Operation Interstellar (1950)

by George O. Smith

  The radio was silent. Only the crackle of cosmic static came from the speaker to show that it was alive. The Z-wave was even more silent for there was no interfering cosmic energies to make Z-wave static.

  Paul set up the test equipment and checked both. They were obviously ‘hot’ and awaiting the arrival of some signal in order to burst into full-throated life.

  Then he settled back to wait. How long, Paul could not tell. Actually, the measurement of this matter was the basic reason for Paul’s being here. The books set Alpha Centauri at 4.3 light years from Sol. Ergo a beam of light or a radio wave should take 4.3 years from transmission to reception. Ten percent error would cause a variable of almost five months; an error of one percent adds up to two weeks.

  The observatories had admitted an error of one percent as a maximum and considerable space travel between Proxima I and Terra had diminished this error to an absolute of about three days plus or minus the nominal. Paul had been gratified to discover that despite his delayed take-off, he had arrived at Proxima before the radio signal arrived from Terra.

  Paul had been worried about his delay and he had driven his ship hard. Not during the days of faster-than-light travel, of course, but after Paul had come down out of the blackness and could set a course by inspection. He had been either lucky or proficient. Even using a not too precise method of aiming his ship, he had still emerged from the blackness less than five million miles from Proxima, which was very good aiming indeed.

  Pilots always aimed for their target on the nose. For one thing, the dispersion was huge because the slightest irregularity in any phase of the maneuver would throw off the point of aim by millions of miles. In years and years of spaceflight, the first direct hit upon target had yet to be recorded. In fact, five million miles was considered brilliant piloting—or as is more possible, it was brilliant luck!

  Then as Paul found his landing-spot, he had pushed the BurAst P.G.l hard enough to make her plates creak and Paul had descended at a full four gravities all the way to the ground. He had arrived before the radio signal had reached the planet and that was all he cared about.

  So he settled back to wait. There was little to do but sit and think, and to watch the occasional meteor shower land on the dusty ground.

  There had been an extensive shower about ten miles from the station shortly after his arrival. The impact was, of course, both invisible and inaudible. But upon impact the dust spurted upwards, billowing and flowing like the column in miniature that came from an atom bomb explosion. Since there was no air on Proxima I, the billowing dust rose and spread apart until the individual dust mote lost its energy and fell back to Proxima I by gravitational attraction.

  He would have liked to inspect that particular spot because the shower had been spectacular. A number of meteors in a close-knit group had landed, sending forth a series of dusty columns —some of the larger of which were still visible when the radio chattered into life three days after his arrival.

  It came all at once and its sound dinned his ears and re-echoed from the smooth walls of the Station. The sound snapped Paul from his place by the window-dome. It grated on his ears until he could rush downstairs to the radio room to turn the volume-gain control down so that the audio signal fell below the overload point.

  From a raucous, nerve-tingling screech, the volume fell until distortion no longer fouled up the filtered purity of the signal-note broadcast from far-off Terra four years ago. Paul measured the signal strength and found it entirely satisfactory. He coupled the recorders to the gear, and then settled back to await the arrival of the modulated timing signals that were transmitted after an interval of straight tone, the first period to be used for establishing contact before the actual timing of the transmission-time began.

  Once the radio signal was coming in perfectly, Paul turned his attention to the Z-wave receiver.

  He tuned it gingerly, cautiously.

  And then it came to life.

  Paul cried in exultation. His was success! True, it was a weakling signal that faded and died at times, but it came in strong and clear enough for recording in the periods of good reception. A bit of work and research, and the construction of a real interstellar Z-wave station would remove this fading.

  Paul snapped the extra recorder on, and then began to dream his dream again, this time more strong than ever before.

  He had connected the Z-wave equipment at Terra’s Z-wave central to the big interstellar radio transmitter, lacking a Z-wave transmitter for his own use. So that now he was hearing the Terran end of conversation. It was a woman’s voice that talked from Terra to someone currently on one of the planetary outposts of Sol.

  “… but it won’t be long, my dear…. Of course, it seems so. … Do that, by all means…. In a month, you say? … I’m very happy about that…” here the signal faded for a full minute. It returned again, “… Terry said so…. How do I know?… By all means, my dear …” and here again the signal faded.

  But it was enough.

  Exultation filled Paul. This was proof. This was the door, opening for life upon everything he ever hoped to gain, everything he hoped to be. It gave him what he wanted to offer life, and by happy circumstance, he had found the one he wanted to offer it to. He could go to Nora, not as a technician in the Bureau of Astrogation but with a grand future of success and opportunity to build ever upward and ever onward to real fame and fortune. Not the real success in his hand, for when the final success in life comes, ambition and desire begin to wane. But far more exhilarating was the hope of success, the chance to work for a magnificent future together.

  He gloated for hours, measuring the radio signal as few radio transmissions have ever been measured before.

  Then with his work finished, Paul packed up to leave. The glittering stone he held in his hand was nice, but tiny now, compared to his tale of success. A bright rock from a far-off planet, not much more than a seashell from a distant beach.

  With a chuckle, he tossed the stone aside and broke out the sand-jeep. Nora might like a meteorite from far Proxima I. At least, it was a souvenir to be quite in evidence wherever it might end up.

  He headed for the meteor shower of three days before, and found it after an hour of running across the featureless sands.

  The area was small, which in itself was strange, for meteor showers cover miles of area, not square yards. The sands were pocked with small craters, and Paul looked at them until he found a crater of medium size where the rock was still showing. He hefted the stone from the sky and carried it to the sand-jeep. On his way back to the little buggy, he caught sight of a glitter less than fifty feet away.

  He dropped the stone in the back of the jeep and strode over to see what could be glittering this brightly in Proxima’s veritable sea of bland, yellow sand.

  Then he stood dumbfounded, for the glitter came from the circular disc of glass, the eyepiece of a space suit, which was buried in the sand. A crater of irregular shape surrounded it, and the meteorite was lying in half-exposed view. Paul dropped into the crater and lifted the stone, to disclose a nauseous clot of brownish blood, the remnant of space suit, and contained in it, the remains of a man. Mostly buried by the impact, the man’s body stood almost upright, the headpiece at ground level while the rest of the body was curved brokenly backwards down in the crater, driven into the sand instantly by the meteor.

  Paul shrugged and removed the helmet.

  The face was vaguely familiar. The man wore clothing under the suit but there was no sign of identification in it. The face bothered Paul, however. He believed he had seen it somewhere.

  Not only that, but just exactly why any man possessed of sane mind would be on Proxima I (save Paul, who had business there) was mystery at its best.

  Paul stood up and looked around the plain.

  He caught another glitter, and got into his jeep to investigate. It was the semi-submerged spacecraft, and Paul wondered at it. It was smashed flat by a gigantic meteor, ruined beyond any hope of
reconstruction. Paul tried to enter to inspect it. It had been too badly wrecked by the meteor.

  Abandoning the spacecraft as a hopeless job for immediate identification, Paul went back to the lone victim. There was still something vaguely familiar about the man’s face. The difference was not because the vacuum of Proxima had distorted the face, for the suit had been sealed at the break by the meteor and the sand and there was no distortion.

  Paul pondered. Identification might be possible by dental means, by prints, by iris-matching, if the face distorted on his way back. There was his refrigerating gear aboard the ship, Paul could stick the corpse in there and hope that some light could be shed on this mystery.

  Paul folded the lower, ruined portion of the space suit to preserve whatever minute bit of air it contained, and packed it onto the jeep. He shoved the body into the freezing cold of the storage bin with a grimace of distaste and determined to dine on canned beans for the duration. It annoyed him to hurl several pounds of fine, well-hung tenderloin steak onto the bald sands of Proxima I to make room for an un-hung corpse. But it had to be done.

  Then, with the mystery still gnawing at his mind, Paul fixed the drive-scope on Sol, made a few adjustments, and set his autodrive and microtimer according to the data supplied before his departure from Terra. It was a corrected-for-duration course, the reverse of his approaching orbit.

  Paul clicked the drive and headed for Sol. When the ship dropped into invisibility, he relaxed. Busy all the time of his stay on Proxima I, he felt seedy. While still pondering the problem, Paul shucked his clothing and showered. Water, both hot and then chilled, did not help his memory any. Nor was it the memory of Nora Phillips that made him lather his face and shave. Not entirely. For the three-day beard made his face uncomfortable and it was personal comfort rather than White Man’s Burden that prompted Paul to reap his beard. Like most men, shaving was not a pleasant occupation, and when no matter of personal appearance insisted upon a smooth face, shaving was postponed and indulged in only when the factors of discomfort balanced one another equally and in diametrically opposite directions.

  Paul grinned at his clean face in the mirror. “Y’know,” he said to himself in the glass, “You’re vaguely familiar, too.”

  The idea hit him hard, then.

  One of the reasons why a picture of one’s self does not resemble one’s familiar appearance in a mirror is due to the lack of facial symmetry. The left side of a mirror image is the right side of the face on a photograph and the two seldom match.

  Paul gulped and dressed quickly. Then he went to the freeze-locker and hauled out the dead man.

  It would take a third observer to tell. But so far as Paul Grayson could tell, this man from Proxima I was his double. “And that,” he said in address to the corpse, “makes two of you!”

  CHAPTER 7

  Ten days later when Paul’s ship dropped out of the realm of invisibility, he was no nearer to the problem’s solution. He did have a course of action formulated, however. So his first telephone call was not to Nora Phillips. It was to John Stacey, the detective.

  “I’m back.”

  “Glad to hear it. Wha’ hoppen?”

  “I’ve got a corpse on my ship.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  “Nope.”

  “Look,” came the cheerful reply, “if you want to murder someone, go ahead. But there’s no sense in putting yourself in jeopardy by carrying the mortal remains around with you. Why didn’t you dump the thing out in space?”

  “I want it identified.”

  “Now, for the first time in years, you make sense.” “Thanks.”

  “But look,” said Stacey suddenly, “just what kind of mess have you gotten yourself into?”

  “I don’t know. I hope to find out.”

  “Well, it’s thick.”

  Paul blinked. “I know it. But why?”

  “You answer that one, it’s your question.”

  “What’s new?”

  “Nora Phillips is missing.”

  “Missing?” exploded Paul. “Where did she go?”

  “I haven’t been able to find out yet.”

  “What do you know?” demanded Paul.

  “Damned little. She left you on your departure day and started to drive back to town. Instead of returning to her office or going home, she turned off on Bridge Street and stopped at a mansion. Number 7111, to be exact. Drove her car into the garage as though she were expected. Hasn’t come out since.”

  “You haven’t kept a man watching the place for all this time?”

  “No, but I’ve had a gent prowl the joint at least once a day for the last two weeks, and the car is still in the garage. You can see it through the windows of the door.”

  “Didn’t she come out?”

  “Garage is connected to the house. She could have gone into the house without breathing fresh air.”

  “That’s 7111 Bridge Street?”

  “Check.”

  “How about her job?”

  “By careful enquiry, we’ve learned that she resigned. By letter.”

  “How did you get that?”

  “Well, law outfits seldom take kindly to characters asking leading questions. But an advertisement appeared for a librarian and I had Milly fill it. She pored through the personnel files and found a typed letter of resignation. Terse; disappointingly uninformative.”

  “Her apartment?”

  “She ran a three-room job alone. A man appeared, armed with a letter from her. He packed up her stuff and it was removed from the premises by the Howdaille Moving and Storage Company. It is currently there in storage with the bill paid in advance for six months.”

  “Any more?”

  “I had Morton enquire about a rental at that address and he was told that Miss Phillips had to return home because of illness of her father. That’s all we could get. Morton got that information from the landlord after expressing first a desire to live there and second asking why the previous tenant moved out. Put it so that the landlord had to show him her letter to prevent a possible tenant from thinking that there was something odious about the premises.”

  “Then what?”

  “That’s all. Morton considered the place—apparently—for several days after putting down a twenty-buck deposit. Gave it up and forfeited the deposit on the grounds that his wife wanted a four room place.”

  “Um. Gone without a trace?”

  “Seems so. Excepting that she went into 7111 Bridge, and we’ve not seen her since.”

  “How long did you watch?”

  “Constantly for ten days. Not a sign or a trace of her there.”

  “But—”

  “Yeah,” replied Stacey’s unhappy voice, “we cased that joint too. I’ve had at least seven operatives hit that front door, on every sort of pretext from stolen nylon hosiery to roofing salesmen, and from governmental surveys on this and that to gents who insist that they look at the electric wiring, the plumbing, and the foundation. The joint is owned and tenanted by an elderly gentleman who has retired. His wife lives there too. One servant, a doddering old fogy who must have been the owner’s father’s gentleman’s gentleman.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Hoagland.”

  “How about the car in the garage?”

  Paul could almost hear Stacey shrug. “So far, there is nothing suspicious about it from a legal standpoint,” he said. “You’d have one hell of a time proving anything. So a woman—none too well acquainted with you—resigns from her position on a perfectly logical grounds, moves from her apartment on similar grounds, and deposits her car in a strange place and disappears.”

  “But that last is the important tiling. She disappeared.”

  ‘‘Yeah? Where does her father live? Maybe she did go there?” “You’re the detective,” said Paul. “Chase it down.”

  “This will cost like hell,” warned Stacey.

  Paul laughed. “What I’ve got will pay for plenty from now on,” h
e said.

  “I’ll re-open the case, then.”

  “You shouldn’t have closed it.”

  Stacey groaned. “How did I know you were that anxious?” “I was.”

  “Okay. But I wanted your approval before I broke this thing wide open.”

  “Will it?”

  “Sure. The first time I go to 7111 Bridge and ask about that automobile in the garage, which is registered under the name of Nora Phillips, someone is either going to get nasty, call the police, or start asking me embarrassing questions that might lead to Paul Grayson.”

  “Stacey, the guy I found dead on Proxima I is another dead ringer for myself. That makes two characters killed off that resemble me. It looks like a plot, to me.”

  “How was the deceased rendered that way?”

  “He was hit by a meteorite.”

  “Act of God, I calls that,” muttered Stacey. “You wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that God is on your side?”

  “When a meteorite hits a man and a spacecraft in the same shower, both of which are prowling on a planet where they had no business and shouldn’t have had any curiosity, it begins to look as though celestial mechanics, formerly run by the Act of God, might have been given a little aid and aim by the machiavellian hand of man or men unknown.”

  “How could you aim a—”

  “Haul it to the right spot and drop it from a good height from a spacecraft. That’s for the big one that wrecked the ship. Garry a boatload of little ones and drop ’em on the head of the character you desire to erase. Not one of them penetrated to the depths I’d have expected, now that it comes to mind.”

  “Okay, Paul. I’m on the trail again. I’ll send a man to collect your corpse and we’ll attempt to identify it. Maybe that will give us a lead.”

  “Check,” said Paul, and he turned away from the telephone with a heavy heart.

  He recalled the lissome warmth of her body pressed eagerly against him; could a woman offer herself falsely with that much ardor?