Three Worlds to Conquer

by Poul Anderson

  “Don’t, Mark,” she murmured; and then: “No, do. For this one time. There can’t be another, can there?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I’m going back to Earth,” she said.

  “No!”

  “I have to. It’s the only way out.”

  “Well . . . I wish you wouldn’t,” he said.

  “No, you don’t wish that Mark. Not down inside.”

  “I could envy the man who marries you.”

  “I do envy the woman who married you. But you know, I’m not jealous of her. I feel sorry for her, that she’ll never have what I’ve had.”

  “You’ve had nothing except a hard time.”

  “With you.” She blinked repeatedly. “C’mon, we’d better get to work before I start bawling.”

  Fraser swore behind shut lips. If Lorraine—

  But she was right, of course, and he was a rat for what he had briefly hoped. Life isn’t a story book, he lectured himself. There are no happy endings. It just goes on.

  Carefully impersonal, they finished the installation. Mounted on the board was a simple deadman switch connected to the main thrust-control lever and to a battery-powered timer. An acceleration of one Ganymedean gravity provided weight for testing and adjustment.

  “I guess it’ll work,” Fraser shrugged, “and possibly it won’t kill us.”

  Jupiter was then between him and the sun. He saw stars in plenty, so great a multitude that he needed his whole piloting experience to identify the constellations. Ganymede was visible, a tiny cold crescent. He banged computer keys, working out a vector with respect to the stellar background that should bring them to approximate rendezvous. The terminal maneuvers would be carried out by seat-of-the-pants, a wasteful, hazardous procedure but feasible if you had a skilled hand on the board and a lot of reaction mass to squander.

  The ship throbbed under his touch. Jupiter fell behind.

  The first stages were rough. They could have spiraled out under low thrust, but that would have required a great deal of time, so he gave a full five gravities for several minutes. After that the Olympia was so far out that he could drop the acceleration to a reasonable value. Most of the crossing he made at half an Earth-gee. Besides the need to spare their bodies further abuse, he didn’t want to build up an unmanageably high velocity. Course corrections were difficult enough without that.

  They talked together, he and Lorraine, during the hours that followed; but what they had to say was no one else’s business. Not even Eve’s.

  Ganymede came near. Fraser was surprised to note how little fear there was in him, and how much savage anticipation. There was something wrong about feeling guilt at killing members of another species, and none at what might happen to men as warm-blooded as himself. Well, the Ulunt-Khazul had done him little personal harm, and they had not been able to shoot back at him. Matters were different now. Yeah, quite a bit different!

  With an angry, chopping motion he switched the ship’s radio to broadcast. “Spaceship Olympia calling Aurora Space Traffic Control,” he spat at the raw mountainscape rolling before him. “Request guide beam and permission to land.”

  “What? Olympia, did you say?” exclaimed an unfamiliar voice.

  “I did.” Fraser gave his approximate coordinates. “Your radar can find me somewhere in that vicinity. Go ahead, slap a beam on. But relax. We’re headed in to surrender.”

  “Wait. Can you hold on for a minute? I have to check with my superiors.”

  Sure, l can wait. I may be in a mean mood, but I’m not anxious to put Lory’s life back in jeopardy. And I’ve got to.

  The radio buzzed with star noise.

  “Aurora Space Traffic Control to Olympia Stand by.”

  A second later, Swayne’s curbed and bitted wrath entered his ears. “You! What are you up to?”

  “We’re beaten,” Fraser said. “We tried to lick you and failed, so we’re coming back.”

  “Who are you, anyway? Vlasek is with you, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Lorraine said. “Proud to be.”

  Fraser gave his own name. Anything else would have been out of character.

  “How did you escape that missile?” Swayne demanded.

  Fraser told him, quite truthfully. “We landed on Jupiter,” he finished. “You’ll see, when we get close, the gas bag is inflated. We had a faint hope the Jovians might be able to help us somehow. But the radio beacon down there was out. I guess the invaders wrecked it. You’ve heard about that war, haven’t you? We couldn’t even find the city we’ve been communicating with, in so much territory. Our supplies exhausted, we decided to give up.”

  “Assume an orbit and I’ll send a boarding party.”

  “I’d rather not,” Fraser said. “Our air is pretty foul. We could be dead before your boat matches velocities. Give me a beam and I’ll follow it down to the spaceport.”

  “Um-m—no, you’ll have to take your chances. I don’t trust you one centimeter.”

  “What the devil could we do? Attempt a suicide dive on your precious ship? A rocket would Mast us before we’d got halfway. Would we have returned if we didn’t want to live?”

  Swayne hesitated. Fraser could almost see that thin countenance twisting in thought. At length: “Are you so anxious to live that you’ll give us the names of your confederates?”

  Fraser’s heart bounded. This is it! He opened his mouth. Lorraine shook her head and raised a finger to her faceplate.

  “Well?” Swayne said. “For people whose air is running low, you’re almighty leisurely.”

  “It’s a hard thing to ask of us,” Lorraine said.

  “I want those names while you ride down. Otherwise I’ll fire on you. There will be further interrogation, a thorough interrogation, after you’ve landed.”

  “Okay,” she mumbled.

  Good girl! Fraser thought. Thai reluctant act convinced him.

  With a radar fix now on the Olympia, the guide beam snaked forth and locked fast. “Give me my right position and velocity too,” Fraser reminded.

  “Naturally,” Swayne said. “But I’ve further instructions for you. I don’t want you landing on the field. You might be tempted to try some fancy stunt, with your jets for instance, once you’re inside our radius of fire. Set down on the Sinus, a mile west of Aurora, just north of Navajo Crater, where we can keep you covered. Any deviation from this line, from any of these instructions, and well shoot.”

  “Check,” said Fraser sullenly. “Turn me over to Control.”

  “At once. Vlasek, start giving me those names!”

  XX

  With his set tuned to the tower band, Fraser couldn’t hear her. He could see her lips move, and imagined he could read them. Bill Enderby? Pete La Pointe? Ellen Swanberg? We’ve got to carry this off, or we’ve spilled their lives too. He lost remorse in the furious activity of correcting his vectors.

  The moon swelled aft as he backed down until its peaks seemed to reach through the screens. Morning lay on Aurora; Jupiter was a pale, lost crescent.

  “You go on straight visual in sixty seconds,” the voice told him. “Countdown: Sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight—“—zero. Over and out.”

  Fraser looked upon Mare Navium, dark and barren—at Dante Chasm—at the fangs of the Gunnison.

  One day there would be a sea here. But he would be very old then. He thought of returning to Earth, and realized he couldn’t For then Lorraine must depart, and she deserved oceans and blue skies.

  The ground rushed up. He mixed in a sideways thrust of steering jets, to avoid the crater that grabbed at him. Now, said the altimeter. He pushed the switch to extend the belly jacks. Dust boiled around him. Balanced on wildfire, he gauged his moment. This was a tricky beast to land non-aerodynamically. Couldn’t be done on a larger world than Ganymede, and perhaps not even then; he had not been trained in that sort of operation. If he cracked up—

  “I’m not going to,” he said, as he cut out the main blast and applied rotatory thrust.
The nose swiveled to horizontal. Steering jets gave less acceleration than gravity. The ship fell.

  Shock-mounted, the wheeled jacks absorbed most of the impact. Nonetheless it rocked him. He tasted blood and realized he had bitten his tongue. So much for the big bold hero.

  The nuclear engine continued to pulse, but silence oozed up through the noise. The dust outside settled and the sun appeared.

  Lorraine unplugged her helmet set from the board, tuned to the standard frequency, and said, “He wants us to come out at once. I told him we have gas in here, under pressure, and don’t want to be blown through the airlock. So we’ve got time to cycle through and—” Her words trailed off. She was already at work on her harness.

  Fraser spent an anxious minute sighting at the Vega. The ship glimmered on the field, enormous even at a mile’s remove. He sighed with relief; the Olympia was pointed accurately. He’d kept an excuse in reserve for realigning her if necessary, but Swayne was so suspicious that it might not have worked. Quickly he switched the autopilot to connection with the inertial compass.

  Lorraine started the timer. “Five minutes,” she said. “Let’s go.” Her face was very white.

  They entered the airlock chamber and waited for it to exhaust. A curious peace possessed Fraser. He had done what he could; the rest lay with the laws of physics. Or with God, maybe. He patted the steel beside him. “So long,” he said. “You were a good ship.”

  Lorraine started to cry, quietly and alone.

  The chug of die pump dwindled away. Fraser cracked the outer door.

  With no ladder to help the ground seemed a long way off. He pimped. The landing hurt his shins.

  Lorraine joined him. She touched her helmet to his. “They’re watching us from the battleship,” she pointed out needlessly. “We’d better start walking.”

  “And get incinerated by the blast? Not you!” He pulled at her arm. They bounded off toward Navajo Crater.

  “Hey, there!” Swayne’s voice was brittle in their earplugs. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Why, we’re headed around the safety wall,” Fraser said innocently. “You want us in town, don’t you?”

  “I want you to come straight onto the field. Quick, before we shoot.”

  Some eons ago a meteorite had struck the crater. The scar was still fresh. The boulder lay at the bottom of the slope. Fraser and Lorraine plunged toward it.

  A laser beam winked, intolerably bright. The lava melted where it hit. It swung after the running targets. Fraser grabbed Lorraine and threw her to the ground with himself for a shield. “No,” she cried, “you’ve got Eve—”

  The timer completed its appointed number of cycles. A relay clicked back a catch. A spring yanked the lever coupled to the main switch. The Olympia leaped forward.

  Someone fired a shell. It exploded yards behind the spot where the runaway ship had been. The titanic rush of exhaust gases vaporized the smaller fragments. Spreading, it raged in a fog across Fraser. The ground shuddered and kicked him. Heat clawed through his armor. Blinded, stunned, he heard a roar so great that it ceased to be noise, an unchained elemental force battering his bones.

  Had the Olympia been less stoutly built, her jacks would have torn her open. As it was, the wheels gouged a double trail of smoke, dust, sparks and splinters. Having been ordered to steer a straight line, the autopilot used side jets for correction, flame and fury to right and left against the volcano that bellowed aft. The men on the Vega had perhaps fifteen seconds to watch the dragon charge them.

  There was no way to stop that onslaught. The ship from Jupiter was beneath the lowest arc of gun and missile tube sooner than a human could take fresh aim. A laser battery might have destroyed her in time. But time was not granted.

  Yet the Vega was on battle alert, her engines warm, every station manned. The pilot threw his own switch and she blasted. At maximum thrust she lifted over the oncoming mass, poured her exhaust down upon it with a force that smashed the concrete beneath.

  The gas bag disintegrated. The thinner cells in the hold of the Olympia gave way. Jovian atmosphere exploded into vacuum. Under that much violence, already weakened by the battleship jets and and with its structural cross-bracing now gone the surface-condition compartment split. Hydrogen came out at more than sea-bottom pressure. Shrapnel chunks and boulders of allotropic ice were hurled heavenward. In airlessness and rocketblast temperatures, the water molecules crashed over to a low-density form even as they flew. The energy released could be measured, but never imagined.

  A shock wave through the stone of Ganymede hurled Fraser aloft. He landed hard, with a gasp, and rolled over several times before he stopped. He scarcely noticed. Nothing could be noticed but that Luciferean burst which annihilated the Vega.

  It was over in less than a second.

  The gases fled back to interstellar space.

  A shallow crater had opened in the field. Wreckage rained down into it. Smoke and dust puffed away, the stars glittered forth, a vast and terrible silence fell.

  Fraser rose to unsteady feet and helped Lorraine up. She stared wildly at him. “Are you all right?” asked part of him. The rest was still ringing and reeling.

  “Alive, anyhow,” she choked. “You? The town?” Frantic, she peered east against the sun. The safety wall was partly crumbled, the main radio mast bent into a grotesquerie. But Aurora herself stood firm.

  “We did it,” he breathed. “Before heaven, we did.”

  “Yes. B-but . . . oh, I don’t know. Trumpets ought to sound for me, I suppose, but mainly I just notice how I ache, how much I want to rest—and all those poor young men, and you belonging to—Let’s walk back as slowly as we can.” Her gauntlet closed on his. He was reminded of Ann.

  Bill Enderby met them as they neared the west central airlock. He stopped and waited, blocky in his spacesuit. The face behind the helmet was overwhelmed by victory.

  “Hello,” he ventured shyly.

  “What about the garrison inside?” Fraser demanded.

  “They haven’t done anything,” Enderby said. “What could they do? Swayne was aboard that ship, along with most of their buddies.” He lifted the firegun he carried. “I took this off one of ’em. He just sat there and cried. We’re rounding them up now.”

  “There are still the boats on patrol duty,” Lorraine said.

  “No worry. What can they do either, except come in to surrender when their supplies run low? Even if they tried to dis us, they’ve only got three or four small rockets apiece—okay against a spaceship but not much use at a place built like Aurora. Not that they will try. Their cause is lost, and without us they’d plain starve to death.”

  Enderby drew a long breath. “This is your doing, isn’t it?” he asked. “You two?”

  “We three,” Fraser said. He didn’t amplify.

  “I haven’t got any words for you, Enderby said. “Nobody does. Those words haven’t been made yet. Here, uh, Miss Vlasek.” He thrust the gun awkwardly at her. “This is a hell of a nice little piece. It’s yours.”

  She shook her head. “No, thanks. I don’t want to touch a weapon ever again. Can you get us to a doctor?”

  “Oh, lord, yes. Anything!” Glory turned to worry. “You’re not hurt bad, are you?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Nothing serious. But so very tired.”

  She leaned on Fraser as they approached the airlock. “You know,” he said, “I don’t feel tired at all.” The remark was perhaps a little heartless, but he couldn’t help making it when he was walking with his head lifted so high.

  As Colin and Ann will walk, he thought. It seems impossible already that I, my own poor self, had the honor of buying them that right.

  He looked upward. The sun was nearing Jupiter. But Eve should have gotten here even before the eclipse was ended. END

 

 

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