Troubled Star

by George O. Smith

  Dusty Britton came to a full zero-zero-zero landing a million miles above Marandis. He came to a grinding halt high above the planet, looked around dazedly, and asked Gant: "What makes?"

  "Keep your drive at one gravity thrust," said Gant. "Stand by for Pilot!"

  The last order was delivered in a ringing voice as though it were a standard procedure.

  To Dusty, familiar with the tactics used by seagoing liners upon entering port, standing by for a pilot was quite a sensible practise. If the Captain of The North America permitted a pilot to bend the big liner along Ambrose Channel, through The Narrows and into New York Harbor, Dusty Britton saw no objection to having a pilot come aboard to bend the big spacecraft down past whatever dangers might be presented by moons, meteors and cosmic junk.

  And Gant Nerley, not knowing how Dusty felt about spacecraft piloting, hoped that this procedure sounded like Standard Operating Practise.

  Dusty replied in ringing tone, "Standing By for Pilot!"

  Gant took a deep breath.

  Minutes later a small scooter hauled alongside and a Marandanian pilot came aboard and took over. He smiled at Dusty and said, "I'm Nort Wilgas, Pilot."

  "Glad to have you aboard," smiled Dusty. It all sounded very familiar; The Space Patrol had borrowed liberally from the clichés of naval procedure and courtesy and he had been through these lines at least once in every picture. "I'm Dusty Britton." Then he remembered the role he was trying to play and added, "Of The Terran Space Patrol."

  "Have a good passage?" asked Nort Wilgas.

  "Yes. A bit tiring. After all, I've never driven a galactic spacecraft before. Frankly, I'm about flat on my face."

  The Marandanian pilot looked into Dusty's face with a perplexed frown. "You know," he said, "It's just occurred to me—you drove this thing all the way on duty!"

  "Yes."

  "Twenty-three hours!"

  Dusty suddenly felt tired. He had been too busy with the board to think of it before. He had been running on nervous energy, but now it had about run out. Dusty had been this way before; so long as there was something that had to be done he had done it, but once the need was over, he invariably came unglued and slept the clock around.

  "Yes," he said. "I had to."

  "Man! What stamina!"

  Dusty yawned and came unglued on the divan opposite the one that Scyth Radnor occupied. Nort Wilgas nodded at him and then turned to Barbara. "You can relax too. I'll take over."

  Dusty Britton was fast asleep when the spacecraft made its landing on Marandis.

  Chapter XI

  Dusty awoke to find the sunshine streaming in through a small porthole and lighting the cabin cheerfully. The smell of fresh air was in his lungs, a pungent, pleasant smell faintly of cinnamon or nutmeg but not quite either. He recalled that he had folded out on the divan in the salon, now he was in one of the cabins below the salon level. He wondered how he had arrived.

  He stretched his muscles, the cool sheets felt pleasant against his back. Then he wondered who had undressed him and how anybody had been gentle enough to do the job without waking him. He looked around the cabin expectantly and as he looked, his door opened and a woman came in.

  She was wearing white from cap to slippers and Dusty pegged her for a nurse at once. She was wholesome enough, but neither her face nor her figure would have stopped any traffic on Fifth Avenue. She carried a book with a finger slipped between pages to mark her place and in her other hand she held the Marandanian equivalent of a cigarette. A pleasant curl of smoke rose from the lighted end.

  "Hello," she offered brightly. "And how do we feel this morning?"

  "We feel fine," grunted Dusty. "And we'll feel better after a shower, a shave, and some of that smoke you're using. I'd also enjoy a change of clothing."

  "We took the liberty of having your uniform cleaned. The shower and shaving gear is in the bath—there—and as for the cigarette, I can offer you one right now."

  "Give," said Dusty with a grin. She handed him a case and snapped a lighter for him. He puffed and found that the stuff, while far from tobacco, was tasty enough. He took a deep puff and let the smoke filter out through his nose.

  The nurse said, "I hope you don't resent sleeping in the—ah—"

  "The raw? I do it all the time." Dusty took another puff and swung his feet overboard onto the deck. It was not deliberate, Dusty was just inhibited and the question of wandering across a cabin dressed in nothing did not even occur to him. The nurse said, "I'll be waiting for you in the salon." She left, not precipitately, but with a certain air that removed all embarrassment.

  Dusty showered and shaved and dressed in his cleaned uniform. When he got to the salon, Barbara was there already, also freshened and cleaned.

  "So this," she said, "is Marandis."

  The nurse nodded cheerfully. "This is Marandis. You'll have to tell me how your Terra is; I've never been anywhere near that far from home, you know."

  "Sure," nodded Dusty. "But now that we're on Marandis, what do we do next?"

  "Oh. I'm to escort you to a formal meeting of the Bureau where you'll meet Gant Nerley face to face."

  "How's Scyth Radnor?"

  "Why, he's doing very well. He's hospitalized and he'll be out and howling for the skin of the man that shot him in about a week."

  "He'd better take a month off for practise, first," grinned Dusty.

  "Or," chuckled the nurse, "leave other men's women alone."

  "Yes," agreed Barbara.

  – – –

  The nurse nodded. "You're very attractive," she said with no trace of jealousy or envy. "I can see Scyth getting side-tracked along your direction. I am a little disappointed in Scyth—seems to me he could do better than a frauland for you."

  "Better than a what?" "Frauland. That bauble he gave you. You wouldn't know, of course, but it comes from Selira, a stellar colony not far from here. It's incredibly cheap."

  Barbara tore the chain getting the bauble away from her. "Next time," she promised sharply, "I'll plug Scyth Radnor myself!"

  The nurse shuddered a bit. Dusty merely laughed and said, "So now we know where we stand. And now knowing, I'm hungry."

  "Of course. We'll all dine at the meeting."

  "Oh?"

  "Naturally. You're here, aren't you? Marandis is not going to send you back without a chance for you to present your case. There is a joint meeting of the Bureaus of Galactic Navigation and New Colonial Affairs. It will start with a formal breakfast during which no business will be conducted. Then, once you are all acquainted with one another, the business of the day will be discussed and a decision rendered."

  She led them to the spacelock and Dusty Britton had his first glimpse of a Marandanian spaceport. There was precious little to see, which made it even more stunning to the senses.

  The size of the place was completely obscured by spacecraft which stood like the trunks in a pine forest. Most of the craft were larger than Dusty's and so obscured his vision. Between those nearby (which were rather wide-set) there were others at a little distance, and beyond them there were still others, and behind those others were more and more and more until all that could be seen were the tips of the upthrust noses. The horizon was an irregular pattern of pointed shapes that was somewhat reminiscent of the Greek egg and dart moulding of ancient architecture.

  Through some of the more distant lines of sight, the far spacecraft had a haze around it, as though it were miles and miles away.

  There was not a building to be seen, only spacecraft.

  Dusty gave up trying to penetrate the forest to the edge of the 'port and directed his attention to his nearby surroundings.

  A road wound around in a zig-zag manner, meeting and dividing around each ship. There was an empty landing block not far from them, and after a bit of puzzled interest—the shape of the block caught Dusty's memory—he decided that the landing block was hexagonal. So were all the rest of the landing blocks. Hexagonal pattern, like the well-known hexagon t
ile floor; the road was the marker-lines between the hex-shaped landing blocks. Those that were empty showed the effect of heavy masses parked on them; a bit of char now and then a chip or a crack, probably made by a rough landing; a deep seam repaired with some sort of cement or concrete (or whatever the Marandanians had devised or discovered as a superior material) and at least one place where the edge of the block had been chipped deeply as though the pilot had missed his landing point and come down on the edge of the hexagonal block.

  – – –

  As they looked, a muted whir attracted their attention and they turned to see a ship lowering itself out of the sky to come down in a slowing vertical drop that ended at the edge of a curtain of nearby spacecraft. The landing ship inserted itself in the pattern behind ships until only its nose was visible. Then to one side—and apparently with no warning, a ship nosed upward, gaining speed rapidly until it disappeared in the bright blue sky above.

  The nurse said, "We land a ship every thirty seconds. There's a take-off every thirty seconds, too."

  "That is a lot of activity," said Dusty, swallowing the daily figure with some amazement—7,200 ships landing—a like number taking off—every hour, night and day. The traffic added up to a rather monumental figure. No wonder they required a huge spaceport.

  "Marandis is the center of Galactic culture," said the nurse proudly. "And this is only the spaceport that handles affairs of the Space Administration Department. Each of the many Departments of Galactic Government has its own spaceport. The one at the Department of Space Commerce is the largest because that is the one that takes care of incoming transports carrying the necessities of living."

  "Don't you do anything for yourself?"

  "We have no room. Marandis is an urban planet. The only parts that are not built-up are preserves, parks and recreation-forestry. There is nothing on the entire planet that does not serve directly toward Galactic Administration, in one manner or another."

  Dusty nodded. He could grasp this even though the magnitude was great. By simple proportion, if it took one complete city to administer the government for a country, it should take one planet to administer the government of a galaxy. He wondered even then how they managed to get it all in.

  He smiled and made a wave at the landing ramp. He had seen everything he could see from the little platform outside of the spacelock.

  At the bottom, in the zigzag road, was a lone, low-slung vehicle with a man in a simple uniform leaning indolently against-the wheel. He was smoking a cigarette which he tossed onto the landing block as they came down. He fired up the thing under the nose of the car after they were inside, and as soon as the door slammed, he let the clutch out with a rap and the car jack-rabbited into motion. They took off from a standing start like a frightened deer at about five degrees lift so that by the time Dusty and Barbara had pulled their heads forward from the jerked-back angle, the car was about thirty feet in the air and arrowing forward above the road. The speed climbed rapidly until Dusty estimated something near to a hundred miles per hour.

  The driver was, of course, cutting the tips of the corners between the hexagonal blocks in a die-true line of flight and naturally paying no attention to the zigzag road below them. Since the spacecraft were all standing in the center of their particular blocks, like a bunch of chessmen parked on a tile floor, there was plenty of space between the ships themselves for such passage. Even at their thirty-foot altitude, which raised them to a point on most ships where the bowed-out flanks were quite wide, there was room to spare.

  And now that they were in one of the aisles, distant buildings could be seen dead ahead. It must have been ten miles from their landing block to the edge of the spaceport.

  The driver barreled along this aisle with the self-assurance of any taxi-driver, hooting his horn now and then as they came to what seemed to be a major intersection of the zigzag road below. Dusty wondered worriedly what happened when two of these characters met in a draw, because the man seemed to pay no attention to any other noise but his own, which he made with great confidence, in the other guy.

  Dusty was beginning to wonder about the need for any road below when his question was answered by a caravan of heavy trucks making their way along the road. They zipped over the caravan and were gone by the time Dusty realized that air-travel was not for heavy cargo.

  – – –

  The buildings at the end of the aisle between the spacecraft loomed larger. The driver whipped along at his thirty-foot altitude, making no attempt to climb over the buildings which were growing taller and more massive at a frightening rate. Dusty's palms went wet; the buildings had seemed minute when they turned into the aisle, but now they were tall and massive and millions and millions of windows could be seen, with magnificent arches between the buildings spanning the gaps.

  The air-cab whipped across an empty perimeter about the hexagonal-pattern of landing blocks, sped above a low building, and howled into the tiny space between two buildings with an arch above and a roof below, and then went into a flat climb. The car rose slowly in the canyon between the buildings that lined the street below. There were people working in those buildings, men and women that sat at their desks behind windows and paid no attention to the passage of a hundred-mile-per-hour skycab within forty feet of them.

  Then the car was above the roof-level but it kept to the street-lanes. Below them were the streets, and in the valley was slow-moving traffic, ground cars and air-cars that ran at different levels to avoid intersection-collisions. Up in the higher strata were the fast-moving aircabs, each moving in its lane, and each lane for a different direction. Even with separate lanes the traffic was a turmoil; constant jockeying to gain position, to avoid trouble, to move a level higher or a level lower so that a corner could be turned without entering the intersection at the wrong level.

  To make a right turn the driver jockeyed himself to the top of the altitude allowed that line of traffic, and in the block before his turn he rose above his lane, made his turn, and then entered the right-bound traffic pattern from below, mingling with the speeding aircabs. To make a left turn, the driver dropped to the floor of his lane, fell below, made his turn, and mingled with the left-bound turmoil from above their upper limit of altitude.

  They raced along in the middle-altitude at high speed; cars above them, below them, to the left and right, before and behind.

  "My God!" breathed Dusty, "New York at rush hour—in three dimensions."

  Their driver turned and winked at them. He flicked a lighter with one hand and lit the smoke that was hanging from one corner of his mouth. "Yeah man," he drawled. "Some of them guys should ought to take lessons?'

  Then he turned back to his job with a shrug, lost a hundred feet of altitude in three hundred feet of run, and whizzed around a corner and fitted his aircab into a space between traffic that was just large enough to let him in without scratching paint. The other cars moved up, aside, down or sped or slowed to give him elbow room. He fought them for position, dropping on a descending run through this cross traffic until he whip out of traffic on a spiral over the roof-top of one of the buildings.

  – – –

  Here the driver phlegmatically put the aircab into a tight corkscrew that dropped them onto the roof. Dusty got out slowly, testing the stiffness of his knees after the ride. He helped Barbara out next and the nurse came out on the other side at the same time.

  Then they were almost roofed as the aircab took off on a flat, screaming 'U' turn that lofted him no more than ten feet, whipped across the street between levels and swooped him down on the opposite side, where he hit the other roof without a bounce and came to a fast braking stop beside a man who had flagged him.

  The man got in and the aircab whiffled off the roof in a crazy climbing turn and burrowed into the fast traffic lane above. It forced its way into the mass of traffic and was lost in a matter of seconds.

  "Holy Rockets!"

  Barbara wiped her damp forehead with the back of a shakin
g hand. "Oh—for a film of this!"

  Dusty grinned weakly. "Shucks, Barb. What's a fender for if you don't fend with it?"

  Quietly their nurse turned from the spectacle and led them to a roof kiosk and down some steps into an elevator ...

  The operator cut the ropes and let them drop slightly slower than the free-fall constant of the planet Marandis, leaving their stomachs somewhere up on the hundred and ninety-first floor. He braked the elevator somewhere down below-below-below, and their innards caught up with them in such a sudden rush it buckled their knees.

  Along a magnificent corridor and through massive carved doors opened for them by men in uniform, and then they were ushered into a vast ornamented room with a vaulted ceiling, tapestried walls, and a polished floor. Deep armchairs were waiting around a huge table that glistened with polished metal and blinding white cloth, the severity broken by color of dish and fruit and fluid. Soft stringed music filled the air that was also lightly scented.

  As they entered, the music bridged from the stringed fugue to a magnificent orchestration and the scent changed subtly from languid sweetness to a pungent aroma that compelled the senses to pleasant attention. The soft-key lighting swirled across the vaulted ceiling and changed into a colored brilliance that made the blood leap high.

  The music slid into a soft passage and a vibrant voice announced:

  "Dusty Britton, Commander in Chief of The Junior Division of The Terran Space Patrol. Barbara Crandall, Thespian and Vocal Musician of Terra. In attendance, Lela Brandis, Mistress of Extra-Marandanian Medicine."

  The music crashed, the scent came heavy and sharp, and the lights flashed like the licking of summer lightning and came to rest outlining them brilliantly.