The 13th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Lester Del Rey

  Erin gave no sign he had heard as the car came to a stop at the small wharf. “Thanks for picking me up,” he said with grave courtesy. Stewart answered with a curt nod and swung the car around on its front wheels. Erin turned to a boy whose boat was tied up nearby. “How much to ferry me out to Kroll Island?”

  “Two bucks.” The boy looked up, and changed his smile quickly. “You one of them crazy guys who’s been playing with skyrockets? Five bucks, I meant.”

  Erin grimaced slightly but held out the money.

  II

  There was nobody waiting to greet him on the island, nor had he expected anyone. He fed the right combination into the alarm system to keep it quiet and set off up the rough wooden walk toward the buildings that huddled together a few hundred yards from the dock. The warehouses, he noticed, needed a new coat of paint, and the dock would require repairs if the tramp freighter were to use it much longer.

  There was a smell of smoke in the air, tangy and resinous at first, but growing stronger as he moved away from the ocean’s crisp counteracting odor. As he passed the big machine shop, a stronger whiff of it reached him, unpleasant now. There was a thin wisp of smoke going up behind it, the faint gray of an almost exhausted fire. The men must be getting careless, burning their rubbish so close to the buildings. He cut around the corner and stopped.

  The south wall of the laboratory was a black, charred scar, dripping dankly from a hose that was playing on it. Where the office building had stood, gaunt steel girders rose from a pile of smoking ashes and half-burned boards, with two blistered filing cabinets poking up like ghosts at a wake.

  The three men standing by added nothing to the cheerfulness of the scene. Erin shivered slightly before advancing toward them. It was a foreboding omen for his homecoming, and for a moment the primitive fears mastered him. The little pain that had been scratching at his heart came back again, stronger this time.

  Doug Wratten turned off the hose and shook a small arm at the sandy-haired young husky beside him. “All right,” he yelled in a piping falsetto, “matter’s particular and energy’s discrete. But you chemists try and convince an atomic generator that it’s dealing with building-block atoms instead of wave-motion.”

  Jimmy Shaw’s homely, pleasant face still studied the smoldering ashes. “Roll wave-motion into a ball and give it valence, redhead,” he suggested. “Do that and I’ll send Stewart a sample—it might make a better bomb than the egg he laid on us. How about it, Dad?”

  “Maybe. Anyhow, you kids drop the argument until you’re through being mad at Stewart,” the foreman ordered. “You’ll carry your tempers over against each other.” Tom Shaw was even more grizzled and stooped than Erin remembered, and his lanky frame seemed to have grown thinner.

  “All right,” he decided in his twangy, down-East voice. “I guess it’s over, so we…Hey, it’s Erin!”

  He caught at Jimmy’s arm and pulled him around, heading toward Erin with a loose-jointed trot. Doug forgot his arguments and moved his underdone figure on the double after them, shouting at the top of his thin voice. Erin found his arm aching and his ears ringing from their questions.

  He brioke free for a second and smiled. “All right, I got a year off, I sneaked in, I’m glad to be back, and you’ve done a good job, I gather. Where are Hank and Dutch?”

  “Over in the machine shop, I guess. Haven’t seen them since the fire was under control.” Shaw jerked a long arm at the remains. “Had a little trouble, you see.”

  “I saw. Stewart’s men?”

  “Mm-hm. Came over in a plane and dropped an incendiary. Sort of ruined the office, but no real damage to the laboratory. If those filing cabinets are as good as they claimed, it didn’t hurt our records.”

  Doug grinned beatifically. “Hurt their plane more. Tom here had one of our test models sent up for it, and the rocket striking against the propeller spoiled their plans.” He gestured out toward the ocean. “They’re drinking Neptune’s health in hell right now.”

  “Bloodthirsty little physicist, isn’t he?” Jimmy asked the air. “Hey, Kung, the boss is back. Better go tell the others.”

  The Chinese cook came hobbling up, jerking his bad leg over the ground and swearing at it as it slowed him down. “Kung, him see boss fella allee same time more quick long time,” he intoned in the weird mixture of pidgin, bêche-de-mer, and perverted English that was his private property. “Very good, him come back. Mebbeso make suppee chop-chop same time night.”

  He gravely shook hands with himself before Erin, his smile saying more than the garbled English he insisted on using, then went hobbling off toward the machine shop. Shaw turned to the two young men.

  “All right, you kids, get along. I’ve got business with Erin.” As they left, his face lengthened. “I’m glad you’re back, boss. Things haven’t been looking any too good. Stewart’s getting more active. Oh, the fire didn’t do us any permanent damage, but we’ve been having trouble getting our supplies freighted in—had to buy an old tramp freighter when Stewart took over the regular one—and it looks like war brewing all along the line.”

  “I know it. Stewart brought me back and told me he was gunning for us.” Erin dropped back onto a rock, realizing suddenly that he was tired; and he’d have to see a doctor about his heart—sometime. “And he’s stolen our steering unit, or thinks he’s getting it patented, at least.”

  “Hmmm. He can’t have it; it’s the only practical solution to the controls system there is. Erin, we’ll… Skip it, here come Dutch and Hank.”

  But a sudden whistle from the rocket test tower cut in, indicating a test. The structural engineer and machinist swung sharply, and Doug and Jimmy popped out of the laboratory at a run. Shaw grabbed at Erin.

  “Come on,” he urged. “This is the biggest test yet, I hope. Good thing you’re here to see it.” Even Kung was hobbling toward the tower.

  Erin followed, puzzling over who could have set off the whistle; he knew of no one not accounted for, yet a man had to be in the tower. Evidently there was an addition to the force, of whom he knew nothing. They reached the guardrail around the tower, and the whistle tooted again, three times in warning.

  “Where is the rocket?” Erin yelled over the whistle. There was nothing on the takeoff cradle.

  “Left two days ago; this is the return. Jack’s been nursing it without sleep—wouldn’t let anyone else have it,” Shaw answered hurriedly. “Only took time off to send another up for the bomber.”

  Following their eyes, Erin finally located a tiny point of light that grew as he watched. From the point in the sky where it was, a thin shrilling reached their ears. A few seconds later, he made out the stubby shape of a ten-foot model, its tubes belching out blue flame in a long, tight jet. With a speed that made it difficult to follow, it shot over their heads at a flat angle, heading over the ocean, while its speed dropped. A rolling turn pointed it back over their heads, lower this time, and the ion-blast could be seen as a tight, unwavering track behind it.

  Then it reversed again and came over the tower, slowed almost to a stop, turned up to vertical with a long blast from its steering tubes, and settled slowly into the space between the guide rails. It slid down with a wheeze, sneezed faintly, and decided to stop peacefully. Erin felt a tingle run up his back at his first sight of a completely successful radio-controlled flight.

  The others were yelling crazily. Dutch Bauer, the fat structural engineer, was dancing with Hank Vlček, his bald pate shining red with excitement. “It worked, it worked,” they were chanting.

  Shaw grunted. “Luck,” he said sourly, but his face belied the words. “Jack had no business sending our first model with the new helix on such a flight. Wonder the darn fool didn’t lose it in space.”

  Erin’s eyes were focused on the young man coming from the pit of the tower. There was something oddly familiar about those wide shoulder, and the mane of black hair tha
t hugged his head. As the boy came nearer, the impression was heightened by the serious brown eyes, now red from lack of sleep, that were slightly too deep in the round face.

  The boy scanned the group and moved directly toward Morse, a little hesitantly. “Well,” he asked, “how did you like the test— Mr. Morse, I think? Notice how the new helix holds the jets steady?”

  Erin nodded slowly. So this was what Stewart had meant by his statement that he had been hit twice as hard. “You resemble your father, Jack Stewart!”

  Jack shifted on his feet, then decided there was no disapproval on Erin’s face, and grinned. He held out a small package. “Then I’ll give you this, sir. It’s a reel of exposed film, shot from the rocket, and it should show the other side of the Moon!”

  III

  The secretary glided into the richly appointed room, sniffing at the pungent odor given off by the dirty old pipe in Stewart’s mouth.

  “Mr. Russell’s here, sir,” she announced, wondering whether his scowl was indicative of indigestion or directed at some particular person.

  “Send him in, then.” He bit at the stem of the pipe without looking at her, and she breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t indigestion, which was the only thing that made him roar at the office force; at other times he was fair and just with them, if not given to kindliness. Looking at Russell as she sent him in, she guessed the object of his anger.

  “Well?” Stewart asked curtly as his right-hand man entered.

  “Now look,” Russell began, “I admit I sent the plane over before you said, but was it my fault if they brought it down? How was I to know they had a torpedo they could control in the air?”

  “Not torpedo, you fool; it was a rocket. And that’s bad news, in itself, since it means they’re making progress. But we’ll skip that. I gave orders you were to wait until Morse refused my offer, and you didn’t. furthermore, I told you to send it over at night, when they’d be unprepared, and drop it on the tower and laboratory, not on the office. I’m not trying to burn people to death.”

  “But the pilot didn’t want—”

  “You mean you had your own little ideas.” He tossed the pipe into i ii.iy and began picking at his fingernails. “Next time I give you orders, Russell, I expect them to be followed. Understand? You’d better. Now get down to Washington and see what you can do about rushing our patent on the unified control; Erin Morse didn’t look surprised or bothered enough to suit me. He’s holding something, and I don’t want it to show up as an ace. Okay, beat it.”

  Russell looked up in surprise, and made tracks toward the door. Either the old man was feeling unusually good, or he was worried. That had been easier than he expected.

  Back on Kroll Island, Erin Morse settled back in his chair in the corner of the workshop that served as a temporary office. “Read this,” he said, handing over a dog-eared magazine with a harshly colored cover to Shaw. “It’s a copy of Interplanetary Tales, one of the two issues they printed. It’s not well known, but it’s still classed as literature. Page 108, where it’s marked in red.”

  Shaw looked at him curiously, and reached for the magazine. He began reading in his overly precise manner, the exact opposite of his usual slow speech. “Jerry threw the stick over to the right, and the Betsy veered sharply, jarring his teeth. The controls were the newest type, arranged to be handled by one stick. Below the steering rod was a circular disk, and banked around it was a circle of pistons that varied the steering jet blasts according to the amount they were depressed. Moving the stick caused the disk to press against those pistons which would turn the ship in that direction, slowly with a little movement, sharply if it were depressed the limit.”

  He looked at Erin. “But that’s a fair description of the system we use.”

  “Exactly. Do you remember whether the submarine periscope was patented?”

  “Why, Jules Verne…Hmmm. Anything described reasonably accurately in literature can’t be given a basic patent.” Shaw thought it over slowly. “I take it we mail this to the attorneys and get Stewart’s claim voided. So that’s why you didn’t try for a patent on it?”

  “Naturally.”

  Morse picked up the records that had been saved from the fire by insulated cabinets, and ran back over the last few years’ work. They showed the usual huge expenditures and small progress. Rockets aren’t built on a shoestring nor in the backyard during the idle hours of a boy scientist. “Total cost, five-foot experimental radio-controlled rocket, $13,843.51,” read one item. From another book he found that it had crashed into the sea on its first flight and been destroyed.

  But there were advances. The third model had succeeded, though the flickering, erratic blast had made control difficult. A new lightweight converter had been tested successfully, throwing out power from the atoms with only a .002 percent heat loss. An ion-release had been discovered by General Electratomic Company that afforded a more than ample supply of ions, and Shaw had secured rights for its use. Toward the last there were outlays for some new helix to control the ion-blast on a tight line under constant force and a new alloy for the chamber. Those had always been the problems.

  “Good work,” Erin Morse nodded. “This last model, I gather, is the one Jack used to reach the Moon.” Under it he penciled the word “success” in bright green. “The boys were quite excited over those pictures, even if they did show nothing spectacular. I’m glad he sent it.”

  “So am I. They need encouragement.” Shaw kicked aside a broken bearing and moved his chair back against the wall. “I suppose you’re wondering why Jack’s working with us. I didn’t know how you’d take it.”

  “I’m reserving my opinion for the facts.” It had been a shock, seeing the boy there, but he had covered up as best he could and waited until information was vouchsafed.

  Shaw began awkwardly, not sure yet whether Erin approved or not. “Jack came here about a year ago and—well, he simply told us he was looking for work. Had a blowup with his father over your being sent up for the accident, it seems, back then. Anyway, they’d been quarreling before because Jack wanted to specialize in atomics, and the old man wanted him to carry on with explosives.

  “So Jack left home, took his degree with money his mother had left him, and came here. He’s good, too, though I wouldn’t tell him so. That new helix control is his work, and he’s fixed up the ion-release so as to give optimum results. Since Doug and you studied atomics, they’ve made big progress, I reckon, and we needed someone with his training.”

  “Any experimental work needs new blood,” Erin agreed. “So Greg succeeded in teaching his son that Mars was the last frontier, but not how to reach it.”

  “Seems that way. Anyway, his father’s kicking up a worse fuss with us since he came. Somehow, there’s a leak, and I can’t locate the source—Jack has been watched, and he’s not doing it. But Stewart’s getting too much information on what we’re doing—like that control. He managed to cut off freighter service and choke our source of supplies until I bought up a tramp and hired a no-good captain.”

  “He’ll hit harder when we get his patent application killed. By the way, are the plans for that air-renewer of Jimmy’s still around?”

  Shaw nodded. “Sure, I guess so. He never found out what was wrong with it, though, so we’ve been planning on carrying oxygen flasks with us.” Based on the idea of photosynthesis, the air-renewer had been designed to break down the carbon dioxide waste product of breathing by turning it into sugar and free oxygen, as a plant does, and permit the same air being used over and over.

  “All it needs is saturated air around the catalyst.” Erin had fished around in the papers from the burned office until he had the plans. Now he spread them before Shaw and indicated the changes. “A spray of water here, and remove the humidity afterward. Took me three years up there, working when I could, to figure out that fault, but it’s ready for the patent attorneys now. Dutch ca
n draw up the plans in the morning.”

  They stuck the papers and books away and passed out of the building into the night. “Stars look right good,” Shaw observed. “Mars seems to be waiting until we can get there.”

  “That shouldn’t be long now, with the rocket blast finally under control. What’s that?” Erin pointed toward a sharp streak of light that rose suddenly over the horizon and arced up rapidly. As they watched, it straightened to vertical and went streaking up on greased wings until it faded into the heights beyond vision.

  “Looks like Stewart’s made a successful model.” A faint, high whine reached their ears now. “If he has, we will have a fight on our hands.”

  Erin nodded. “Start the boys on the big rocket in the morning; we can’t stop for more experimental work now.”

  IV

  The big electric hammer came down with a monotonous thud and clank, jarring against the eardrums in its endless hunger for new material to work on. Hank Vlček’s little bullet head looked like a hairy billiard ball stuck on an ape’s body as he bobbed up and down in front of it, feeding in sheets of cuproberyl alloy. But the power in the machinist’s arms seemed to match that of the motor.

  Dutch Bauer looked up from a sheet of blueprints and nodded approvingly, then went back to the elaborate calculations required to complete the design he was working on. The two co-operated perfectly, Dutch creating structural patterns on paper, and Vlček turning them into solid metal.

  On paper, the Santa Maria was shaping up handsomely, though the only beauty of the ship itself was to be that given by severe utility. Short and squat, with flaring blast tubes, she showed little resemblance to the classic cigar-hulls of a thousand speculative artists. The one great purpose was strength with a minimum of weight, and the locating of the center of gravity below the thrust points of the rockets. When completed, there would be no danger of her tipping her nose back to Earth on the takeoff.