Collected short fiction, p.536
Collected Short Fiction, page 536
XIX
Five hours later, beyond the swarms of contraterrene drift and the wheeling spatial mines, Jenkins dropped toward the jagged iron cube of airless Freedonia. A tired triumph possessed him, for the human barriers lay conquered behind. Ahead were only engineering problems, and he was trained to cope with them.
“We’ve won—almost!” he whispered to the quiet girl near him, in the gray-walled pilot house. “With any luck at all, the Brand transmitter will be running, before . . .
before that Mandate fleet can stop us.”
He had nearly said before he died, but he checked himself in time. Jane Hardin didn’t reply. He turned quickly from the hooded instruments, wondering at her silence, and found no reflection of his triumph in her veiled, watchful eyes. She stood frowning at him, with a perplexing air of troubled disappointment.
He wanted to ask her what the matter was, but he lacked little Rob McGee’s uncanny perception of the movements of matter in space and time. The business of landing demanded all his attention. Anyhow, he tried to assure himself, she had aided him enough to prove her loyalty to the Fifth Freedom.
Beneath the descending craft, the, cragged planetoid rolled slowly against star-frosted spatial night. Jenkins searched its sharp-edged fracture planes with anxious eyes, and felt a vast relief.
For nothing moved.
Nothing had changed. No men, he thought, could have been here to disturb the unfinished equipment. For the lonely rock, guarded by the drift and the mines, was now also defended by radiations from rock and metal that the seetee shot had poisoned. The geiger on his wrist began purring a new warning as he brought the tug down at the dock above the shop.
He turned to the girl, sharply concerned.
“I’ll unload the metal as fast as I can,” he promised her. “Then you may take the ship back out away from these rays, to wait for me to get the transmitter going.”
“I could help,” she suggested quickly. “I’m a fair mechanic.”
He shook his head, puzzled by that offer—for he was suddenly certain that she didn’t really want to help. And the reason she didn’t, the conviction seized him, was something more than any fear of radioactive isotopes.
“This job needs more than a fair mechanic,” he hold her softly. “I’ll be working the condulloy on special automatic tools that are already set for it, and installing the coils and castings on machines that are half seetee. I’m afraid you couldn’t help—and you’ve already been exposed to too much radiation.”
“Then I’ll wait,” she promised quietly.
The stark suspicion caught him, then, that she didn’t mean to wait. She had risked her life and her youthful loveliness to support him—or sacrificed them already, the chances were, to the slow poison of penetrating rays. He wanted urgently to like and trust her. But he couldn’t.
The stakes were too great. Her manner was too aloof and alert. He couldn’t shake off the feeling that she still was playing a deadly game—fighting, with all her nerve and skill, for some goal so vast that she would toss health or life away to gain it, without a second’s indecision.
A well man marooned on this radiant rock could scarcely hope to survive until aid could reach him. She would know that, he reflected—even if she didn’t suspect that he was already within a few days of death.
“The nearest spatial mines are set in circular orbits a hundred kilometers out,” he warned her gently. “They all have proximity detonators. Better stay twenty kilometers inside the shell.”
She merely nodded, her blue eves narrowed warily.
He left her in the pilot house, after she had showed him a somewhat surprising competency in astrogation, and he went down to climb into his stiff dirigible armor. An inner valve sealed off the lower hold, and a special pump sucked the air from around the stacked ingots of condulloy—for terrene air wasn’t wanted on Freedonia.
He opened the lower lock, when the hold was evacuated, and dragged the segmented aluminum serpent of a paragravity carrier tube aboard, to swallow the heavy ingots and move them to the furnaces. When he had retracted the tube again and closed the valves, he called to the girl on his helmet photophone:
“Stand off, now. to fifty kilometers. I’ll call you when the transmitter is ready to run.”
The big lamp swung and flickered above the square stubby nose of the tug, and he heard her quiet voice.
“I’ll be waiting, Nick.”
But that was all. The taut hush of her tone reflected none of his own breathless eagerness to open the gates to a new kind of civilization, but rather the desperation of near defeat. With no word to wish him success with all the difficult tasks yet before him, she snapped off the light and took the tug aloft.
Jenkins went to work.
The powered armor lifted him again, and dropped him into the dark chasm of riven iron that concealed the entrance to the shops. The automatic machine tools there were already adjusted, to heat and draw and wind and anneal the wire, to pour the castings, to mill and polish the transmitter elements. But machines need overseeing. He read dials and changed settings—and watched the white precious metal flow into finished coils and machinings.
Working, he lost the count of time.
Fatigue grew in him, and became a creeping illness. For that dark and dreadful plant within his flesh was coming at last into bloom. Fever parched him. Cold sweat turned his body clammy in the armor. Sickness drained away his strength. Giddy nausea overwhelmed him.
He vomited. Too ill to adjust the plastic container in the armor, he spattered the inside of the helmet and had to fumble his way, half-blinded, to the abandoned living tunnel. Washing up there, he saw himself in a mirror and gasped with a shaken unbelief.
For his hair was falling out, leaving bald patches on his scalp. His unshaven face was hollowed and thinned, bleak with pain and desperation. Blood oozed steadily down his cheek and chin from a tiny scratch the edge of the helmet had made on his temple. That red stain was the color of death. He knew the little wound would never heal, but he patched it with adhesive tape, and cleaned the helmet, and went back to finish the transmitter.
The generator coils were annealed at last, and he labored to install them. They weighed six tons each, too much for the strength of a dying man to manage. But he was still an engineer. He reset the selective pull of the paragravity unit at the heart of the rock to reduce their weight almost to zero, and then he used the power of his armor to tow them into place.
He fell asleep, despite himself, while the main cables were annealing. Hours later, it must have been, the distress of mounting illness aroused him. Fever was burning him again, and his parched hands were weak and clumsy with the controls of the armor.
Spurred by the dreadful urgency of ripening death, he went to work again, dragging the long thick cables through the conduits ready for them, from the generator to the tower on the iron summit above.
Then there were only the transmitter castings. Three polished machinings of dull gray metal, they seemed to him as massive as planets. Even weightless, they stubbornly resisted every effort to move them, and then, perversely, kept on moving too far. They drank up his ebbing strength and bruised his fingers in the clumsy gloves.
But he towed them into place. He aligned them, with painful care. Groggily, swaying at the task, he tightened the connections and brazed them with condulloy metal. He inspected the assembly, tested all the circuits, and straightened triumphantly in the chafing confinement of his armor.
The Brand transmitter was finished!
He saw red drops spattering the inside of his helmet, and knew his nose had begun to bleed. The first small hemorrhage, of many. He knew it would never stop, but that didn’t seem to matter now. His work was nearly done.
The dirigible armor carried him back to the gloomy cavern that held the reaction chamber. Awkward now in the powered suit, he missed the high control platform. He plunged on past it, fumbling feebly at the control studs, toward the untouchable metal of the upper hemisphere and the red signs that warned: SEETEE—KEEP OFF!
The steel rails of the terrene barrier caught him. His trembling fingers found the studs again, and he alighted at last on the platform. Abruptly ill, he vomited again. Darkness came down upon him, and he thought he was blind.
He lay a long time, merely clinging to the platform rail, until he found that he could see again. Nearly too weak to move the stiff armor, he drew himself erect. He waited for his head to clear, and make meaning come back to the gauges and controls before him. He pressed buttons and pulled switches.
The generator ran.
A green indicator light told him that the Levin-Dahlberg field was functioning. The fuel-milling machines ran silently in that airless space, grinding terrene and seetee rock to dust. Separator coils refined the fuel, and paragravity injectors metered it into the reaction field.
Matter was annihilated there, but Jenkins saw no frightful fire. He heard no ultimate crash. He was not destroyed. For the reaction field contained that raving energy, and converted it into a silent tide of power flowin in the condulloy coils.
Meter needles crept over, as that river of tamed energy flooded higher. They steadied, as full output of the generator built up the power field extending beyond the far sun to the limits of the solar system. They dropped back suddenly, as the full potential was established and automatic relays shut off the flow of fuel.
Swaying over the board, Jenkins pressed one final button. Fever was burning his body. Unquenchable thirst consumed him. He felt the drip of unstaunchable blood from his nose. Illness crushed him down, until only the cruel stiffness of the armor supported him. Yet he clung to consciousness, and tried to listen.
“People of all the planets—”
Those triumphant words came faintly from the speaker in his helmet, spoken in the deep voice of old Jim Drake. A red photophone light was flickering on the board, and his mind could see the powerful automatic photophone and ultrawave beam transmitters above, sweeping every rock and planet in the ecliptic with that recorded announcement, as Freedonia turned.
“The Fifth Freedom has arrived!” Drake’s canned voice proclaimed—for he had planned and toiled against this crucial hour. “Free power is flowing out from our contraterrene plant, and all you who hear can tap the power field with simple tri-polar receptors.
“Receptor voltage is set by the dimensions of the elements, current output limited only by circuit resistance. Specifications are—”
Jenkins vomited again, into the rubber bag beneath his chin. Sweat was clammy on his body, and the vast, untouchable machines beyond the barriers blurred and dimmed. But he tried to listen, and he heard Drake’s recorded voice again.
“. . . benefit all men. But there are men too blind to see the good. There are a few selfish men and women, anxious to preserve their cruel old monopoly of power, who will attempt to stop the Brand transmitter. We beg all common men, everywhere, not to let that happen.”
A pause, and then the tape repeated:
“People of all the planets—”
But Jenkins didn’t try to listen any longer. His small concluding part of the great task was done. In time, he knew, the plant would require maintenance and fuel—but then he wouldn’t be alive.
For a long time he hung there on the high platform, slumped inside the rigid armor. Darkness came down upon him, and once more lifted. The thing that aroused him at last was concern for Jane Hardin.
For she was waiting for him, dim recollection insisted. She was alone on the ray-contaminated tug, and she didn’t know the safe passages through the spatial mines and the seetee drift around Freedonia. If she tried to leave, she would surely be killed.
The image of her came to haunt his sick mind, the lean planes of her face white with some secret tension, her blue eyes strangely watchful and aloof. He didn’t understand her, but she had aided him. Her enigmatic loveliness shouldn’t matter to a dying man, but she had surely earned a kinder reward than death.
With feeble clumsy fingers, he groped again for the control studs of the heavy armor. He soared away from the platform, and lifted once more from the dark fissure that concealed the entrance to the shops.
Emerging into the blackness of the sky, on the night side of the rock, he wondered again if retinal hemorrhage had at last claimed his sight—for he failed to find the riding lights of the Good-by Jane. He was gliding hopefully toward the day side of the planetoid, when the helmet photophone brought him Jane Hardin’s quiet voice:
“. . . problem to discover a safe course through the seetee drift and the spatial mines without a chart. But you’ve heard that automatic broadcast in old Drake’s voice, proclaiming his fantastic Fifth Freedom. You must realize that the Brand transmitter has to be stopped.”
Jenkins sagged in the heavy fabric, stunned, A fit of dry retching came and passed and left him drained of all vitality. Thirst was hot dust in his throat. He tried to doubt what he had heard, but the girl’s level voice throbbed again in his helmet.
“. . . desperate situation. Personally, I’m ready to face any risks necessary, to stop that machine. I suggest that the Mandate fleet be ordered to stand outside the swarms of drift, and bombard Freedonia with fission missiles. One hit on the seetee machinery ought to be enough to end this sort of mischief for another century or so. If the high commissioners agree, I’ll stand by to report the hits. How’s that?”
There was silence for a while, because he couldn’t overhear the other half of the conversation. Stunned by the girl’s duplicity, he wondered vaguely who could be at the other end of the beam.
“No, I haven’t.” Her taut voice came back at last, oddly regretful. “I haven’t seen him since I left him on the rock, two and a half days ago. I suppose he’ll have to die, along with his mad notion of a Fifth Freedom. Perhaps he’d rather have it that way.”
Such staggering treachery was as incomprehensible as Jane Hardin’s aid has been. Jenkins had mastered the final technical problem, but such human difficulties were too much to master. A giddy faintness came over him, and his sore belly muscles contracted weakly against the emptiness in him. His fingers slipped away from the studs. He drifted in the armor, lost in the spatial chasm, waiting to die.
XX
Jane Hardin’s brittle voice aroused him, calling sharply:
“Nick! Nick Jenkins—can you hear me?”
He didn’t answer, for he hated the girl. He lay faint and ill, floating in the heavy armor through caves of purple darkness, beaten and hopeless and eager to die.
“Are you hurt, Nick?” Her urgent words echoed insistently in the helmet, and he became slowly aware that he was not yet completely blind. For the sun-struck redness of the stubby tug was drifting close beside him, its photophone beam trembling to the girl’s voice.
Still he didn’t try to answer.
“Nick!” she called again. “I know you’re alive—I picked up your helmet light, and I could hear yo’u gasping. Please try to get to the valves. I don’t know how to use this armor, but I want to help you, Nick.”
Drifting, too ill to move, he asked bitterly:
“Has your spatial bombardment started yet?”
His voice was a husky croaking. His throat felt sore. He spat feebly against the helmet, and saw the color of blood. The dark roots of dissolution were spreading in him.
“Not yet,” she told him. “Perhaps we can still get outside the mine shell in time, if you can show me the way. But the Mandate commissioners issued the order, and your uncle says the fleet is on the way from Obania.”
What had she to do with Martin Brand, since she had quit her job with Seetee? Or had she really quit? His sick mind phrased the questions, but he felt too ill to ask them. lie caught the hush of pity in the girl’s voice.
“I’m sorry, Nick.”
“Sorry?” He tried to laugh, and hurt his raw throat. “Why?”
“I really am,” her quiet voice throbbed. “And please try to get aboard, Nick. I know you’re hurt—I can see the blood inside your helmet—and I really want to help you. Please—before the bombardment starts. When you know why I’m against your impractical schemes, perhaps you can forgive me.”
“I don’t think so!”
But the thirst was upon him again, hot torture in his throat. His limbs ached and throbbed in rebellion against long confinement in the cramping armor. A ruthless hatred burned in him, against this girl and the stubborn blindness of all mankind.
But he didn’t want to die alone. His numb and swollen fingers found the studs, to drive the armor awkwardly to the tug. He opened the outer valve and dragged himself aboard and somehow closed the massive door behind him. Air sighed in at last, and he must have unlocked the inner valve for Jane Hardin came to him.
The sight and odor of him turned her pale, but she resolutely helped lift the helmet, helped him out of the armor. He saw her swallow hard, as if trying not to be ill. Staring at him with eyes grown darkly violet, she whispered huskily:
“What’s the matter, Nick?”
“Seetee shock.” He swallowed at the pain in his raw throat. “I got it when the others did.”
“You knew?” she breathed. “All the time?”
He nodded groggily, trying hard to hate her.
“Why did you help me,” he croaked at her, “if you meant to turn against me?”
“I’ll tell you, Nick.” Her voice seemed husky with concern. “But right now you need medical attention. We must get you back to Worringer.”
“Why bother?”
“Please, Nick!” He was swaying drunkenly with the fevered weakness in him, and she caught his arm to help him. “I’ll explain my side. The right side, I think. But first we must get you to Obania—if you can show me how to get out through those mines.”
He glared at her with a drunken hostility.
“So you can show the fleet how to get in?”
