by Don Wilcox
I hadn’t remembered much about my dazed hours of walking away from that catastrophe. But one dim vision had haunted me. A mound of sparkling rocks and a little hand-written card, “Here lies Patches Black.”
“Here it is,” Bill said quietly, and led me to the mound. The card was there, fastened to a stick. The letters were in my handwriting.
“You knew him, didn’t you?” I said to Bill. “If it hadn’t been for his rash act, Menniker and McCune and Romanoff would have set themselves up at the top of this planet, against America. We owe Patchy a lot.”
“I’ve always owed him a lot,” said Bill, bowing his head.
“You knew him quite well?”
“He was my father,” said Bill.
We rode back toward the rest of the American party. Already Vedo was making provisions for their safe transportation to Marshington.
“I didn’t know who you were when I came upon you, burying my father,” Bill said. “I could only stand back and watch. And when I tried to talk with you, you didn’t hear. You were dazed . . . Later I followed you.”
“Where did you get the name Rambler?”
“I took it on my own, after I learned that I had been reported dead. I thought it would give me a better chance to see the inside of the tower plot. I tried to get word through to my father that I was still living, but must have failed.”
“Your father pretended he was my valet on the Blue Palace. I’ve lots to tell you about how he stuck with me.”
“I’d like to stick with you too,” Bill said, smiling, and tossing his head in a way that had reminded me, subconsciously, of someone I’d come to trust.
“Then come back to Washington with me,” I said. “With you and Bobby and Betty—that is, if they’ll postpone their honeymoon—”
“And Vedo—”
“And a few prisoners we picked up at the tower, we can’t fail.” I glanced toward the ruined Menniker fortress. “Say, I wonder what happened to Stubble-chin that we left up in the tower.” Bill grinned. “He came through alive, but he had a close shave.”
QUEEN OF THE FLOATING ISLAND
First published in Amazing Stories, March 1952
A girl with hot lips and a rotten temper stood between them and two billion bucks!
The little sky jeep Yellow Jacket was cruising back toward the earth with five disappointed persons aboard, when a radio message abruptly changed its course. Bob Erickson’s pulses jumped. “This may change our luck,” he said as he returned the signal. Kay Chalmers and her brother were right at hi» shoulder waiting to hear what the message would be.
“Bad news?” Kay whispered anxiously. Bob shook his head. Steeple, the elderly little man at the controls, didn’t so much as turn his eyes.
A moment later Bob handed a written order to Steeple, and without a word the pilot veered from his B-line course. Bob watched the dials for a few moments, then relaxed with an easy, “There. It’s a faint hope, but it’s worth trying.”
The five of them had made a futile trip to Venus under the auspices of the Earth-Solar Insurance Company in the hope of recovering a lost shipment of currency. The ship carrying the money had never come in. A cold two billion dollars in American bills had apparently gone off into the ether.
Bob, in charge of the insurance company’s errand, had failed to find any clue in Venus, and his inquiries among space men arriving from other planets had availed nothing.
“Call it joott,” was all the answer anyone could give for space ships that never came in. “Joott” was the space man’s word for Just One Of Those Things.
Now, Kay and her brother Randy waited for an explanation, as the earthbound Yellow Jacket set its course by the stars. The fifth member of the party, Clip, the fourteen-year-old office boy from Earth-Solar Insurance, who had come on the trip against everybody’s orders, noticed that something exciting was in the air and so roused out of his bunk, rubbed his baby-blue eyes and came up to join the group.
“All right, Stowaway,” Bob said to Clip, “you came along hoping for some excitement, so make the most of this. It’s our last chance for a clue on the disappearance of that two billion. Otherwise, we head for home with a goose egg.”
“I never knew you not to get a home run,” Clip said, reminding Bob that the kid’s hero worship went back to the amateur baseball games in the city park. In the kid’s eyes, Bob had been a champion hitter.
“This message,” Bob said, “informs us that a space eddy has come within range of the Earth-Venus route.”
“Within range? Shooting range?”
“Gravitational range. Drawing range. Not many months ago it slid into this field of space. You understand what an eddy is?”
“In a river,” Kay said. “It’s a pool off to one side of the main current where the driftwood goes round and round.”
“It’s the same general idea in space, except for an added dimension and many more directions of currents. It’s a spot where two or more crisscrossing paths of gravitational attractions exert almost identical pulls, and so there’s a point of balance where things drifting in space tend to come to a rest.”
“Gee! What’ll we find there?” Clip asked.
“That’s anybody’s guess,” Bob said, “but it wouldn’t be too surprising if we’d run onto the remains of a wrecked ship or two.”
“And maybe two billion dollars?” Bob watched the countenances of three of his listeners light up into curious smiles. It was at least worth a few thousand extra miles of travel to find out. There was the gruesome side, of course—the possibility that they would find the mangled bodies of those who had, by accident or otherwise, been hurled out of their course.
Randy said, “I trust there’s no danger we’ll get stuck there.”
“How could we?” his sister asked. “Well, I’m always looking on the dark side of things, but wouldn’t it be an ideal place for space bandits? If many navigators know there’s something there and cruise over that way to see, just as we’re doing . . .”
“Maybe no one else knows,” Kay said hopefully.
Her brother, obviously discounting her false optimism, went on, “It could be one of the hottest spots in the sky, from a legal point of view. Ships that meet on the planets are subject to laws. But when they make contact out in space, who knows what happens?”
“There’s a space code, isn’t there?” Kay persisted.
“Unfortunately, there’s not a policeman on every corner.”
“Oh, you!” Kay gestured her hopelessness, smiling at Bob. “My brother is a chronic pessimist.”
“I’m glad we have you along for our optimist,” Bob said. “However—”
Kay shook her head. “Whenever you say however, it means you’re going to agree with my brother.” She flashed her eyes at Bob and he knew she was teasing. She started to turn away but he stopped her by putting a hand on her shoulder.
“The question is, are we all completely willing to take the risk involved?”
Bob made sure of their individual answers on that question. When Steeple, the silent old pilot, showed no signs of responding, Bob motioned the others to go on back, to leave him alone with Steeple. Here was a typical old space man, Bob thought, observing his yellow wrinkled skin, his steady eye that refused to flicker with any sign of emotion. It would seem that Steeple had long since ceased to feel either the fears or the surges of courage that might fill younger men.
“So we’ll not get back to Earth quite as soon as you expected,” Bob pursued.
Steeple said nothing. Through thousands of miles he could be as uncommunicative as a turtle. His silence must be taken for his assent.
In the privacy of his own thoughts, Bob sought his own consent. If this venture could add even a grain of success to the trip, his own personal prospects would be brighter. He would like to ask Kay to marry him. They had been only half acquainted when the excursion started. It had not been a case of love at first sight in the story-book sense, but the hours of companionship had found t
hem growing more and more devoted. She was strong-nerved, afraid of nothing. That buoyant optimism and sparkle which she wore on the surface was an expression of an inner confidence that Bob had discovered was real. And he was terribly eager that her confidence in him shouldn’t be misplaced.
Hours later, Clip emitted a shout that rang through the ship like fire-bells. What he saw at the telescope Bob also had been watching for many minutes. But he allowed Clip the privilege of proclaiming his discovery.
“Hey, everybody! There’s something dead ahead. It’s a meteoroid—the craziest meteoroid you ever saw! Come and look!”
“What is it? Where? I don’t see anything.”
“That speck of light. Look at it through the telescope. It’s a whole bunch of little specks going round and round.”
To Bob’s eyes it was like dust in the sunshine. At the center it was a solid mass, somewhat spherical in shape.
It grew rapidly. The counter motors had been at work during the past several minutes, slowing the swift space fall until now the ship held nearly motionless in the sky.
“As we approach, we’ll doubtless drift around as aimlessly as those specks, spending the remainder of our momentum,” Bob said, and tried to imagine how far a little momentum would go under such conditions. Very likely the movement of passengers from one side of the ship to another would be enough to influence the direction of its drift.
The objects moving like lazy electrons around a nucleus gradually took form as the ship grew close. What a conglomerate lot of nothing, floating around in the highlights and deep shadow, in and out of the sunshine. A junk heap in space! Anything and everything that travelers through the void might discard or lose en route could be seen here. Bob quickly identified a rudder blade and some floating pieces of rocket guns that attested to space battles of some far-off place and time.
Clip said, “Gee, Bob, what a place to set up a second-hand store.”
“What a place for a captain to park his stowaways,” Bob said, tempering his caustic remark with a wink.
Randy, Bob knew, was already feeling the weight of tragedy in the heaps of wreckage, and was also on the alert for possible trouble. “I don’t exactly like the look of that solid core.”
“What do you see?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe a gun pointing out.”
“Where?”
“To the left of that black patch that looks like air locks left open.” Kay hummed uneasily. One could see anything, and a pessimist was sure to see the worst. “What we want to see is a black metal box two feet wide with red and white seals.”
Bob saw the “gun” that Randy had identified. It was the nose of a red space boat pointing out through the heap, caught like a piece of driftwood in the tangle. There very likely was a gun in that red nose.
The nucleus—the “Floating Island”, as Clip called it—was about as large in bulk as a big city railway station, Bob thought. And considerably less solid. It appeared to have the solidity of a thousand circus balloons against a ceiling. The center of the cluster held together like a log jam on a river, while around the sides the unattached objects bounced and tumbled like so many children’s balloons in motionless air.
The pinkish, purplish haze that enshrouded the whole area had already been noted by Bob, and it took on an interesting meaning when Kay said, “There’s a burning torch going around.”
“Burring?”
“Yes. See? It’s floating over the top, now—or is it the bottom?”
Directions were quite meaningless, but the burning torch, whatever it was, meant a great deal. It signified the presence of air. However little, there was air to burn. So even the weight of air was enough to cause it to drift, along with other substances, in the gravitational vortex.
The fire was a warning that friction of heavy objects coming together like two ships at sea could set inflammable materials ablaze. He was thinking especially of the metal box with red and white seals.
“Keep your eyes peeled for a two-foot box,” he said. “If we can once spot that, our luck does a flipflop. All the rest of this is just so much scenery.”
The Yellow Jacket moved around in a wide orbit of perhaps five hundred yards, slowly drawing in. They moved into the shadow, and for a few minutes they were peering into what might be called the night’s darkness. The “Floating Island” was like a tiny planet, Kay observed, and she went to work to compute its period of rotation. She came up with the information that it turned through a day and a night every fifty-six minutes.
“We’ve a fair chance to bump into the side, moving with the rotation,” Bob observed.
“Good or bad?” Clip asked.
“We could help ourselves in two ways. The more of these outside objects along the surface that we can bump loose, the more chance we’ll have of finding what we’re looking for. Then, if our bump should speed up the rotation of this midget planet, we might be able to speed up our own survey.”
“Imagine giving a planet a push to make it turn faster!” Kay laughed.
“We might hitch on and tow it back to Earth,” Clip suggested.
“We may hitch on by way of anchoring,” Bob said, “but any stiff pull would probably jerk the nucleus apart. Steeple, can you give us just a breath of power to bring us in closer?”
It was a shaky landing, when contact was eventually made. Objects bumped out of the path like so many croquet balls floating in water. The impact sent a slice of drifting metal off at a tangent with force enough so that it would probably never find its way back.
“How far do you think it will go?” Clip asked, watching it through the telescope.
“All the way to another planet, maybe, or to the sun,” Bob ventured. “On the other hand, it may coast out a few thousand miles and lose its momentum and be drawn back to this point.”
“Gee, Bob, from here you could bat a baseball all the way to the sun, couldn’t you!”
And that was just about the last moment, as Bob later recalled, that anyone felt gay or carefree. The impending tragedy which Randy Chalmers had vaguely sensed was close at hand.
“There it is!”
“The box?”
“See it—way back there. Red and white stickers. It seemed to be drifting after us. It’s gone down now.”
“Where?”
“Back of that ridge of metal—over to the right.”
“Something pulled it down,” Kay said. “It must have caught on something.”
Bob donned a space suit, passed through the air locks, and crawled out onto the heaps of wreckage. He was as light as nothing. The air was firmer than he had expected; he felt that he could almost swim in it, but he was afraid of drifting out of reach of the solid things he wanted to hold on to.
A line of rusted steel cable sagged across his path, and he carefully crawled under it. Farther on he came to a line of rope. He stared. This looked very much as if someone had placed it in that exact spot. For what purpose? Was it a device to hold the “planet” together? Was this place by any chance inhabited?
He swung under the rope and crawled—pawing along weightlessly—toward the point where Kay and Randy had seen a box disappear. Suddenly he froze in his tracks. Ahead of him were moving figures.
There were three men, naked and golden skinned, with flowing hair and rippling muscles. They were a weird picture of strength and deformity, for not one possessed the normal physique of an athlete.
One was legless, but he moved as easily in this realm as a fish in water. Another was cruelly bent, perhaps with the crippling affliction of arthritis. A third possessed a twisted arm that hung over his back, useless.
All three men were working with long hooks, as slender as fishpoles, with shepherd’s-staff crooks. They were facile and clever in their motions, obviously acclimated to this realm. Not completely naked, they wore bands of brilliant purple, and Bob saw at once that they carried ray pistols.
They were drawing the box in with their hooks. The man with the useless arm clung to the pa
th with the grip of his feet, seeming to know when to let go his anchor, and when to freeze on with a toe hold against the caprices of momentum. The three played such teamwork that one might deliberately float outward to exert a push on the box, knowing that one of his companions would draw him back with the hook.
It was the box, Bob was sure of that.
He clambered ahead as fast as he could safely go. Their part of the planet was passing into shadow. He must see where they were going.
He bumped into a rope, and an explosion occurred. Fire burst out of a crate a few yards to his left. The bang of a bomb roared into his helmet.
Flash! Another bomb to his right. The reverberations rattled through his phones. He ducked back. He knew he had set off a series of warning signals.
They were coming toward him, bounding like track men over hurdles. The legless one scrambled onto an elevation, hand over hand, perched himself, drew a pistol, and waited like a sentinel.
Bob held to a piece of copper railing, placed a fist on his hip, and watched them advance.
The bad-armed one confronted him, and the heavy, sullen voice hummed in through the phones.
“You don’t need that helmet. We’ve got air enough.”
It wasn’t an altogether unfriendly beginning. Bob removed his helmet and let it hang at his back. The deformed man before him had a solid face, a sturdy mouth and a heavy jaw. Glazed of eye, bright gold of skin, lightly clothed in purple, he presented a picture of unreality that made Bob think of a circus sideshow. But his crusty words meant business.
“What are you doing here?”
“I might ask you the same question,” Bob said.
“I belong here. I am a servant of her majesty, Queen Dezeeta.”
“Queen who?”
“Queen Dezeeta—and speak the name with respect, please.”
“I never heard of her. Who is she?”
“The owner of this planet.”
“Planet?”
