“You mean—”
“Right now.”
“Well . . . there are no important demands on my time.”
“If you can give me the rest of the day, I’ll do better than explain—I’ll demonstrate.”
“Fine.” Etcheverry put out his cigar. “I’ll admit you’ve aroused my curiosity.”
Farrero called an air cab. “Purdy Field,” he told the driver.
At Purdy Field, Farrero took Etcheverry into the hangar. “Jump in,” and he followed the stooped figure into the two-place space boat.
Etcheverry adjusted himself gingerly to the cushions. “If you haven’t a license to build, I hope at least you have a license to fly space.”
Farrero grinned. “I have. Check it if you care to. It’s under the aerator.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
They rode up off the seared field on snoring atomic jets, beat up, up, up. A hundred miles, two hundred and earth blurred below. A thousand, five thousand, ten thousand miles—twenty, thirty thousand miles, and Farrero kept a close watch on his radar screen. “Should be about here now—” A pip showed yellow-green. “There it is.” He swerved the boat, jetted off in the new direction. After a minute:
“You can see it below, off to the left.”
Etcheverry, craning his gaunt neck, saw a small irregular asteroid, perhaps a mile in diameter. Farrero edged down the boat, lowered with hardly a jolt on a patch of white sand.
Etcheverry grabbed Farrero’s arm violently. “Are you crazy?” he squealed. “Don’t open that port! That’s space out there! Vacuum!”
Farrero shook his head. “There’s air. Fifteen pounds pressure, twenty per cent oxygen. Good breathing. I’m not crazy. Look at the barometer.”
Etcheverry looked, watched numbly as Farrero flung open the port. The air was good.
Farrero jumped out of the boat. Etcheverry followed. “But. . . there’s gravity here—”
Farrero climbed to the top of a little hillock, waved an arm to Etcheverry. “Come on up.”
Etcheverry stalked slowly up the slope.
“This is Westgeller’s estate,” said Farrero. “His private world. He paid 300,000 munits for it. Look, there’s his house.”
Westgeller’s house sat on a wide flat field covered with emerald-green turf. Nearby a lake glistened in the warm sunlight, and a white crane stood fishing among the rushes. Trees lined the plain, and Etcheverry heard birds singing across the distance.
The house was a long rambling structure, singlestory, built of redwood planking. There were many windows, and below each, a window box overflowing with floral color. Beach umbrellas, green, orange, blue, rose like other, larger flowers from a terrace.
Farrero squinted across the field, smooth and grassy-green as a golf course. “Westgeller is at home. I see his space boat. Like to call on him? Might like to talk things over with your old friend, eh, Mr. Etcheverry?” Etcheverry gave him a sharp side glance, said slowly: “Perhaps it would be just as well if—”
Farrero laughed. “Save it. It’s no good. You probably don’t know I read lips. Well, I do. I was stone deaf the first ten years of my life. And when you flashed Westgeller’s picture on my screen, his voice saying, ‘I’m sending over my dear old friend Etcheverry,’ and his lips saying, ‘I’ve decided to have you stop work on my job, Mr. Angker,’ I smelled a rat. I suppose you’re Marlais. It’s a cinch you’re not Angker.”
The thin man shrugged, gave Farrero a quick side-glance. “I’m Marlais. Nice set-up you’ve got.”
“I like it,” said Farrero. “I’m making money.”
Marlais looked around the toy world. “You’re spending it too.” He stamped his long fragile-looking foot on the ground. “You’ve got me beat. How do you lick gravity? Why doesn’t the air all blow away? Seems as if I’m . . . oh, about normal weight.”
“You’re a little lighter,” said Farrero. “Gravity here is three per cent less than on Earth.”
“But,” and Marlais looked horizon to close horizon, calculated, “call this a half mile in diameter—that’ll be a half of a half cubed, approximately—one sixteenth cubic mile. Earth is ... 512 trillion over two is 256 trillion cubic miles. And the gravity is the same. Why?” “For one thing,” said Farrero, “you’re closer to the center of gravity—by almost four thousand miles.” Marlais reached down, plucked a blade of grass, inspected it curiously.
“All new,” said Farrero. “The trees brought here at no slight effort, I’ll tell you. Lindvist—he’s a Danish ecologist—is working with me. He figures out how many bees I need to fertilize the flowers, how many earthworms, how many trees to oxygenate the air.” Marlais nodded his head, darted Farrero a look from shadowed eyes. “Very good, very good!”
“There won’t be a millionaire living on Earth in another twenty years,” mused Farrero. “I’ll have sold them all private planets. Some will want big places. I can furnish them—”
“Incidentally, where did you get this one?”
“Out in space a ways.”
Marlais nodded sagely. “That’s probably where Marlais & Angker will go to find theirs.”
Farrero turned his head slowly, looked-the man up and down. Marlais met his gaze blandly.
“So—you think you’ll cut in?”
“I’d be a fool if I didn’t.”
“You think,” Farrero went on meditatively, “that you’ll cash in on my idea. You’ve got all the equipment, all the technicians necessary for a quick skim at the cream. Maybe you’ll even get some laws enacted, barring non-licensees from the game.”
“If I didn’t—I’d be a fool.”
Farrero shrugged. “Well. . . maybe yes. Maybe no. Like to see another of my jobs? This is Westgeller’s. I’ll show you Desplains’.”
Marlais bowed his head. They re-entered the space boat. Farrero clamped the port, pulsed power through the jets. Westgeller’s world fell away beneath them.
They reached Desplains’ world half an hour later. “Eventually,” said Farrero, “space around Earth will be peppered thick with these little estates. There’ll be laws regulating their orbits, minimum distances set for their spacing—” He jerked the controls, threw the power-arm hard over. The space boat fled across Desplains’ sky.
Marlais squirmed his long bony shoulder blades, cleared his throat with a sound like a saw cutting a nail, glanced sidewise at Farrero. “Why did you do that?” Farrero expelled a lung full of taut air. “That was a narrow one. Did you see it slip past?”
“No.”
“I forgot that Desplains wanted a moon. It’s been installed. We just about rammed it.”
He set the boat down on a rocky outcrop. Marlais unsealed the port, angled his skinny legs to the ground. “Phew,” he grunted, “Desplains must intend to raise orchids—positively dank.”
Farrero grinned, loosened his jacket. “He hasn’t moved in yet. We’re having a little trouble with the atmosphere. He wants clouds, and we’re experimenting with the humidity.” He looked up. “It’s easy to get a muggy high overcast—but Desplains wants big fluffs of cumulus. Well, we’ll try. Personally I don’t think there’s enough total volume of air.”
Marlais looked into the sky too, where Earth hung as a huge bright crescent. He licked his pale old lips.
Farrero laughed. “Makes a man feel naked, doesn’t it?” He looked across the little world to the queerly close horizon—barely a stone’s-throw off, so it seemed —then back to the sweep of sky, with the majestic crescent of Earth dominating a new Moon behind. “Out here,” he said, half to himself, “beauty comes a lot at a time.”
Marlais gingerly perched himself on a slab of rock. “Exotic place.”
“Desplains is an exotic man,” said Farrero. “But he’s got the money, and I don’t care if he wants the rocks upholstered with rabbit fur.” He hopped up beside Marlais. “Desplains wanted something unusual. He’s getting it.” He indicated a clump of trees. “That’s his bayou. Flora from Africa and the Matto Gros
so. Fauna from here and there, including a very rare Tasmanian ibis. It’s rather pretty, and certainly wild enough—connecting ponds, with overhanging trees. The moss hasn’t got a good start yet, and there isn’t quite the authentic smell, but give it time. Behind there’s a . . . well, call it a swamp—a jungle cut with a lot of waterways. When the flowers all start in blooming it’ll be heaven—”
“Individual worlds to suit any conceivable whim,” murmured Marlais.
“That’s it exactly,” said Farrero. “We’ve got our largest world—about ten miles diameter—sold to a Canadian yachtsman.”
“Fred Ableman,” said Marlais dryly. “He canceled his contract with us about two months ago.”
Farrero nodded. “He wants his world all ocean— blue ocean, plenty of wind to sail his boats. He wants islands here and there, with beaches and coral banks—” “Coconut palms too, I expect.”
“Right—but no sharks. We won’t have-it completed for another year and a half. It’s heavy and unwieldy— difficult to bring out and get established in an orbit. Then there’s an awful lot of water needed.”
“Where do you get the water? You can’t bring it out from Earth?”
Farrero shook his head. “We mine the Hipparchus ice floe, and every time the moon comes in apposition we shoot across a few big chunks. Slow but sure. It costs a lot, but Ableman makes too much money for his own good. Anyway, how could he spend his money' better?”
Marlais pursed his lips in agreement. “I expect you get some strange specifications.”
Farrero grinned. “There’s a man named Klenko, made his money in fashion design. He’s the man responsible for those whirling things women were wearing a year or two ago on their heads. Strange man, strange world. The air is full of thirty-foot glass bubbles, floating loose. Glass bubbles everywhere—topaz, blue, red, violet, green—high and low. It’s a hazard trying to land a space boat. He’s got a fluorescent forest—activizers in the sap. When he turns ultraviolet on it, the leaves glow ghostly pale colors—silver, pale-green, orange. We built him a big pavilion overhanging a lake. Luminous fish in the lake.”
“He evidently plans a lot of night life.”
Farrero nodded. “He wants nothing but night. His world won’t have any axial spin at all, when we get it trued in its orbit. But he’d better watch his step, or he’ll get in trouble with the Anti-Vice League if he goes through with some of his entertainment ideas.” Marlais shrugged, took a cigarette from an onyx case, lit it. “If a man owns his world, I suppose he makes the laws.”
“That at least is Klenko’s theory.”
Marlais blew out a puff of smoke. “One thing has me stumped,” and his shadowed eyes calculated Farrero. “How do you beat gravity? So far as I know, artificial gravity has never been discovered.”
Farrero nodded. “True.”
Marlais made an airy gesture. “Well—whatever the system is, I imagine it will work for Marlais & Angker, too.”
“So it would,” said Farrero. “Only Marlais & Angker have come to the party late. I don’t especially want to drive them into bankruptcy. I don’t imagine I could. There’ll always be Class III construction on Earth. But Farrero is pulling all the nuggets out of the pan, and he’ s making an awful dent in that precious twenty.” Marlais shook his head, and a spark appeared back in the depths of his eyes. “You have not quite grasped the idea, my friend. We don’t plan to take the back seat.
We have the connections, the equipment, the staff. We can bring the asteroids out here cheaper than you can, undersell you four ways from Sunday. We’ll even take losses if we need to. But you won’t stay in business long. Whatever, however you handle gravity, our engineers can duplicate the conditions.”
“My dear Mr. Marlais,” jeered Farrero, “do you think I’m a fool? Do you think I’d leave a loophole for you and the other bandits? Have you ever heard of the Norton Space Claims Act?”
“Certainly. It defines and authorizes mining development of the asteroids.”
“That’s right. I’ve filed on eleven hundred and twenty-two asteroids. Of a peculiar nature— You see that little black pebble by your right foot. That shiny one, like flint. Pick it up.”
Marlais reached, grasped, strained. His mouth slacked in amazement. He pulled again, till his skinny old arms quivered, creaked. He glanced up at Farrero.
“It weighs close to a ton, I expect,” said Farrero. “It’s star stuff.2 Matter crystallized at tremendous pressure in the heart of a star. It figures out about a ton a cubic inch. A little bit turns on a lot of gravity. Somehow or other, eleven hundred and twenty-two good-sized chunks of the stuff drifted into an orbit around the sun—not too far out from Earth. They’re small and dark and not heavy enough to cause any noticeable perturbations. But when you stand on their surface, the center of gravity is close enough to give you fairly close to Earth weight. I’ve filed on every one of those chunks, Marlais. Some I’ll have to lump together, others I’ll have to crust over with a few miles of ordinary matter to reduce gravity. It diminishes, you know, as the square of the distance from the center of mass— But I tell you what, Marlais,” Farrero opened the port of his space boat, motioned Marlais in, “I know where you can get all this heavy matter you can use.”
Marlais wordlessly climbed into the boat. He eyed Farrero lambently. “Where?”
Farrero clamped the port, swung the power-arm, and Desplains’ world fell off below.
“Here’s what you do,” Farrero confided. “You go out to Sirius, only ten light-years. It’s got a small companion. You can cut chunks off the companion, as big as you want, as many as you want. Bring them back to Earth, and then you’ll be in a position to compete with Farrero-Styled Worlds.”
Marlais stared ahead at expanding Earth, knees hunched up under his sharp chin. Farrero could not resist a last gibe.
“Of course there’ll be the detail of cooling off your acquisitions. I understand they’re pretty hot. Twenty or thirty million degrees Centigrade—”
. . . AND BEYOND THE SOLAR SYSTEM
A. E. Van Vogt - FAR CENTAURUS
Without question, this is one of the great tales in the modem literature of space travel. First published in January, 1944, more than a year and a half before the first public demonstration of atomic energy in the form of superbornbs, it soars so far ahead of what we have discovered in the realms of nuclear and other power sources that we cannot even conceive of it. In addition, it involves the space-time theories of Einstein and many other great mathematical physicists of our century. The result is one of the most imagination-stretching constructions of future possibility to be found in science fiction.
I wakened with A start, and thought: How was Renfrew taking it?
I must have moved physically, for blackness edged with pain closed over me. How long I lay in that agonized faint, I have no means of knowing. My next awareness was of the thrusting of the engines that drove the spaceship.
Slowly this time, consciousness returned. I lay very quiet, feeling the weight of my years of sleep, determined to follow the routine prescribed so long ago by Pelham.
I didn’t want to faint again.
I lay there, and I thought: It was silly to have worried about Jim Renfrew. He wasn’t due to come out of his state of suspended animation for another fifty years.
I began to watch'the illuminated face of the clock in the ceiling. It had registered 23:12; now it was 23:22. The ten minutes Pelham had suggested for a time lapse between passivity and initial action was up.
Slowly, I pushed my hand toward the edge of the bed. Click! My fingers pressed the button that was there. There was a faint hum. The automatic massager began to fumble gently over my naked form.
First, it rubbed my arms; then it moved to my legs, and so on over my body. As it progressed, I could feel the fine slick of oil that oozed from it working into my dry skin.
A dozen times I could have screamed from the pain of life returning. But in an hour I was able to sit up and turn on the lights.<
br />
The small, sparsely furnished, familiar room couldn’t hold my attention for more than an instant. I stood up.
The movement must have been too abrupt. I swayed, caught on to the metal column of the bed, and retched discolored stomach juices.
The nausea passed. But it required an effort of will for me to walk to the door, open it, and head along the narrow corridor that led to the control room.
I wasn’t supposed to so much as pause there, but a spasm of absolutely dreadful fascination seized me; and I couldn’t help it. I leaned over the control chair, and glanced at the chronometer.
It said: 53 years, 7 months, 2 weeks, 0 days, 0 hours and 27 minutes.
Fifty-three years! A little blindly, almost blankly, I thought: Back on Earth, the people we had known, the young men we’d gone to college with, that girl who had kissed me at the party given us the night we left—they were all dead. Or dying of old age.
I remembered the girl very vividly. She was pretty, vivacious, a complete stranger. She had laughed as she offered her red lips, and she had said, “A kiss for the ugly one, too.”
She’d be a grandmother now, or in her grave.
Tears came to my eyes. I brushed them away, and began to heat the can of concentrated liquid that was to be my first food. Slowly, my mind calmed.
Fifty-three years and seven and one half months, I thought drably. Nearly four years over my allotted time. I’d have to do some figuring before I took another dose of Eternity drug. Twenty grains had been calculated to preserve my flesh and my life for exactly fifty years.
The stuff was evidently more potent than Pelham had been able to estimate from his short period advance tests.
I sat tense, narrow-eyed, thinking about that. Abruptly, I grew conscious of what I was doing. Laughter spat from my lips. The sound split the silence like a series of pistol shots, startling me.
But it also relieved me. Was I sitting here actually being critical?
A miss of only four years was a bull’s-eye across that span of years.
Great Stories of Space Travel Page 8