“When?” a reporter asked. “Expect to be ready in the near future?”
“Why not now? The time’s about right, and my affairs are in order. Is everything ready here?” Judging from their looks that it was, Stewart took over authority with the ease of old habit. “All right, who’s coming? A woman? How about you, Jack?”
Jack’s voice was brisk, but the cold had thawed from it. “Count me in, Dad. I’m amateur copilot.”
“Me, I think I go too,” Dutch Bauer decided. “Maybe then I can build better when I come back.”
Erin counted them, and rechecked. “But that’s nine,” he demurred. “The ship is designed for eight.”
Tom Shaw corrected him. “It’s only eight, Erin. I’ve decided to let Jimmy carry on the family tradition. Shall we stay here and watch them take off?”
There was a mad rush for the few personal belongings that were to go, and a chorus of hasty good-byes. Then they were gone, the reporters with them, and the two men stood quietly studying each other. Erin smiled at his foreman, an unexpected mist in his eyes. “Thanks, Tom. You needn’t have done that.”
“One in the family’s enough. Besides, Dutch wanted to go.” His voice was gruff as he steadied Erin to the door and stood looking out at the mob around the spaceship. The reporters were busy, getting last words, taking pictures, and the Chinese laborers were clustered around Wah, saying their own adieus. Then Greg’s heavy roar came up, and they tumbled back away from the ship, while the men who were to go filed in. The great port closed slowly and the first faint trial jets blasted out.
Confidence seemed to flow into the tubes, and they whistled and bellowed happily, twisting the ship and sending her out over the water in a moonsilvered path. Erin saw for the first time the fierce power that lay in her as she dropped all normal bounds and went forward in a headlong rush. Stewart was lifting her rather soon, but she took it and was off.
They followed the faint streak she made in the air until it was invisible, and a hum from the speaker sent Shaw to the radio. Greg’s voice came through. “Sweet ship, Erin, if you hear me. I’ll send you a copy of Gunga Dhin from Mars. Be seeing you.”
Erin stayed in the doorway, watching the stars that looked down from the point where the Santa Maria had vanished. “Tom,” he said at last, “I wish you’d take my Bible and turn to the last chapter of Deuteronomy. You’ll know what I mean.”
A minute later Shaw’s precise reading voice reached him. “ ‘And the Lord said unto Moses, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go hither.’ ”
“At least I have seen it, Tom; the stars look different up there.” Erin took one final look and turned back into the room. “Until the reporters come back here, how about a game of rummy?”
THE STILL WATERS
Zeke watched the red light on the panel fade, then listened to the chatter of the relays as the ship searched its way back to its course. The pip on the screen had disappeared into the background of snow that the anti-noise circuits could no longer blank, even this far from the sun. He dropped his eyes to his hands that lay on the board, staring bitterly at the knuckles that were swollen with arthritis and covered with coarse hairs that had begun to turn gray.
Behind him, he heard Mary sigh softly. “Those blamed blowtorches,” she said, but her voice was as tired as he felt, and the old anger at the smaller, direct drive ships was almost automatic. “He might look where he’s going.”
“He looked,” Zeke told her. “There wasn’t any danger, Mary.”
She smiled at him, as if to indicate there could be none with him at the controls. But he could feel no lift in response. There really had been no danger. The blowtorch must have spotted the huge bulk of the Midas well in advance; its newer radar couldn’t have missed.
He stared at his hands again. He’d known there was no need for an emergency blast and had been reaching for the controls when the automatics went on. But, like the screen, age had let too much noise creep into the messages along his nerves. His fingers had reacted too late, and had fumbled. Just as the Midas had fumbled in overblasting needlessly.
An old man, he thought, in an old ship. But lately it seemed that he was growing old faster than even the ship. Once, he’d liked it best when they were furthest from the planets. Now he’d found the trip in from Tethys almost too long and wearying. He was actually looking forward to berthing at Callisto where there could be no alarms to wake him from what fitful sleep he could get.
He heard the control room door close softly and knew without thinking that Mary had gone to make tea for them. Their habits were as automatic as those of the ship, he thought. But he reached for his pipe and began filling it, unconsciously muttering the words that had become a symbol of their needs: “A good smoke and a pot of tea never hurt anyone.”
If their boy had lived, things might have been different. Zeke sighed, and got up, heading back for his regular tour of inspection before tea. He passed the three other empty seats in the control room. Bates had died on Venus, Levitchoffsky had sold out to join a blowtorch company, and Ngambu had gasped out his life from a sudden stroke only three years before, leaving the Midas entirely to Zeke. Somehow, it had been harder and harder to get younger men to replace the missing ones. Now he was resigned to doing everything himself. He’d had years enough in which to learn since he’d first been taken into the group as head engineer.
He went back through the empty crew quarters, past the equally empty passenger rooms, and through the holds with their small load of freight, until he came to the great engine that drove the Midas. There, for the first time that day, he relaxed. Elsewhere, the brightwork had long since dulled, but the huge fusion converter was the one thing he never neglected. It purred on smoothly, turning a trickle of the hydrogen in ordinary water into huge floods of power, and it gleamed under his approving glance. They weren’t building engines like that any more—not since the blowtorches had taken over. A complete blowtorch weighed less than the seven thousand tons of power equipment the Midas carried. It had been constructed when space ships were so tremendously expensive that their engines were designed to last almost forever. The ship could fall to pieces around it, or he could be forgotten for generations before it began to fail.
Then the satisfaction passed. Even the engine had one weakness—it needed someone to feed it and to give it the minimum care. Once he was gone, the engine would die with him. With the blowtorches controlling the space lanes, nobody would be interested in an old ship, no matter how well the engine could convert hydrogen to power for the great ion blasters to hurl out in driving force.
Reluctantly, Zeke turned from the engine room and on back toward the complexities of the driving tubes. He moved slowly now, putting it off as long as he could. The blast that had been wasted in trying to avoid the blowtorch had been too strong; somewhere, some part of the controls had misfunctioned. Now…
It could have been worse. The drivers were still functioning, at least. But the imbalance that had been creeping up was worse. The strain of the needless correction had crippled them more than a year of normal use could have done.
Zeke moved about, avoiding enormous bus bars and giant electronic parts in the huge but crowded section out of old habit. He could make up for the damage to some extent, by inhibiting the less worn sections. But it was only a temporary expedient. The Midas was long since overdue for drydocking and repairs. It could no longer be delayed.
Mary had the tea ready when he finally went back to their cabin. She started to pour his, then stopped as she saw his face. “Bad?” she asked.
He nodded. He’d never been one to talk much, and with Mary it hadn’t been necessary. “Shot!” he told her. “How much is left?”
She pulled the bankbook out and handed it to him. He added the figure to the freight he�
��d collect for at Callisto. There was some insurance he could borrow against. But he knew it wasn’t enough.
“Maybe Mr. Williams will give us an advance against next year’s contract,” Mary suggested. “You’ve never asked before.” She stared at him, the worry in her voice less for the ship than for him. “Zeke, why don’t you lie down for an hour? It’ll do more good than the tea.”
He shook his head, picking up his cup. “Can’t,” he answered. “Too much figuring to do.”
The Midas would need babying for its landing, with the drivers so badly out of condition, which would mean finding just the right landing orbit. And while he needed pampering too because of his own condition, that would have to wait.
There’d be time for that, maybe, after he talked to Williams.
It had been five years since Zeke had dropped into Callisto to discuss the last contract renewal with Williams, head of the Saturanus Mineral Corporation. Now, after resting from the long, cautious landing, he found Zeus City changed, without being able to say what the change was at first. Then it began to register; the city was the same, but for the first time, he walked down Main without meeting a single man who recognized him. And there was a new look to the faces—the old, wild expression of the spaceman had given place to a businesslike air he hadn’t seen beyond Mars before.
At Saturanus, there were more changes. The receptionist was a young chit of a girl who kept him waiting for nearly half an hour before sending him into the President’s office. And then it wasn’t Burt Williams who greeted him. The man was a complete stranger!
“Mr. Williams died three years ago, Captain Vaughn,” he said. He hesitated a second, then stood up and held out his hand. “I’m Julian Hathaway, used to be treasurer here, if you remember.”
Zeke had a dim memory of a younger man, and he nodded. Hathaway wasn’t exactly fat, but he’d added a solidity usually called respectable. Now he seemed vaguely uncomfortable.
“I suppose you came to collect what is still due on your contract, Captain Vaughn?” he asked.
Zeke nodded slowly. “And to discuss renewal,” he said. He was still adjusting to the change. He’d never been close enough to Williams to be hit by the man’s death, but all his figuring had been done in terms of the former president. He had no idea of how to broach an advance. Williams had always made it easy to talk to him, but…
Hathaway fidgeted uncomfortably, biting at the end of a cigar. Then he reached into a drawer of his desk and drew out what was obviously the former contract. He compared it with a sheet in front of him. Finally he shrugged and cleared his throat. “According to my figures, you have eighty-four hundred dollars and thirty-one cents due you, plus three hundred dollars retainer to the end of this month. I’ve already had a check made out. And there’s a separate check for five hundred, since Mr. Williams had you listed on the employee roll. That means you’re entitled to that as automatic termination pay after fifteen years. Here.”
He passed over an envelope. Zeke fingered it open, staring at the checks. Then his eyes snapped back to Hathaway. “Termination? But—”
Hathaway looked more uncomfortable, but he nodded. “Unfortunately, we can’t renew the contract, Captain Vaughn.”
“But Williams told me—”
“I know. And I’m sure he meant to keep you under contract as long as you were in business. I don’t know whether he ever told you, but he served for a year on one of the old ion-drive passenger liners, and he was quite sentimental about all ion-drive ships. He had contracts with five, in fact, at one time—though the other four have all been retired. But he had a constant fight with the stockholders over it. As a new president of the company, Captain Vaughn, I don’t have the authority that he had.”
“I don’t get it,” Zeke said. The man was practically telling him he’d been a charity case. And that made no sense. “I charged less than the blowtorches! And freight rates went up last year, too.”
Hathaway looked like a man caught beating a dog. His voice was unhappy, but there was no uncertainty in it. “That’s part of the reason. When the rates went up, Hermes Freight offered us a contract at the old rate, in return for exclusive rights. And since that represents an annual saving of several million dollars to us, we couldn’t turn it down. I’m sorry, Captain Vaughn, but it was out of my hands.”
“Yeah.” Zeke stood up slowly, putting the envelope with the checks into his pocket. He held out his hand, trying to smile normally. “Thanks, Mr. Hathaway. I’ll get the Midas off the Saturanus section of the docks as soon as I can.”
“No need to do that. Until the end of the month, your ship’s technically entitled to berth there, and I’ll see there’s no trouble. Good luck, sir.” He shook Zeke’s hand almost gratefully, and saw the older man out through the office and to the entrance. He was still watching as Zeke turned a corner two blocks away.
He deposited the checks and checked his balance, hoping that Mary’s records had been wrong. But he knew better, without the words of the young teller. Then he headed back to the rocket field, avoiding the hotel where he and Mary were staying.
The Midas loomed up huge among the smaller blowtorches there. They had never succeeded in building a blowtorch drive larger than the original, and the problem of phasing more than one such drive had kept them from multiple drive. Originally, the small ships had contained less than half the cargo space of the Midas, though they’d stepped up the efficiency until it was now about the same.
When the direct conversion of a tiny, intermittent fusion blast to propulsive drive had been invented, the spacemen had laughed at the ships designed for it. They had seemed little more than toys. And the inability to increase their power beyond certain limits had already been recognized. Obviously, with a few more improvements in the reliable, proven ion-drive and fusion motors, the tiny blowtorches would never have a chance.
Spacemen, Zeke now knew, had been right in everything but their knowledge of economics. The big power generating motors and the ion-drive could have been improved, and ships far better than the maximum for the blowtorches could have been built. But they never were. A ship like the Midas had cost over twenty million dollars to build. The huge motor alone had cost sixty percent of that. And for the same money, forty of the direct-drive ships could be completed.
In every way except one, the ion-drive was more efficient. But that one way was the determinant. It wasn’t economically efficient to tie up twenty million dollars and its interest when two blowtorches would yield the same return for a single million! The ship companies stopped contracting for ion-blast ships, and the progress that could have been made still remained only a possibility.
For a while, during the brief trouble between Mars and Earth, when it seemed interplanetary war might occur, Earth had suddenly grown interested in the big ships again. The government had bought them up, planning to arm them. Then the scare had blown over, and they were dumped onto the surplus market, since no freight company was still equipped to use them. Bates and Levitchoffsky had scraped up the price of one, taking Zeke in as engineer and Ngambu as pilot with equal shares for their skills. A lot of spacemen had done the same.
But that had been forty years ago, and now apparently the Midas was the last of the old ships. Zeke had seen some of the others, scrapped on the outer planets, or blown up because the old engineers died or quit; they weren’t training men now to service the big motors properly.
He reached the ship finally and climbed up the ramp. Forty years! He wondered how often he’d climbed it, and then tried to remember how it had felt when he was young enough so that he didn’t wheeze asthmatically before the last step, even on the light planets.
Callisto had been an outpost then, the point beyond which the big companies and the blowtorches didn’t go. Zeke and men like him had built the outplanet colonies; when the blowtorches quit, ships like the Midas had been the lifeline for all beyond Jupiter. Even now, the
re was a copy of a picture of the Midas on the planet seal of Neptune. And kids had wanted to grow up to handle such ships. They hadn’t been aible to land without a bunch of kids—and grown-up kids, too—streaming out to admire them, and to ask to go inside, to gasp in awe at the engines.
Now to greet him there was only the estimator from the repair company Zeke had consulted on landing. He was standing doubtfully in the main lock, and he swung quickly as Zeke came in.
“Oh, hi, Captain Vaughn. I was just coming to look you up. How soon would you want her rebuilt?”
Zeke frowned. It was a foolish question, but it apparently wasn’t meant for a joke. “As soon as possible, naturally. But—well, how much—”
“Impossible!” Now the estimator seemed to think Zeke was being foolish. He grinned doubtfully. “We don’t keep stuff here to fabricate all this. In fact, you’re lucky we’ve got a man who can handle the job. No other company this side of Earth would touch it. We’ll have to send to Mars for scrap parts for some of it, and maybe get other parts specially tooled at Detroit. Look, you sure you want her drydocked?”
“How much?” Zeke asked again.
The man shrugged. “I haven’t the foggiest notion. It’d take three months to get estimates on the parts. In round numbers, maybe a million dollars for parts, plus shipping and labor, if you want a complete overhaul. A quarter of that just to work on what you’ve got wrong with the drivers, if we disregard minor defects. Your engine looks sound. And you might get by a few more years on the controls. You sick?”
Zeke shook his hand off. He’d been foolish to think it could be done for what he had. With a bitter grin at himself, he took out his bank book and passed it over.
The 13th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack Page 14