Collected short fiction, p.469
Collected Short Fiction, page 469
Staggering wealth—but Rick, rather to his own surprise, didn’t feel staggered at all. He had accepted the common idea that sudden millions brought a crazed intoxication. But now he found himself sober and calm, grave with new responsibility, strong with new confidence.
In this victorious moment, it seemed to Rick, he was really growing up. He had been torn between two conflicting worlds, at home in neither of them. But now they both were ended, it came to him; and he was helping build a new world on their ruins.
For these diamonds would be the key to unlock contraterrene matter. They would pay the taxes on Freedonia and buy equipment for the seetee shop. If shrewdly spent they might even purchase immunity from the Mandate government—Rick had begun to consider himself a political realist.
He glanced at the timepiece at his wrist and felt a little startled to see that midnight had passed. Already it was April 2nd. They had only eight days left to get back to Pallasport, and sell diamonds enough to save Freedonia. Time enough—but none to spare.
With a cautious eye to spaceward he scraped the last dusty diamonds from their womb of iron and tied them in the last sack. He hastily dismounted the drill and towed it back across the night face of the rock toward the hidden ship.
In the wan starlight it seemed just as he had left it. The air lock was still open. He got the drill back aboard and slid gratefully out of his stiff, confining armor. It was good to feel the ship’s paragravity again. The normal air pressure eased a dull discomfort in his middle. He was ravenously hungry.
“Cap’n Rob!” His eager voice pealed up the ladder well. “I’ve got the diamonds—kilograms of them! We can take right off. We’ll be back to Pallas in plenty of time—”
The stillness was suddenly ominous. Alarm sank cold talons into his throat. Clutching the three precious little bags by the strings, he clambered apprehensively up the narrow ladder shaft.
They were waiting for him in the wardroom.
VIII.
They had made the silence. One stood behind the table, and one was on his knees, and one stood in the galley door. Their big automatic guns all were pointing at the ladder, ready for him. Dazed and stupid, Rick spelled out the white-stenciled legend across the breast of a black steel suit, HIGH SPACE GUARD.
“H’lo, Drake.” The slurred brisk voice of Captain Anders came out of Rob McGee’s silent cabin. “Wise you not to make any fuss—my men will shoot to kill. Just stand where you are and let me see your diamonds.”
Rick Drake had always enjoyed a fight. There was elation and escape in the hard game of swiftly traded blows. Now he caught his breath and crouched and weighed the diamonds for a club. But he saw he had no chance before those ready guns and he let the voice of Anders stop him:
“I wouldn’t, Drake—they’ll cut you to cat meat.” He let his arm relax and whispered to a sudden fear:
“Captain McGee . . . what have you done to him?”
“ ‘Sleep,” said the cool and careless voice of Anders. “We didn’t want to take the chance that he would warn you, so I gave him twenty milligrams of ametine. He’ll wake up soon enough.”
“He was already ill!” Rick flared. “You shouldn’t have—”
Impulsively, he thrust toward the tall, black-armored giant in the doorway, but Anders stopped him with the quiet gesture of a gun—and Rick saw that it was McGee’s old space pistol.
“Keep your head,” Anders warned. “There’s nothing you can do. Leroux, take his bags.”
The kneeling man rose alertly and snatched the three small bags from his fingers. Anders untied one of them and lifted out a handful of black dust and frozen light. In the frame of the black helmet his handsome face went stiff with awe.
“Kilograms of diamonds,” he whispered. “Millions—so that was your game!”
A covert glance told Rick that the man behind the table and the man in the galley doorway still had their eyes and their guns upon him. Anyhow, he warned himself bitterly, he couldn’t fight—that would only turn suspicion into certainty.
“But they’re mine.” His helpless eyes followed the diamonds, and his protesting voice came hoarse and flat. “McGee’s and mine. You can see our claim notice on the cliff where I dug them out. You’ve no right to take them.”
“We don’t intend to rob you.” Anders tied the bag and returned it to Leroux. “But you landed here in violation of an established military sphere and I expect to develop more serious charges against you—if I can prove the connection I suspect between you and the stolen cruiser that attacked us.”
He swayed ominously forward, a towering robot of black-painted steel. Rick gulped to protest, but he found no voice.
“I’m placing you under arrest,” the Earthman went on. “The courts can settle the ownership of these diamonds—and you may need them to pay your fines for treason before you go to Pallas IV. Meantime, I’m going to hold them as evidence of your activities here.”
Rick’s brown fists balled impotently.
“We’d nothing to do with that other ship,” he bitterly insisted. “We’re not guilty of any treason. I knew you had declared a military sphere—but your cruiser had been gone for more than twenty-four hours before we landed, and we assumed that it was void.”
“And so it would have been.” Anders turned sarcastic. “That story will save your diamonds if you can convince the judges.” His sardonic brows arched. “But it’s not six hours since we shelled your allies here.”
Stunned, Rick could only shake his head.
“Now think up something for the judges.” The Earthman’s voice was biting. “I’ll leave these men aboard to see you back to Pallasport. You and McGee will be confined to your quarters—”
The hollow clang of the air lock sounded up the ladder well, interrupting him. Another guardsman in black armor came clawing up the rungs in frantic haste. He slammed his face plate up.
“Captain Anders!” He was breathless, obviously frightened. “Commander Hauptman sent me, sir. It’s that enemy cruiser, sir—coming back! They’re calling on the photophone again—in that same language that ain’t quite human! Commander Hauptman wants to know, sir—”
Even at that tense and bitter moment Rick had time to feel a grudging admiration for Captain Anders. For the schooling of aristocratic generations didn’t fail him. He met this new emergency with instant hard decision.
“We must get back at once.” His steel eyes flickered at Rick. “You are still under arrest, but I’ll leave you to look after McGee.” A black and resolute automaton, he rapped curt orders at his men: “Disable this ship. Denvers, cut the photophone. Chiang, smash the engine.”
“Please!” Rick protested desperately. “There’s no need for that—”
“Leroux, take the diamonds.” Anders wasn’t listening. “Have the warrant officer lock them in the safe and bring a receipt to me.”
“Aye, sir!” The guardsman snatched the three precious bags and dropped down the ladder well. Another mounted into the pilothouse and dropped back with the photophone receiver and a length of cut wire. Rick shuddered to the brittle smash from the engine room, Anders was the last to leave.
“S’long, Drake.” He waved McGee’s old revolver in a mocking little gesture of farewell. But don’t go ’way.”
He stepped into the shaft. Below, he didn’t wait to use the economy pump. Rick heard a double clang and knew that he and McGee were left alone upon the murdered ship.
Shaking away the daze of disaster, Rick stumbled into the silent cabin. There had been no struggle, for the fussy array of pipes and cleaners and humidors was undisturbed. Under the blankets, McGee lay gray and still.
The ship was ghastly quiet. The terrible fear shook Rick that Rob McGee was dead. For he lay utterly still. His hands were stiff and cold. He had no pulse that Rick could find.
Ametine—Rick groped through his sketchy knowledge of spatial medicine. That powerful drug, he knew, slowed metabolism vastly. The survivors in wrecks at space often took it as a last resort to stop the agony of asphyxiation and stretch their dwindling oxygen. It had saved many lives, but an overdose could kill.
He ran back to the emergency cabinet in the wardroom wall and found a stethoscope. It brought the faint slow flutter of McGee’s heart—only sixteen beats a minute.
“Well, Cap’n Rob, that gives you a fair chance to wake up.” In his uneasy relief, Rick spoke half aloud. “Now I’m going out to see what that mysterious enemy does to Anders—because, if anything happens to him, we’re left in a pretty bad spot.”
The wan sleeper didn’t move.
Rick went heavily down the ladder well. One glance, as he passed the engine room, showed him that the brittle refractory shell of the separator-manifold had been smashed beyond repair.
“No, Anders,” he muttered bitterly, “we won’t go ’way!”
He thrust his tired limbs back into the cramping stiffness of the armor, sealed it, started the air unit and pushed wearily out through the air lock. Anders and his men were gone beyond the near starlit horizon. He launched out upon a cautious search for their cruiser.
Drugged with shock and fatigue, Rick had to fight a sense of baffled defeat. The perplexing riddles of the runaway asteroid had come to seem a fantastic, deadly web. The rock rewarded every human effort, he thought, with inexplicable frustration.
He had little hope of ever recovering the diamonds. Anders himself seemed honest enough—genuinely convinced that he was implicated in some treasonable cabal—but Rick knew that such a tempting prize would never escape the clutches of the Mandate bureaucrats.
Now, however, the stake was more than diamonds.
His mind sorted bits of the puzzle in desperate search for a common denominator. That novalike flash that turned a contraterrene rock into this one. That photophone call that Rob McGee hadn’t made, with its hint of a fortune waiting here—the diamonds, of course!
But what of the eighteen injured men? The enemy cruiser? The not-quite-human voices? What had caused the Guard cruiser to vanish and return—when Anders didn’t seem aware that it had been gone at all?
Rick wanted the answers desperately—because he thought they should demolish the suspicion of Anders, and recover the diamonds, and end the threat of the prison rock. But he couldn’t find them.
Soaring high over the night side of the rock, he searched for the cruiser’s shape by starlight. He failed to discover it. Dropping lower, he approached the Sunward face, darting cautiously from shadow to shadow. At last, hovering behind a jagged point of iron, he found the cruiser.
Beyond the peak that hid him lay a shallow hollow. The ship stood tall and black on the tiny plain of yellow clay. He glimpsed an armored man just disappearing into the air lock in its stern, the last of the crew returning aboard.
The photophone light above the tapered nose was pointed into space but he could see the flicker against its rim. The cells in his helmet picked up, faintly, a voice with a harsh Martian accent—that would be Commander Hauptman.
“Cruiser at space, identify yourself!” The voice was tight and blustering. “Our range finders can follow you in spite of your shadow paint. If you can understand English, answer—”
Rick lost that harsh, uneasy voice as his eyes followed the direction of the pointing light into space. The peak beside him hid the Sun; the dazzle of the landscape faded from his eyes and he could see the stars. But he found no flicker of an answering photophone. Instead, he saw a yellow-red flare—the flash of spatial guns.
The cruiser’s officers must have seen it, too, at their periscopes. For the photophone went abruptly dark, and the vessel lurched spaceward in a hurried take-off. Its ground gear must have lifted a dozen meters above the ocher clay before the shells arrived.
A hit! He saw the instant eruption of fire and debris from the ugly pointed snout, and the ship was battered back against the rock. Then the hollow became a fantastic inferno of dust and smoke and lurid flame.
Rick lay flat behind the ledge of iron to protect himself from flying splinters. Unchecked by air or gravity, the cloud of dust and expanding vapor made a thin pale veil across the stars. He could feel the shuddering of the iron, but there was no sound.
He had thought he was out of danger. But the last salvo from space went oddly wild, so that one shell burst far behind him. Splinters thudded against his armor. He listened for the deadly hiss of escaping air, but the tough steel had held.
Now the flash of guns had ceased in space, but Rick saw the fitful gleam of a ship’s photophone. He caught it in his helmet receiver—and shivered to its strangeness for it was that same unintelligible and scarcely human voice that he had heard before.
He crept back to where he could see the Guard cruiser. Amid deep shell craters in the yellow clay it lay battered and helpless on its side. At least three direct hits had pierced the black hull. Air escaping from an ugly hole amidships still made a frosty, dissipating mist. One turret blister was crushed underneath; but the other moved, as he watched, to fire two defiant shots into space.
Rick retreated again, expecting the enemy to reply. No shots came, but he lay motionless for a long time in the flowing shadow of the iron peak. He was afraid to move again, cold with a dread that the unknown enemy would discover him when they came to examine their unwarned victim.
But the enemy didn’t come. The photophone light went out and the unknown attacker was lost in the black of space. At last, when the concealing night had flowed over the wrecked Guard cruiser in the hollow, Rick slipped down to it.
His hopes fell as he inspected the damage by white starlight. The bow compartment was caved in. A shell had penetrated amidships, exploding inside the engine room. Another hit, near the stern, had wrecked the air lock so that it seemed impossible to get aboard. But the ship was obviously crippled beyond repair—as completely disabled as the Good-by Jane.
It was difficult to hope that any of the crew survived. But he knew that men had lived to fire those two final shots. He found a loose steel bar in the twisted wreckage of the ground gear, and began tapping desperate signals in the Interplanet code.
Empty space carries no sound. He pressed his helmet against the black steel to listen for an answer. When none came he thought that he and Rob McGee were the last men living on the rock—and doomed themselves to slow asphyxiation as the strange runaway carried them four million kilometers a day into the interstellar abyss.
At last, however, near the battered stern, he heard a feeble tapping, spelling slow words: “Who are you?”
“Drake.” That brought no immediate reply and Rick added thoughtfully: “I know nothing about attacker. Enemy has gone. You know McGee and I unarmed, helpless. Can we help each other?”
An answer came at last, the taps slower and more faint:
“No provocation for attack. Can’t understand—if you are innocent—pardon. Eighteen men alive, but air equipment wrecked. All taking ametine to await relief. Signal aid if possible. Anders.”
Rick tapped back: “If I can repair photo phone.”
That brought no reply. He heard no other sound from within the ship. Anders had fallen with the last of his men, Rick supposed, into drugged pseudodeath. He knew that the sleep of ametine would postpone their death from oxygen thirst, perhaps for many days.
Rick returned to the Good-by Jane. He found Rob McGee unmoved. Hopefully he climbed into the pilothouse to see if the photophone could be repaired. It couldn’t—for the guardsman had carried away the receiver and there was no extra.
Dull with exhaustion and defeat, Rick went down again to McGee’s silent cabin. The grayfaced spaceman lay appallingly cold and still but the stethoscope found his pulse again—now risen to twenty beats a minute.
“Well, Cap’n Rob, you aren’t missing much.” Rick tried to grin, but he couldn’t shake off the burden of inexplicable disaster. “Anders grounded the Jane, and now our mysterious friends have grounded him.”
He kept on talking for his voice seemed to push that dead silence back.
“So we’re both marooned. Anders has got our photophone receiver aboard the wreck, along with our bags of diamonds. We can’t signal and we can’t get away.” He groped resolutely for the one hope left. “But the Guard will surely send out a relief ship when they don’t hear from Anders in—”
He caught his breath and anxiously stooped. For McGee’s eyelids had flickered. The gray, square face furrowed with a slow agony of effort. Shining sweat misted the forehead. At last the squinted eyes came open. Dilated to the whites, they were black wells of desperate mute purpose.
“It’s all right, Cap’n Rob.” Rick could feel his terror, like a ghastly presence, and he tried to reassure him. “Anders won’t cause us any more trouble. The cruiser’s crippled and he has taken ametine with all his men.”
But McGee still fought desperately to speak.
“Take it easy, Cap’n Rob,” Rick urged him cheerfully. “All we’ve got to do is wait. I’m going to keep awake in case anybody comes near enough to pick up my helmet photophone. But maybe you had better take another shot of ametine. Because we’ll have to shut down the peegee field to save the batteries. They’ll run the air machine for another week or so. But then things will be a little dreary. You’re better off asleep.”
But McGee’s yellow head shook in the pillow in feeble slow motion. He drew a long, rasping breath. His wet gray face creased with a frown of desperate effort. And Rick knelt beside the berth to listen.
“Don’t . . . don’t wait.” Out of that drugged abyss his whisper came thin and labored and queerly slow. “For help—won’t come. Now I understand—everything. Too weak—to explain. But no help—is possible. And enemy—won’t—come back. You must—get us off—yourself, Rick. Try to rescue—Anders. Save the men. But get away—before . . . before April 10th. Because the rock—is going—to collide.”
The whisper was slower, now, and scarcely audible. But Rick had dismissed the idea that McGee might be out of his head for those tortured words somehow carried a terrible, sane conviction.
