Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Fox B. Holden

  “You tell me when people run out of respect for a blaster, sonny, and I’ll tell you when they’re worth their freight.”

  “No sir—I’ve found the trouble. My theory, sir—I’ve got ‘em pin-pointed I think.”

  “Trouble? Theory—hurry up Adrian, I’m busy . . . you, sergeant, make any contacts yet?” The com-sergeant shook his head and I turned back to Adrian. He looked as if he was getting ready to bust wide open.

  “It wasn’t the comps, sir. It’s the people themselves. People have machines beat a mile, sir—and the machines can’t keep up, that’s all. Machines are a lousy substitute—”

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “My theory, sir—that people’s attitudes are constantly changing—maturing, if you want to call it that. The machines were set to analyse the standard of psychological values that were valid when colonization first began fifty years ago. The values changed—slowly, but they do change—and the machines don’t.”

  I didn’t get what he was driving at, but I let him rattle it out. Sturgess had fourteen minutes yet, and I had the R-gun ready.

  “When the first real move toward Mars started, Captain, it was like—well, like years ago in the nineteenth century, in a move toward a place they called California and the Barbary Coast. They were first, they were new, and when they hacked out a place to live they used big strokes. Sometimes too big. But after they were through hacking they eventually started the more tedious job of trimming and molding and perfecting. To an extent, at least within the framework of their own back yards, they grew up. The. people who came after them didn’t come to hack—they came to help perfect. Like these people you’ve got on board now, Captain. Just like these. Only these people are working on more than a back yard. This one doesn’t have any fences . . .”

  “We went all over this once before, Adrian. Now—”

  “Let me finish, sir. Because the machines were working on a pretty flexible behavior-constant, the change—and it’s been gradual, you see, just bit by bit—the change didn’t register until it got big enough to actually invalidate the constant as a whole. Well, it just did.”

  “Just did what, man?”

  “Invalidated the fifty-year-old behavior-constant one hundred per cent, sir. Broke its back! The behavior-change got built up to the point where the old constant just couldn’t handle it any longer—simply passed its differential limits. So, the mass file reading was haywire. The individual ones were too, but it just happened that they looked normal. They could have looked any old way.”

  “Then the three individual files Sturgess had me help him recheck—”

  “Two are adolescent cases, sir—the change hasn’t affected them yet. The boy and the girl, and the group of men with suspiciously similar names. Kids are kids, and the fast-money people never grow up. It’s the third one, sir.”

  “The philosopher joker, staring out the port.”

  “Gone, sir. Star-happy as they come . . .”

  I got going. Sturgess would be able to pin-point the old gaffer for me before he was able to do any real damage, and we’d just confine him until we lit on Old Bed. And while I was at it, I’d be able to countermand the quarantine order—it’s a bad enough order to have to give in the first place, and I wanted to kill it before it did any damage. A hell of a note if I panicked ’em all now. Adrian and his theories be damned, a tank-load of humans could be a powder-keg. and it wouldn’t take much to set ’em off. Funny at that, I was figuring, when a kid with a kid’s theory can be right just the same . . .

  IT WAS about then that my own private hell broke loose. I had made it almost back to the bank room so I could buzz Sturgess when the old duck with the blown fuses popped out in front of me, an old-fashioned slug-tosser in his thin fist—and pointed right at my head. And the way he held it I knew he meant business from start to finish. Where he’d gotten it, or how he’d gotten it aboard, I didn’t know—but right then it hardly mattered.

  “Stop! Stop, Captain Logan!” The cracked voice made him sound even crazier than he looked, and the film of sweat that glistened on his neck above a high white collar and on the bony places in his face made him look even more like something resurrected from a grave dug a century ago. The black cloak he wore might have been used to bury him in.

  I stopped. I wouldn’t have gone for the R-gun even if the cannon-like barrel of the slug-tosser had been shaking. It couldn’t have shaken less in the jaws of a vise.

  “I am taking control of your ship, Captain! Yes, yes I am! I want you to press the button by the port and make them open it! Then you must make them come out here, and I will go inside! I mean it, Captain Logan, yes I do, I mean it!”

  Those eyes of his were pools of blood on fire.

  “You haven’t a chance, pop,” I told him. “My officers will be reporting back here any minute.”

  “Let ’em, Captain Logan! If they budge an inch toward me I’ll shoot you right in the head! You and them too and everybody! I’m going to kill everybody, Captain. I’m going to take this horrible dirty ship into the sun as fast as it will go! Press that button, Captain!”

  His trigger-finger was white with pressure at the knuckle, just like in one of those old-fashioned westerns. If I didn’t signal my three non-coms he’d just blow my head off and signal them himself. But this way it was better. This way he had a hostage and five slugs was enough for one man. He didn’t know how many men there were inside.

  But it added up to the same thing so I pressed the button.

  The lock buzzed and clicked.

  “Push it open, Captain—push it open, and order them all to come out!”

  I pushed it, and I was trying to think but I didn’t have any answers. He was cagey and he kept far enough from me so that I couldn’t jump him—I’d be a cold mackerel before I laid a finger on him. The port swung open.

  “Go on! Call them out! All of them! When I go in I’ll kill whoever is left!”

  He had me stymied there too, so I did what he said.

  “Johnston! Gates! Steinhammer! Out here on the double!”

  They came. By the time each one saw what was going on it was too late to do anything, and the old joker was starting his move for the bank room.

  Half inside the open port he stopped and sort of grinned at me.

  “I’m not the only one, Captain! Oh, no! Space hates you too! Space doesn’t want you and your horrible ships full of people trampling through it, spoiling it . . . people are horrid, Captain, and shouldn’t try to pollute the beautiful purity of the Universe with their little, filthy souls! No, they shouldn’t try, Captain—Space is their enemy and so am I! So am I! And when these die in the

  Sun, others will be afraid to come . . .

  THERE was the sudden sound of running boots coming from the A-deck ramp and I expected him to shoot the four of us down where we stood. But he didn’t. He waited, because he had more to say and I guess he figured the bigger the audience the better.

  Sturgess and Adrian just stopped in their tracks.

  “Move another inch, gentlemen, and I will blow your captain’s head off! Now listen to me—I’ve got more to tell you—”

  Sturgess looked at me and I looked back at him.

  No, the old goon wouldn’t be fast enough on the trigger to get two men at once. Me, he could get. And then Sturgess would have him before he could move another muscle.

  I couldn’t tell what Sturgess was thinking.

  “My first officer’s coming to disarm you,” I said. “You won’t have time for both of us. Mr. Sturgess! Get him!”

  And the old goat turned tail and bolted into the bank room!

  “Only one man can get through the port at a time!” he was shrieking. “Try to get me and I’ll blast you one at a time!”

  “Christ, he didn’t even shut the port!” Sturgess growled. “Cap—”

  But I wasn’t waiting to figure the ifs and buts of how lunatics think.

  “Life boats are the only chance,” I sa
id. “Sturgess, you and Adrian—”

  Sturgess just stood there.

  “Nuts,” he said. There was still that icy look in his eyes and I knew he’d caught me second-guessing again.

  “That’s an order!”

  “You should see what’s happened to the life-boats, Logan, and you’d forget about your precious orders. We’ve seen ’em—Adrian and me—that’s what all the running was about. Out of fifty boats, the old coot had time to get to all but five. Forty-five boats, so much junk, Logan.”

  “Then we’ll use five! We can at least save five hundred of the damned fools anyway—”

  I heard Adrian’s voice. It was thin and nervous. “And leave forty-five hundred to—to burn, sir? In the sun . . .”

  I looked at Sturgess and this time I could read something in his face. It said well here we are again and how was I going to play it this time?

  Regulations. Forty-five hundred “pioneers.” Adrian and his nervous voice. Sturgess, looking straight through me.

  I looked at the open port and started running, reaching for my R-gun.

  And Adrian was in front of me, blocking me.

  “Not you, sir! Ships need men like you! I’ll do—”

  I saw the swinging spanner wrench glance off Adrian’s head first but there wasn’t time to duck it because we were too close. A hell of a pain, and then I folded to the deck like a cruiser with blown jets . . .

  When one of the non-coms finally brought me around, Sturgess was gone and I could see Johnston working over Adrian.

  I slammed my hand to my thigh, and the cumbersome R-gun just wasn’t there any longer.

  Easy sir. You’ll be all right, and so will Lieutenant Adrian.”

  “Easy! For God’s sake man—” And then I saw it. The bank room port. Shut, sealed.

  “It was Sturgess, sir. He grabbed the spanner off the bulkhead there and clouted the two of you. Then he grabbed your R-gun. He was yelling like hell and none of us—we just couldn’t move, sir. He was just like he’d gone crazy!”

  “Come on, come on!” I tried to make it up on one elbow, fell back.

  “It was all so fast, sir. He ran through the port and hauled it closed with one arm, carrying the R-gun in the other, not even aiming it. We heard the sound of a shot—and the R-gun, both together. He must’ve been blasting away even when the old guy’s bullet drilled him, sir.”

  “But did he get him, did he get—”

  “He didn’t have to, sir. He knew he’d never have time for a second blast, so he must’ve just let go at the hull itself. When the air in there left it sounded like a—a banshee straight out of hell, Captain . . .”

  “When the air . . .”

  “Yes sir. We’ll have it patched as soon as Steinhammer gets some of the maintenance crew with suits up here.”

  I felt dizzy. Dizzy all over. “He yelled, you say——”

  “Yes sir. He hollered—said to tell you Lieutenant Adrian had a point, but if you still wanted to be a—a damn cynic, sir, you could go to the—go to the devil.”

  Gates got me up and then helped me to my feet. I looked over at Adrian, and he was beginning to come out of it. I told Johnston I’d take it from there.

  I guess I wanted to tell the kid what happened myself.

  I wanted to tell him about the milk run. About people and about Space—or maybe he’d be telling me.

  But anyway, Mars or bust, I’d tell him. Mars or bust, that’s their motto, come hell or damnation . . .

  Our job: Get ’em there.

  Here Lie We

  When they left for Mars, they didn’t expect to get there for the final curtain of a great show

  Unpredictable Man

  THERE is an unlovely footnote in the story of man’s climb toward the stars—it deals with his merciless exploitation of weaker people or races. Science-fiction authors peering near-sightedly into the future may well be pardoned for taking a gloomy view of mankind’s descent upon other worlds. But sometimes even the optimists may be right. And with man, the unpredictable, there is no real telling what may be. Homosapiens is capable of the most outrageously altruistic gestures as well as the most fiendishly selfish.

  Here is a story of human idealism—a story touched with beauty and insight. If optimism be justified, there is hope for us yet.

  —The Editor

  I

  KRUGER was quiet, sitting there, watching the screen, and for a long time neither of us spoke. You could hear the soft hum of the ion drive and it got to be sort of a muted thunder. You wondered if maybe, somehow, in the awful silence of the Big Dark there were any other ears that heard it, and the wondering framed the question for you again.

  The question was in Kruger’s mind, too. Maybe in a harder, cooler, more scientific sense than it was in mine, but I knew it was there. And in the silence between us we watched the orange-green sphere grow bigger by the second.

  Kruger spoke, finally. “Wes,” he said, “I’ll even make it eight to five. Eight to five she’s as dead as a doornail. So you lose, but think of being the first man in history to make a bet on life on Mars, knowing that in less than an hour it’s bound to be paid off one way or another! How ’bout that!”

  If he’d been anything but a government-commissioned scientist at the threshold of an historic achievement, the quipping might have been bravado. But two years of training and study were paying off, and we had he-man danger reduced to a pretty unromantic minimum. No, it wasn’t bravado because there was no genuine fear within us. Something else; I can’t name it.

  I pulled a wadded-up five-dollar bill out of my pants-pocket and tossed it onto the screen. It looked funny . . . a five-dollar bill sitting on Mars like that. And in a second it was joined by another fiver and three singles.

  “Who’ll hold the stakes?” Kruger said.

  “You. You hold ’em—be more fun winning that way. How about a reading, huh? Better get ready to twist this barrel around—”

  “Such a product of environment you are. Always in a hurry . . .” He picked the money up with an exaggerated slowness, pocketed it ceremoniously, and then looked for a second at the screen. Then the ready grin on his squarish, young-old face faded a little, and then it disappeared altogether. “But I suppose you’re right. Got a cigarette?”

  “On the comp-panel.”

  “Yeah.” I waited for him to light it, lit one myself. “Ready, kid?”

  He grunted.

  We twisted her.

  Tail-first, ion stream cutting the Big Dark like a white-hot rapier, we started—down. There was an up and a down, now, and Mars was at the bottom.

  We bumped.

  Then Kruger dumped out our drive potential, and it was all over. For a few seconds, anyway, it was all over.

  Kruger started in with the Physical Check equipment then and I focused the screen. It was as though the whole business were a routine that we’d done for half our lives. And we had to keep it that way—not for the efficiency side of the book; hell, we had five years if we needed it. It was because Space Medicine said so—the whiz kids in Psychiatrics. “Keep it on a ‘pass the salt basis’ were the orders, “and you’ll keep all your buttons. Otherwise, I guess they were right. The newspaper, radio and TV boys back home would be going pffut about the trip with habitual regularity—but we couldn’t. Brother, the tons of newsprint and ink they’d be chucking around while we passed the salt!

  I focused, and started a slow, full circle. I jacked in the ship’s dicto and talked cryptic things onto its tape. Terse little things our confreres in science would later decipher into a complete picture of an infinite, rolling expanse of desert at twilight, with a sun the size of a shirt-button almost directly overhead, letting the far-off ridges of dull green vegetation get swallowed up in the darkling night.

  And then I stopped the circle. I was about two-hundred degrees around, and I locked the screen in, and then hollered at Kruger.

  He brought me the lens-plates I asked for, helped me mike them in over the scr
een. They played hell with the nice focus I had, but there wasn’t any mistaking what they blew up for us.

  “Pay me, kid!” I said.

  They were domes—mile upon incredible mile of polished domes, each maybe a fifth high as wide. They skirted the edge of a long, gently-curving vegetation-line, and were probably less than twenty miles away. Our preoccupation in getting the E-M-1 down in one piece was the only excuse I could think of for not having spotted them on the way in.

  “Not so fast, Gaylord . . . I still say dead as a doornail . . . help me break out the suits and gel the track ready, huh?”

  “Think we need ’em?”

  “Almost pure CO-2 out there, just like the books all said in Astronomy 1. The P-C makes geniuses of us right down the line. You coming?”

  “I want my money.”

  “Pass the salt and come on!”

  THEY met us halfway. Their vehicle was essentially the same as our own; broad, flat tracks over bogies slung on an efficient torsion-bar suspension—wide, light-weight chassis fitted with a tear-drop canopy of crystal transparency. But traveling with a lot less noise, and with almost twice the speed. Kruger said, “I guess I owe you eight bucks.”

  “Maybe they’re robots. Long-dead civilization. Only the machines remain to traverse the wind-whipped sands . . .”

  “Stop, you’re chilling my marrow!”

  “Want to try the radio?”

  “Minute . . . hold on, looks as if they’re stopping!”

  “Obviously want us there. Truce-parley in the desert—look, getting out, I think. Come on, club this thing on the flanks, will you?”

  Kruger had his boot flat to the floor as it was, and we were tossing up sand on both sides like a miniature tornado. Typically Earth-style—lots of noise, lots of splash, all show and no go.

  It seemed as if we kept them waiting for an hour, but it was actually less than ten minutes before Kruger had us up alongside.

  “You think they know all about radio and such, I hope? Because brother, I’m not going to take this goldfish bowl off to hear them utter the Secret of the Universe itself . . .”