Raiders From the Rings

by Alan E Nourse

  “Well,” the Earthman said, dumping his load on the floor. “So the Sleeping Beauty finally woke up. It took that kiss a long time to work.”

  “Never mind the humor,” Joyce said. “Just get him sitting down before he passes out again. Then maybe he can show you how those silly circuits are supposed to work.”

  Leaning on Tom’s arm, Ben staggered across the cabin and into the seat behind the control panel. The ship was operational, beyond question, even though he knew the blast had come directly through the engine rooms. Tom checked something on a sheaf of papers, and adjusted the controls with the air of a bride making her first cake. The ship jerked roughly as it shifted course.

  “You’ve got it running!” Ben said in amazement.

  “Oh, it’s running, all right,” Tom said. “But that’s about all. I couldn’t make head nor tail of those null-gravity circuits, and we spent about three hours turning end-over-end until I got us stabilized with the side jets, but we’re on a steady course now even if we can’t develop any power.”

  “What kind of a course?”

  “I’m not sure,” Tom said dubiously. “Roughly away from the sun, and more or less in the direction of your Asteroid Central. At least I think that’s where we’re headed.” He waved a hand wearily at the ship’s computer. “Your gadget there and I have been going round and round. But once I figured out how to tape information into the miserable thing, I began to get somewhere plotting a course. Trouble is, we keep veering off it all the time. Either I can’t add or the computer can’t.”

  Ben peered at Tom’s pages of calculations, and began to check the ship’s dials. Tom’s technique was awkward, but his answers were amazingly accurate. Ben looked up at him. “How long did we wander under power before you got your figures straight?”

  “Quite some time, maybe seventeen or eighteen hours,” Tom said. “I was pretty slow.”

  “Well, that might account for the drift. The computer assumes the ship is in the plane of the ecliptic unless you tape in correction data. We must have drifted about eighty degrees off the ecliptic while you were calculating. But that shouldn’t cause a lot of deviation from course.”

  “Then something else is causing it,” Tom said. “I have to correct every ten minutes. It seems as if something is pushing us off course steadily in the same direction.”

  “Well, whatever it is, we’ll fix it. You’ve done all right for a city slicker.” It was an understatement, and Ben knew it. What Tom had done was little short of miraculous for one without training or experience. “But what happened to the Earth ship?”

  Tom Barron’s mouth set in a hard line. “We had a couple of shells left. I used them. If I hadn’t been so mad I would have used wasps instead, but I just emptied the tubes at them. So don’t worry, they won’t shoot down anybody else that tries to help them.”

  “But your own people!”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t claim them. They knew you were trying to help them. If you’d planned to hurt them you’d never have started to land. They deliberately waited until you couldn’t veer off, and then let you have it.” The Earthman shook his head. “Okay, they made their choice, and I made mine. As it was, they almost succeeded. The shrapnel tore through a corner of the engine room and split open this rear bulkhead. You got hit in the neck and shoulder, and you took a piece in the chest as well. I’m no doctor, but I got two big pieces out of your shoulder, and sealed off the hole in your chest, and spent a few hours picking cinders out of your scalp. Then Joyce took over the nursing care — she was in training back home before this started. And if you try to tell me we did wrong, I’ll gladly blow some shrapnel back into you myself.”

  “Okay, okay,” Ben said. “Relax. You’d better show me the damage to the ship.”

  Inch by inch he went over the ship with Tom. “I’ve been working on it as fast as I could,” Tom said. “I got the holes in the hull patched up, or welded, or both. The jet engines were damaged, but the main jets worked pretty well once I got a crack in the combustion chamber welded shut. The only trouble is that the engine temp starts going up every time I try to throw on any power.”

  Ben shuddered. Jet combustion chambers were built to critical tolerances; sometimes in testing them the tiniest flaw could blow an engine to fragments. “I’m glad I was unconscious during all this,” he said. “You must have a guardian angel.”

  They went on with the inspection. The more Ben saw, the more difficult it was to believe. It was a miracle that they were alive in the first place, and as much of a miracle that there was anything left at all of the ship’s engine room. But most miraculous of all, it seemed to Ben, was the thing that Tom Barron had left unspoken. With Ben wounded and unconscious on the cabin floor, there was nothing to prevent Tom Barron and his sister from moving the ship out of range of the wounded Earth ship’s missiles and then establishing radio contact with them, identifying themselves as Earthmen and demanding to be taken aboard. Ben struggled with the thought, still searching for hidden motives, but he could find none.

  There was only one possible answer. The Barrons had made their decision. Even if they did not say so in so many words, they had unmistakably thrown in their lot with Ben and the Spacers.

  And that meant that now they too were outlaws, and for the same reason that the earliest Spacers had become outlaws: because they had been unwilling to take part in an idiotic war, a war that they saw to be pointless and foolish. Somehow the Barrons had realized that the source of their fears had been superstition and ignorance. And once they had realized that the Spacers lived the way they did just to survive, that there were no monster regiments and mutated horrors ready to invade their home planet, they had begun to recognize this war between Earthmen and Spacers for what it really was — a pointless and hysterical reaction to the shadowy fears that had been festering in the minds of Earthmen for centuries.

  Back in the control room, Ben and Tom held a council of war. “You’ve done splendidly,” Ben said, “but we’re literally sitting on a powder keg. Those engines won’t hold up without a thorough overhaul. We can fix them so we can limp along to drydock somewhere, but we don’t even dare limp very far without some work on them. We’ve just got to kill our power and improvise something before the engines go out altogether.”

  Tom hesitated. “Isn’t there some place we can take cover while we’re doing that? Some place we can’t be spotted so easily as just sitting out here in the middle of nothing without any power?”

  Something in his voice made Ben look up. “Are you worrying about Earth ships spotting us?”

  “Well, there’s that….”

  “But there’s something else, too, isn’t there?”

  Tom nodded. “I might have been mistaken, hut there was a time a few hours ago when I was sure we’d picked up our invisible friends again.”

  “You mean the phantom ship?”

  “At least, something I couldn’t pick up on the ‘scope. The radar picked it up for just a minute or two, and then lost it again. Of course, the explosion might have jarred some wires loose in the radar and given me a false signal for a while. But it was just about that time that the ship began this business of drifting off course.”

  Ben looked skeptical. “That’s hard to swallow,” he said. “There isn’t any known way for a ship at a distance to alter the course of another ship without having a remote control governor on the responding ship’s engines. And I know there isn’t any governor aboard this ship … I’d have seen it while we were inspecting just now.”

  “There couldn’t be some kind of unit you overlooked?” Tom asked.

  “I’ve been working with rocket engines since I was five,” Ben said. “I’d have noticed anything that didn’t belong there in a minute.” He laughed at Tom’s sober expression. “So you’re just chasing a red herring. The drive engines are merely out of alignment.”

  “Maybe,” Tom said, obviously still unconvinced. He stared angrily at the tracer map, still showing a steady deviation
of the ship from the charted course. With Ben watching he again adjusted back to the course. Within minutes the little ship had again veered off. “But I still wonder just where this ship would go if we quit adjusting back to our course.”

  “Probably nowhere,” Ben said. “Eventually, of course, we’d come within contact range of some asteroid or other, but there isn’t a chance in a million that we’d actually be heading for one right now.”

  Tom sat silent for a moment. Then he said, “Just on a long shot, why don’t you check and see?”

  “Sure, if you’re really worried.” Ben began taking co-ordinate readings from the control panel at one minute intervals for about ten minutes and taped them into the computer. The ship’s deviation from course wasn’t great, but it was consistent. Next Ben hauled out a tape marked “Co-ordinates of the Asteroids” for the current year. A few moments later he had taped the deviating course of the ship into the computer for comparison with the orbits of known asteroids in their present segment of space.

  The computer clicked busily for a few moments, and dropped a card down into the slot. Ben picked it up, and stared. Then he handed it over to Tom, frowning. “Okay, there you are. If we stop correcting and let the ship follow the course it’s taking, we’ll be in contact course with a major-sized asteroid in about three hours.”

  Tom whistled. “Then something is pushing us off course!”

  “Either that, or it’s a million-to-one coincidence,” Ben said gloomily. “Of course, there are lots of asteroids, and it could be just happenstance.”

  “But you doubt it,” Tom said.

  “In space you don’t believe in coincidences. In any event, we’ll soon know. We need a landfall to allow us to repair the engines. If somebody wants us to land in a certain place, maybe we’d better let ourselves be shoved around for a while. Because if there’s a ship out there that’s trying to make us go somewhere, the sooner we call its bluff the better.”

  • • •

  The calculation of travel time to the asteroid was surprisingly accurate. In just a few minutes less than three hours the S-80’s radar picked up the huge rock fragment in its scanning sweep, one of the ragged chunks of cosmic debris that were to be found scattered far and wide throughout the Asteroid Belt. Their target had no name, and according to the most recent almanacs in the ship’s tape library, it had never been landed upon nor explored. It had merely been observed from a distant scout ship at some time in the past, its orbit calculated and its position relative to Asteroid Central at that moment in time recorded. Thereafter, its position had been checked by the astronomers on Asteroid Central once every twenty years, and the minute orbital changes entered on the record of asteroid co-ordinates.

  As asteroids went, it was neither large nor small, utterly undistinguished as it made its silent, endless passage around the sun. But now Ben Trefon scanned its surface closely, automatically checking in his mind the physical qualities necessary for a useful landfall: the general size and shape of the rock, its stability on its axis, the nature of its surface. As the asteroid slowly rotated before them on the view screen, the entire surface was exposed to the sun’s light. It was forty miles in diameter, almost spherical except for one flattened side, and covered with small surface rubble.

  Finally Ben nodded. “It’ll do, as far as a landfall is concerned. As for a reception committee — if they’re there, they’re staying well hidden.” He scanned the surface through another complete rotation. Then he nosed the little S-80 downward. “It looks deserted. But keep your hands on the wasp controls just the same.”

  Tom manned the weapons controls as Ben pulled his blouse tighter around his chest and tried to adjust his sore shoulder to ease the steady aching. Suddenly he was aware of the black belt around his waist. It seemed tighter than before, and for a moment he thought he felt an almost imperceptible vibration from the capsule lodged within it. Then he shrugged in disgust. It was only his own muscle tension as he gripped the controls. “Hold on,” he said. “We’re going down.”

  Slowly the little ship drifted down toward the surface of the rock. All three of them were tense now, hardly breathing as Ben brought the ship in for a smooth and graceful landing at precisely the same orbital velocity as the asteroid. There was hardly a jar as they touched down; Ben sent out the grappling plates, watched them as they slithered along the surface to lodge tightly into crevices in the iron-bearing rock. Ben touched the ship’s power momentarily to strain at the cables, making certain that the ship was firmly secured to the surface with no possibility of settling or shift. Then he killed power and sat back, a fine line of perspiration on his forehead.

  Nothing happened. The view screen showed a ragged, barren surface, the horizon unexpectedly close. Beyond the rim of rock a million stars blazed, tiny pinpoints of light, and the sun inched slowly down in the black sky to be hidden behind the rock as it rotated on its axis.

  But there was no sign of life, no ship suddenly appearing in the sky….

  No reception committee.

  For a full hour they waited, hardly moving from their seats, as though expecting a time bomb to go off. And then, suddenly, the tension broke and the three of them were roaring with laughter, practically hugging each other in relief. “Talk about a bunch of frightened old ladies!” Tom Barron said. “Joyce, I’m starved. Get us something to eat while I break out the pressure suits. The sun ought to be around again in another half hour. And if something jumps out of the shadows at you, be sure to scream.”

  They ate hungrily. Ben’s appetite had been voracious ever since he had regained consciousness, and even the dull fare of shipboard rations seemed exceedingly tasty. But both he and Tom were eager to get to work. During transit they had made a list of the major repairs necessary in order of their importance; now they spent an hour or so hauling tools from the repair locker, sharpening drills, checking the tolerances of the machining tools and getting ready for the first job.

  The engines, of course, took precedence. Opened seams had to be power-clamped, braised and welded, and then reground. The null-grav units had cracked open just enough to leak gyroscope lubricant all over the engine room. It took several hours of greasy work to get each unit resealed, and then tested out under full power. Tom handled the cable controls to hold the units down as each of the six gyros was tested individually; another hour of work was required to get all six into perfect timing so that the null-gravity was imperceptible to the human occupants in the ship, and so that resonance between the units did not develop with its steel-shattering vibration.

  Tom and Ben worked, ate and slept in regular rotation, trying to plan work periods to take advantage of the asteroid’s brightside hours. Joyce undertook some wiring repair, but for the most part she just got meals and grew bored. After a few hours of clanging hammers, roaring drills and the brassy rattle of riveting guns going on all sides of her, she told the boys she was going to explore a bit between meals.

  At Ben’s insistence the first reconnaissance was made by the three of them together, so that he could check the integrity of their pressure suits and see that Joyce got the hang of travel with magnetic boots on a virtually gravity-less surface. For Tom and Joyce it was a strange experience indeed to feel their boots grab the ragged terrain, to talk by pressing their helmets together when they got tired of using radio communication, and to walk the surface of a planetoid with the horizon just a stone’s throw away. The asteroid was a place of darkness and shadow even in full sunlight; its solitude and silence were unnerving at first. Ben watched his Earthling friends out of the corner of his eye for any evidence of the panic reaction that the most hardened Spacers sometimes experienced on asteroid landings, but the Barrons seemed to adjust to the strange landfall without difficulty.

  After that Joyce was free to explore while Ben and Tom worked. But she found other things to do as well. She found the tape library an endless source of pleasure, with the microfilmed books from the Spacer archives on Asteroid Central, and the hund
reds of music tapes Ben had stored over the years. More than once he found her listening entranced to the recorded songs of the maukis … the chants and laments, the battle songs and lullabies that Ben had known since birth. Nothing seemed to relieve the loneliness and tension so quickly as music, but to the Barrons the mauki songs were subtly different from the songs and symphonies they had known at home on Earth.

  “It’s such mournful singing,” Joyce said on one occasion when Ben found her listening. “Even the marches and victory songs give you a funny feeling.”

  “Funny in what way?”

  “Funny-peculiar. As if something were missing. I can’t put my finger on the right word.”

  “Maybe you mean homesickness,” Ben said. “You don’t find it on the surface, but it’s there, buried in every song. Even in the victory songs. I guess the one thing all Spacers have always wanted to do was to go home.”

  Joyce nodded. “Maybe that’s it,” she said. “After all, there hasn’t ever really been a Spacer victory, has there? But the singing is beautiful. Even in the laments there’s no hint of begging or self-pity.” She looked up at Ben. “Your people must be very proud.”

  “Anyone who lives in space is proud,” Ben Trefon said. “We have a right to be. But we also have hope of someday going home again. That’s what the maukis are singing about, really. An exile can be proud and still hope to see the end of his exile.”

  “But with the horrible things Earthmen believe about Spacers, it’s hard to see the end, even if this war were over,” Joyce said. “If there were only some way to tell people the truth … all of them, all at once.”

  “Well, there isn’t any way, and that’s that. The truth has to be believed, to do any good. And the war isn’t over, and if our encounter at Outpost 5 is any guide, it won’t be over for a while. And we won’t be any help unless we get this tub back together again.” Ben paused. “Find anything interesting on your jaunts outside?”