Troubled Star

by George O. Smith

  Jann Wilkor shook his head. "I wish I'd made this run before. I could make it faster."

  Gant pointed at the screen and nudged Dusty. The color-scale was still high in the blue-violet and there were a couple of places on the viewpanel that were a dead black, tiny spots that did not move as Jan Wilkor's delicate touch corrected the course. Spots burned out of the substance of the panel like over-exposed film burned through.

  "It takes a master pilot to make a run this fast. Even so, we're taking a rather high risk. But if the channel was free and open from Marandis to Spiral Cluster, with only a big phanobeacon at either end, we could make it with the screen burning black-violet. We may even have to develop a new supraradiant material for ultra-high velocities."

  "How fast can you go?"

  Jann Wilkor soared around a beacon and centered on the next before the flicking wave of heat was gone. He did it easily and with the negligent reflex of the master pilot. "Fitt Mazorn took one of the high speed jobs into intergalactic space for a speed run a year ago and claims to have made it from Laranonne to Ultimane in slightly less than an hour. Or," corrected the pilot, "an equivalent distance, out in deep-deep space. Some of this is probably guff; I doubt that he could do it. That's a hundred thousand light years per hour and just a bit fantastic. Trouble is that the phanobands propagate at a finite speed, according to Hahn Tratter, and therefore the true velocity is difficult to check, since no one has been able to measure phanoband velocity."

  "At any rate, it's fast," said Dusty, who did not understand half of what the pilot said.

  Gant nodded. "It's fast. It's what we'll be doing in your clear channels, Dusty. That will make you rich and famous, that idea of yours."

  "Iffing and providing we can get there in time.

  "No matter. If Terra is lost to you, you'll still—"

  "Look," said Dusty, "if that bunch wins out, I'll—"

  "And I won't blame you," replied Gant.

  There came a double report. The man on the barytrine detector said, "Barytrine field just went into the second phase," at the same time that the pilot said, "Last lap!" and turned his point of aim around the beacon to center the hairs on a small star that did not wink.

  "Our next problem is to scour Terra inch by inch to find their barytrine generator," said Gant worriedly.

  Dusty groaned. He thought of the trackless wastes of the planet; the Upper Amazon jungles, the tundra of Alaska and Siberia, the hidden reaches of Africa, high Tibet, and for that matter the cornfields of Iowa and the wheat fields of Saskatchewan. The fathomless, staggering area of the sea bottoms was too vast a hopeless search-problem to contemplate.

  – – –

  Gant looked at Dusty. "It's bad, Dusty. I'll not fool you, but it's bad. We have perhaps a day or two, perhaps three. We're late. By the time we arrive the phase-two growth will be heavy enough to cause leakage-reaction in our detector and render the detector completely ambiguous."

  "Meaning what?"

  "What I said. That we must scour Terra inch by inch. And here is where you must help."

  "Me?"

  "Yes. You must issue orders to your Space Patrol to comb the landscape. You must find that barytrine generator.

  Dusty looked at Gant Nerley blankly. "You realize what you're asking? That within a matter of hours we must set up a land-scouring search and completely cover the entire earth? I haven't even got the foggiest notion of how many million square miles of earth there are, let alone the ocean-bottom which we couldn't even touch, lacking the equipment."

  "They wouldn't plant it on a sea bottom.'

  "No? Look, Gant, remember that they're planning on keeping this thing running for a thousand years. They'll have to hide it good."

  Gant shook his head with a wan smile. "Not at all. You forget that so far as anybody within the barytrine field is likely to see it, the total time will be from right now until the field goes on in a few hours. Then the enclosure-time will elapse instantaneously for those within. Anybody who finds it once the job goes on will find it after you have been freed of the field. - The chances are high that they've dropped it in some comfortable climate, possibly near a large city, just as Scyth Radnor did."

  Dusty eyed Gant sourly. "For the same purpose?" he asked.

  "Probably. After all, Dusty—" Gant let the statement hang, suggesting silently that Dusty was the kind of human who would think of the same thing and act on it. "So you must issue orders to your Patrol—"

  Dusty grunted. His Patrol? Discredited, his position shot to bits, his public appeal running somewhere near absolute zero, who would even listen to him? His former admirers had shucked their Space Patrol clothing for the costume of Jack Vandal, Space Rover.

  Then he sat up with a puzzled smile.

  "You have an idea?"

  "I hope so."

  "And—?"

  Dusty smiled wistfully. "From the time Scyth Radnor opened his space-lock and blasted off the end of my antenna, I've been running a losing battle," he said. "I've been playing a game far over my head; outpointed, overbid, overdrawn and sinking, About the only reason I'm still here fighting is that some of the rules of this cockeyed game seem to fall into my own act. Yes, dammit, I've got an idea. Can I call the orders, Gant?"

  "Take over, Dusty."

  Dusty turned to the pilot. "When we get there," he said, "Circle the planet several times as fast and as low as you can. Create a stir. Radiate like mad, anything you can radiate. Call attention to us in a bold fashion and show 'em that what we've got is big, important and powerful." Then to Gant Nerley he put the question, "You wouldn't have anything as primitive as a radio set aboard, would you?"

  "You mean a radiomagnetic communication device? Well, not for communications but we do have a small receiver for detecting the lower-radiation stars and one for scanning planetary systems for primitive cultures. What did you have in mind?"

  Dusty looked Gant in the eye. "I want to broadcast orders to my Patrol."

  "Oh. An excellent idea. We'll save time that way. The scanner-type radiomagnetic wave equipment is two-way and connected to a menslator for contacting primitive peoples, you know, and—"

  "Get it fired up," said Dusty shortly. "Full power."

  – – –

  The screech of air came first as a thin whistle, and then thundered and slammed down at Earth below as the thirteen Marandanian spacecraft were inched lower and lower into the complaining atmosphere. The howling racket dinned into the ears of Russian and Chinese and Hawaiian and Californian and New Yorker and Briton and Frenchman and Indian and Maylayan and Indonesian and Argentinian and South African and Australian and Mexican and Floridian. Around it went, across the land and the sea, a thunder blast of rent air that piled shock wave on shock wave and sent them tearing down at the ground below. The thunder cracked windows and made plaster sift down from ceilings. It dinned down a tree or two, and it hurled some people to the ground. It flipped a parked fleet of jetplanes over in crumpled ruin like a windstorm hitting a deck of cards.

  Across the world, radar operators looked blankly at the signal pips that raced across their screens and began to make apologetic reports. Interceptors tried to rise, but were tossed madly in the racing shock-stream to lose ground and return to earth limping.

  But in the lead spacecraft of this mad fleet, the barytrine operator watched his detector hopefully- The entire screen was aglow, but he watched it and finally said, "I think it's down there somewhere."

  He pointed to a region in Indiana not far from the lower tip of Lake Michigan.

  The fleet circled Terra once more, swung high for the long dive, and then came howling down on a long slant, while Dusty took the radio and cried: "Junior Spacemen of The Space Patrol, Attention!"

  The radio, powered by machinus forces, hammered down and blanketed the radio broadcast stations. It broke up the video screens in a mash of spots, flecks and snow-flakes. Dusty's voice roared into telephone lines and onto the commercial radio links and chattered indistinctly in dir
ection-finding equipment and made incomprehensible squiggles clutter the radar screens.

  "Junior Spacemen, Attention to Official Orders! By now you are aware that your Commander, Dusty Britton, flies with a fleet of spacecraft above you. Now hear this!

  "Within a few hundred miles of the lower tip of Lake Michigan there is concealed somewhere a dangerous device known as a barytrine generator. This must be located and stopped.

  "Now! To the Junior Spaceman who locates this machine I will personally award the Medal of Merit. And to the entire Group Command of which he is a member I will award full scholarships as Space Midshipmen in a real Space Academy, to make them real spacemen.

  "Now, Junior Spacemen, go out and find me that barytrine generator!"

  Dusty signed off as the down-rushing fleet swaybacked close to the ground and pulled out to swap ends and go screaming up in a stark vertical climb, its drivers fighting the rise to a standstill fifty miles in the sky.

  Here they hovered for a second to turn rightside up and then the flight formed into a pattern and began to land, coming down slowly.

  Before they were halfway down, Dusty saw results. In the telescope were moving dots scouring the landscape. And along highways that led from town and city were boys on bicycles and a few in cars driven by parents. Across the fields they went, peering under trees and behind bushes, scouring the cornfields and the farms and stamping through woodsy sections like swarming ants.

  But then as the flight landed in a neat pattern in a bald field, the barytrine detector hissed once and gave up, smoke curling out of the cabinet.

  "Close," said the operator.

  But Dusty, with a yell, was at the airlock. For across the field a thousand yards away was a faint bluish haze that shimmered iridescent in the sunlight. He pawed at the door as it swung open ponderously, then he looked around wildly for something to use. His eyes fell upon a small cabinet.

  Scyth had placed that fluted-barrelled thing back in the airlock after he burned Dusty's antenna off. Dusty tore a cabinet open and grabbed one of the fluted-barrelled things from a clip.

  Then he jumped to the ground and raced across the field.

  "Dusty!" roared Gant Nerley. "That's dangerous. You can't—"

  Gant let his voice trail away as Dusty plunged into the blue haze, fingering the trigger-button at the top of the pistol grip. The searing beam lashed out and slashed at the air as Dusty's heels caught the ground in a braking slide. Then the knifing beam slashed down across the metal case and into the ground before it. Curls of smoke arose and the ground sizzled. He cross-slashed and cut another ribbon out of the air and the barytrine generator, then cut down again.

  There was a hiss and a sputter and the blue haze ceased—there was a blinding flash and a flat bark of something exploding violently. Dusty felt a wave of almost-intolerable heat, his closed eyes were seared by a flare of brightness, and the explosion hurled him backwards on his spine. He turned and scrambled back, stumbling over the rough ground, blinded.

  At that moment four members of the Junior Space Patrol came through a small thicket of trees.

  "Gee," said their Group Leader. "Gee—the Commander found it first!"

  – – –

  They stood on a small reviewing stand, Dusty Britton and the Group Command that had come through the thicket of trees in time to steer their blinded Commander away from the flaring barytrine generator. Dusty's face and hands were a super-sunburned red, and his eyes were still puffy but open enough to see.

  From a sheet of paper he read:

  "It is not within my power to grant a medal that is worth the tin it is made of. But for the diligence and their quick action I do hereby grant and guarantee them full scholarships in White Sands University, which by the time they graduate will have become a full Space Academy. So I here hand them their Certificates of Entry, and to the President of White Sands University I deliver a certified check to be held in trust and used for their education.

  "I salute the future Commanders of The Space Patrol and step down from my position to leave it open for them!"

  There came a roar from the crowd that thundered across the field as Dusty stepped from the platform into a spaceport jeep and were hustled out to Gant Nerley's flagship. Inside there were a number of men waiting.

  "Now see here, Dusty, you can't go galaxy-hopping when we've got plans for you."

  Dusty eyed Martin Gramer with a grunt. "Last time we met in a place like this you had me all scheduled to take a space hop when I had other plans for myself. No dice, Gramer."

  "But look at the money—"

  "I'll make millions out of this clear-channel idea, according to Gant, here."

  "That's right," said Gant.

  "So," said Dusty, "if you think I'm going to go on playing the part of a broken-down hero-spaceman when there are real spacemen around, you're nuts, Gramer. Include me—as you've said so often—out."

  "But what are you going to do?"

  "Me? I'm going to Marandis. Barb and I have an offer from Supergalaxy Spectacles to make a series of what they call 'Primitives.' You know, old-timers with men using chemical rockets and learning their first feeble steps into space."

  He grinned at Barbara knowingly. "I've got a script of Destination Moon I swiped from Central Files. It should oughta wow 'em cold!"

  The End