Earthbound (Winston Science Fiction Book 1)

by Milton Lesser

  They fought for the blaster as he spoke, but Mr. Fairchild still held it, forced it slowly in toward Gus, forced it closer. . . .

  Pete dove for the other weapon, hit Clarence with his shoulder and saw him tumble away. Then Pete scrambled to his feet, blaster in his hand.

  “Break it up!” he cried. “Stop it —”

  He was too late.

  A muffled explosion came from the other side of the sled, and Ganymede Gus moaned once, then fell over on his back. Pete reached them an instant later, climbing over the sled. He wrenched the gun from Mr. Fairchild’s fingers, and bent down over Gus.

  “I tried to show you how a — spaceman — should act, sonny —”

  A moment later, Ganymede Gus was dead.

  Over and over again, “He’s dead.” Pete kept on saying it. He did not know why. “He’s dead —”

  Joe told him, “I think he died as he wanted to, Pete. For twenty years he’d gone the wrong way, and he finally found his chance to strike a blow against evil.”

  “They killed him —”

  Joe placed a big hand on his shoulder. “I know how you feel. You get to see a lot of that in my business and you never like it. Some men are that way, Pete, living by violence. And life just isn’t what it should be for them, for guys like Mr. Fairchild. He can kill without compunction. But don’t get this wrong: don’t say what so many people do. It wasn’t because society did not understand him. No, it was the other way around. He couldn’t get along with society. The world is a wonderful place, Pete,, if you can obey a few simple rules of decency. But I guess Mr. Fairchild wouldn’t understand.”

  “Our Indian is a philosopher too,” Mr. Fairchild sneered.

  Ushuaia Joe shrugged. “We’d better get going, Pete. We won’t have to take these three with us, because our underground retreat here is better than any prison. They’ll just stay put until the police can come in after them.”

  It was a long and difficult job, but Sam and Clarence attached some stout ropes to the sled and, using the top rung of the ladder as a fulcrum, got it up through the trapdoor. Then, for what seemed an endless time, Pete hacked away at the ice with a pickax. Cold winds howled across the frozen tundra; snow fell in swirling gusts.

  “I think it’s deep enough,” Joe told him.

  Gently, they lowered Ganymede Gus’s body into the deep trench, shoveling ice over it. It was not in any way a casual grave, Pete realized as he fashioned a crude cross out of two slats of wood. The Antarctic ice was permanent, eternal — and Gus could rest eternally with it.

  Pete hardly realized he was saying it, but he heard his own voice hollowly, as if from far away. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: . . . he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.”

  And then it was over. The group stood with bowed heads and lodged the cross firmly in the cairn of ice. They went down below once more, searched for weapons, found none. When the police came, they would be met with no resistance —

  Joe then began to work over the sled. Before long, the jets commenced their throbbing, and soon the fiery exhaust thundered out over the ice. Pete brought up a last carton of supplies, strapped it down under a canvas cover, then climbed aboard.

  The jets roared as they streaked away from the underground camp. But louder and stronger was the roaring of the blizzard.

  It would be a long, hard road to Little America, but they were on their way. . . .

  Chapter 14 — White Sands Again

  Cold. Utterly unlike any cold Pete had ever before experienced.

  It was cold beyond chilling, cold beyond freezing, almost cold beyond numbing. It was the kind of cold that, paradoxically, burns. Too much of it and too intense to freeze the extremities first, it hit the whole body at once, and fur garments seemed no more effective than would sheerest silk.

  The speedometer needle did a crazy jig as the sled bounced and jumped over the icy terrain. Give or take ten, the needle hovered at the 90 miles per hour mark. Pete was strapped up in a sitting position, and with every jolt the thick leather belt cut cruelly into his frozen body. He knew he’d be black and blue by the time they reached Little America.

  If they reached Little America —

  There was no time for talking, no strength for talking. The sky covered everything like a thick leaden shroud, the tundra bounced and rocked on all sides of them, barely visible through the twilight gloom.

  Pete lost all track of time. There was nothing but the cold and the howling wind and the leaden sky spilling out its snow. The snowflakes did not fall; they never merely fell on the Antarctic continent. Caught up by the fierce wind, they spun and swirled and whipped down, each soft flake a stinging needle. Pete sensed that hours had passed, but it could have been days or weeks or infinity.

  Hadn’t he spent all his life just like that, tumbling along through the snow? He’d never known anything else. There was nothing else to know. The world consisted of the wind and the snow and the cold and the endless need to stay awake.

  To stay awake — that was the worst part of it. He wanted to sleep; the cold drove all but that desire from his mind. Yet sleep would slow the bodily functions and the cold would encroach. If he slept, if even he allowed himself to catnap, there would be no waking.

  Ever.

  Still, he felt himself drifting. His eyes blinked shut, and it suddenly became an effort to raise the lids again. A cloud drifted over his mind and squatted there. The storm noises receded off to the horizon of consciousness, crouching there, waiting for him to sleep before they swept in permanently over him.

  He wanted to talk, for that might keep him awake. But then the blizzard howled back and he could not even hear his own voice. He wondered dimly if Ushuaia Joe were fighting the same battle. All he could see ahead of him was the Indian’s broad, fur-garbed back. He could not tell if Joe were awake; he did not even have the strength to lean forward against the cutting pressure of his safety belt and prod the man.

  On they sped and on, but the journey was completely without meaning. Even the cold ceased to exist. All that remained was the desire to sleep, and the conflicting desire to remain awake — and alive.

  Maybe if he thought . . . it didn’t matter what; any thoughts would do. If he could only keep his mind occupied. But what was there to think about? His brain felt impossibly sluggish. Multiplication table? Run it through. Two times two is four times two is eight times two is sixteen times two is thirty-two times two is sixty-four times two — No, that was no good. The monotony of it made him drift, drift. . . .

  There was the time, an age ago, when he first saw the spaceships thundering off into the sky, when he was a little boy of three and Big Pete assured him — or was he four? — anyway, Big Pete assured him that the spaceships were not ablaze, despite the pillars of flame that supported them. He had vowed right there and then to go to space with a burning pillar of flame and fury behind him and weave his ring of fire around all the distant stars.

  Or later, when he was older and could understand, they received the news of his brother’s death two hundred million miles away, and Big Pete said nothing, absolutely nothing. He just sat there. He sat there for a long time and he said nothing about it; he never mentioned it at all and that was worse. He went out early, though, and took Pete by the hand and watched the ships blasting off. Maybe he saw Jerry’s face in every shining hull, or maybe he saw nothing but the wonders of space and knew that Jerry had died happily, as a man should die. . . .

  Or the time he first met Garr MacDougal when Garr came to the Academy with his gangling limbs and his freckles and admitted with a blush that he’d never even seen a spaceship. He’d just heard an awful lot about them, so he wanted to see them first-hand, despite the fact that his family did not understand why a boy would want to go to the moon or beyond, or any place at all.

  Or the times at the Academy when the spacemen would come and visit their old rooms, and maybe if you were real nice they wou
ld stop and talk to you about the hothouse that was Venus or the seas of lunar pumice or the ageless ochre sands of Mars and the mysteries that lay buried beneath their shifting surface, or the spinning chaotic asteroids or the dome-cities on far Jupiter’s moons.

  That was it! Think, think, think, and drive the cold and the sleep away. Drive away? Drive what away? Drive....

  “Pete! Pete!”

  A hand on his shoulder, shaking him. And something stinging his face, hard, yet living. Another hand, slapping him.

  “Out of it, Pete! Up, boy, up!”

  “Huh? J-Joe — I’m all right. I’m up.”

  “We’re out of fuel. We coasted to a stop, and when I unbuckled myself and turned around, you were asleep. I couldn’t turn around otherwise, and if our fuel lasted, I don’t think you’d have made it to Little America alive.”

  Joe was shouting to be heard, but the motion of their sled had kicked up a man-sized gale by itself, and now that they had stopped, talking could be heard over the storm.

  “How far are we from Little America?” Pete asked.

  “I don’t know, not exactly. But we’ve been moving for almost five hours and we’ve been going in the right direction, too. I don’t think it can be more than a couple of miles, Pete. But that’s liable to be the toughest part of our trip, because we’re going to have to make it on foot.”

  Pete did not reply. He was very tired and very cold, and he sat quite still while Joe reached down for their supplies to get some food. He lighted their portable stove — a can of stored heat, actually — and soon had some dried beef thawing out in melted snow. The snow, now water, began to boil, and a delicious aroma came from the little pot. Pete found a fork in his hand, without remembering when he reached for it, and soon he was eating, and the meat was hot and the liquid scalding, and he let these burn his mouth and his throat, and he felt much better.

  “The longer we sit here the longer it’s going to take,” Joe finally said. “I don’t like the idea of walking off into that storm any better than you do, Pete. But what do you say?”

  For answer, Pete stood up, stepped away from the small circle of warmth which came from their stove. The cold tried to chase him back, but he set his eyes resolutely away from the shimmering waves of heat as he said “Okay. What are we waiting for?”

  The first mile wasn’t so bad. It took more than an hour, for fresh drifts of snow were soft and deceptive, and often Pete found himself in knee-deep before he realized what had happened. But the cold did not assert itself the way it had on the sled, and they pumped their legs up and down and did not think of sleep.

  The second mile was worse. They fought the wind all the way, and although they trudged slowly through the snow, they panted as if they had been running — only it was a lot harder than running.

  “Pete?”

  “What?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Tired.”

  “Umm-mm. Me too. If we don’t reach it soon —”

  “We’ll reach it. We have to.”

  Ushuaia Joe fell down suddenly, sprawled full length in the snow. It seemed a long time before he could pick himself up, and when he did he said not a word. He kept right on walking into the teeth of the wind, and Pete walked with him.

  Endlessly.

  It was Pete who saw it first, or thought he saw it. Something just over the horizon, which seemed to stay there no matter how far they walked.

  Something.

  A light?

  It spread out in front of them, and square shapes, which might have been low buildings, loomed up out of the murk. Little America? Civilization’s outpost on the fringes of the Antarctic continent. . . .

  Pete was running, shouting, waving his hands, stumbling, then running again. His breath came in ragged, burning gasps. His eyes clouded.

  He fell, saw Joe down in the snow beside him, clawing at it, too weak to rise. But he too was shouting, and their voices were a hoarse roaring not unlike the sounds of the storm. The buildings were close, so close —

  Did he see figures scurrying out from the nearest one, heading for them? Did he? Then he saw nothing. . . .

  “Easy now. Don’t try to sit up.”

  “I — won’t.” It was a voice he had heard, but only a voice, without the shrieking wind as a background. A pleasant warmth blanketed him.

  “Exposure out there could be a nasty business. Here, drink this.”

  Something propped his head up, something else prodded his lips and he drank. The liquid was hot and he rolled it around in his mouth and felt its wonderful heat before he swallowed it. He opened his eyes, saw a white-walled room, a chain, a bureau. He was on a bed and he saw an electric light glowing pleasantly overhead. A smiling man, portly and middle-aged, held a cup to his lips.

  “Where’s Joe?”

  “Joe? You mean your companion? He’s in another room, right next door. This isn’t much of a hospital, son, but it’s the best we can do. We run the weather station here at Little America, and it’s lucky one of you had a brass-lined throat. I think we heard your shouting even before we saw you!”

  “How long have we been here, sir?”

  “Two days. Name’s Jenkins, son.” The man tamped tobacco into a corncob pipe, lighted it. “But don’t ask me why I’m down here. Six months of it and we’re relieved, and if we handle ourselves all right in Little America, the next stop is the moon or someplace else like that. Good training. Say, I’m a big dope! Are you strong enough to talk — or to listen to me gab my head off like this?”

  Pete nodded eagerly. “Sure.” Then he smiled. “Long as you don’t make me get up and go outside again.

  “Well, okay. I’ve got a question. What were you two doing out there?”

  “It’s a long story. I think you’d better get it from Joe, because he’s a Government agent of the United States. You American?”

  “Yep. There aren’t many exchange students for Little America, son! I guess they figure we can have it. But a Government agent, huh? Anything, important?”

  Pete nodded. “We’ll have to leave here as soon as we can. Say, do you have a plane, Mr. Jenkins?”

  “What for? We can’t take any sight-seeing tours down here. But seriously, a jet comes in once a week from Tierra del Fuego. Should be along in three days, near as I can figure it.”

  “Will they have room for us?”

  “I expect so, provided you’re ready to travel. Excuse me, son. I’m going in to take a look at your friend.”

  Ceres Base, in the asteroids, was a large dome-city on Ceres, the largest planetoid of them all. Actually, the Solar Patrol base there was a huge, glorified lighthouse which charted courses above and below the Belt for freighters and passenger liners. Once in a long while and for very special circumstances, a course might be plotted through the fringes of the Belt itself, but that was only when speed seemed imperative, and even then it was regarded as a highly dangerous journey.

  The dome itself was of thick, tough quartzite in three layers, and because it was not uncommon for a stray meteor to blast a jagged hole in the outermost one, crews of space-suited figures could be seen scurrying all over it with their repair kits. Below the dome was pressure and an Earth atmosphere and a good-sized city.

  Ships came in through an airlock atop the dome, and within the past fifteen minutes Roger Gorham had come down in his battered life-rocket. Now he stood, fidgeting, in the commanding officer’s quarters, and Colonel Tomilson was speaking:

  “So one of you managed to get out of that wreck, eh? Frankly, that’s more than we could have hoped for. We’ve been following the ship by radar, and it’s in a lot of trouble. The thick of the swarm, Cadet Gorham. We don’t hold out much hope for rescuing your friend.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Roger said stiffly.

  “So am I. What’s your friend’s name — MacDougal? Well, he’s in for it. He’s in the deepest part of the Belt right now, and it will be impossible to get a ship through to him for — umm-mm —
six weeks. By then, the chances are a hundred to one it will be too late.

  “It might happen today; it might happen in a month. MacDougal has enough air and plenty of food from what you tell me, but he can’t fight that swarm with a derelict ship. Six weeks from now, and section seventeen — that’s where he is now, section seventeen — in six weeks, that section will thin out some, but until then it would be suicide for anyone to go in after him. A rescue ship would have to plot its own orbit as it went along, with changes necessary every few seconds. It would be murder.

  “It won’t be quite so bad in six weeks, as I’ve said, but even then I’ll have to ask for volunteers. I wouldn’t order any man out there, although I daresay there have been several volunteers already. Well, in six weeks, but it will be a miracle if MacDougal’s ship hasn’t fallen to pieces by then. A meteor half the size of this room would do it, and a smaller one could be just as bad. A speck the size of a pea could penetrate the hull and get rid of all his air, unless MacDougal wears his spacesuit all the time.

  “We’re trying to contact him by radio, so we can at least tell him that. So far, no answer. Could be that he’s already dead —”

  “No,” said Roger. “Our radio conked out when we were hit, but MacDougal didn’t think it was hopeless, sir. He’s trying to repair it.”

  “We’ll keep a twenty-four-hour watch, of course. If he does repair it, we’ll radio him instructions, though a lot of good that will do. I wish I had those pirates here, right now. I’d — never mind, Gorham! You’re excused.”

  “Yes, sir,” and Roger saluted smartly before he left the room.

  For a long time Colonel Tomilson stared from his window, stared up past the transparent dome and into the black sky above it, studded with the thousand-thousand tiny specks which made up the Belt. “That poor kid,” he said. “That poor kid. . . .”

  Joe and Pete left Little America. The supply plane had taken them to Tierra del Fuego, where it was snowing, but it was nothing like the storm on the Antarctic continent. There they changed to a private plane which, in a few hours, had deposited them in Buenos Aires. Ushuaia Joe had made his report, and now he stood talking with Pete in the United States Government Liaison Building.