“I want you to listen most carefully to me,” Mr. Smith said. “The United States has worked for three years to prepare and send a ship to the moon. That mission was completed this afternoon at two o’clock. The moon is inhabited by a gentle and gracious race of what, I suppose, we should call people. They were happy to welcome our emissaries, but they insisted that they—and their continent—had been sold to a person on Earth. How they learned of this, I’m not sure. But they are highly principled people—though naive as children—and they refuse to allow to investigate their country until we have a title to the place from the original purchaser. Do you understand what this means?”
REGGIE nodded slowly. “Means you don’t want a drink, eh?”
“You bought the moon,” Mr. Smith said sharply. “We can’t make any investigation there unless you sell it to us. I don’t know how or why you bought it—but I know this; unless we can settle the matter tactfully the United States is going to appear as a ruthless predator in the eyes of the world. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Why, of course,” Reggie said.
An atavistic cunning, perhaps inherited from his grandfather, had come to his aid. “Perfectly clear business,” he said, nodding quickly. He knew that he must get away from these men. Nothing but trouble came from chatting with men who wanted to buy or sell the moon. He’d learned that much from today’s lesson. “Tell you what,” he said, “I need a drink. Won’t be a minute. Pop into the old kitchen and mix-up something. Don’t stir.”
And with that Reggie fled from the room. It didn’t take him a minute to get out the backdoor, down the stairs, and into the welcome normality of a traffic jam. Popping into a cab he settled back against the cushions with a sigh of relief. He told the driver to take him to his only sanctuary, the club.
“He seems to have gone out, sir,” Clive told Mr. Smith ten minutes later.
“Out?” Mr. Smith cried. For an instant his composure deserted him completely; he paced aimlessly while the Generals stared at Clive with their mouths open.
“Why would he do that?” Mr. Smith demanded at last. “Why in the name of Heaven would he jeopardize the security of the most important—” Mr. Smith paused and looked at Clive. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Our voices carried?” Mr. Smith asked him with a little smile.
“You describe it euphemistically, sir.”
“I daresay we should have listened to you from the start,” Mr. Smith said. “Your young master is—ah—unusual. Where can we find him now?”
“He’ll be in the men’s bar of his club.”
Mr. Smith tugged at the lobe of his ear. Then he said, “Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ve seen my pictures in the paper? I’m not pressing the point out of vanity, I assure you. It’s merely that I want you to understand the gravity of this affair.”
“I think I understand,” Clive said. “And it is not from the rotogravures that I know you. I had the pleasure of meeting you at Potsdam.”
“What were you doing there?” one of the generals said bluntly. Clive raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think Sir Winston would care for me to say. Not yet at any rate.”
“Now listen,” Mr. Smith said. “We’re in a perilous mess. Our problem is to get your young master to sell us the moon. What do you suggest we do?”
“HE is in a highly nervous state,” Clive said thoughtfully. “I think our best chance would be to work through his erstwhile fiancé. She has a remarkably calming effect on him.
“Well, get in touch with her then.”
“But another problem presents itself,” Clive said judicially. “The master surely won’t leave the men’s bar, and his fiancé certainly can’t get into the men’s bar.”
“Why that’s nonsense,” Mr. Smith said. “They’ll make an exception under these circumstances. Where’s your phone?”
“In the foyer, sir. But I’m not too sanguine about the matter. It would be most unusual for a woman to enter the men’s bar.”
“We’ll see about that,” Mr. Smith said grimly.
He got the club’s number from Clive and was on the phone for a good ten minutes. When he returned to the drawing room he was pale and shaken. “They will not make an exception,” he said hoarsely. “I explained that it was imperative to the safety of the country, but the idiot I talked with didn’t give a tinker’s damn. He was most courteous, but absolutely adamant. Claimed that half the members had strokes once when a female cat wandered accidentally into the men’s bar from the kitchen.”
“We’ll have to call the White House,” one of the generals said, wincing visibly.
“That might help,” Clive said, none too hopefully. “It’s worth a try, at least. He’s a member, after all.”
At eight-thirty that same evening two stout members of Reggie’s club were carried out the main entrance to waiting ambulances. A group of men in the main lounge stood clenching their drinks with trembling hands, and talking to one another in hoarse, incredulous voices.
When the unbelievable happened—when Sari walked lightly past them and disappeared into the men’s lounge—a strong old codger burst into helpless tears and had to be escorted to a chair . . .
Sari found Reggie sipping a drink in mournful and solitary splendor.
“I say, what are you doing here?” he said.
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“Have a drink? Kind of quiet here tonight. Usually a good bunch around. Slack season, I suppose?”
“Reggie, I was an absolute stinker about the moon.”
“I thought you were a little grim,” Reggie said. “Seemed like an awfully good idea though. Buy old Sari the moon.” He shook his head sadly and sighed. “Not a good idea though.”
“Really Reggie, I was a stinker. It was sweet to think of me.”
Reggie brightened. “Very decent of you to say so,” he said.
“Not mad anymore, eh?”
“No, I’m not mad, Reggie,” Sari said, and kissed him on the cheek. “But I want you to sell it to some friends of mine. For just what you paid for it. Will you do that?”
Reggie looked at her closely. The dear girl had got madly off the tracks, he realized. Potty as a loon. “Anything you say,” he said. This, he knew, was the time to strike. While she was completely out of her mind. “Marry me tonight?”
“Certainly, I will,” she said, and kissed him on the lips.
“Let’s go,” he said happily. At the door of the lounge he paused and glanced about the empty room. “You’ve never been in here with me, have you?” he asked, struck by this coincidence. “Can’t imagine why. It’s a restful spot.” Then he remembered that he hadn’t signed his chit. “A moment, old girl,” he said, and hurried to the bar.
“Check, please,” he said.
“It’s on the house, sir,” the bartender said. “The White House.”
“Queer business,” Reggie muttered. He didn’t even know the chap, he reflected. Well, that’s how friendships started, probably. Bloke bought a bloke a drink, and pretty soon they were boon buddies. He and Ferdie would have to stop off at Washington one day.
EQUATION OF DOOM
First published in the February 1957 issue of Amazing Stories.
They grounded Ramsey’s ship on a hostile planet hoping he would starve to death, so the first thing he did was give most of his money away and lose the rest gambling. Then he picked a fight with the Chief of Police and joined forces with a half-naked dream-chick who was seemingly bent on self-destruction. The stakes were big—a planet or two—but it all added up to an—EQUATION OF DOOM!
“YOUR NAME ith Jathon Ramthey?” the Port Security Officer lisped politely.
Jason Ramsey, who wore the uniform of Interstellar Transfer Service and was the only Earthman in the Service here on Irwadi, smiled and said: “Take three guesses. You know darn well I’m Ramsey.” He was a big man even by Earth standard
s, which meant he towered over the Irwadian’s green, scaly head. He was fair of skin and had hair the color of copper. It was rumored on Irwadi and elsewhere that he couldn’t return to Earth because of some crime he had committed.
“Alwayth the chip on the shoulder,” the Port Security Officer said. “Won’t you Earthmen ever learn?” The splay-tongued reptile-humanoids of Irwadi always spoke Interstellar Coine with a pronounced lisp which Ramsey found annoying, especially since it went so well with the officious and underhanded behavior for which the Irwadians were famous the galaxy over.
“Get to the point,” Ramsey said harshly. “I have a ship to take through hyper-space.”
“No. You have no ship.”
“No? Then what’s this?” His irritation mounting, Ramsey pulled out the Interstellar Transfer Service authorization form and showed it to the Security Officer. “A tip-sheet for the weightless races at Fomalhaut VI?”
The Security Officer said: “Ha, ha, ha.” He could not laugh; he merely uttered the phonetic equivalent of laughter. On harsh Irwadi, laughter would have been a cultural anomaly. “You make joketh. Well, nevertheleth, you have no ship.” He expanded his scaly green barrel chest and declaimed: “At 0400 hours thith morning, the government of Irwadi hath planetarithed the Irwadi Tranthfer Thervith.”
“PLANETARIZED the Transfer Service!” gasped Ramsey in surprise. He knew the Irwadians had been contemplating the move in theory for many years, but he also knew that transferring a starship from normal space through hyper-space back to normal space again was a tremendously difficult and technical task. He doubted if half a dozen Irwadians had mastered it, yet the Irwadi branch of Interstellar Transfer Service was made up of seventy-five hyper-space pilots of divers planetalities.
“Ecthactly,” said the Security Officer, as amused as an Irwadian could be by the amazement in Ramsey’s frank green eyes. “Tho if you will kindly thurrender your permit?”
“Let’s see it in writing, huh?”
The Security Officer complied. Ramsey read the official document, scowled, and handed over his Irwadi pilot license. “What about the Polaris?” he wanted to know. The Polaris was a Centaurian ship he’d been scheduled to take through hyper-space on the run from Irwadi to Centauri III.
“Temporarily grounded, captain. Or should I thay, ecth-captain?”
“Temporarily my foot,” said Ramsey. “It’ll be months before you Irwadians can get even a fraction of the ships into hyper. You must be out of your minds.”
“Our problem, captain. Not yourth.”
That was true enough. Ramsey shrugged.
“Your problem,” the Security Officer went on blandly, “will be to find a meanth of thelf-thupport until you and all other ecthra-planetarieth can be removed from Irwadi. We owe you ecthra-planetarieth nothing. Ethpect no charity from uth.”
Ramsey shrugged. Like all extra-planetaries on a bleak, friendless world like Irwadi, he’d regularly gambled away and drank away his monthly paycheck in the interstellar settlement which the Irwadians had established in the Old Quarter of Irwadi City. But last month he’d managed to come out even at the gaming tables, so he had a few hundred credits to his name. That would be enough, he told himself, to tide him over until Interstellar Transfer Service came to the rescue of its stranded pilots.
Ramsey went up the gangway and got his gear from the Polaris. When he returned down the gangway, the late afternoon wind was blowing across the spacefield tarmac, a wet, bone-chilling wind which only the reptile-humanoid Irwadians didn’t seem to mind.
Ramsey fastened the toggles of his cold-weather cape, put his head down and hunched his shoulders, and walked into the teeth of the wind. He did not look back at the Polaris, marooned indefinitely on Irwadi despite anything the Centaurian owners or anyone else for that matter could do about it.
THE Irwadi Security Officer, whose name was Chind Ramar, walked up the gangway and ordered the ship’s Centaurian first officer to assemble his crew and passengers. Chind Ramar allowed himself the rare luxury of a fleeting smile. He could imagine this scene being duplicated on fifty ships here on his native planet today, fifty outworld ships which had no business at all on Irwadi. Of course, Irwadi was an important planet-of-call in the Galactic Federation because the vital metal titanium was found as abundantly in Irwadian soil as aluminum is found in the soil of an Earth-style planet. Titanium, in alloy with steel and manganese, was the only element which could withstand the tremendous heat generated in the drive-chambers of interstellar ships during transfer. In the future, Chind Ramar told himself with a kind of cold pride, only Irwadian pilots, piloting Irwadian ships through hyper-space, would bring titanium to the waiting galaxy. At Irwadi prices.
With great relish, Chind Ramar announced the facts of planetarization and told the Centaurians and their passengers that they would be stranded for an indefinite period on Irwadi. Amazement, anger, bluster, debate, and finally resignation—the reactions were the expected ones, in the expected order. It was easy, Chind Ramar thought, with all but the interstellar soldiers of fortune like Jason Ramsey. Ramsey, of course, would need watching. As for these others . . .
One of the others, an Earthgirl whose beauty was entirely missed by Chind Ramar, left the Polaris in a hurry. She either had no luggage or left her luggage aboard. Jason Ramsey, she thought. She had read Chind Ramar’s mind; a feat growing less rare although by no means common yet among the offspring of those who had spent a great deal of time bombarded by cosmic radiation between the stars. She hurried through the chilling wind toward the Old Quarter of Irwadi City. Panic, she thought. You’ve got to avoid panic. If you panic, you’re finished . . .
“SO that’s about the size of it,” Ramsey finished.
Stu Englander nodded. Like Ramsey he was a hyper-space pilot, but although he had an Earth-style name and had been born of Earth parents, he was not an Earthman. He had been born on Capella VII, and had spent most of his life on that tropical planet. The result was not an uncommon one for outworlders who spent any amount of time on Irwadi: Stu Englander had a nagging bronchial condition which had kept him off the pilot-bridge for some months now.
Englander nodded again, dourly. He was a short, very slender man a few years older than Ramsey, who was thirty-one. He said: “That ties it. And I mean ties it, brother. You’re looking at the brokest Capellan-earthman who ever got himself stuck on an outworld.”
“You mean it?”
“Dead broke, Jase.”
“What about Sally and the kids?”
Englander had an Arcturan-earthian wife and twin boys four years old. “I don’t know what about Sally and the kids,” he told Ramsey glumly. “I guess I’ll go over to the New Quarter and try to get some kind of a job.”
“They wouldn’t hire an outworlder to shine their shoes with his own spit, Stu. They have got the planetarization bug, and they’ve got it bad.”
Sally Englander called from the kitchen of the small flat: “Will Jase be staying for supper?”
Englander stared at Ramsey, who shook his head. “Not today, Sally,” Englander said, looking at Ramsey gratefully.
“Listen,” Ramsey lied, “I’ve been lucky as all get out the last couple of months.”
“You old pro!” grinned Englander.
“So I’ve got a few hundred credits just burning a hole in my pocket,” Ramsey went on. “How’s about taking them?”
“But I haven’t the slightest idea when I could pay back.”
“I didn’t say anything about paying me back.”
“I couldn’t accept charity, Jase.”
“O.K. Pay me back when you get a chance. There are plenty of hyper-space jobs waiting for us all over the galaxy, you know that.”
“Yeah, all we have to do is get off Irwadi and go after them. But the Irwadians are keeping us right here.”
“Sure, but it won’t last. Not when the folks back in Capella and Deneb and Sol System hear about it.”
“Six months,” said Englander bleakly. “It�
�ll take at least that long.”
“Six months I can wait. What d’you say?”
Englander coughed wrackingly, his eyes watering. He got off the bed and shook Ramsey’s hand solemnly. Ramsey gave him three hundred and seventy-five credits and said: “Just see you make that go a long way supporting Sally and the kids. I don’t want to see you dropping any of it at the gaming tables. I’ll knock your block off if I see you there.”
“I’ll knock my own block off if I see me there. Jase, I don’t know how to thank—”
“Don’t is right. Forget it.”
“Do you have enough—”
“Me? Plenty. Don’t worry about old Jase.” Ramsey went to the door. “Well, see you.”
Englander walked quickly to him and shook his hand again. On the way out, Ramsey played for a moment or two with the twins, who were rolling a couple of toy spaceships marked hyper-one and hyper-two across the floor and making anachronistic machine-gun noises with their lips. Sally Englander, a plump, young-home-maker type, beamed at Ramsey from the kitchen. Then he went out into the gathering dusk.
AS usual on Irwadi, and particularly with the coming of night, it was bitterly cold. Sucker, Ramsey told himself. But he grinned. He felt good about what he’d done. With Stu sick, and with Sally and the kids, he’d done the only thing he could do. He still had almost twenty-five credits left. Maybe he really would have a lucky night at the tables. Maybe . . . heck, he’d been down-and-out before. A fugitive from Earth didn’t have much choice sometimes . . .
“Red sixteen,” the croupier said indifferently. He was a short, heavy-set Sirian with a shock of scarlet hair, albino skin, and red eyes.
Ramsey watched his money being raked across the table. It wasn’t his night, he told himself with a grim smile. He had only three credits left. If he risked them now, there wouldn’t even be the temporary physical relief and release of a bottle of Irwadian brandy before hitting the sack.
Collected Fiction (1940-1963) Page 320