The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “I travel in spirals,” said Charlie, “because a slight error on the part of the finest instruments in the world could make straight-line travel fatal. At the rate this ship accelerates and retards, a split second’s delay in cutting my speed on so short a hop as from the Earth to Jupiter might be disastrous on a straight-line flight. We could crash to the core of Jupiter without ever knowing what happened.”

  “We might shoot straight through Jupiter as if nothing had happened—” Rat-face’s words were cut short by a sharp rasp from Frobanna, but the big fellow seemed anxious to have his say. “Well, that’s your own theory, ain’t it, Frobanna?”

  “Shut up!” Frobanna exploded. “You talk too much!”

  “Okay,” said Rat-face.

  “Now,” said Frobanna, brushing his two husky guards back of him and coming up within a step of Charlie, “you travel in spirals, you say, because it gives you better control of your high speed?”

  “Right,” Charlie replied.

  “Suppose we were going to some other system of planets,” said Frobanna, assuming the air of a commander, “would you fly us in spirals or in a straight line?”

  “Straight line, of course,” said Charlie, “but I’d go into a spiral before landing.”

  “Very good,” said Frobanna. “From now on you’re our pilot. As long as you obey orders and keep your ship in shape you can be one of us. One false move and you’re buzzard-bait, do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Charlie.

  “Good,” said Frobanna.

  He turned his eyes on me, and I had the sensation of being faced with a pair of black-flamed blow-torches. “Who’s the girl?”

  “My wife,” my brother answered.

  “Why, Char—” I swallowed my gasping words. Charlie knew what he was doing, of course. I tried to cover up my blunder. “You weren’t going to tell, Charlie.”

  Charlie gave me a curious look. “This man is Frobanna, dearest. We’ll have to tell him whatever he wants to know. We’re rather at his mercy, dear. But you needn’t be frightened. Frobanna is never disrespectful to women.”

  “Is that so?” Rat-face put in. But Frobanna gave him an ugly look that froze him.

  Again Frobanna’s blow-torch eyes were on me.

  “Get up!”

  I clutched the rail and brought myself unsteadily to my feet. The two big guards reached to help me, but I shrank back from them.

  “Damn these timid brides,” the snaky fellow muttered.

  “She might turn out to be good company,” said Frobanna. “Some of my best anarchists have been females—”

  “Yeah, after she gets over honeymooning—” Rat-face tried to put in.

  “Some of my brainiest promoters, I say,” said Frobanna testily, “have been females. You dim-witted guards wouldn’t appreciate a smart woman any more than you appreciate a smart space pilot. All right, girl, if you’re his wife we’ll let you string along with us for the present.”

  “I’ll bet she ain’t wearing a wedding ring,” Rat-face grumbled.

  “Let’s take a look,” said the Cobra.

  All three of the anarchists drilled me with their eyes and I must have had deceit written all over my face. But Charlie forestalled their proposed search for a wedding ring. He reminded them that we were all wearing Perfect Pressure Marlot suits for a purpose, and that at our rate of acceleration it would be physically dangerous for me to remove so much as a glove.

  That brought Frobanna back to the matter that intrigued him most. How fast were we going? How did our speed compare with that of light? And how soon would we reach Jupiter, spiralling at our present rate?

  To all of which Charlie gave highly indefinite answers. This was the first space voyage of the Nebula Spinner I, and consequently a dangerous voyage. He would not for the world have taken anyone on this voyage—not even his wife “if she hadn’t insisted on going.” It was a bad bet, he said, for stowaways, and he wouldn’t make any promise that he could get them through to Jupiter alive.

  “You’ll make it Jupiter,” said Frobanna in a manner that was too strong for mere prediction. “You haven’t told me what speed you’re making. Half of your dials are blanks, and the other half are spinning too fast to make sense. Let’s have a little information on these levers. You might get sick—too sick to operate this thing yourself.”

  “Or you might get injured,” said the Cobra, tapping the point of his gun against the ledge of a porthole.

  “You might even die,” said Rat-face, half grinning through his big teeth.

  I didn’t see how Charlie could be so calm, but somehow he overlooked all the things they did to antagonize him and went right on talking to them as if he was going to give them every break.

  “The best answer I can give you on the speed,” said Charlie, “is that we’re still accelerating. You can hear that. Listen at those hums go up the scale. That’s new units of the atomic motor batteries rolling into action. But just how fast we might go if we ever got completely opened up—well, I wish I knew!”

  “You’d do well to find out, the sooner the better,” said Frobanna imperiously. “As soon as I plant a few eggs in the sands of Jupiter, you’re going to take me to some other system of planets. I’ve got a burning message for the world. The Earth may reject me. Mars and Venus may reject me, and other planets as well. Rumors of my cause may have seeped through to Jupiter, and if so the civilizations there may already be braced against me. But I’ll go on! You’ll take me on—and on—and on! I’ll spread the gospel of down-with-government and up-with-man throughout the skies! And somewhere, sometime, I’ll find a people with the intelligence to appreciate—What happened? What went wrong with the lights?”

  Every light in the ship was off. The darkness had swept in with the swiftness of a wind. I was almost certain that Charlie hadn’t touched a switch, for he had been sitting half-turned as if spellbound by Frobanna’s outburst of eloquence.

  The two guards began to roar. “What the hell?” “Give us lights!” “Come off that stuff!” “Snap ’em on or I’ll blow your face off!”

  Their two voices made enough tumult for a dozen men; but their leader quickly put them to silence with a sharp command. There was no voice that could begin to compete with Frobanna’s. Little man that he was, he was completely the master—no less so in the dark than in the light.

  “Leave it to our pilot,” Frobanna said stiffly. “Give him two minutes, and keep your guns on him.”

  As Frobanna spoke, I was conscious that he was backing away through the narrow passage. I could both hear him and see him—for it was not totally dark. The thin gleams of the distant sun that caught against the panes of two or three portholes streaked inward with faint reflections. The light, what little there was, reminded me of the glints a tiny candle might throw around the corner of a black-walled cave.

  I backed farther toward the rear of the ship. My instinctive fear was sharpened. Charlie called back to me. I retorted that I was all right. Charlie’s low angry mutter echoed back to me.

  “If anyone starts to harm you, Esther, damned if I won’t wreck this ship to smithereens!”

  At that the guards sputtered and fumed. They weren’t going to harm anybody, they said, but they were going to have lights, by heavens, if they had to empty their automatics to get them.

  Again it was Frobanna’s mystical masterful voice that took command. Frobanna had stopped, halfway down the passageway toward me; and from the bobbing about of his gleaming helmet I knew he was searching among the drawers in the wall.

  “Stop your wild talk, all of you,” Frobanna champed. “We’ll have lights in a minute. . . Here, I’ve found a flashlight.”

  “Bring it up!” Charlie called fiercely. “I’ve got to have light on this instrument board!”

  The tensed note in my brother’s voice made me quail. I hadn’t stopped to think, until this instant, that all those little colored lights across the rows of dials had been swept away too.

  “Well, I�
�m damned!” Frobanna snarled angrily. “Your flashlight’s dead as a tombstone!”

  “But that’s a new flash! Brand new!” my brother protested.

  “It’s dead, I tell you!”

  Crack! In the faint light I could see Frobanna’s short arm swing down fiercely to smash the flashlight against the ledge of a porthole.

  “Dead, huh?” Charlie grunted.

  The puzzled tone of my brother’s comment was the thing that stayed with me the longest out of that confused conversation. I was hazily aware that the anarchists tried lighting matches, but for some strange reason they couldn’t get their matches to work. There was more threatening, more accusations of trickery, more demand on Charlie’s part for a light; more groans and apprehensive cursings on the part of the anarchists at the prospect of attempting a landing on Jupiter under these conditions.

  And all the while we were still accelerating!

  Whenever the talk would quiet down, you could still hear those inexhaustible up-the-scale sirens of power.

  “All right, we’re in for it!” Charlie snorted. “If I can’t have a light on these dials, we’re gonners.”

  The three men made no response. The glint from their helmets showed them huddled in a tight conference midway down the passage.

  “Hope you aren’t gambling too heavy on your theory, Frobanna,” Charlie added.

  This got a rise.

  “What theory?” Frobanna barked.

  “That we can plunge squarely through Jupiter if we’re going fast enough.”

  But the three men were again lost in an earnest conference, and all I could get was their overtones of worry.

  Through the portholes along the left side of the narrow passageway the planet of Jupiter loomed larger and larger. It was like a mammoth bloated moon. It kept expanding, second by second, into fearful proportions. The men were fascinated by it; their helmeted faces took on a weird aspect under its baleful light.

  They took turns at the left-side telescope, trying to make something of its features. Frobanna was especially anxious to detect signs of civilization—it was common knowledge among space navigators that there was a civilization there. But neither Frobanna nor the others could make anything out of their telescope studies. The planet’s surface, they reported, seemed nothing more than a whitish blur.

  I was not surprised to hear this. Of course I kept mum about it, but I knew as soon as I turned the thing over in my mind that Jupiter was a blur because we were spiralling around in circles so fast.

  After all, as I told myself at the time, you wouldn’t expect to see much of the Earth if you were doing a halo above it at the speed of light—fast enough to circumnavigate it seven times every second! A whitish blur? I should think so!

  It surprised me that Frobanna didn’t think of this, as applied to Jupiter. But by this time Frobanna was wrapped up in a fervent anarchist speech. The more he thought of these new worlds to conquer, the less practical and the more eloquent he became. He seemed to turn the management of practical affairs back to his two guards.

  Rat-face checked over his firearms in the pale white glow of a porthole.

  The Cobra kept prodding Charlie to know whether there would be enough light to land by. Charlie answered in the negative.

  “I’m navigating by guesswork,” said my brother in a disspirited tone. “But I’m at the mercy of you men. You’ve ordered me to go to Jupiter. I’ve no choice but to obey.”

  Rat-face came back to me.

  “Don’t suppose you’d consider parting company with your boy-friend? Or would you?” Rat-face whispered.

  “Why should I?” I replied. “If Frobanna is taking Charlie as his pilot—”

  “Talk,” Rat-face mumbled. “Simply talk. Just a bluff, the same as your boyfriend’s fear that he can’t land—”

  “But Charlie’s not bluffing!” I blurted, and with a sudden outburst of terrified sobs I found myself clutching at the arm of that ugly hulking anarchist, begging him to let Charlie turn back. Rat-face didn’t exactly ignore my pleadings. He responded by knocking me back against the rear wall.

  “You’ll get yours right along with your boy-friend,” he hissed, “after he lands us safely on Jupiter!”

  Then hesitating a moment as if debating whether to take one good sock at me, Rat-face added, “All I can say for you and your man is, you’re damned good actors—”

  “Come here!” Frobanna called.

  Both guards were at his side instantly.

  “That ship’s drawing closer!” the little leader barked.

  “What ship?”

  “The ship that’s been on our trail for the last several minutes,” said Frobanna. “Look for yourself.”

  The guards took turns at the right-side telescope. Now I recalled that Charlie had been keeping watch to the right some time earlier, while the others had been engrossed in a study of Jupiter on the left.

  I leaned into the ledge of the nearest porthole and strained my eyes. For a long two minutes I saw nothing. But the three men at the right-side telescope grew more excited. The ship was coming closer, they declared.

  Then it came to me that a certain speck of light was growing larger. Now and then the speck would vanish momentarily—then it would come back stronger than ever. Gradually it grew close enough to assume the form of a space ship.

  “They’re keeping up with us!” the Cobra exclaimed.

  “That’s proof enough that it’s no Earth ship pursuing us,” Frobanna declared with a hint of triumph in his observation.

  “But why the hell is it pursuing us?” Rat-face asked.

  There seemed to be no answer but silence. Our own ship hummed along at an even pitch. We had evidently ceased to accelerate at last. Gosh, I hoped so! As close as Jupiter was getting, I thought we should be easing down for a landing, if such a thing were possible under these freakish conditions.

  But all at once I saw that the reflected light of Jupiter took a turn toward our tail. Charlie must have struck off on a tangent. The big planet went out of the picture. And so did the ship.

  “Good strategy!” Frobanna called.

  “I don’t think it will work,” Charlie snapped back.

  “Sure it will! You gave him the slip.”

  “Hell, no!” Rat-face growled. “He’s right after us!”

  “Well I’ll be damned!” the Cobra grumbled. “The slippery devil!”

  Again silence. I was all needles and pins. I felt sure that Charlie had jammed on all the speed he thought our ship would stand; and still the other ship raced right along with us, hung parallel to us, less than a mile away! And every second it was drawing closer!

  “Where’d they get all that speed?” Rat-face huffed.

  “That’s one for our pilot,” the Cobra muttered.

  To my surprise Charlie volunteered a bit of information. He said that what we were seeing was a typical Jupiter transfer ship; and if they cared for a confession, he had patterned his own ship after the Jupiter models. There was no use to try to outrun this Jupiter ship.

  On the other hand, there was no use being afraid of it.

  “In a minute or two, unless I’m badly mistaken, it will be running along beside us,” said Charlie.

  “Why?” Frobanna asked sharply. He and his men were gripping their guns solidly.

  “That’s Jupiter’s way,” said Charlie. “They’re suspicious as the devil—must have an over-developed fear of invasion or something. Anyway, that’s the reason our legal cruising limits stop short of Jupiter—”

  “It’s gone!” Rat-face shouted.

  “Gone, your eye!” the Cobra sneered. “But it was gone for an instant—”

  “It just flashed its lights off, sap!”

  “Probably a signal to us,” Charlie commented. “You see, the rule is that if an incoming ship has anything for Jupiter, it must be transferred at the planetary boundaries and delivered by one of these transfer ships. That prevents any outside ship from having to land on Jupiter.”
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br />   “We haven’t got anything to transfer,” said Frobanna authoritatively.

  “With your permission,” said Charlie, “I’d like to transfer my wife—”

  “Why?” Frobanna barked.

  “To spare her the risk of a perilous landing in our own ship. She can join us later if we have the good fortune to come through. I promise you she’ll not speak to anyone in the meantime regarding your mission of anarchy—”

  “We haven’t any time for transfers,” Frobanna said angrily.

  The ship was drawing close. From the glint of sunlight on its sleek frame I saw that it was built on the same lines as the Nebula Spinner I. Its portholes were aglow with interior lights.

  “Are you ready, Esther?” Charlie called to me.

  “I told you we can’t take time!” Frobanna blazed.

  “We haven’t any choice in that matter,” Charlie replied. “Whether we like it or not, that ship will move up to us and attach itself to our side. For a space of thirty seconds our airlocks and theirs will revolve in synchronized rotation. Are you ready, Esther? You’ll have just thirty seconds to get across.”

  “I’m ready,” I replied.

  I clutched the handrail at the entrance to the air locks. Frobanna’s shadowy form approached.

  “You haven’t asked my permission!” The anarchist’s voice was the nearest thing to an electrocution I may ever experience, I hope. My words fouled up as I tried to answer him.

  “But Charlie said—that is—if this boat’s sure to crash, and you’re always chivalrous to women—”

  “I never carry my chivalry too far!” Frobanna boomed.

  “It’s on us, boss!” Rat-face shouted, his form jerking back from a porthole ledge. Dark as it was, I could scarcely see what was happening. But right on the heels of Rat-face’s outburst Charlie shouted at me.

  “All right, Esther!”

  I could hear the airlocks, both left and right, rotating with their high-pressure swish-swish. But something knocked me backward from the entrance, and I knew that something was Frobanna’s fist. It was he that dashed through the airlocks at the head of the procession. It must have been the snaky fellow who was second, for the second blow that caught me on the shoulder was a twisting shove of a muscular arm.