Collected short fiction, p.342
Collected Short Fiction, page 342
Involuntarily, my dry lips whispered, “Killahin!”
Sardonically, my captor bowed. “I’m going to Saturn. As co-pilot, or”—and his weapon made an ominous gesture—“pilot!”
Flinching from the menace in his tone, I tried to set my spinning brain in order. The Swallow had to get to Jado Station—for two very good reasons.
The first was Doctor Jollabard himself, founder and still head of Stellar Express. Four hours ago at Tycho Dome he had gripped my hand nervously.
“Kane,” he had said, “you’ve got to get through safely with that shipment of serum for the Yellow Death which is striking down the miners of Japetus.”
That was one reason. The other was more personal—Elida Lane.
DAUGHTER of Captain Derk Lane, the old space-rat who had been Jollabard’s partner when they were radium-prospectors on Pluto, she had gone out with her father to keep him company when he became station master at the Titan depot. For three long years, ever since I took Jon Trevor’s place on the Saturn hop, I had known Elida—and loved her hopelessly.
She had devastating red-gold hair, a willowy slender beauty that would have set the artists back on Earth to raving—and a blank shadow of tragedy staring out of her wide blue eyes that put an ache in your throat to see.
Perhaps I fell for her because that agony made her so different from other women I had known. I had proposed to her a dozen times in three years, but the shadow had not gone out of her wounded eyes.
But we got to be good friends. Whenever I could get them past the inspectors, I took her seeds and bulbs for the hopeless little garden that she tried to grow in the thin frozen soil beside the station shed. And one day: “Sorry, Reg,” she told me. “You’re a swell somebody, and you’ve been mighty good to me. But there is a promise that I must keep. I’ve got to wait here at Jado Station.”
The dim blue-gray light, filtering through the luxaloid dome from the frozen moonscape, turned her red curls almost black. Pain grayed her face. Her voice was low and husky.
“You see, Reg,” she finished, “I’m waiting for Jon Trevor.”
There was nothing I could say to that. I couldn’t tell her the bitter thing she already knew—that Jon Trevor, once the greatest pilot on Stellar Express, was a convicted murderer, lying in the death-block at Kenya City, awaiting his turn to die.
Nothing I could say. But still I could hope. This trip I had brought some hardy rose cuttings under the false bottom of my tiny kit, and I was hotly anxious for Elida Lane’s gravely smiling thanks.
Putting those two reasons together:
“Very well,” I told the big man waiting behind the menace of his omeganode gun, “I’ll pilot you to Jado Station.”
That promise, just now, was pretty obviously the price of my life. But my solemn oath, made before the ICC, to observe and enforce the laws of space, was certainly more binding than any unwilling word given this pirate.
Killahin evidently read what was passing in my mind. The one bloodshot dark eye glittered ominously.
“Look here, Kane,” he rumbled swiftly. “We’ll each have a hundred chances to kill the other—but the one that lives will have a mighty long watch to stand alone. Will you give me your hand on a truce till we make Jado Station?”
I put out my hand, but the act made Killahin none the less an outlaw. His dark face seamed to a handsome grin. His lean hand, scarred and dark and powerful, took mine in a crushing grip.
“Good, Captain Kane,” he rumbled. “Now there is one thing more to be understood between us. And then I am at your command, till we touch Titan.”
I searched the dark, bronze-bearded mask of his face.
“What’s that?”
HIS hard lips were motionless; it was like a metal statue speaking:
“We are going through the Kappa Space.”
“Through—the Kappa—Space?” Idiotically, I parroted his words. I staggered back against the turret bulkhead. For, if there was anything that interplanetary voyagers struggled to avoid, in the century since its tragic discovery, that was the Kappa Space.
My voice was ragged with outraged protest:
“Not deliberately—into the Hole? That’s suicide.”
The Hole was what we called it, in the argot of the starways. For it was crudely pictured as a hole in space. A deadly phenomenon. Essentially a closed field of special space-time curvature, as the astro-physicists described it, a blind whirl-pool in the ether, its resistless vortices could trap anything from a photon to a planetoid.
The very planets, so a new theory of cosmogony held, were mere cores of extinct Kappa Spaces—aggregations of matter which had finally damped out the terrific etheric fields that had collected them.
Eventually—that theory maintained—after a billion years or so there would be a new planet in the gap that Bode’s Law indicated, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Most of the asteroids would have gone into the building of it. And, at the rate things were going, the wreckage of thousands of space ships and the bones of millions of men.
For men couldn’t keep out of the Hole. Since it refused to follow the known laws of matter, the motion of the Kappa Space was not accurately predictable. Because the terrific forces of it prevented escape of light or even gravitational energy, it could not be observed from a distance. Only a new instrument, the Clauson sub-electronic detector, sometimes gave warning in time. Only one man was known to have escaped from the Hole with his jeep—Jon Trevor.
The Kappa Space was a colossal cosmic trap, ever-growing since some unguessed eddy in the ether had been its beginning; its web spread unpredictably, blind and deadly. And the danger was relatively greater for our jeeps, partly because their speed was twice that of the rockets, also because their momentum-field drive was almost useless in the freakish ether fields of the Hole. Working on an electro-magnetic principle, the electro-magnetic currents of the Kappa Space must have counteracted the drive field.
I began to suspect that I had a madman as well as a criminal for a passenger. I backed uneasily toward the passage. The dark face of Killahin set grimly, and his bright weapon made a significant gesture.
“Steady, Kane,” he rumbled. “We’re running through the Hole! And we’ll make it!”
I raised my hands in protest.
“But you don’t know the Kappa Space,” I gasped. “A grinding, flaming hell of trapped energy and cosmic debris. A stellar storm, with deadly radiations for lightning, and nickel-iron boulders for hail. And we’ll be helpless in it—the jeep could never pull out.”
The man shook his shaggy black head.
“But I do, Kane,” he said gravely. “I know all about the Hole. Jon Trevor told me.”
WONDERMENT took my breath again. I had never seen Trevor, for we had always been on different hops. But I knew that he had been the adopted son of Dr. Jollabard, the ranking pilot of Stellar Express and the favored of fair Elida Lane—until that fantastic tragedy in space.
“Oh!” Enlightenment came to me. “You knew him in prison?”
“I knew him three years in the death block,” said Killahin defensively. “Jon’s a friend of mine.”
“Not of mine!” I said bitterly. “They should have blasted him three years ago. Doc Jollabard has been a fool to ruin himself fighting the case, when it is Trevor who whitened his hair and bent his shoulders and broke his heart. Trevor who killed the soul of the woman waiting for him at Jado Station!”
“Elida Lane?” The great voice had an eagerness that I did not like. “I’ve got a message for her. A message from Jon.”
I knew, then, that I didn’t want Black Kell Killahin to get to Jado Station. And the telescreen announcer, I recalled, had mentioned a huge reward for the convict, dead or alive. It had better be dead, I determined. My omeganode gun was still in the pilot cuddy. And ondman, with the auto-pilot, could run the jeep to Titan.
“Well?” Killahin saluted me, grinning.
“The rotors are running well enough,” I told him. “You can take Mohr’s bunk. I’ll call you for your watch in four hours.”
“Aye, sir.”
I went back to the cuddy, checked the instruments, reset the softly clicking auto-pilot. But a jeep is a small and silent craft. Above the faint hum of the rotors, I caught the sounds that told me when my companion took a shower in the tiny bathroom, helped himself to a tin of space rations in the minute galley, flung himself into Mohr’s bunk. Presently, in the air from the ventilator, I scented a faint acrid sweetness.
The sweet smoke of the rogo-bean. I had smelled the narcotic vapor of that Martian weed often enough in the Jollybird Tavern at Tycho to know what it meant. Many space-men breathed the smoke of the burning waxy seeds; they said it soothed their nerves and yet sharpened all their senses. But I knew that at last they all lay in a senseless stupor. And I was very well pleased.
Two hours passed, and the Moon’s yellow crescent became a dot beside the reddish crescent Earth. The sweet pungence was gone. And at last I heard what I was waiting for, a slow and stertorous breathing.
I locked the jollybar again upon the auto-pilot. Silently I slipped the thin silver tube of my omeganode gun from its clip on the bulkhead, noiselessly tested its fine deadly mechanism, went soundlessly down the passage, past the galley and the power turret, to the tiny cabin.
ABRUPT alarm caught my throat as I realized that the hoarse snoring had ceased!
The gun clutched hard in my sweating hand, I jerked aside the curtain from the bunk that had been Victor Mohr’s. The blankets were tumbled. Upon the pillow lay a thick-stuffed brown wallet, a leather pouch of rogo-beans, and the little metal pipe. But the bunk was empty!
Convulsively I spun, shuddering. Already I could feel the fiery jet of Killahin’s omega beam burning into my back. I had been very neatly tricked—he must have been crouching in the galley when I passed.
But I lived to turn, and looked down the empty passage. Where was the pirate? Then I heard the sharp hiss of his ray from the cuddy, heard a muffied explosive woosh, and the tinkle of shattered crystal. And the air was suddenly sharp with the odor of burned insulation.
What was he up to?
I ran forward. The space pirate met me at the narrow entrance to the cuddy, his tube alertly leveled. His dark, one-eyed face surveyed me unscrutably.
“What are you doing?” I demanded. His great shaggy head shook solemnly.
“Now, Kane, I think we can both put up our guns.” The heavy rumble of his voice was oddly calm. “You see, I was afraid your sense of duty would lead to difficulty. So I destroyed the auto-pilot. With only the jollybar, neither of us would get to Titan alone—and I think neither of us wants to turn back.”
I lowered my weapon. That was true. And I couldn’t help an unwilling admiration for the outlaw’s deliberate efficiency, a real gratitude for the fact that it was the robot-pilot he had destroyed, and not me.
“You win, Killahin,” I told him. “And you did it very neatly.”
“Thank you.” His dark face was expressionless. “And now, with your permission, Captain, I’ll get some real sleep.”
The space shell was already spinning off her course. I moved swiftly past him to snatch the loosely flapping jollybar and pull the green circle on the astrogator-dial back upon the red dot of our destination.
Standing wearily over the control board, quivering now with reaction, I kept the red dot centered. There would be four long weeks of that, out to Titan. And there could be no turning back, even if I got the better of Killahin, because that little brown package of serum in the express hold must not be delayed.
The pirate answered my call four hours later with a booming readiness that made me doubt that he had been sleeping. Before I crawled into my own bunk, I took the liberty of searching his. I wanted to know what message Jon Trevor might be sending Elida Lane.
The thick wallet was gone. But under the pillow I did find a worn clipping of paper that must have slipped out of it. In my own bunk, I carefully spread out its ragged folds. Nothing about Elida. But still I caught my breath as I read.
ONE MILLION DOLLARS’ REWARD!
The Pan-Planetary Museum of New York, Earth, hereby announces the above sum to be paid for the living body of the entity known as “Susie-Q.”
Allegedly, this astounding being was created through mutation of a life cell in a bulb of Lilium tigrinum, under the radiations of the Kappa Space. Known only through the evidence in the case of The System vs. Trevor, it is believed to manifest not only specific and phyletic but fundamental differences to any form of planetary life heretofore observed, and is therefore thought to be of unique scientific value.
This anomalous entity is believed to be aboard the derelict space shell Kingbird, last seen drifting in the suspected vicinity of the Kappa Space. All searchers are warned to exercise the utmost caution in any approach to it, for the nature and the evolving powers of it are beyond prediction.
(Signed) Alpheus Crayle, Curator.
I had seen that notice before, but I had never tried to find the thing known as Susie-Q. No sane space-man would willingly have entered the Hole, not for ten millions. And few who had followed Jon Trevor’s trial would have touched the “entity” for even twice that.
Every fantastically amazing detail of the case had been repeated a thousand times, in the Jollybird Tavern.
THREE years ago, to sum up the facts, Jon Trevor had taken off for Saturn with the Kingbird. His copilot was a thin sallow youth named Sydlow Hawl—a man obsessed, as it proved, with an overwhelming dread of the cold, dark, empty millions of miles between the planets. They never got to Jado Station.
A rocket captain found the wrecked jeep, drifting far inside Jupiter’s orbit. Trevor was insensible with the rogo-weed. Sydlow Hawl was sprawled in the cuddy, stabbed in the heart with a knife from the galley. And there was this thing, the incredible being born of a lily’s cells—Susie-Q.
Abandoning their rosy thoughts of salvage, the terrified officers retreated with the corpse and Trevor. The natural presumption was that the two had quarreled; that Trevor had stabbed Hawl and then attempted suicide. Anyhow, it was upon that charge of murder, preferred by the rocket captain, that Trevor was tried.
It was the dead co-pilot’s diary—a strange, horror-ridden document—that convicted Trevor. It left no doubt that they had quarreled.
Their first difficulty came over a potted tiger lily that Trevor had smuggled past the ICC inspectors. He meant it for a gift to the girl he loved, red-haired Elida Lane, out at Jado Station. Safely out in space, he unwrapped it from his radiation-cloak, and set it under a lamp in the cuddy.
“I felt it my duty to protest,” Hawl wrote in his diary. “I quoted to Captain Trevor that section of the ICC Code which prohibits the unauthorized transportation, from any planetary body to any other, of any seed, seedling, plant, shrub, bulb, spore, fungus, bacterium, tissue culture, life germ, egg, animal, virus, or any other living or semi-living thing.’ He merely laughed. But I feel that no good can come of his disregard of law.”
The next rift came when the Kingbird passed across the edge of the Hole. Hawl describes the flaming eldritch radiations and the hurtling meteoric matter of the Kappa Space, his nausea and terror as the jeep spun almost helpless through it, his shaken relief when Trevor’s skill brought them out of danger.
“Trevor is to blame for this disaster,” he wrote. “In his haste to see his girl at Jado Station, he is driving the jeep too hard. He ignored the Clauson detector. His lack of caution will get us yet, I fear, into grave difficulty.” Their final quarrel, however, resulted from a series of almost incredible happenings—events that the court would certainly have refused to accept as fact, but for the combined testimony of the diary, the rescue rocket officers, and Jon Trevor himself.
A dozen entries record the amazing observations of the doomed co-pilot; his reactions of increasing wonder, incredulity, and terror; and the ever-mounting tension of his conflict with Trevor.
“Captain Trevor’s lily seems to be dead, since we escaped the Hole,” he wrote. “The radiations burned it. The leaves died, and the bulb itself shriveled. But Trevor keeps it under the photon tube and now it’s growing again—growing much too fast. And the pale new leaves are not those of a lily.”
AGAIN, he wrote:
“I have begged Trevor to destroy the thing that was a lily. Something happened to it, in the Kappa Space. It is alive—but like no living thing that ever was. The pale shining tendrils of it move! Today I saw them clinging caressingly to Trevor’s hand when he watered the thing. They recoiled from me when I tried to touch them. I feel that this monstrosity of life must be destroyed. But Trevor only laughs at me.”
A subsequent entry:
“Today I noted a more serious incident—one which heightens my conviction that Trevor’s strange pet must be done away with before it kills us both. Trevor talks to it when he feeds it. He calls it Susie-Q. And its queer bright tendrils brush his hands, as if affectionately. But today I found them coiled around the lead wires of the photon tube. The tube was dim, and the meters showed that it was drawing two thousand watts, instead of twenty. The damned thing is sucking the power out of our batteries—that’s how it grows and changes so fast! I begged Trevor to kill it. ‘Better make friends with Susie-Q,’ he told me. ‘She knows you don’t like her.’ Is Trevor going mad? Or am I?”
And then the last entry:
“Trevor still hopes to preserve this fearful entity. He says he hopes to exhibit Susie-Q on Earth. He won’t listen to me. But I know that his folly can lead only to death.
“Today I attempted to kill the thing myself. While Trevor was sleeping, I got a bottle of powerful antiseptic from the medicine cabinet. But the entity has already an uncanny sentience and a terrible strength. When I approached it, the glowing tentacles whipped the bottle out of my hand. It was shattered on the floor, the flesh on my fingers cut to the bone.
