Privateers

by Ben Bova

  “The President wants you to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom,” the old man said, gesturing stiffly. Dan followed him back into the hall.

  The butler opened the heavy door of the bedroom and stood to one side. Dan saw a mammoth rosewood bed, Victorian tables with ornately carved legs, topped with marble, a portrait of Lincoln next to the bed. His travel bag had been deposited on the sofa that sat in the middle of the room.

  “Lincoln never slept in this room,” the butler said as Dan stepped in. “He used this as an office. He signed the Emancipation Proclamation in here.”

  The old man showed him the connecting bathroom, the light switches and the television set hidden behind draperies opposite the huge bed. Dan thanked him and was glad to see him leave. Feeling very tired, Dan went to his travel bag and began to unpack his toiletries. Then his eye caught a framed set of three pieces of paper, covered with handwriting. He went to the wall and studied the patient, forceful pen strokes:

  “Fourscore and seven years ago. our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation …”

  A dull rumbling sound seemed to shake the room slightly. A roar, almost like the distant thunder of a rocket lifting off. Dan went to the window and pulled the curtains back.

  The windows were double-paned with thick shatter-resistant plastic that was almost soundproof. Almost. But the noise from outside leaked through. The riot police had arrived, in squadrons of armored vehicles that were spraying streams of vile-looking greenish gas at the crowds of picketers. People were screaming, running, placards dropped to the pavement as they tried to escape the tracked vehicles lumbering down upon them. Where the gas reached them, they doubled over, fell to the ground retching, coughing, spasming. Blazing searchlights played over the seething mass of people as platoons of helmeted foot soldiers linked arms to form a cordon that stretched far out into Lafayette Square and up New York Avenue.

  Dan reached down and picked the remote TV control unit from the bed table. One button drew back the draperies and turned on the set. The tube showed an old movie. Impatiently, Dan clicked from one channel to another. Nothing about the riot. The twenty-four-hour news channel was showing a tape of the President’s press conference, from the day before. Jane looked cool and totally in command of herself as she spoke about new government programs that would stabilize employment and revitalize American agriculture.

  For half an hour Dan watched the troops gassing and clubbing the picketers, dragging them away into huge waiting vans, while the TV showed nothing of the riot at all. No bulletins broke the regular programming. Looking through the window, Dan could see television trucks out there among the Army vehicles. Squinting against the hard glare of the searchlights, though, he saw that even the TV trucks were painted olive green. Army. There would be no media coverage of the riot. Nor of the arrest and detention of several hundred picketers.

  The last of the heavy tracked vehicles rumbled away. Cleaning crews drove up in big garbage trucks to make the area look neat and unblemished before the sun rose.

  Dan let the curtain fall and turned away from the window. His eye caught the Gettysburg draft framed on the wall.

  “… testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

  Jane would be reelected all right. Dan was certain of it. And she would guide the nation down the path of least resistance, telling herself and the American people that time was on their side, that all they had to do was grit their teeth and bear their present pain and humiliation, and someday in the rosy future the Soviets would mend their ways and the whole world would be free and happy.

  Dan made up his mind to get out of Washington, out of the U.S.A., as early as possible the next morning.

  Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

  “There she is,” said Carstairs.

  Dan’s eyes flicked open. He felt a moment of confusion. “Was I sleeping?” he muttered.

  “Snoring lightly,” answered the Australian.

  Dan tried to rub his eyes and bumped his gloved hands against his helmet visor. Blinking the sleep away, he peered out through the flitter’s canopy and saw the Soviet ore freighter, looming huge and close, a giant hollow sphere, a thin shell of metal that could split apart to disgorge tons of lunar rock and soil-the raw materials of all space industries. A massive, perfectly round egg floating through empty space. With a big red star painted on it, above the letters CCCP.

  “Soyuz Sovietskiya Socialistik Ryespublik,” Dan muttered.

  “That’s an awful accent you’ve got,” Zlotnik’s voice teased in his helmet earphones.

  “Sure. And I don’t intend to learn any better, either,” Dan growled.

  Carstairs piloted the flitter close to the bulky ore carrier, then maneuvered their spacecraft to circle all the way around it. This close, it looked to Dan like a world of its own, bright sunlight glinting off its curving flank.

  “Gawd,” muttered the Australian, “it’s huge.”

  “It’s almost as if they hung it there to tempt us,” said Zlotnik. “Like they want us to steal it.”

  “We’re not stealing,” Dan snapped. “We are claiming natural resources that are the common heritage of all humankind, and therefore belong to no single nation.”

  He heard Zlotnik’s answering snicker. “Yeah. And we’re doing it when the Russians aren’t looking.”

  Vargas, the young Venezuelan who was usually as silent as a rock, said, “We are expropriating the expropriators.”

  “Paco?” Carstairs said with mock surprise. “Was that you?”

  “Reciting from Marx?” Zlotnik added.

  “My father is a member of the Communist party of Venezuela,” the young astronaut said. “I learned Marx and the Bible at the same time.”

  “No time for religion now,” said Carstairs. “Or for chat.”

  The Aussie’s gloved fingers played deftly across the control panel keyboard. With microscopic puffs of thrust the needle-shaped flitter matched its speed and trajectory to that of the massive Soviet freighter. Like a tiny pin chasing a fat, round balloon. Dan thought.

  “No crew pod in sight,” Carstairs muttered.

  “No radiator fins or any other signs of a life support system,” said Zlotnik. “She’s unmanned.”

  “I pick up two transponders,” Vargas added, his eyes on the electronics control panel in front of him. “They are signaling at the usual Soviet frequencies, just as all the others do. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  Dan turned the radar scan to maximum range and studied the orange-glowing screen in front of him. “No other spacecraft in view. She’s unescorted.”

  “Ours for the tyking,” said Carstairs.

  For half an instant Dan hesitated. Then he said, “Okay, let’s get to work.”

  Carstairs pressed his thumb against the button that actuated the canopy release, and the glass bubble silently, smoothly swung up and away from the cockpit. One by one the four astronauts unlatched their safety harnesses, floated out of their seats and clambered slowly, hand over hand, along the grips that studded the latticework midsection of the spacecraft. From the equipment pods there they detached one-man maneuvering units, which looked rather like high-backed chairs minus the seats. Dan strapped himself into one of the jet backpacks slowly, with deliberate care.

  “Need any help, boss?” Carstairs chuckled in Dan’s earphones. He was already floating free of the spacecraft, ready to jet out on his own.

  Dan smiled. “I can do for myself, thanks.”

  “1 just thought someone your age, you know …”

  “Listen, pal, there are old astronauts and there are bold astronauts-”

  The Aussie finished in unison with Dan, “But there are no old, bold astronauts.”

  The jet backpacks were one-man spacecraft, complete with their own thrusters, electrical power, tool kits and life support systems. They turned an individual astronaut into a one-man spacecraft, independent and free to maneuver for two hours or more.

  It
took almost a full two hours for them to accomplish their tasks. First all four men checked the freighter’s spherical hull for booby traps or alarms. Then Zlotnik and Vargas detached the ship’s two radio transponders, electronic beepers that told the mission controllers in the Soviet space station, Kosmograd, and back on the Moon at Lunagrad, where the ore carrier was. They linked the two transponders with a length of plastic line, which they unreeled from a heavily insulated container made of foam plastic. The line became as rigid as steel after ten minutes’ exposure to vacuum, and ensured that the two transponders would be separated by exactly the same distance they had been apart on the freighter itself. Then they attached angular metallic radar reflectors to the line, so that a radar probe from Kosmograd would get a return blip of just about the same intensity as the freighter would yield. To the

  Russian mission controllers at their consoles in the space station, it would look as if the freighter were still on course, placidly gliding toward its scheduled destination.

  Dan and Carstairs found the freighter’s electronic guidance unit, a black box the size of Dan’s hand. They disconnected it and replaced it with a black box of their own, preprogrammed to alter the freighter’s course by slight degrees until it was heading for Nueva Venezuela instead of Kosmograd. The freighter was propelled by its own rocket motors, which burned the cheapest and most abundant propellants available: powdered aluminum and oxygen, scraped up from the Moon’s dusty soil by the lunar Gulag miners.

  The new guidance unit Dan connected to the Russian control system immediately activated the rocket motors. Dan felt a sudden nudge of acceleration, light, but as definite as a tap on the shoulder. They wanted to move the freighter into its new trajectory with as little thrust as possible, both to conserve the freighter’s supply of propellants and to make as small a cloud of radar-reflecting exhaust gases as possible.

  Don’t attract the attention of the mission controllers, Dan warned himself. Let them think everything is so normal that they can take a nice, quiet nap.

  The final task the four astronauts had was to make the freighter invisible to Soviet radars. From pouches the size of mailbags, they dug up gloved handfuls of glittering metallic dust and strewed them into the emptiness around the freighter and their own flitter. As he jetted slowly in a widening arc, sprinkling the radar-absorbing dust, Dan suddenly got an image of Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell. He laughed aloud.

  “You all right?” Zlotnik asked.

  “Sure,” Dan replied. “Sure.”

  The growing cloud would absorb radar waves: not completely, but enough to mask the freighter and their flitter so that the normal Soviet radar surveillance would not see the ore carrier change course. If, for some reason, the Soviet controllers directed a high-power radar beam or a laser probe at the freighter, the dust cloud could be penetrated. Dan was banking on the hope that the Russians were not going to be alert enough to use their more sensitive equipment.

  As he jetted carefully around the freighter, Dan recalled how the flatlanders back on Earth thought that working in zero gravity was like floating on air, when actually it was more like swimming the English Channel. He was soaking with sweat, and the air circulation fan in his helmet was buzzing its loudest to keep his visor from fogging over.

  Finally they were finished. Dan hung in the dark emptiness, the huge glowing Earth spread like an overwhelming vision of beauty, off to his right. The Sun was at his back. The Soviet freighter loomed in front of him, with their flitter hanging alongside it. The cloud of radar-absorbing dust glittered faintly around him, shimmering slightly where the sunlight struck it at the right angle to create a fragile, shifting rainbow. Already the transponders and radar reflectors were too far away for Dan to see.

  They jetted back to the flitter, unstrapped and stowed the backpacks, and slid into their cockpit seats. Dan felt bone-tired, exhausted emotionally as well as physically. As Carstairs closed the canopy over them and punched in the course corrections to allow the flitter to stay alongside the ore carrier, Vargas fussed over his electronics console.

  “Radio transmissions from Kosmograd seem normal,” he reported.

  “What about Lunagrad?” Dan asked.

  Vargas muttered to himself for a few moments, then Dan heard Russian folk music in his helmet earphones: balalaikas and zithers and a mournful baritone voice.

  “Christ, that’s dreary!” Dan said.

  “Must be what they ply to the miners,” Carstairs joked, “to cheer ‘em up.”

  For the thousandth time that day, Dan wished he could open his visor and scratch his nose, rub his eyes or just run a hand across the stubble on his chin.

  “We’ve got to pressurize the cockpit next mission,” he said. “Sitting in these suits for ten, twelve hours is no picnic.”

  “Don’t know about you,” Carstairs agreed, “but it smells like a bloody sweat sock in here.”

  “That’s because you don’t spray under your arms,” Zlotnik kidded.

  “And another thing,” Dan said, ignoring the banter. “There ought to be some way to dispense the radar chaff automatically. Having us flit around like a quartet of double-damned fairies is ridiculous.”

  “A quartet of what?” Carstairs quipped.

  “Don’t get cute.”

  “You’re thirty-six years too lyte with that advice, chum.”

  “Vargas, can you turn off the Russian music?” Dan asked. “It’s damned depressing.”

  “Yessir,” the young Venezuelan said.

  For several moments, Dan heard nothing at all except the hum of his suit’s air fan and the hiss of his own breathing.

  Then Carstairs began crowing, “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum … sixteen men on a dead man’s chest.”

  Suddenly they were all laughing.

  “We did it!” Zlotnik said. “We’re pirates! We stole it right out from under their radar noses and they don’t even know it yet!”

  Dan laughed with them, but inwardly he wondered what the Russians would do once they found out about his piracy.

  Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

  Dan stayed at the Nueva Venezuela factory complex for an additional six hours, long enough to see the captured freighter unloaded and then swiftly broken up. He watched from the factory’s control center as a picked team of workers used industrial lasers to cut the freighter’s spherical shell into long slivers of metal, like a giant clockwork-orange skin being sliced apart. The dismembered freighter was fed into the factory’s smelters, together with the ores it had carried. Dan demanded that they get the job done quickly, before the Soviets realized what had happened and sent a team of armed inspectors to the factory.

  Satisfied that the evidence had not only been destroyed, but turned into useful raw material, Dan showered quickly, changed into a fresh set of coveralls and rode the next regularly scheduled shuttle back to Caracas. He helicoptered from the landing field to the roof of his downtown building. When he breezed back into his own office, Pete Weston was waiting for him, his usual worried frown wrinkling his high-domed face as he sat in the anteroom, chatting with Dan’s new secretary. Weston jumped to his feet as Dan came in, still wearing the sky-blue coveralls he had put on that morning at Nueva Venezuela.

  The lawyer was wearing a light sports jacket and pale blue slacks. Even his shirt and tie looked less rigid than usual. Dan grinned at him, realizing that Weston was finally learning how to relax and be more comfortable.

  “You’re looking dapper this morning,” Dan said.

  Weston forced a quick smile, but raised one hand. A single flimsy sheet of paper was clutched in it.

  “We’ve got troubles, boss.”

  Dan nodded at the new girl, wondering if she had been told what had happened to her predecessor.

  “Come on in, Pete,” he said, opening the thick oak door to his private office.

  “Financially,” Weston said, once the door was firmly closed, “your little hijacking expedition is a big success. The ores alone were worth slightly more than ten mil
lion.”

  Dan slid into the big leather chair behind his desk. “But?” he prompted.

  Weston’s worried frown deepened as he dropped his slight frame into the chair in front of Dan’s desk. “But the Russians are apeshit. They’ve been burning up the telephone links between Moscow and Caracas all morning. Their satellites have been put on full alert. The Soviet space committee has requested an emergency meeting of the IAC. We’ve received an official request for an inspection of our facilities, and my spies in Hernandez’s office tell me that he’s received a request for a complete inspection of Nueva Venezuela.”

  “Which he will grant,” Dan muttered.

  “We’re granting their request, too,” Weston said. It was not advice, it was a fait accompli. “Either that or they’ll send in tanks and troops.”

  Dan waved a hand in the air. “Let them inspect! There’s nothing for them to find.”

  “They’ll want to interrogate Astro employees.”

  “No,” Dan snapped. “That they can’t do. We’re under Venezuelan law. The Venezuelan police can interrogate our people, if they arrest one of us for breaking Venezuelan law. But the Russians can’t.”

  “They can if the Venezuelans allow them to,” Weston pointed out.

  Dan gave him a sour look.

  “It works this way.” the lawyer said, hunching forward in his chair. “International law supercedes Venezuelan law. If you’re suspected of breaking international law-like committing an act of piracy-the nation in which you reside has the responsibility and the authority to arrest you and hold you for trial.”

  “So?”

  “So the locals here could allow the Russians to participate in the interrogation of anyone arrested in this matter.”

  “Hmm.” Dan leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “Looks like I’d better get to Hernandez and make sure he’s not too sore at us.”