by Jerry
But then he had remembered the pact, and with it had come a way to exorcize the pale ghost of the young scientist. Erik Chambers had been in deadly earnest about the appointment. He had sworn that no matter what happened he would meet Boulton on Nemone. Somehow, in a deep, instinctive way, Boulton felt that by breaking his sworn vow Chambers would lose the tenacious hold in his memory. He felt certain that after this day he would be able to forget his former partner forever.
“Three hours more, Boss,” Sully said coming in with the drink. Boulton downed the tall glass at a swallow. The liquor spread a comfortable warmth through him.
“Wake me before we land, Dude,” he said. “I’ve got time for a nap.”
“Right, Boss.”
THE bodyguard left the cabin and Boulton lowered the back of his luxurious, convertible chair. But he didn’t close his eyes at once. To his right, through the Vampire’s round quartz port, a bright orange object out in the black dome of space caught his gaze. Boulton judged it to be a comet and watched the gleaming disc idly through half-closed lids.
Erik Chambers, the tycoon thought wryly, would have wanted to know everything about that comet, its area, density and history. Chambers had been a scientist to his fingertips, no doubt of it. But he hadn’t been very smart. He, Boulton, had been the smart one, the businessman, and the businessman in him had crowded out the scientist. A break between the two had been inevitable and it was best it came when it did.
The tycoon’s mind flashed backward through the years to an early, heatgenerating freighter plodding the spaceway toward Earth from outlying Pluto. On board were the models of the epoch-making inventions for rocket-control perfected on the dark planet. And in a cheap cabin on the lugger, the two partners faced each other. . . .
“It’s not right,” Erik Chambers said earnestly, his face pale and wan from months of sleepless effort, “to market our devices for our own exclusive gain, Bruce. They must be utilized so that all society will benefit equally. Besides, the Council will pay us well for—”
“Bah! Ten thousand apiece if we’re lucky!”
“That’s more than I can use.”
“Listen, Erik, there’s millions, even billions in our own company! With these new devices, we’ll control every ship in space in ten years! Think, man!”
“I have thought,” the young scientist said slowly and with suppressed emotion, “and I warn you, Boulton, that I’ll destroy every model rather than let you exploit the inventions to make a private fortune! I haven’t worked for years to see my sweat turned into a monopoly for a single individual.”
Boulton raged inwardly but said nothing and resolved to rid himself somehow of the troublesome idealist. The opportunity presented itself sooner than he hoped. Chambers fell ill on board of a Plutonian fever, a serious disease but not necessarily a mortal one. Any Council port along the lugger’s route stocked the specific antitoxin. Boulton could have saved his partner’s life by informing the captain of Chambers’ ‘danger. But the coming industrialist had kept silent and made certain that no one suspected. There was no doctor on board. Erik Chambers died within twenty-four hours. . . .
The tycoon stirred uneasily out of his revery. He felt no conscience pangs. Remorse was a weakness of petty minds. Too many other lives had been sacrificed in the building of Rockets. Chambers was only the first. And his great commercial creation was worth twice all of them, Boulton thought contemptuously. If only he could forget his old partner!
He would—after today. Chambers was dead and he, Boulton, was alive, that was the main thing to remember. He was alive and a billionaire several times over in a position where not even the Council could touch him. He would be a supreme fool to let an ancient memory seriously upset him. After today, Erik Chambers would really be dead—this time for good.
The drowsy tycoon found the last thought grimly pleasant. He stretched and closed his eyes. In a few minutes, he slept in untroubled peacefulness. Through the port, the rays of the orange comet fell on the outstretched financier, enveloping Boulton in soft, saffron-red fingers of light.
Underjets blazing, the plump, burnished hull of the sleek Vampire settled slowly in a vertical descent. Below lay the formless chaos of a primeval world. Nemone was arid, oxygenless and uninhabitable. Sully set the cruiser down amongst jagged crags and crevices into a hollow hardly longer than the Vampire’s beam-length.
The bodyguard removed two bulgers from the cabin lockers, and he and his awakened Boss donned them. The asteroid was only a twenty-third degree gravity body. The two men stepped carefully out of the air-lock, bracing themselves against the expected loss in weight. On the uneven ground, they swayed drunkenly. It took some effort for them to keep balanced in the weightless atmosphere.
“Let’s get out of here, Boss,” Sully muttered into his transmitter. “This is no place for humans!”
Boulton ignored his bodyguard’s attempt at levity. The tycoon motioned for Sully to follow him, and walked toward a nearby rock cluster with shuffling little steps to avoid bounding. There he gave the little man a Very-pistol he had taken from the cruiser.
“Fire it at the top of this pile,” he ordered. And then, when Sully grimaced: “Get up there, Dude. This is part of Chambers’ final instructions!”
The bodyguard stared incredulously, started to say something, then thought better of it. Cursing under his breath, Sully climbed gingerly. An extra bit of pressure on a single leg muscle would send him hurtling against a crag. At the summit, he set the flare and ignited it. A blue-white incandescence hissed forth, turning the dusk around the Vampire into a glaring circle of light.
Sully descended and the two men rounded the cruiser’s hull to avoid the glare. In the semi-darkness, the gaunt, black boulders roundabout threw eerie shadows over the pitted volcanic terrain.
“How long do we have to stay here?” Sully asked disgruntledly. The little man had given up trying to fathom his Boss’ latest eccentricity.
“Not long,” Boulton said coolly, glancing at his wrist chronometer. “Exactly a half hour.”
“Boss—this guy is dead?”
“Yes.”
“Then—”
“Shut up.”
Boulton chuckled mirthlessly.
“I was a fool to come,” he said evenly, “but I’m glad I did. Know something, Dude? For some idiotic reason, I think I sort of half-believed back in New York that Chambers would make good his boast and meet me here!”
Sully shivered and the big man laughed mockingly.
“What’s the matter, Dude?” he asked. “You’re not afraid of ghosts, are you?”
The little killer grinned feebly but did not reply.
Overhead, the night of space was fading before a pinkish radiance. Boulton saw the change and put it down to the coming dawn. Erik had given him explicit directions as to where on Nemone they would meet. It was on the side they were on—away from the Sun. With its rapid axial rotation, the asteroid would bring them around in an hour or less. Only by then they would be on their way back to Earth.
BOLTON frowned. His partner had been absolutely positive and exact about the appointment. It was that, the tycoon thought, which had unsettled him and made him do a screwy thing like coming to Nemone. Well, in a few minutes, the old, fifteen-year farce would be ended. Today, he would bury Erik Chambers for the second and final time. Sometimes, he thought grimly, the memory takes more killing than the man himself!
“You know, Dude,” the tycoon said reminiscently, “just before he died, Chambers became suspicious that I was causing his death! He was delirious, of course. He raved at me and swore that he’d have his revenge for what I was doing to him. Poor chap! I let him go on because there was nothing I could do. Like I told him, the tramp had lost her bearings and we couldn’t get him to a port. See?”
“Yeah,” Sully grunted. “I see.”
“The steward and a few crew members all swore at the Commission investigation that Chambers’ death was unavoidable. Those men are comfortably f
ixed today. People who are my friends don’t have to worry, you know that, Dude.”
“Sure, Boss, I know that.”
Boulton glanced at his wrist and looked up with a nervous grin.
“Ten minutes more,” he announced in a voice that trembled only slightly under the sudden tension that gripped him. “Chambers or whatever is left of him had better hurry if he wants to make the date!”
Sully stirred uneasily at his side. Around them the airless silence of Nemone seemed to deepen in a queer hush that had nothing to do with sound. It was the silence of extreme cold, the quiet of absolute motionlessness. Yet the men in the bulgers felt noticeably warmer. Boulton looked up puzzled, and saw that the sky had turned a sullen and ugly red. Suddenly a great jagged flash of dazzling intensity split the dome overhead from horizon to horizon. For a long instant, the jagged peaks and crags around the Vampire were thrown into stark, lonely relief.
Sully bounded upward in terror. Only Boulton’s clutching hand prevented the bodyguard from fleeing back into the ship.
“Wait, you fool!” the tycoon blazed. “Only a few minutes more. No ion-storm is going to frighten me away now!”
“Boss”—Sully squirmed miserably—“I don’t like this! What if that comet we saw back there is passing close? We’ll fry like rats on here! Let’s get off now!”
“Don’t be an idiot, Dude,” Boulton rejoined with angry nervousness. “That comet won’t pass within a thousand parsecs of us. Any fool knows that a comet’s tail stays away from the Sun! That puts it a hundred milliard kilos away from us. Use your head. This is a static storm. I’ve lived through dozens of them!”
Sully relapsed into troubled silence, and both men turned their gaze upward. Boulton had indeed witnessed many a gale in space. They were generally spectacular but harmless. But the tycoon couldn’t recall any that equaled in fury or grandeur the one that was beginning to boil above them now.
The sky had become a cauldron of angry, bloated scarlet, wreathed with mucky, black swathes. Long hissing streamers of incandescence burned through it in jerky, crisscross fashion. Huge showers of thick, blazing spark-clusters dropped out of the seething dome which shook again and again under a series of titanic, grinding crashes.
THEN Boulton heard another sound which seemed at last to awaken him to the possibility of genuine danger. The cupra-steel hull behind them was vibrating under internal, atomic stresses. Like some great animal in deathly agony, the Vampire was trembling and emitting a high shrill whine. No ion-storm could affect drop-forged cupra-steel! The big tycoon uttered a sharp cry of warning to his underling and both made a precipitous dash for the airlock on the Vampire’s port side.
As they rounded the hull, the airless atmosphere itself seemed to go berserk around them. Space curved, knotted and struck at the two men, twisting them about like weeds. The ground seemed to titillate under Boulton, and he could hear as through a fog the cry of the cruiser’s plated hull become louder, more piercing.
Desperately, the tycoon fought his way toward the handle on the airlock. It was only a few feet off, yet the inches seemed miles as a thousand microcosmic whirlpools tore and tugged at his fabrikoid bulger. Overhead the blinding and deafening pyrotechnics multiplied their fury. Fear seemed to give the terror-stricken financier a sudden and awful comprehension. His starting eyeballs rolled upward.
“Chambers!” the tycoon cried aghast. “Chambers! By God, it’s—” The last words were whipped away by a torrential ocean of sound, and Bruce Boulton never spoke again. It seemed to the fear-maddened tycoon and his killer-bodyguard that the Universe itself suddenly gaped wide and engulfed them. Torn by fierce atomic disruptions, the cragged terrain of Nemone sundered and piled upward in a great, heaving cataclysm. The Vampire and everything near it was buried under countless tons of rock.
At the same moment, the sky burst into a furious saffron blaze that paled all else as the main body of the orange comet broke over the horizon! Like some great eye, the comet stared unblinkingly down on the wracked body of the little asteroid. The time by the chronometer on the wrist of the crushed and lifeless financier was precisely twenty-two, System time.
On Earth the next day, the Telenews bulletin ran its lead article in caps. It read:
BRUCE BOULTON DISAPPEARS
FINANCIER UNHEARD FROM IN
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
RADIO COMMUNICATION CUT
FEAR FELT FOR MULTI-
BILLIONAIRE’S SAFETY
There was more but the employees of Rockets, Ltd. read the news without undue emotion. Few of them would have any cause to mourn their powerful employer’s demise. They went on with their work. A little later that day some of them perused interestedly a science-filler that came through the ticker.
“Chambers’ Comet makes appearance,” the filler read. “The comet whose apparition was forecast by Erik Chambers, young scientific genius, before his untimely death fifteen years ago, was observed by cameras at the New York Observatory last night. It conformed in all aspects with Chambers’ predictions, even to the extent that its tail curved toward the Sun. This striking phenomenon is considered a temporary feature of the comet and attributed by scientists at the Observatory to the influence of some nearby unknown star.”
Erik Chambers had kept his vow!
SOLAR PLEXUS
James Blish
Brant Kittinger did not hear the alarm begin to ring. Indeed, it was only after a soft blow had jarred his free-floating observatory that he looked up in sudden awareness from the interferometer. Then the sound of the warning bell reached his consciousness.
Brant was an astronomer, not a spaceman, but he knew that the hell could mean nothing but the arrival of another ship in the vicinity. There would be no point in ringing a bell for a meteor—the thing could be through and past you during the first cycle of the clapper. Only an approaching ship would be likely to trip the detector, and it would have to be close.
A second dull jolt told him how close it was. The rasp of metal which followed, as the other ship slid along the side of his own, drove the fog of tensors completely from his brain. He dropped his pencil and straightened up.
His first thought was that his year in the orbit around the new trans-Plutonian planet was up, and that the Institute’s tug had arrived to tow him home, telescope and all. A glance at the clock reassured him at first, then puzzled him still further. He still had the better part of four months.
No commercial vessel, of course, could have wandered this far from the inner planets; and the UN’s police cruisers didn’t travel far outside the commercial lanes. Besides, it would have been impossible for anyone to find Brant’s orbital observatory by accident.
He settled his glasses more firmly on his nose, clambered awkwardly backwards out of the prime focus chamber and down the wall net to the control desk on the observation floor. A quick glance over the boards revealed that there was a magnetic field of some strength nearby, one that didn’t belong to the invisible gas giant revolving half a million miles away.
The strange ship was locked to him magnetically; it was an old ship, then, for that method of grappling had been discarded years ago as too hard on delicate instruments. And the strength of the field meant a big ship.
Too big. The only ship of that period that could mount generators that size, as far as Brant could remember, was the Cybernetics Foundation’s Astrid. Brant could remember well the Foundation’s regretful announcement that Murray Bennett had destroyed both himself and the Astrid rather than turn the ship in to some UN inspection team. It had happened only eight years ago. Some scandal or other . . .
Well, who then?
He turned the radio on. Nothing came out of it. It was a simple transistor set tuned to the Institute’s frequency, and since the ship outside plainly did not belong to the Institute, he had expected nothing else. Of course he had a photophone also, but it had been designed for communications over a reasonable distance, not for cheek-to-cheek whispers.
As an after
thought, he turned off the persistent alarm bell. At once another sound came through: a delicate, rhythmic tapping on the hull of the observatory. Someone wanted to get in.
He could think of no reason to refuse entrance, except for a vague and utterly unreasonable wonder as to whether or not the stranger was a friend. He had no enemies, and the notion that some outlaw might have happened upon him out here was ridiculous. Nevertheless, there was something about the anonymous, voiceless ship just outside which made him uneasy.
The gentle tapping stopped, and then began again, with an even, mechanical insistence. For a moment Brant wondered whether or not he should try to tear free with the observatory’s few maneuvering rockets—but even should he win so uneven a struggle, he would throw the observatory out of the orbit where the Institute expected to find it, and he was not astronaut enough to get it back there again.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap.
“All right,” he said irritably. He pushed the button which set the airlock to cycling. The tapping stopped. He left the outer door open more than long enough for anyone to enter and push the button in the lock which reversed the process; but nothing happened.
After what seemed to be a long wait, he pushed his button again. The outer door closed, the pumps filled the chamber with air, the inner door swung open. No ghost drifted out of it; there was nobody in the lock at all.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap.
Absently he polished his glasses on his sleeve. If they didn’t want to come into the observatory, they must want him to come out of it. That was possible: although the telescope had a Coude focus which allowed him to work in the ship’s air most of the time, it was occasionally necessary for him to exhaust the dome, and for that purpose he had a space suit. But be had never been outside the hull in it, and the thought alarmed him. Brant was nobody’s spaceman.
Be damned to them. He clapped his glasses back into place and took one more look into the empty airlock. It was still empty with the outer door now moving open very slowly . . .
