by Andre Norton
“Civilians, too,” the commandant frowned, “against regulations, you know.”
“Purely caution against infectious disease, sir. The doctor requested it, and I do not argue with the medical officer of the ship. His duty is to prevent illness and—”
“Good idea, you know. Prevents dangerous guys aboard, too.”
“I’m ready to drop my ground tackle, float free and blow,” Nord said stiffly.
“Glad to hear you youngsters like space so well. No hazard at all now. Was a time it was dangerous. Astrogation was bad, air management poor, crew went crazy being cooped up so long. Purely routine now, purely routine spacing.” His eyes took on a knowing glitter. “Did you have a good trip out?” he asked. “Experience any difficulty?”
“No, sir.” He said it very stiffly, eyes directed at the admiral. “Usual sort of trip. Little trouble with the air about halfway out, but on the whole a rather boring trip.”
2 GALACTIC COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Harry Redkirk
As man travels out—to other worlds—to other stars—
so will spread his network of communication
and there must be those who live
to tend the links of voice and eye. Such
a man is Harry Redkirk.
Star-Linked
BY H.B. FYFE
The walls of the small communications office seemed to have been erected mainly to hold panels of dials and switches. One end of the cubicle was occupied by the control desk, banked high with rows of toggle switches and push buttons labeled with the names and code numbers of stars or planets at which telebeams might be aimed by automatic mechanisms. There were also more complex controls, for use by the operator in contacting worlds infrequently called from this interstellar station on Phobos.
In the right-hand rear corner was a simpler desk with a microphone and a single telescreen for a stand-by operator. Of the remaining space, the best part was taken up by Harry Redkirk’s chrome and leather swivel chair.
“Sorry, Oberhof,” Redkirk was saying. “I can’t put your man through direct from Luna to Centauri IV. It’s behind its sun.”
“Any relay possible?” asked the dark-haired man watching him—apparently—from the large screen at Redkirk’s eye level beyond the desk.
This screen was flanked by eight smaller ones arranged in vertical pairs and identified by association with the several transmitters of the station. Screens One and Two went with “Beam A,” and so on. At the moment, Six and Eight, to Redkirk’s right, were alive with outgoing, previously transcribed, routine messages. The voices, at super speed, were high and gabbling.
“I’ll try through one of the Wolf 359 planets,” said Redkirk.
He switched on the automatic caller and punched the button that would cause the beam to be aimed at one of Sol’s closer neighbors across about eight light-years of space. There was no need to worry about adjusting for the position of any planet not hidden by the star; the best beam achieved by man would spread at that distance to blanket the whole planetary system. Even subspace waves had their limitations, although Redkirk’s job was made possible by the fact that their time lag at that distance was imperceptible.
Redkirk’s face became intent as the answer bleated in from Wolf 359. He made manually the last fine adjustments to tune out a slight fuzziness left in the signal by the automatic correctors, and looked up at the screen from which he had temporarily displaced the Lunar operator.
He was thin enough to seem tall even while sitting down. The effect was increased by a leanness in his features; he had a long, pointed chin, arched nose, and hollow cheeks. Straight yellow hair was combed back from his high forehead, along the left side of which ran a long, narrow scar. Except for this white mark, his face was tanned to the dusty gold shade often seen in blond people who do not bum red.
Had it not been for the tan, anyone examining him at the moment would have thought him a sick man. The lines from nose to the corners of his mouth were deep grooves. If the wrinkles around his eyes suggested laughter, the frown-creases between them spoke of pain.
Here he comes, thought Redkirk, as he brought into perfect focus on his main screen the image of a nonhuman.
The distant operator was chunky, tentacled, and rounded, with several hooded eyes. Behind him, the scene was flat and shadowless, which in this case meant to Redkirk that it was as dim as might be preferred by beings in the system of an M8 red star.
He keyed off a sequence of universal signals. After a moment, the tentacled one replied with a similar standard message.
“He can get them,” Redkirk told the Lunar operator as soon as he got him back on the screen. “Get your party on!”
A few minutes later, he had an Earthman on screen One and another from the Centaurian colonies showing on Two—the beam picked up by his receiver and the one he was transmitting. He listened a while to make sure everything meshed, and caught fragments of a conversation about something or other to be sent back to Sol in the next interstellar ship.
Redkirk flicked a finger at the Lunar man as the latter withdrew from the main screen to attend to other affairs. Then he leaned back in the chrome and leather chair, thinking idly of the years he had spent piloting such ships as the two men were discussing.
Oh, well, he thought, I had it for a while and I shouldn’t gripe at having to stay here spinning around Mais. Many a good man would like nothing better than to have a shift at the main interstellar station of the Solar System.
Demand for the job did not worry him, however, for he recalled that the company owed it to him for the rest of his life if he chose to keep it.
He had been on the desk about an hour of his four-hour shift, during which the tiny satellite would move around the spaceward side of Mars and back to intersect the orbit ahead of the planet. In another hour, Johnny would come in with coffee, and two hours after that, Garnier would relieve him.
“Not that I’m anxious about it,” he murmured. “I’d stay a day at a time, if they’d let me.”
He switched the main screen to a view through the exterior scanner and focused in a view of Mars. Half of the mottled red planet showed above the jagged horizon of Phobos. He knew that if he watched the ruddy disk long enough, it would give the impression of rotating backward upon its axis. The speed of the tiny moon was such that it made better than three revolutions in a Martian day. Redkirk manipulated the controls to scan the sky, and other viewers set along a band about the satellite came into action. Against the black void, the stars shone hotly, watching, waiting, drawing his consciousness out of reality toward them.
A series of beeps signaled a call from the Lunar station. Redkirk snapped out of his reverie and replied.
“Got a nice one this time,” Oberhof told him. “Mr. Secretary Rawlins of the Solar State Department, wants to talk to Ambassador Morelli.”
“All right,” said Redkirk agreeably. “Where is he?”
“Only aboard the space liner Iris, SL-3-525, which is presumably”—he referred to a note before him—“about three-quarters of the way to Procyon right now.”
“Oh, fine!” groaned Redkirk, rolling his eyes upward. “How about sending the message to be recorded on Procyon V and held for Morelli’s arrival?”
Oberhof grimaced.
“That’s what I said. No go. He wants him in person, so they can use a scrambled signal and exchange dope in private.”
Redkirk chuckled.
“How private can you get, shouting for light-years through space in this day and age? Well, I’ll see if I can pick them up.”
He switched beam C to the direction of Procyon, expecting little trouble in sweeping the volume of space containing the ship. Unless the latter had moved fantastically off course, the spread of the beam would catch it as well as the planets of Procyon. The trouble was that a moving ship in subspace drive often had difficulty in picking up signals sent after it by a process resembling its own method of propulsion. Any little maladjustment or interference, even a thin clo
ud of cosmic dust, was enough to prevent reception.
Redkirk set a tape to beeping out a repetitive call signal, and glanced up to meet Oberhof’s eye.
“If it doesn’t work,” he promised, “I’ll get Procyon V to tell them to call me.”
“Fair enough,” said Oberhof. “I’ll let you know if His Nibs objects to doing it that way.”
“Any time,” said Redkirk. “I’ll be out of touch with you for a couple of hours soon, but you can pick me up again when we swing around Mars.”
The Lunar operator hesitated, and the other saw his shoulder move as if he had dropped his hand from the cut-off switch.
“What kind of shift do you pull?” he asked Redkirk. “I haven’t been on the station long enough to know everybody yet.”
“About four hours, once in sixteen. Actually, it’s figured according to the time it takes Phobos to get around its orbit. Pretty near to what you pull, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Oberhof, “but I heard that you . . . uh, you used to be a pilot, didn’t you?”
Redkirk grinned, and some of the traces of pain disappeared from his thin face.
“You mean you’ve been hearing stories of how I piled up a Martian liner on the Lake of the Sun?”
Oberhof managed to look polite and curious at the same time.
“Well . . . they say you got it pretty bad, and being it was mechanical failure, you could have a pension.”
“So why do I work at Phobos?” finished Redkirk. “But why not? A man’s got to do something.”
The Lunar operator seemed about to ask further questions, but manners got the better of interest, and he switched off after a few aimless remarks.
Redkirk tried the ship’s code signal at intervals, but failed to get an answer.
“They wouldn’t leave their receiver off out there,” he muttered to himself. “I must be running into some dust or other interference.”
He had to put the problem aside when a call boomed up from the surface of Mars. The Solar Exploration Department, in the person of the regional office in Sand City—now beneath the position of Phobos—wanted to contact its current expedition on Pluto.
Redkirk ran his finger down the row of buttons marking beam settings for Solar System bodies, found “Pluto,” and put out an automatically aimed call.
Within the planetary system, the possible error due to the mechanism’s not precisely matching the motion of the planet was trifling, and he had an answer coming back before he had time to think about any correction.
“Your headquarters on Mars wants to talk,” he told the squarefaced man who appeared on his main screen.
The latter grimaced slightly, then nodded as if resigned to wasting time that might be better employed in the long overlooked task of studying the frigid planet.
“Put them through,” he said. “If they’re willing to talk to the assistant chief, I’ll try to tell them what they want to hear. Tell them you have Hodges; the boss is out on the ice.”
Redkirk checked the Martian operator, and presently had a two-way conversation flowing through Three and Four. Seeing that the relay of the series of routine messages through Six and Eight had been completed, leaving those screens blank, he switched off his C and D beams. Except for a few minutes when he had to arrange film recording of more such messages from some asteroid station to be re-transmitted to Martian townships as Phobos circled into a favorable position for it, he listened in to the beam from Pluto.
The report was weighted with statistics and technical requisitions until the square-faced Hodges withdrew from the screen in order to show his superiors an example of the party’s boring toward the planet’s surface through ice and frozen gases.
Redkirk followed with eager interest the process of thermite-drilling a well down through strata of congealed substances. The film recording of the first blast revealed an unearthly kaleidoscope of colors on the dark surface of the planet from whose position Sol was merely a bright star. Then, artificial lights showed the space-suited figures preparing for further penetration. Subsequent scenes displayed samples of the walls as the passage probed downward.
Redkirk was sorry when the directors on Mars were brought up to date with a view of the bottom of the digging. Switching off after the communciation had been completed, he realized that for a quarter of an hour he had forgotten where he was.
“Comfortable little hole, though,” he murmured, gazing about at his eight-by-ten office. “Lot warmer than Pluto.”
The quiet sough of the air-conditioning unit had heightened his imagination of nonexistent, freezing blasts of wind whipping across the chill waste on the screen. He decided he was just as happy to hear Johnny clattering coffee cups in the outer office.
A moment later, his young assistant thrust his head inside.
“Got time for coffee, Harry?” he asked.
“Fill ’er up!” called Redkirk. “I’ve just been talking to Pluto, and I need something to warm my bones.”
Johnny brought in the coffee and sat with his on the corner of the stand-by desk after handing Redkirk a full cup.
“Much doing?” he asked.
“Nothing special,” answered his chief. “Except one for a spaceship almost to Procyon. I can’t pick them up.”
He thought a moment, savoring the hot liquid.
“Johnny,” he directed, “look up the Iris in the Solarian Register, and see if her code signal is really . . . uh . . . SL-3-525. Maybe Luna didn’t have it right.”
The youth took down a volume from the shelf of such reference books and leafed through it, holding his coffee cup in one hand. When he found the ship on the list, the call signal was correct.
“Then I’m just not hitting her,” said Redkirk. “Luna won’t be on our necks for a while, till we come out from behind Mars, but I’d like to have something to tell Oberhof by then.”
“Why don’t you relay through some Procyon planet?”
“Oh, there’s some big jet on our end. Oberhof thinks it’s diplomatic and secret.”
He frowned over the problem until Johnny went out to refill their cups. Deciding that he would contact Procyon only as a last resort, Redkirk pressed the button that would aim his A beam at Pluto.
“Could you do me a little favor?” he greeted the square-faced Hodges when the latter appeared.
“Sure,” said the explorer woodenly. “Want me to run down to the comer for a beer or a blonde?”
Redkirk repressed a grin, realizing vaguely what a lonely life the other was leading at the moment, and explained his situation.
“Either they’re not able to pick up my signal,” he concluded, “or something is screening me out. Remember last month when you had trouble getting Phobos because a flock of asteroids distorted your beam?”
“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” promised Hodges. “Don’t forget—I haven’t the power you have at that big station.”
“If you can just get them to call me,” said Redkirk, “it will tell what the score is.”
The man on Pluto nodded and faded out. Five or ten minutes went by before he reappeared. His broad face showed a trace of excitement.
“By golly, I picked up a weak answer!” he exclaimed. “I can just about focus a blurry image. What do you want me to tell them?”
“Have them give me a call,” directed Redkirk.
He waited, scanning the instrument that would report any reception too faint to appear as sound or picture. One needle, after a while, wavered reluctantly. That was all.
He adjusted the same antenna for Pluto, as a check, and Hodges came in clear and strong.
“I can’t pick them up,” said Redkirk. “Now, listen, and tell me if you can do this—call the Lunar station and let them know you have the Iris. Then relay if they can’t catch her signal. I’m out of it both ways, at least till Phobos swings further around Mars.”
He sat back after Hodges had faded out, grinning at the feeling of having pulled strings all around the System. He doubted that O
berhof could pick up the ship’s beam; whatever was damping it before it reached Phobos would probably take care of Earth also.
In a few minutes, he discovered that he was not entirely cut off from the operation. Hodges worked manfully to feed the images through Pluto to Luna at one end and the Iris at the other, and Redkirk’s receiver picked up the beam relayed inward from the frigid planet.
Ambassador Morelli was a blurry white face with dark blurs for eyes and black hair. Evidently, however, he was recognizable to his superior, for the conversation continued quite a while.
“Wish I could figure out what he’s talking about,” murmured the Phobos operator.
Morelli, in stilted, guarded phrases which he chose like a man selecting a life insurance policy, indicated where the “information” desired might be found. That is, he seemed to be naming a place—Redkirk did not believe the Department could employ so many people with such curious cognomens.
Well, if it is a code, it’s probably none of my business, he thought regretfully.
He decided that he was getting to be a busybody, and was relieved when the time came to send some of the transcribed messages down to the Martian cities. This kept him intermittently busy for some time.
Shortly after the last message was cleared, a call came across the System from Venus. Someone had to speak to Altair VII about certain Altairian microorganisms desired for urgent medical research. Since it turned out to be a conference hookup with several personages at the terminal screens, Redkirk and the Altairian operator kept in constant contact on a companion beam to monitor the transmission.
The Altairian struck Redkirk as being oddly human in movements and bodily attitudes despite a strikingly unhuman physique. There was no actual separation of head from body, and the numerous short, one-sectioned arms ending in powerful claws suggested that the distant being had evolved from something that had crawled. His skin gleamed, between areas of warty protuberances, with brown and golden tints reminiscent of either polished leather or some metallic substance.