The Man Who Staked the Stars
Page 12
figure dropped out of sight in the corridor.
* * * * *
In the flick of time that Bryce's eyes had been away from the fallingone, the path of the man's leap had begun to curve strangely, untilnow he seemed to be floating in a curve, flying sidewise and upward,faster and faster as he approached the hull. The rule of conservationof momentum was having its way. To the man's dizzied eyes, as he triedto keep Bryce within his sights long enough to fire, it must haveseemed that the ground began inexplicably to turn and slide by, thatsuddenly the whole shell was turning around him like a big wheel,carrying his target up the wall and over his head.
He was almost to the sliding ground when a bush caught at his feet andyanked them from under him with a crackling of branches, and thebottom tread of a flight of stairs swung at his head like a giganticclub. Among the sudden splintering of branches and snapping of vineswas a crunching thud which sounded final.
To anyone within a globe, it did not ordinarily appear to be spinning,the only sign it was, was the comfortable pseudo-gravity for anyonestanding on hull level. But to those who approached the ground fromthe lighter G corridor, the stairs were necessary--stairs whose treadswere oddly dipped in the middle in a shallow U. By bracing against oneside of the U coming down, and on the other going up, one invisiblypicked up enough speed to match the speed of the ground level. Jumpingwas the equivalent of jumping out of a moving car at forty feet asecond, the sixteen feet a second, half of the corridor plus an extrathirty feet a second spin, the side slip speed of an eighteen footdrop where it had looked like five.
It was probably these added extra distances in the air, Bryce decided,that sometimes made the bird flights look so bewilderingly variable inspeed and direction. He had not thought before how difficult it wouldbe to plot a straight course from one side of the globe to the other.
He waited for a sign of motion, his magnomatic ready, looking up atthe gunman lying overhead, forty feet away on the other side of theglobe. The limp figure was unmoving, it looked badly tangled in vines,and its gun was gone. There was no need to shoot, but he wonderedsuddenly, if he had, what kind of a curve would the bullet havefollowed?
There was no sound from the other, but Bryce hesitated to climb thestairs and put his head above floor level of the corridor. A voicemight give the other direction for a snap shot if that was what he waswaiting for. Bryce chanced speaking.
"I've got this one, Pierce. How's the other?"
The televiewer in the entrance hall replied, "Lying on his back withhis gun five feet away. You all right?"
"Yes." Bryce walked around the circumference of the globe and searchedin the vines for the missing weapon of number one. The body in thespacesuit nearby was quite definitely a corpse. He saw the gunglittering a little further on and picked it up, wiping off leaf pulpon a clean patch of moss. It was a heavy duty police pacifier, adistance stunner, adjusted to a narrow beam.
He climbed to the corridor and collected the other weapon. It was apolice pacifier too. They had not meant direct murder then, but onlyto stun him and deliver him to Orillo, C. O. D.
"How are you doing with their ship?" Bryce asked, "Is it armed?"Armament for spaceships was illegal, and careful official inspectionmade it rare.
"I didn't wait to see," Pierce's voice came apologetically after apause in which some background noise sounding like a crash came overthe televiewer speaker. "It started swinging around when I came insight, so I just rammed it with that pretty ornamental nose spike. I'mbacking off now with the forward braking jets."
"Then whoever's inside is probably either spacefrozen or cooked.Jockey that ship around on the spike and give her a four minute shovetoward Earth, then push that button that collapses the ornamentalvanes on the spike and let it pull loose when you start braking. Idon't want any ship hulks floating around here."
"Aye-aye, Cap."
"Go slow on those braking jets when you pull loose. The back washcould touch your hull."
Pierce returned and came in to help Bryce drag the corpses through theairlock and into space.
They braced against the silver curve of the floating spaceship andgave the body a combined strong shove towards Earth. Spinning slowlyend over end it dwindled into a dark speck against the glowing orb ofEarth, destined to be a meteorite and make a small bright streak inthe Earth sky several days later.
_When the tubes conk out, the fuel runs down, The cold creeps in to where I lie._
Pierce was reciting as they went back into the globe for the secondcorpse.
_I'll take the meteor's trail--go home to Earth And make a Viking's funeral in the sky._
"This is too easy," Bryce complained as they watched the second corpsefade from sight. "The trouble is, in space all corpses are delicti.It's an incentive. Launch your enemies."
"Gaucho country did all right under that system," Pierce saidsomberly, "and so did the American frontier." He floated motionless, aspacesuited figure turned toward the gray-green misted globe of Earththat shone against the black star-sprinkled sky as if he could havereached out and touched it. The sun caught the planet on its dayhemisphere and reflected brilliantly from a shadowy blue glaze ofwater that was the Mediterranean, turning half of it to white fire.
Bryce's earphones picked up Pierce's voice again. "Frontier-bornnations always look back and say that the first years were the best."
The words caught at something Bryce had felt before. He looked atEarth hanging splendidly in space. It was beautiful and he was fond ofit, but--He said, "I don't think we'll ever go back." Nor wouldmankind itself. Never again--through all conquests from this point intime--would mankind go back down into the mesh of gravity to be a thinfilm over the surface of a planet.
"Give old Earth a smile, Bryce, we've hatched."
For a moment longer Bryce hung, watching Earth turning below. Themanagement of UT was down there. He'd be damned if he'd let them getaway with thinking they could tell him what to do, or tell the Beltwhere a line should be extended and a colony planted. The belt was hiscountry, not theirs. Space belonged to the people who lived in it.
"No taxation without representation," Pierce said irrelevantly, as ifhe had been reading Bryce's thoughts. They jetted back to the ship andinto the spacelock.
"Frontier country--" Bryce said as he stepped into the cubical of therevolving door. Gently tightening elastic bands drew him into positionwithin the man-shaped mold. "What's a frontier on your terms, Roy?"When he was in place the other half of the rubbery, air-excluding moldclosed on him and the airtight cylinder rotated, delivering him intothe interior of the ship. He pushed the button impatiently to have itrevolve back for Pierce, but it remained obstinately open, its servorefusing to close on a mold full of air and rotate air back forrelease into space.
Bryce remembered then. This was something he didn't have to botherwith when he flew alone, for when going in or out he was always in thedoor when it rotated; it never turned empty. Beside the door on a hookhung an inflated pressure suit, complete with gloves, boots, andhelmet. Except for the absence of any sign of a head or face insidethe dark translucence of the helmet it looked like a full-sized man.Bryce reached it down and placed it in the mold, and watched grinningas the mold closed and the door rotated, delivering the man-form to anequivalent hook in the spacelock. The doll was known by all spacemenas Hector Dimwitty, and every ship had one or two. There were athousand yarns and jokes circulating about the adventures of theHectors, most of them lewd, and a few of them true.
Pierce's answer was in his earphones, "A frontier is where people gowhen they are young, broke, or have the cops after them."
"Right. Suppose I stake the broke, and loan them transport, and offerthe fugitives unregistered safety to receive mail and to buysupplies?"
"You do that?" Pierce stepped out of the door and they took off theirhelmets.
"Yes, when I am my own man, not working for UT."
"If you do that, you bring in ten times as many of the broke whowanted t
o settle there, and--" Pierce took a long jump inunderstanding, saying softly, "They're dependent on you. Handcuffed toyou and praying for your health and prosperity as long as you holdtheir loans and secrets, for with your death or bankruptcy, anotherman might come to your books to read the records of your loans, anddemand payment, and give the secrets to the police or keep them forhis blackmail. But to do it is to take a risk of murder or arrest, anda high cost in hard work and money. Why do you want to do this? Whatpayment do you take?"
"They pay by being my men, grateful and ready to back me up when Iwant help later. They don't have to be grateful, for they know I cancall any loan if the owner crosses me, and I've built a reputation foran occasional fit of irrational temper