Earthbound (Winston Science Fiction Book 1)

by Milton Lesser

  “What’s your speed?”

  “Uh — one-forty!”

  “Still no good,” Pete told him. “We’ve got snow-runners around the wheels, but we’ll skid and crash at that speed.”

  “One-ten!”

  “That’s better, but better check your radar. Maybe the ground isn’t flat below us —”

  “Hey, get us out of this,” Sam Smith wailed, and Clarence Roth was mumbling to himself off in a comer of the cabin.

  After a time, Gus said, “Radar’s bad. Crags and peaks and outcroppings of ice below us. But we’re going down — into the wind, which makes our ground speed only forty-eight miles per hour. Elevation, three thousand feet.”

  “Put on your jets!” Pete yelled.

  From the front of the ship, there was a coughing sound, once, and then again.

  “They won’t kick over!” Gus cried. “They won’t. . .”

  “They’ve got to!” Pete fought his way forward as the plane was rocked and buffeted by the winds.

  “Elevation, two thousand, ground speed the same as before. We’re going to crash!”

  Chapter 12 — The Last Frontier

  Except for Pete, no one seemed ready for any decisive action, except, of all people, Ushuaia Joe. As Pete made his way forward, he found Sam and Clarence Roth in his way, jostling each other about in frightened confusion. Pete had no time to fight his way through, and he looked ahead of him helplessly to the controls.

  But somehow, Ushuaia Joe was at his side. Using his arms as flails, the Indian of Tierra del Fuego swept the two men aside, and Pete flung himself down the length of the cabin. Joe was there again, heaving Ganymede Gus bodily from the pilot chair.

  Pete sat down — with only seconds left to act.

  He kicked at the jet pedal, heard the motors cough in protest. Frozen? If they were frozen. . . .

  He kicked again. The engines sputtered, coughed, kicked over! Pete pulled the stick all the way back, saw the angry little pips flashing on the radar screen. They’d skimmed something, a jagged cliff of ice, probably, by not more than fifty feet.

  Landing by radar can be a ticklish business. You can’t see anything, which is the reason why you use radar in the first place. Instead, radar sends out its light-fast energy to substitute for your eyes. The beam hits something and bounces back, and you know that something’s been hit at such-and-such a distance.

  And with that as a guide, you try to bring down a big jet plane through an Antarctic blizzard.

  Pete began to sweat. His first impulse was to look through the pilot window to try to see something other than the swirling storm. But he fought it down, and forced his eyes to remain on the radar screen with its little pips. He played the controls delicately with his fingers.

  Down there? No! Radar warning — something high and uneven. There? No, the same. But according to the directional computer, latitude and longitude were right on the nose. The base should be directly below, and near it a long stretch of flat ice. There! Flat and long enough. Now bring her around slowly, into the wind. Don’t nose down, for you won’t get another chance. Closer, closer —

  Something touched. The plane bumped, bounced rocked from side to side. Pete cut the jets and they were gliding across the ice like a silent ghost. Something threw Pete forward and his bead struck the control panel sharply. He felt himself falling, and someone, possibly Ushuaia Joe, eased him to the floor just before he blacked out.

  “You feeling better?” Ganymede Gus’s voice sounded fuzzy around the edges.

  “I’ve got a headache,” Pete mumbled, trying to sit up. He couldn’t make it.

  “Well, just relax a while. You brought us down safely, and that’s enough till you feel better. Near as I can figure it, sonny, we plowed into a snow bank. No damage, thanks to you.

  “You see,” Mr. Fairchild said smugly, “I knew we would need Peter with us.”

  Ushuaia Joe then soaked a rag in some of the water left aboard ship, and bathed Pete’s head with it. Strength flowed back quickly after that. Before long Pete was on his feet again.

  “All right,” said Mr. Fairchild, “the sooner we find our base the better I’ll like it. Let’s get into our furs.”

  Sam Smith spread out the heap of fur garments, and everyone donned them. Their boots were spiked for travel over ice. They strapped their snowshoes to their backs, and also piled their food and supplies on their backs. Each one bundled into a shapeless mass, they headed for the door.

  Gus opened it, hopped outside and fastened it back against the hull while the blizzard whipped in at them. One by one, they stepped out on the ice of Antarctica.

  “You can’t see much through this storm!” Gus roared over the keening wail of the wind.

  Mr. Fairchild shook his fur-hooded head. “We don’t have to. They set a pole over the base, painted it with a mildly radioactive substance. We should see its glow.”

  They looked in all directions, holding on to one another with mittened hands. If a man got separated from the rest by as much as twenty yards in this blizzard, he might be lost forever. Pete had never felt such cold. It knifed in almost at once, numbing in its intensity. It stung, it blinded, it brought tears and froze them before they could roll down their cheeks.

  Ushuaia Joe’s sharp eyes caught the glow first. “Light,” he said. “That way.” He pointed.

  And then they all saw it, faintly — the smallest suggestion of a glow cutting through the frozen gloom. “That should be it!” Mr. Fairchild yelled triumphantly, stalking out over the ice.

  They followed him in single file, still gripping hands tightly. It was late winter, and a vague twilight suffused the air and the wind-driven snow. The sun had worked its way close to the horizon, but it would not rise for several weeks. Thus Pete knew they could expect some twenty hours of total darkness for each four of half-light.

  The glow grew brighter.

  It took shape in the dusky light, became a long needle of metal pointing up at the heavy sky. They reached it, circled it excitedly.

  They dumped their packs of equipment on the ice. Sam Smith and Clarence Roth each hefted a pickax; Joe and Gus dug into their supplies and came up with shovels.

  The pickaxes swung up and then down, cracking and splintering the ice with every blow, and the shovels scooped away the debris. Soon Pete relieved a panting and thoroughly exhausted Ganymede Gus. Moments later, Sam and Clarence rested over their handles, too tired to continue. But a tireless Ushuaia Joe took Sam’s pickax from him and continued to hack away at the stubborn ice while Pete wielded his shovel.

  “I strike wood!” Joe called, after what seemed an endless time to Pete.

  After that, the Indian had to be careful. A trapdoor of thick wood was buried under the ice, and he did not want to damage it with his pickax. He probed around it carefully while Pete scraped and chopped at the ice with the edge of his shovel.

  Finally, the door was exposed, black and somber against the ice. Pete found a ring on one side, pulled at it experimentally. Nothing happened.

  “Icebound.” Mr. Fairchild’s teeth chattered as he spoke. Activity had warmed Pete, however, had even brought a warming perspiration to his skin. But that could be dangerous — once it started to freeze.

  He tugged again at the metal ring, heard something scrape, felt it give a little; but the trapdoor held fast. Ushuaia Joe joined him, and together they pulled.

  The scraping again, and Pete was thrown flat on his back when the door finally came up all the way. He looked at Ushuaia Joe stretched out near him on the ice, and they began to laugh. But they sobered quickly after that, as they began to follow Mr. Fairchild through the trapdoor and down a flight of wooden stairs. Everything was cold and damp and dark as blackest night.

  Ganymede Gus explored the space with his flashlight, found a light switch, snapped it on. Pete saw comfortable living quarters, with a radar screen and powerful radio transmitter off to one side. A hall led out to a large bunk room, a kitchen, a bathroom.

 
“All the comforts of home,” Clarence Roth murmured. He hardly ever spoke, but when he did, he regretted it — which was the reason for his usual silence.

  “Ain’t that nice,” Sam’s booming voice almost purred. “Clare thinks we’ll have all the comforts —”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “Shut up, both of you!” Mr. Fairchild snapped irritably. “We have enough on our hands without you two arguing all the time. First, we’ll have to set this camp up, and that will take some effort. After that I’ll radio our ships in space, one at a time. When they come in, Pete’ll guide them down with radar. Won’t you, Peter?”

  Pete did not answer. Instead, he found the heating unit, activated it. He crossed back to the trapdoor, saw that someone had shut it. He climbed halfway up the stairs, felt heat in the ceiling, heat which would keep the door from freezing over again until they would have time to build an igloo of ice blocks over it.

  After that, they all were busy. It took them three days to set up camp and another two to cut blocks of ice and construct an igloo over the trapdoor.

  One night after they had made the igloo, Pete found Mr. Fairchild bending over the radio transmitter. “F, calling Ship One. F, calling ship — go ahead, Ship One.”

  Of course, he could not expect an answer at once. Radio, like light, was the fastest thing in the universe — each traveling at better than 186,000 miles per second. But that incredible speed still meant that ten or twelve minutes must elapse before Mr. Fairchild’s message reached the asteroid belt, and another ten or twelve minutes for a return message, if any.

  Mr. Fairchild leaned back, lit a cigarette and puffed thoughtfully. “I’ve never asked you, Peter. You will bring those ships in for us, won’t you?”

  “Why should I aid an illegal enterprise?”

  “Why? Because there’s money in it for you, that’s why.”

  “I don’t want your money, I don’t want any part of it. You brought me down here against my will, and I helped set up the camp because all our lives were at stake if I didn’t. But that’s all. I don’t see why I should bring your ships in.”

  “Then I’ll tell you why. Once I call those ships to Earth, there will be no turning back. They won’t have enough fuel to leave this planet again, and landing any place else would mean prison. In that case, they’d try to come down whether you helped them or not. Without you at the radar screen it would be suicide, and you know it. Would you like to send all those men to their deaths?”

  “It wasn’t my idea in the first place,” Pete said. But he was fencing meaninglessly, and he knew it. He would have no choice except to bring in the ships.

  “You’ll do it,’’ Mr. Fairchild informed him.

  Pete nodded glumly. “I’ll do it.”

  Less than a half-hour later, a voice came in through the receiver, clearing Earth’s Heaviside layer with a lot of static. “Ship One to F! We heard you, F!. Lord, man, where were you? We’ve been hiding out here in the asteroids until we all have grown beards. We thought you’d been caught or something, and it’s been touch and go all the way, because those now graduate Cadets are patrolling the swarm as if it was their backyard. They’d find us sooner or later, unless — tell me, F, can we get out of here? Where do we go? Over, F, Over.”

  Mr. Fairchild smiled, flicked the switch over to sending. “You return to Earth,” he ordered. “We’ll wait for you on the Antarctic Continent, and I want you to let me know at once when you can make it to the following south-polar coordinates —”

  “He talking far?” Ushuaia Joe demanded.

  Pete nodded. “Very far, Joe.”‘

  The answer came, half an hour later: “Wonderful, F! We’re starting at once, naturally. Give us exactly twenty days and we’ll float in over your heads. That’s all, F. We’re signing off and rocketing in!”

  “You see,” Mr. Fairchild explained, “the authorities will never find us here in Antarctica. It’s Earth’s final frontier, and except for a base at Little America some five hundred miles northeast of our present position, it’s deserted. Our plane will be icebound until summer, but by that time we should be able to blast it clear and start bringing goods, north. We’ll let the ice bury the spaceships completely, so if anyone on the hijacked ships got a good look at them, they’ll never be traced. Small loss, with millions of dollars in cargo coming in.”

  “All obtained illegally!” Pete raged.

  “Peter, please. There is business and business — and who is to draw the line between shrewd manipulation and out-and-out stealing?”

  “There are laws for that! The Government has been able to draw that line for hundreds of years, and the vast majority of people like it.”

  “I do believe you’re an idealist.”

  “Maybe I am. I only know that if everyone thought as you do, we couldn’t have any civilization at all. I only know. . . .”

  The radio was buzzing again. “F! Hello, F. Boss, we’ve been spotted. I think they beamed onto our radio or something. Anyway, there’s a patrol ship closing in. just a small one, boss, but I think it can outrun us. You want us to rocket away or fight? Over, F.”

  “Fight!” Mr. Fairchild fairly screamed into his transmitter. “You have no choice, not if you think they can outrun you. Disable them at the very least, but fight. They must not be able to follow. You have long-range blasters on your ship, and I doubt if a small patrol scout vessel could match them. You are to fight! That is all.”

  Then, to Pete: “Carelessness! They can spoil everything if they’re caught —”

  “So you’re willing to have them murder anyone in that patrol ship! That does it, Mr. Fairchild — I won’t bring that ship in for you if it gets here.”

  The bleak depths of deep space. On the fringe of the asteroid belt, two hundred million miles from Earth. Two graduate Cadets in their small cruiser.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Roger Gorham insisted. “Part of a radio message, unscrambled at the last minute, so you figure it’s the pirates.”

  Garr nodded his head stubbornly. “I didn’t insist, Roger. I’m not sure. But on the other hand, we’re not turning back until we find out.”

  “Aw, you’re as bad as Pete. You’re acting just as if this were a game of cops-and-robbers. Because of that, we have to go rocketing out at full speed, and I thought we’d be able to rest today.”

  “I didn’t become a Cadet to rest! Pete sure wouldn’t —”

  “Pete! That’s all I hear, Pete. But he’s not here with you. I am.”

  “Well — hey! Hey, look ahead. See it?”

  Roger frowned. “Of course I see it. A spaceship. So what? There’s no law against taking a ship out here on the fringes of the asteroid belt.”

  “No, there isn’t any law. But Ceres had no ship listed for this sector, and they wouldn’t miss a big baby like that. Give them a signal and see if they answer it.”

  A few minutes later,, Roger was still frowning. “They didn’t answer, but they seem to be coming closer.”

  “Hold it!” Garr cried. “That ship is armed to the teeth.” He set the controls on automatic, crossed the cabin to the port blaster. “I’m going to fire across their beam,” he muttered, triggering the big space-cannon.

  Together they watched the beam of raw energy streak out from their ship, saw it zoom off through space a mile ahead of the unknown vessel.

  “Radio them again, Roger!”

  Pause. “I did, Garr — and there’s no answer. I — I’m scared.”

  Garr sat down at the controls again, turning the ship in a steep bank which threw Roger against the stanchions. “I think I’d better make it hard for them to hit us, in case that’s their idea. I wish Pete were here — Roger!”

  “W-what?”

  “They’re shooting at us!”

  Roger saw it too. Three beams of energy roaring out at them across the void.

  Garr slammed down on the controls, sent their ship rocketing away, preparing for a turn and a new approach.

  �
��Call headquarters on Ceres!” he cried. “Give them our location and . . .”

  Something jarred their ship, shook it. The lights blinked out, and a moment later Roger whimpered, “The radio d-doesn’t work.”

  “Try it again!”

  “It s-still d-doesn’t work!”

  Garr swore under his breath, stood up. “Neither do the controls. They must have got our main power line, Roger — hello! Look, they’re going away. I guess they know they’ve disabled us.”

  “Can we get out of here?”

  Garr shook his head. I don’t think so. We’ve got enough food, water and air, so we don’t have to worry —”

  “But what?”

  “But we’ll have to repair that radio fast, or our number’s up. We’re still moving, Roger, at ten miles a second. And we’re heading straight into the thick of the asteroid belt.”

  “Well, we should plow through it in a day or so —”

  “No. There are millions of particles in there — some pieces tiny, others miles in diameter. There’s the most cockeyed, complicated gravitational -field in the solar system. We’ll plow in, and slow down. Gravity’ll get us. First one hunk of rock, then another. Our speed forward will slow down to zero, but we’ll bounce back and forth between those hunks of stone until one decides to hold us permanently.

  “Our only hope is to fix that radio fast and send out our position. But tell me, Roger, do you know any prayers?”

  “I — I —” Roger began to blubber. “Wait! There’s the life-rocket.”

  “Only big enough for one,” Garr muttered.

  “‘Well, one of us could go out in it, reach Ceres and report the position of the other.” Roger looked at Garr hopefully.

  Garr snorted. That would help, of course. But if it had been Pete, if it had been anyone else, they would have tossed a coin. He knew, however, that Roger would be helpless alone in the derelict.

  He looked up wearily. “You take the life-rocket and get out of here. Come on, scram before I change my mind! I’ll stay with the ship.”