit, and with Stan's help fitted it slowly into its niche. When the tip of the ten-foot bag reached the hull, they applied pressure, squashing it slowly to fit its compartment. Then, while Stan held the square of inner hull and cabin insulation in place against the water pressure, Paulsen snapped its bolts into place, and the section was sound again.

  They still had time to spare as the skipper fed air back into the control cabin, though Stan could feel the slightest touches of cramp in his muscles.

  "Even lighter pressure this time. We sure been getting rid of the air this trip," Paulsen said over his suit speaker before shucking the hood.

  "That hole didn't look like an accidental rock coming in to me, Skipper," Stan said cautiously, removing his own emergency suit. "It looked more like an internal explosion."

  The other looked at him queerly. "Yep. It sure wasn't any accident."

  "But it was so easy to fix up! No real sweat. Why in hell would anyone bother?"

  "That's what I was going to ask you," Paulsen told him tartly. "And since we'
re sharing this one together, maybe you'd better let me know at least how serious it's likely to get."

  "But this is your ship. Somebody must have been after you"

  "I thought of that. I thought maybe the Earthies had started sabotaging Belt ships at Mars. But anybody who set out for a systematic system of sabotage would have taken time to find out how Belt ships are built. It wouldn't have been a hasty, ineffective job like this one. Then I thought mavbe you were an Earthie spy, and somebody in the Belt was after you. But in that case, I'd have been in on it. So either of those is possibly the reason, but not probably."

  Stan staved silent, and finally Paulsen went on, "On the face of it, I had a chance. Not much of one, but a chance. But you didn't.

  "You're an Earthie. You're an Earthie passenger. You wouldn't have been expected to know about diox. Even if you knew ab^ut it, you wouldn't know where it would be found. Even if I'd been the one to get it and hand the syrette to you, you wouldn't know what to do with it without waiting for instructions, and that would have been too late.

  "You're supposed to be dead, Earthie. Which tells me somebody wants you dead real bad. Which also tells me that I'm a sitting duck as long as I'm with you, and maybe you'd better give with a little info."

  As Stan staved silent, the other shrugged, then started to pull the log toward him. His hand hesitated on the book itself, and slowly withdrew. Then he leaned back, clasping his hands behind his head.

  "Look," he said conversationally, "I'm not a prier. And I'm not asking many questions. And who you are and what you are is not, essentially, my business. But when a High-G

  Earthie—that means rich—is on my ship—and I risk the Sassy Lassie without knowing I was going to—by taking you aboard; and you hadn't warned me one word—and when you ignored my question . . . I'm not a prier," he added defiantly, "but by God—"

  "You don't have to pry. I'll answer any questions you want to ask. I'm as puzzled as you are," Stan admitted. Then he asked, "But why shouldn't you pry? It's your ship, and-"

  "I reckon," Paulsen said slowly, "that's another difference between Earthie and Belter. On Earth, everything about you is in the computers, and anybody can find out anything they want to, like what you spent and where you spent it, and probably if they're interested, why.

  "But in the Belt, the only think anybody else needs to know about you, unless you want to tell 'em, is what job you're doing—which they can tell by the color of your suit; or what kind of training you have—which they can tell from your belt. Those are useful bits of information for you to have other people know. If you don't want 'em known, you change to a plain suit and a plain belt. Inside your belt is your credit rating, which automatically changes as you spend or get credited—but that's private information unless you want to display it; and though it goes through the computer nobody else can get at your credit rating in the computer but you.

  "So a man's not subject to interrogation by computer or by anybody else, unless he wants to be. And it's . . . well, you just don't pry into a man's business. It's his business. If it affects you, you stay with him or you leave; but you don't pry."

  "Well," said Stan. There was a lifetime of training behind that "well." It was a lifetime habit that anybody could know anything about you at any time, except for the privacy cloak and the immediate moment, and it took time to digest the fact of his obvious freedom from that sort of— yes, prying. Then:

  "Would it be prying to ask why you took on the Mars guys when they wanted to arrest me?"

  Paulsen leaned back his head and laughed, a loud, long, tension-relieving laugh, and Stan found himself smiling in return.

  "You can ask, but I don't think I rightly know the answer to that one," he said at last. "I wasn't looking forward to an Earthie passenger, but—well, you got off the ship without a damned privacy cloak. And then there was the belt. Out here a gold belt means AT training; and the level of training is indicated by the workings of the belt. I didn't think your belt meant anything but it . . . well, it might. Then you walked straight, and you talked straight. You didn't sort of slink, like most Earthies. And anyhow," he added defensively, "Marsers and Earthies just aren't allowed to interfere with a Belter. We don't let 'em."

  Stan thought a minute before answering. Then: "I don't know why anyone would be after me," he said slowly. "I was as surprised as you were—probably more so—that those guys had a warrant for me from the school. I'm supposed to be home for a two-week leave; and I'm supposed to report back to the school. But it's just a school," he added, and knew himself instantly for a liar. He'd always thought of it as just a school, until the day he'd left. But that wasn't something you could explain, even if you wanted to.

  "I'd say," Paulsen was speaking in a slow drawl now, "that, if it's the school, they want you back, dead or alive."

  "Yeah," said Stan. "It—well, it just cant be the school. But it can't be anyone else, either."

  "You said I could ask anything I liked. Okay. It may be important. Damned well could be important to you; and it is to me as long as you're aboard. So I ask: What are you doing out here anyhow?"

  "I guess I'm running away from the school. They were training me, I just found out, for the military. I didn't like the idea."

  "Oh? So you just up and ran away? You must be really High-G to afford it."

  Stan grinned. "I only had enough to get to Earth Orb-dock. I was tiying to find a job on a ship, when a guy came and said he was my Uncle Trevor's lawyer, and that I'd been left some stock—a thousand shares—in something called Astro Technology. He also left me passage fare out, so . . ."

  At the look on the other's face, his voice ran down. What could he have said to cause a reaction like that?

  V

  THE SILENCE went on and on; and Stan waited. Finally Paulsen spoke:

  "Your name's Dustin," he said. It wasn't a question. "And your uncle was Trevor Dustin." He looked over at Stan in awe. "Do you have any idea who Trevor Dustin was?"

  "He ... he was nicknamed Trail Blazer Dustin. I've

  been told," Stan said, "he was killed in the Belter Upris-

  ing------ "

  "He was the biggest hero of the Belter War of Independence," said Paulsen reprovingly. "He was the guy who—well, he was Mr. Belt. He was the guy who invented ship-guerrilla; who invented ship-freeze. He had us paint our hulls black to radiate the heat out and freeze the hull shielding water so we didn't blow open when a laser beam bit into the hull. He was the one who invented putting soft plastic noodles into the shielding water to absorb freezing expansion and to take up the hydrostatic shock from those laser hits.

  "He was the one who taught us to sting the Earthies with our tails, since we didn't have the fire power to hurt them. .. . You're Trail Blazers nephew?"

  Stan nodded dumbly, his mind racing.

  Paulsen was continuing slowly. "And you've got Trail Blazer's shares in AT?" At Stan's nod, he went on: "One of his partners is dead; the other's sort of in retirement AT's in the hands of—well, they're different now. Powerful and power-hungry. They're taking over an awful lot of the policy-making out here. AT's different than it used to be but . . . but look. This belt." He thumbed at the gold belt he wore. "It means I've been trained by AT; it's the most valuable possession I own.

  "The school's been going down since the partner that ran it went into retirement, almost four years ago; but

  the belt that says you're AT-trained will give you top priority on any job they say you've been trained for. It's going downhill, but it's still better than the best."

  He looked at Stan again. "If you've got a thousand shares of AT stock, I don't have to ask who's trying to kill you. Nor whether it's serious, either. I think the AT partner who died—not your uncle; the one who died shortly afterward—well, the scuttlebutt is that he was murdered to get him out of the way of the guys who took over at AT. It's been hushed, but he probably was."

  "So what do I do now?"

  "Damned if I know. But you're fast on your f
eet and you've got an amazing amount of knowhow, even if there are some pretty astounding gaps in it that take a guy unexpected. I think I'm on your side, at least for this part of the action. I haven't liked the way the school's been going recently—the kind of kid they've been turning out. Seemed more like zombies than AT-trained experts. I don't know much about the rest of AT enterprises, except they're rooting for war with Earth, which doesn't make sense to me. And maybe if you've got enough Dustin blood in you, you'd be better than what's there now. I damned well better be on your side, at that, if I want to keep my hide; 'cause somebody sure doesn't want you around. So I reckon we better figure how to keep you and me both alive until you can do something with those shares."

  "But we're on a ship that they know I'm on, which puts your ship at hazard. And—"

  "First thing we do is see if there's a beacon on this crate. Then, when we get de-bugged, if we're bugged, we put the doughnut on a homing course ..."

  "Does that mean a Hohmann orbit? It sounds as though it should."

  Paulsen laughed. "Right. We put it on a Hohmann orbit for Belt City. Then we turn on its beacon and let it coast on in, while we cut loose and get there a bit before they expect you. Or you want to change course for AT's own asteroid? It's about two weeks away."

  "I think Belt City. It might be a good idea to find out—" "Well, at any rate, we'll land there at an unexpectedly early time. You're probably right. ATs a small pebble; you'd be conspicuous. At Belt City, with about six million people around, we can get a little lost. We'll land at a docker I

  don't normally use. And once we're docked, well skip into the tunnels so fast they won't know where we got to. What do you want to do once you get there?"