He didn’t move a muscle while I told him what had happened. But he made the grimmest picture my Earth-video had ever framed.
“You’ll effect pursuit at once, Kenton. Take what armament your maintenance can fabricate. If he is simply attempting escape, he’ll find there’s not far he can go. Since he is an inexperienced pilot, you should be able to overhaul him with little difficulty. However, the more logical probability is that he’s defecting to them. He undoubtedly has the microstats in his possession, and will rendezvous with one of their own orbit craft. It will be your responsibility to destroy him before that rendezvous can be completed.”
“But sir, there’s no way of being sure—”
“Destroy him.”
My protest was completely lost to a cut contact and a dead screen.
I muttered something and began a halfhearted attempt to contact McGinty. Between signals I scrawled a fast note and handed it to Knight. It told him to order an L-8 ready with an extra rocket unit bolted onto its stern someplace. For the extra power, he’d need a set of transition coordinates for a modified orbit, but that would be up to his department.
The note said for Haliburton to take care of having maintenance rig up a couple of hydrazine torpedoes of some kind. Hell, we weren’t even allowed pistols up here, and Kolomar had just said destroy him.” More official double-talk. But, sometimes a maintenance crew was good for something a little better than keeping the rust off door knobs. It was a pretty old rule-of-thumb in Space—if you haven’t got it, make it.
And right now, the responsibility for those stats was mine. All mine.
I kept Loftus with me, and kept trying to raise McGinty. The chances were he wouldn’t answer, of course. But there was nothing else to do until Haliburton and Knight buzzed me that they had everything ready.
“Guess you’d better forget it,” Loftus said.
I nodded, tried a final signal pattern, and then quit trying.
I looked into Loftus’ young face. It wasn’t hard to read.
“Go ahead and say it,” I told him.
He looked up, and his mouth twisted into a cynical smile.
“We all fall for happy accordion music and an Irish brogue. All fall for a guy because he appeals to what there is inside people like us that says some guys you can always trust. Maybe, Ken, we deserve to be second-raters.”
“Maybe,” I said. Only I was thinking about men like Kolomar. About right and wrong, success and failure, always in terms of physical size, physical strength. Whomp me and I’ll whomp you back harder. Twenty-first century civilization—still the spoiled brats of a half century ago. “Maybe we do,” I said, and wondered if we always would.
“What was it McGinty was always saying?” Loftus asked quietly. “Something about—’the further out y’go, the more th’ edge y’got—an’ leave all the other dir-rty business behind besides.’ ”
“Your brogue smells, kid. But that’s about the way it went.”
“Somehow, I never thought he meant it, this way. Thought he had something else in mind. The way he always looked out the port when he played. At the stars.”
“I know, I know,” I snapped. “Can it, can.it.”
Loftus shut up, but I knew what he meant, had known it before he said it, because I’d felt that way about McGinty for a long time, myself. McGinty played accordion music because it was something a little better than the canned stuff we could get on our radios. He had tried for that science degree because he’d wanted to make himself a little better, if he could. He griped about how “slow” the scientists were, griped about the “misers” we had in our politics. Just as a reaction against a state of affairs that he thought might be made a little better. It had always seemed to me that in McGinty’s simple philosophy, if you could just get started making things a little better here and there, pretty soon, a lot of things would be a lot better everywhere. Not second-rate.
I drummed my fingers on the communications panel, watching Loftus and waiting for either Knight or Haliburton to buzz me that things were set. I started to get up and that was when my video signal started its nervous blinking. In a single movement I had it switched on. It framed McGinty’s big red face.
He was drunk, and his blue eyes were blazing the way they always blazed, drunk or sober.
“Y’been a’callin’ me, Colonel? Well here I am! Lookin’ fer these, I’ll bet!” He waved a huge gauntleted paw in front of the screen. It clutched the thin plastisheen envelope that contained the microstats.
Loftus was out of his chair in an instant, crowding the video next to me and triggering a desk recorder into action at the same time.
“Look, you crazy fool,” I bellowed. “I’m not going to ask you what or why, McGinty, not now. But we’re coming out after you, and you’d better be turned around and headed back this way by the time we’ve started.”
“Yi, yi, Colonel! Kolomar’s a-burnin’ is ’e? Ha!” McGinty’s red beard bristled, and brick-red hair straggled down into snapping eyes. “He’s a slow-poke like a-a-ll the rest of ’em! Only I’ve got me a deal, Kenny me b’y!”
“McGinty, for God’s sake! Kolomar’ll hunt you to the end of Time!”
“Will ’e, now!”
“There’s nothing he won’t do or can’t get done to see you in the death chamber, McGinty. No matter where you go or whom you meet—”
“Sure, an’ y’wouldn’t be a’kiddin’ now, Colonel, would ye? No, y’wouldn’t kid McGinty! Ye’re not the blarneyin’ type, Colonel! Well, come along, then. You take the high road an’ I’ll take the low—” Singing, suddenly, singing like a drunken madman, and then the screen went blank.
As it did, Haliburton buzzed.
“Ready Ken,” he said.
And Loftus and I headed for the landing nets and a taxi berth.
BECAUSE he was blasting all the way, it would take McGinty slightly more than twenty-two hours to get from the satellite into an orbit around the Moon. The regular way, blast and drift, it takes about seventy-one. But McGinty was in a hurry.
There was no knowing how soon before that twenty-two hours he would be meeting the Comrades. Nor was there any way of knowing if McGinty intended to break his orbit when he neared the Moon and head on out into Space. That way he’d end up a derelict with his fuel exhausted, smothered when his air was used up, and lost forever. Something began picking at the back of my mind, but I didn’t have time to play with it.
With the extra rocket motor Knight had had jury-rigged to the stern of our L-8, there was a chance we could overtake McGinty an hour or so before he entered a lunar orbit, if that’s what he was going to do. And if we’d been able to crowd on enough fuel.
Or, if he just kept on going, we were certain to overhaul him—and that was why neither of those two angles made much sense. From a practical point of view, anyway.
“It’s a rendezvous set-up for certain,” Knight said. He was strapped in the bow astrodome seat, working with the L-8’s two-inch refractor.
Earth and our satellite rolled some twenty hours and two hundred twenty thousand miles behind us; we were tired, we were apprehensive and edgy. We’d been power-on all the way instead of blasting and drifting. But so had McGinty.
Knight had had McGinty’s L-8 in his lenses almost from the hour we’d blasted out. There were just three of us—myself, Knight and Loftus. I’d left Haliburton behind as second-in-command and to take care of Kolomar when he came up, as he had. Right now, he was only a couple of hours behind us in the L-8 I’d ordered Haliburton to have ready and waiting for him.
There hadn’t been anything else from McGinty. Not a flicker. And not a word either from the Comrades. Things should’ve been crackling about now. Their satellite had just rounded Earth’s illumination an hour or so before, and they should be throwing cover-up messages at us by the barrel, wanting to know what was the meaning of an uncleared orbital flight, and why hadn’t they been notified.
But not a word. At least not that Loftus had picked up on our own H
-F. Maybe they were just going to play it straight—“Hey, hey, here they are after all,” Loftus said suddenly. “All translated and everything. Give a listen.” He turned up the volume.
It was good cover-up, all right. Just as though they hadn’t known a thing about it Just discovered it and wanted a fast explanation.
I hollered to Knight. “You actually see any of their rigs up ahead?”
“Two of ’em. Just starting on an intersect with McGinty.”
“Can we make it first, do you think?”
“Nip and tuck, skipper. Maybe. It’s almost as if it’s all a big surprise to ’em. They’re still way out in left field, maybe not quite as close as we are.”
Knight muttered something over the rasping voice on his H-F. “—ought to get an Academy Award—”
He was right. Their acting and their timing couldn’t have been more perfect except that they had had to gamble from the first on getting to McGinty before we did and still make things look all innocence. Maybe we could make them lose that one, anyway. You could be too clever.
But they were armed, and that hedged their gamble pretty convincingly. We had two clumsy jury-rigged torpedoes which might or might not hit whatever they were fired at.
The voice halted, and then it was up to me. I was supposed to be the one to make up the excuses, not Kolomar. I was the one who had to give “an immediate account of the untoward and unadvised action” of my L-8s. And Kolomar would let me sweat it out by myself.
“What’ll I tell ’em, Ken?”
“Tell ’em—oh, hell. Tell them one of our crew went Space-psycho, and that we’re doing all in our power to recover him and the rig he’s flying before any inconvenience can occur which might disturb the planned schedules of our esteemed Comrades of Space. One fairy tale’s as good as another.”
Loftus reworded the message as nice as pie, and then after a minute the H-F was quiet. For the record, things were fine. Of course, our Comrades were going to “assist” in the recovery of our wayward crewman—
“We’ll beat ’em, I think!” Knight was hollering.
“Any guns—Loftus began. I answered that one myself.
“They’d ruin their own show,” I said. “A premature show of muscle would tip their hand. If they make it work this way, all we can ever do is accuse, but we won’t be able to prove a damn thing. And they’ll know what they want to know, and be ready for our quick little shuffle. They’ll be ready at those conference tables. If they miss this time, they’ll just try again later, another way.”
“It sure reads fine,” Loftus said. “But I wonder how soon they start shooting.”
We were both at the starboard port, watching. We could see McGinty’s L-8 out there, floating like a three-barrelled hour glass, its tiny rocket bank glowing red against the blackness, one side a blinding white brightness in the sun.
The Moon hung like a chewed-up white basketball below the both of us, and you could see the greenish cast of Earthshine stretching out a little beyond the night shadow over the ridge of the lunar Appenines.
“How do you suppose they ever got wise to the microstats in the first place?” Loftus was asking.
“We’re still not sure they did. Or sure that he—or sure of anything,” I snapped back at him.
“But you think it’s McGinty all right, by this time. I mean—”
“I guess so,” I said.
HE TURNED from the port and looked square at me. His youthful face was a strained, white thing, and if I saw a certain innocence in his young eyes, I saw something else, too. He was the strange kid-man combination you get in Space—just a youngster on the one side, and a latter-day wizard on the other. A head full of scientific answers down to the last decimal point—and full of that other stuff that makes a young man a very young man; the kind of stuff we older guys like to wish could be true, but know just can’t be.
“Add it up yourself,” I said. I was looking over his shoulder and through the port again. There were other hour glasses out there now, further from McGinty than we were still, but not by much. And to our stern was another pin-point of winking red light and flashing whiteness. Kolomar. We were closing on McGinty’s L-8 fast now, and I started for the closet where we kept the suits. Loftus grabbed my arm.
“Not the torpedoes if we can help it, kid,” I said. “I’m going out when we pull above him. On a line. If I can grab onto any of the framework, maybe I can put his motors out of commission without blowing things apart. If I can, then maybe we can nudge him all the way around, and shove him all the way back if we have to.”
Loftus just turned away. He was watching the red-white flash in the blackness that was Kolomar’s rig. I knew what he was thinking, and I was glad he thought that way. Maybe, sometime, the youngsters could play things their way, and we’d have that something a “little better” that McGinty had always been hoping for.
And I guess Loftus knew the plan I outlined had less than a thousand-in-one chance of coming through. Even if I managed to break McGinty’s fuel lines some way, this “nudging” business I talked about was probably ninety per cent hokum. Even in an orbital state of comparative weightlessness there was still inertia to consider, and any direct contact we made with McGinty’s L-8 could cave in our bulging plasti-fabric fuel tanks. That, or split him wide open.
But I’d never be able to sleep again if I didn’t try something before Kolomar’s torpedoes, and I didn’t care what he saw me do.
I was all rigged out, standing by the airlock, about five hundred feet of line in one gauntlet and a reaction tube in the other, when Knight’s voice slurred in my helmet receivers.
“Kenj—hold it! He’s busting the orbit! He’s going to—my God. Ken, he’s ditching her Moonside!”
I had a time getting over to the port Loftus was crowding. What Knight was saying was true. I madesmotions, and Loftus started helping me out of my cumbersome Space outfit while I watched.
We were just about dead center over the Moon itself, and McGinty had started drifting in what would have been a perfect, if wide, orbit around it. Continuing in it, he’d’ve circled the side opposite Earth, and then started back toward the orbit of our satellite. Either that, or, as we’d expected, broken from it and rendezvoused with one of the Comrades. Only it wasn’t working that way.
McGINTY was breaking his orbit, all right, but not toward Space. He was going dawn. He had cut the stern rockets and was using his bow jets to slow himself enough to-kill the velocity that had balanced him in his orbit. Slowly but as surely as politicians have two faces, Moon gravity would take over, pull him down, split him wide open on the jagged edge of Aristillus crater.
“He’s out of his head,” I heard Loftus saying. “Clean gone. An L-8 can’t land; an orbit rig can’t take even two Gs and hold together.”
McGinty was peeling off, falling.
We just stood at the port and watched. Knight kept him in the two-incher.
Falling in that lazy, gradual, ever-steepening airless glide until soon it would be B—PLANET—Fall straight up-and-down. The Moon just hung there, cold, bleak, waiting. Waiting to rip McGinty all to hell on the ragged peaks of its gutted, inhumanly beautiful terrain. A strange love affair had McGinty, through the satellite port as he played his accordion.
I was pulled out of it by the racket on the H-F receiver, and Loftus was clambering over to it as fast as I was.
“This is Kolomar,” the voice said. “Destroy him. Now. That’s an order, Kenton.” Loftus looked at me. So did Knight.
I picked up a mobile mike, flicked it on. “This is Kenton,” I said. “I don’t believe we received your message correctly, general. In fact I’m certain we didn’t! Over!”
“I said destroy him. And God help you, Kenton, if you can’t hear me!”
No, I hadn’t expected Kolomar to take anything back. He was still doing everything by the books.
Loftus acked him out, and then just stood there.
“Okay,” I said, “you heard him!”
> “But he’s going to die anyway, Ken! Going to—”
“Damn it, fire those torpedoes!”
Loftus spun away from me, something shiny in his eyes, and started priming the two thin, long cylinders of hydrazine and HNO3 for the make-shift torpedo tubes that maintenance had installed.
“Those aren’t such hot looking jobs, are they, Loftus,” I said. He looked up me, and that hot shine was still blazing in his eyes. “I hope you don’t have any trouble aiming with those homemade tubes.”
It took him a second, but he caught on. The torpedoes missed McGinty’s falling rig by a good three hundred yards apiece. I let Loftus take a look.
“What’s he doing?”
“Blasting like hell at the tail,” the young lieutenant said. “He’ll hit like one of those old-time ski jumpers! Between Aristillus and Autolycus, in that flat, open plain—” I watched him hit.
And it was as Loftus said. He slewed onto the flat, dust-covered plain like a ski jumper, falling but going forward at a hell of a rate, probably using up the last of his fuel in a single, sustained, straight-ahead blast.
And then there was a flurry of dust maybe ten miles long. And after that, even with the ’scope, you couldn’t see anything. “Good try,” I heard myself saying. “Might’ve made it!” Loftus said, hope ragged in his voice. “He just might’ve—”
“All alone, oxygen enough for almost two months if he cuts way down,” I heard Knight say softly.
But I was already calling Kolomar. “Destroyed,” I said. And I wished I could’ve been lying to his teeth.
FROM the time Kolomar got back to Earth it took just two days for him, with maybe just a touch of help from his floor leader brother, to pry the government loose from a half-billion bucks. It took him just twenty-four hours more to get the Pentagon to release plans for a Moon-landing ship that had been mouldering in a vault tor tire last fifteen years; plans that nobody’d known about since the day they were drawn, I guess; plans just waiting for that halfbillion.
He had his toughest time with our own scientists. It was sort of the way McGinty had said. The thing would need weeks of study, months of testing, years to perfect, they told him.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 52