Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Fox B. Holden

  Mentally, Prescott ground his teeth. “No, it’s never been news, Senator!” he raged silently. “You—you goddamned old pirate!”

  In another Space, in another Time, an old man waited for a third signal.

  But it never came.

  Milk Run

  The service had a motto: Mars or bust . . .

  IF YOU’RE fool enough to give the Space brass any back-talk—even when it’s through all the prescribed channels and you use only the words the book says you can—they find ways of getting even. Not, you understand, that a captain’s officers are ever assigned to him on any but the most impersonal, business-like basis. Not much.

  First Officer Sturgess, I figured, was to be my spanking. At least that was the way I had it added up when the milk run started, and when it started, I had made up my mind to let it go at that.

  What Sturgess had on his record would be his own punishment for as long as he lived, and brass be damned if I was going to let it punish me. Even though I was the fair-haired cadet those twenty years ago who had turned him in. No, he wouldn’t have forgotten. And right now the brass wasn’t forgetting, either.

  The milk run was at the bottom of it of course—it’s the bottom of everything, and that’s what I told the brass when they put me back on it for another hitch. The assignment order was plastered with a lot of nice words like “maximum efficiency” and “commendable command ability and discipline” but I wasn’t having any—not any longer, and I told them that, too.

  “You may resign if you wish, Captain Logan,” they told me. “But—unfortunately, there are no exploration commands available at present, It is strongly urged that you give further consideration to such a step. In view of your retirement status—” and that’s how it went. The milk run. Stuck with it, and stuck with Sturgess to boot. All for a bunch of boobs who get the urge to be pioneers about two hundred years too late. Every trip, five thousand new ones, “Mars or bust” written all over their faces in one way or another. I suppose a fair percentage of them are always sincere enough about the colonization angle—the “bright new world” routine—but only a few, the way I saw it. And the rest? God only knew. But there’s always a full five hundred of ’em, every trip . . .

  EARTH to Mars, Mars to Earth—it’s simple enough when you look at it that way. Every other captain in the service carries a hull full of nice, manageable exploration gear, maintenance equipment or at the worst just general supplies to a million places in Deep Space where things worth a man’s while are going on. But on the milk run you’ve got a cargo of everything from frustrated dime-store salesgirls to tired exnewsmen with ulcers, and you have to wet-nurse ’em for ten months at a stretch, for only forty million miles.

  Mars or bust, Come hell or damnation—your job: Get ’em there.

  Sturgess buzzed me in the bank room and I pressed a sono-switch that would unlock the hatch and let him in. My second officer—young Adrian—had the main control bank and things were running pretty smoothly all things considered, so I had the time if not the inclination to see what Sturgess was after. Putting him in charge of my stewards had seemed the best way to keep him out of trouble, but then, with five thousand human beings in any kind of close proximity, you never can tell.

  “Report for the third week, sir.” He still looked like a cadet of seventeen to me—maybe some people would take him for his middle twenties, but not anyway for a guy pushing forty. There was still that just-scrubbed face look about him—that bright-eyed look that went more with fuzzy cheeks than with the just-visible, tight little wrinkles at the edges of the thin-lipped mouth, and the slender leanness of body that belies a lot of time on space-decks. Steady, cold blue eyes—they’d look straight inside you, and the brain behind them would know every time you’d pulled a boner. And you had the feeling that it laughed silently, telling itself how damn ridiculous people are who always stick with the regulations. A troublesome, rebellious brain that liked people too well and had an undefinable contempt for the laws they made.

  And to Sturgess I wasn’t a person. I was a law.

  I took the; report from him and kept him standing there at attention while I scanned through it. Neat. Orderly. Defiantly perfect. It was Sturgess to the letter.

  “Did you check this group in Section 83-L with Registration?”

  “Which group is that, sir?”

  “Smith, Jones, Brown, Edwards . . . all of the men who are in the thirty to thirty-five age group. All together.”

  “No sir. There seems to be no more than the median index of restlessness for eighty-seven percent of the group, with the remaining thirteen percent pretty much split but falling well inside safety margin. I—”

  “Occur to you that you’ve got five thousand people out there—all kinds of crazy people who are running away from Earth for one reason or another—money, business, politics or what-have-you—and for every one there’s always some half-baked motive cooking to do God knows what? That’s a group of names there, Sturgess. Common names. Too common to be all together that way. Smith, Jones, Brown . . .

  “There’s no departure from behavior expectancy statistics. I’ve checked carefully. Each file’s been run through the machines twice.”

  “You just do what I tell you. Keep an eye on that section.”

  “I’ll record them and do their psycho-met analyses personally, sir.”

  “All right, see that you do. Now how about 43-M?”

  “Just youngsters, sir. They—”

  “Cut the goddam excuses! Yon know the rules in Space, Sturgess! Ship’s surgeons’ll have plenty of important things to keep ’em busy when these people get their first taste of the sickness—those kids’ll have all the time they need for that kind of monkey business when they get where they’re going. See that they stay in their compartments where they belong. Separately!”

  “Yes sir.”

  I kept going through the thing page by page, laying it on good, but it was actually as Sturgess had said. Nothing really out of line. Nothing I wouldn’t have let pass if the first officer had been anybody but Sturgess. As long as comparative statistics said the round pegs were in the round holes I didn’t give a damn. When they started in acting as though they were home on Earth I got tough, but most of ’em usually stayed where they belonged and kept quiet, and the stat-checks kept me on top of the heap. But you never can tell when some screwy idea is getting ready to pop—and if the milk run ever has anything, it has a pot-full of screwy ideas. And when they begin to pop their seams, it shows on the stat sheets, and the stewards get busy. On some trips they’re always busy. On most they’re just along for the ride. But you never can tell, and I’ve never tried to. I know better.

  “This one who just keeps watching through the port all the time. Get him away from it.”

  “That would be the philosopher chap. He’s quite happy that way—”

  “I said get him away from it. I don’t care if he’s happy or dead, I just want him to keep all his marbles till we tie up. Keep that in mind about all of ’em. O.K. you’re excused, Sturgess. And it’s a fair report.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He turned, hesitated, then turned back to me.

  “Captain Logan.”

  “I’m busy, Sturgess.”

  “I think you can spare me a moment, Captain.” Those eyes of his bored into me, maybe looking for a conscience. I looked back into his and they stopped me cold. “You haven’t asked to examine my honorable reinstatement papers, Captain, and I’ve brought them with me. There is a regulation, you know. I have to show them to you.” He handed me a long plastic envelope, and I took it, opened it. I scanned the contents, and everything was there . . .

  A brief outline of the cadet incident, the way Sturgess had gone against my orders when I’d been the cadet officer of the day, and the way I’d had him bounced from the Academy.

  IN SMALL type it told about the two hundred men on the training mission outside Pluto, and how a stray meteor had slipped our screens and caught us
with our pants down. It told in detail about what happened to our oxygen and fuel supply, and how half the two hundred could have been brought back safely if the other half were sacrificed. It quoted my order to Sturgess as second in command, and described the way he’d walloped me with the butt of an R-gun and then tried to save the whole shebang.

  Sturgess lost all except a handful of men including the two of us who made it back, and I saw to it that he got the boot. The Academy had to see it my way—one hundred men alive are better than two hundred dead.

  But—and now the papers switched to bigger print—upon consideration of his appeal and the “admittedly commendable, if misguided, motives which caused Cadet Sturgess to act against his orders as herein brought forth,” he had been, after a five-year suspension, awarded a reinstatement. It said in bigger print yet that all commanders were supposed to “be thus advised, and be duly made aware” of Sturgess’ readmission to the service, with full commission, on honorable status.

  That was the story, and I knew Sturgess would have pushed the damn envelope in my face regulations or not. He wanted to watch me squirm. Me, you see—the law’.

  I handed the stuff back to him.

  “All you have to do is remember who’s captain,” I told him, and turned back to the main control bank.

  STURGESS remembered. Scrupulously. If there was some seething resentment smouldering underneath that cold-eyed mask of his it was either perfectly disguised or I was imagining it. He was behaving like a first-class automaton—it was like feeding orders into a battery of the machines and having them executed exactly as they had been fed, no more, no less. I didn’t get it at first, but there wasn’t time to worry about it. The way it added up to me was that instead of finding a time-bomb planted under my pillow I was finding a busted rebel instead. “Yes sir, no sir” was all the cold-eyed mask would say, and that’s just the way I wanted it.

  We got through the sickness all right. In fact, better than on most trips. Only about half came down with it, and only about twenty percent of them had it bad, so I was without the usual overcrowded ship’s hospital headache. The chief ship’s surgeon told me that space-sick preventatives were getting better all the time, just the way my second officer tried to make me believe that these colonizers were getting more serious all the time.

  Adrian was a youngster and still believed all the stuff they’d taught him in his humanities term at the Academy. He was a bright young, kid and I liked him. You know the type—well-educated, eager to make the grade, high-minded and ail ready to give the universe a whirl on its major axis.

  “Sir, I’m not exactly sure I agree with you,” he told me. “I think the Conestoga and her passengers are pretty important. That’s why I signed on her.”

  We were about half-way out, the sickness had been taken care of as I said, and there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do until we crossed approach ecliptic in a month or so. Our engines w ere damped down to a half, and we were on the part of the trip where if anything is going to be serene at all, this was it. I had talked to Adrian between the routine duties before, and I guess I did get sort of a kick out of listening to him. Took me back twenty years.

  “Think it’s pretty important, do you?”

  “Yes sir, I do. Look through the port, sir, and maybe you’ll see what I mean.” So serious, these kids. I’d seen more Space in the last two years than he had in all his life, “It’s big, Captain Logan—awful damn big. It makes an ocean look like a—a saucer with spilled tea in it. The Conestoga makes one of the old sailing ships look like a child’s toy in a bathtub. Out there you can go in any direction for all eternity, and travel what might as well be an inch or so . . .”

  “You’ll be star-happy before you know it, young fella!”

  “No, but you get me, don’t you, Captain? We’ve learned how to build ships that really amount to something. We aren’t tied down any longer to just one of those millions of tiny bright lights out there . . . we can get to any of ’em—all of ’em, if we want—

  I DECIDED to change the subject because he was beginning to get at me where it hurt. I knew we could get to “any of ’em, all of ’em” if we wanted. “We” meaning other guys. But not Logan. I was just as trapped as if I’d been pushing one of those water-going barges Adrian talked about.

  “Sure,” I said. “But you’re on the milk run, sonny.” Instead of shutting him up, it pulled the cork further out.

  “Maybe you call it that, sir.” He seemed as though he was talking only half to me, and half to somebody or something else. His clean-cut, young face even looked a little older for a minute. “But expeditionary ships don’t conquer universes, Captain. People do. Lots of people, no longer Earthbound, whose scientific expeditions into Space say that they’ve licked it—and whose presence, not just in ships, but on other planets, proves it. Someday it’ll be more than just Mars, Captain Logan. Someday there’ll be fleets of Conestogas.”

  I made a funny sounding laugh which I guess was supposed to get across the idea that one milk run was one too many as things stood, and Adrian just smiled.

  “Don’t have to worry about your second officer, though, Captain. If I was star-happy I’d be talking out of the other side of my mouth. The macropsychotics want people out of the picture entirely. Get a great urge to purify the universe and all that . . .”

  “I’m not worried,” I said. “If anybody’s going star-happy aboard this tank it’s me. Sometimes I think if people just plain dropped dead it wouldn’t be such a bad idea—”

  He laughed, a mass-indicator buzzed and he checked on it. He was cross-compensating a trajectory variation when Sturgess buzzed and I let him come in. “Captain Logan, sir—”

  “Oh for God’s sake cut it out, Sturgess. What’s on your mind?” Something was. Sturgess looked different. His face was the same, but something in those eyes of his—different.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d go over a stat-check with me, sir.”

  “Think I’m qualified, Sturgess?”

  “By your leave, sir—” He stood there at attention, rubbing it in. And he was making me do what he wanted me to—and he knew it. But that look in his eyes said that maybe it was more than that. It said there was a chance that somehow Sturgess had gotten himself too deep into something and needed a way out and fast.

  “What’s your trouble?”

  “The specific areas you instructed me to keep under close observation, Captain. I’ve checked the individual files on each five times. Each one checks out at plus or minus .5 norm—well inside the requisite stability margin. But it’s the group check—”

  “What about the group check?” I got to my feet.

  “I don’t know, sir. According to the stat sheets we’ve got a—they’re all—all crazy as bed-bugs, sir.”

  “They’re what?”

  And Sturgess was right. I checked with him. The banks of machines whirred and hummed in that conceited way they had, and each time the master file got tossed out with a reading of plus twenty-seven for the whole damned bunch—so far outside allowable behavior expectancy margin that if the computers were right I had a whole tank-full of lunatics aboard ready to split the Conestoga apart at the seams.

  But that wasn’t the way it was.

  I had Sturgess, assemble the whole hundred-man staff of stewards in an emergency pow-wow and got fast individual reports. No sir, they all said. Everybody quiet—some a little depressed and reading old-fashioned westerns instead of the science-fiction classics—but beyond that, everybody happy. Everything swell. Not a groan in a light-year. Happy . . . happy . . . happy.

  I looked at the stewards’ faces, and by now they were scared faces. I looked into Sturgess’ and it was enigmatic again, some hidden I-told-you-so sneaking just beneath the surface where I couldn’t see it.

  “What are your orders, Captain?” Sturgess said. Like a little machine. What are my orders, Captain—what do the rule-books say, Captain? There wasn’t any answer for this in the rule-books and Sturgess knew
it. I’ll say he knew it. He was willing to die laughing as long as it was at me.

  “Sir—”

  It was Adrian. I hadn’t known he’d left the bank room, hadn’t known he’d heard any of it.

  “Yes, what is it?” I was watching Sturgess. No, the machines hadn’t been tampered with. I knew, I’d looked. Fast; but with a damn well practiced eye—you’ve got to know your stat-comps when you’re lugging a mob of potential Ward Eights year in and year out. No, it would have taken the kick out of it for Sturgess. It would have to be the real thing—a trumped-up Waterloo wouldn’t come close to satisfying the passion he had to see me cook. That’s why no time-bomb routine the way it is in stories. That’s why the robot routine instead. Waiting . . . waiting for it had to be real—and he’d been lucky with the luck of the damned. He hadn’t had to wait long.

  “Sir, I’ve got a theory about the stat-comps. If I may have your permission to try something—” It was Adrian. I could hear him talking, but I wasn’t listening.

  “All right, go ahead,” I said. “And when you’re done you can throw the pieces away. You, Sturgess!”

  “Yes sir!”

  “Quarantine Procedure, and you’ve got just thirty minutes!”

  “Yes sir!” Sturgess turned sharply and went to execute his orders.

  ONLY ten minutes after that Adrian found me in communications. The radio crew was already busy knocking out an A-priority SOS on every Patrol wave length on the band, and I invoked the regulation that says a captain can strap on his ship’s only R-gun at his own discretion.

  One is all you need. A single blast and you can knock a hole in the side of a ship big enough to roll Jupiter through. Raw power.

  I strapped the thing on and adjusted the trigger for a half-ounce pressure. Raw power they wanted, raw power they’d get.

  “You won’t need that, sir.” It was Adrian, and there was a flush in his young face.