The Best Science Fiction of 1949

by Everett F. Bleiler

  Slidell sighed. “All right, I promised,” he said resignedly. “You can take Fireball if you insist.”

  “But you want me to—”

  “Use your head, Walter. We need all the boost Doughnut II will put out. Not bare escape velocity. And you know there hasn’t been time to check her properly since you boosted Firestreak out last Thursday. You’re the one who—”

  “How about Bob Ord?”

  “He could, under normal conditions. But this won’t be standard pattern. Besides, we haven’t been able to find him yet. This would happen between schedules, when everybody’s scattered to hell and gone!”

  “Now, listen here, Jerry. I don’t intend to get pushed—” “Walter, I’m doing my best. I caught Wraxton vacationing in Los Angeles, and he should be here in a couple hours to see what he can do.”

  Merrill grimaced. Wraxton of Chesapeake Spaceport was supposed to be a good boosterman, but Doughnut was touchy and Chesapeake used a different control system. The pleasant feeling of a few minutes earlier had evaporated completely.

  Slidell’s voice was suddenly crisp with authority. “Go get your shots. Thomas will take care of you. We’ll settle later who takes what.”

  Merrill didn’t argue, but if the door panel had been glass instead of plastic, it would have shattered as he slammed it. As he stomped toward the locker-room he had a rebellious suspicion that he was being had—again.

  Haskell-Jenkins nuclear shift drivers had taken spaceflight out of the over-Niagara-in-a-barrel category, but they had the intrinsic drawback of critical mass limitation. Too much fuel, and a ship exploded spontaneously. Enough to stay under the e.c.m. and it could reach Mars—but on the return voyage it would run out of fuel before completing deceleration, and hit Earth’s atmosphere fast enough to burn itself to powder.

  The intricate equipment necessary made step-rockets, in which sections were jettisoned in space, fantastically uneconomical. So the great brains of Interplanet had conceived the Doughnut to boost its ships through the power-hogging lift from Earth.

  Walter Merrill had been picked off the Luna experimental work for his uncanny power sense and delicate kinesthetic perceptions, for no auto-control had been devised capable of coping with all the variables of blast-off. He had become Interplanet’s first and only boosterman.

  In many ways it was a dream job. One boost-out a month, with the rest of the time almost entirely his own. A salary rating of Senior Pilot “A,” which easily financed such financed such impractical hobbies as putting jets on an automobile, as well as a house and sailboat and all the trimmings. A sense of importance, too, for the fate of each spaceship was in the hands of the boosterman during the most critical interval.

  But dissatisfaction had set in. Boosting lacked the glamour of deep space. The line pilots and their relief men talked endlessly of the strange floating landings through the low .38 gravity of Mars, and of the remains of a vanished civilization there, and of the Colony that was beginning to grow at Marsport —and all he could do was keep his mouth shut.

  He was a glorified elevator operator, missing out on the high adventure that lay out there, never getting much beyond Luna’s orbit, and ending each flight with a hissing drop into Puget Sound beside the Mukilteo beacon, while his friends one after another had been given command of full-fledged space vessels.

  Recently even men he had been forced to downcheck as potential boostermen had been taking ships through to the Colony. Here he was, stuck in a rut, and every time he had been promised a line run, something had gone sour!

  He stripped and put on the buttonless one-piece knit garment he would wear beneath his circulation suit, then kicked his feet savagely into a pair of slippers and shuffled down the hall to the medical department. In the empty treatment-room he stuck two fingers into his mouth and whistled shrilly.

  Bubsy Thomas emerged from the dispensary. She had auburn hair and green eyes; and her white stockings and starched nurse’s uniform could not hide the fact she carried deluxe equipment throughout; but for once he was too disturbed to open the conversation with his customary suggestion of Matrimony.

  “Limit dose,” he told her. “And Neogravinol too. This hop will get rough.”

  She looked at him questioningly. The boosterman ordinarily did not need the more prolonged action of Neogravinol in addition to the regular Gravinol shot.

  “You had breakfast before the office caught you,” she accused.

  “Coffee and toast,” he hedged.

  “—and three eggs and a pound of bacon. I’ve seen you eat. Now get your teeth out.”

  “Aw, honey!” he protested.

  Impatiently she tapped a toe against the waxed flooring.

  His front uppers had been removable ever since one of the Luna experimentals had set in with a smash that broke his shock chair straps, but still he felt there was something comical and faintly disreputable about wearing falsies. Too much like those females who wore padding to remedy natural deficiencies—which Bubsy definitely did not.

  Grimly she watched him, and finally he took them out.

  She measured a brownish liquid into a small glass while he cursed the medical records for telling her about his teeth. They hardly helped make him a romantic figure.

  “The basin is over there,” she directed. “Now drink this.”

  Two minutes later he had no further worries about gravity cramps from a full stomach. It was full no longer.

  “Sometime you’ll blast with that bridgework in, and get it knocked down your throat,” she warned as she had often before.

  “A lot you’d care,” he growled, still retching.

  “But I would,” she declared sweetly. “You might wreck a ship.”

  Before he could think of a suitable rejoinder, she had the hypos ready.

  “I shot your left arm last time,” she remembered, and he rolled back his right sleeve.

  Deftly she found the vein and pressed the plunger. Then, changing syringes, she began to inject the

  Neogravinol. “If you take—sit still, darn it!—who’ll handle—” His skin was prickling and itching, and a distinct rainbow aura was forming around every object in

  the room as the drugs took effect.

  “Ord, maybe. Or Wraxton from Chesapeake. But I’m taking Fireball.”

  For a moment her hands were unsteady.

  “And why not?” he asked sharply. “I can straighten out any trajectory error they hand me.”

  “If it’s not too bad,” she corrected. “But what about Mars Colony if Fireball gets a sour boost and

  has to abort?”

  Merrill didn’t want to think about that. “But I don’t intend to keep on—”

  Jerry Slidell banged through the door. His face was streaky pale from moving too violently, but his

  tongue was unimpaired.

  “Wraxton was flying his own plane up,” he told them at last with forced calmness. “At Medford some lard-headed student cut in on him during landing. He’s got a fractured leg and concussion. Now what the hell?”

  “Call Ord,” Merrill snapped. He was in the depressive-irritant phase that followed a Gravinol injection. He started to get up, but the nurse pushed him back. He had to take it easy until the shots

  “settled in.”

  Slidell glared. “Been trying, and still am. You think I got holes in my head?”

  “Yes, if you think I’m going to—” Merrill growled sullenly.

  “Shut up, both of you!” Bubsy interrupted. “Barking at each other won’t help.”

  Slidell’s shoulders slumped, and his manner was almost pleading.

  “You’ll stay on call, Walter?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be around until you get me a boosterman.”

  A circulation suit was too heavy to put on until the last minute, so he had nothing to do but wait. It should have been pleasant, but the nurse ignored him while she cleaned up and put the hypodermics in the sterilizer. The few glances which she did cast his way were troubled, almost
angry. He used her phone to get preliminary flight data from Calculations. Then he fidgeted.

  “What’s the idea of giving me the busy signal so much lately?” he asked at length. “You sore at me? Or is it that Fred Morgan off Firesprite?”

  The girl turned quickly, as though she had been waiting for that question.

  “I’ve been afraid.”

  “Huh?”

  “Not of you. Of myself. Afraid moonlight and biochemistry would gang up on me.”

  “And that would be wrong, because I’m a boosterman instead of a line pilot?” he demanded belligerently.

  Her eyes misted unexpectedly. “You and I both know there’s something real under all our kidding. But Walter, I want a husband who’s emotionally mature, who understands responsibilities and accepts them instead of acting like a brat in a temper tantrum.”

  Merrill frowned.

  Jerry Slidell’s voice interrupted, rattling abruptly through the inter-office call-box. “We’ve found Bob Ord. Get ready to give him his shots.”

  Instantly the nurse thrust personal matters aside.

  Merrill felt better. Slidell wasn’t giving him the runaround after all. But now he had a different worry.

  He had let Bob handle a few splits, those critical moments when Doughnut and boosted spaceship parted company; and although Bob looked more promising than any of the other men sent to him for training, he hadn’t yet quite got the feel. This was going to be a tough boost; and it had to be good—or else. He only hoped Bob could hold the trajectory skew below the limit that meant aborting the flight.

  Slidell’s voice came again, tinny through the speaker. “Walter, better get your suit on.”

  Automatically Merrill answered. “On my way!”

  He turned to the nurse as the connection snapped off. “How’d he know I was here?” he demanded.

  She smiled, half tenderly and half teasingly. “Everyone around here knows how long and painted and gray-furred your ears are. And since that front-office blonde—”

  “She did not!” he retorted indignantly. “And I never made a pass at her, anyhow.”

  “Okay. So you didn’t, and she didn’t.” Bubsy pulled that infuriating feminine trick of refusing to argue.

  There were eighteen zippers and twenty-seven adjustment straps on the suit, and he checked each one personally while the two dressers made the suit-to-boots, suit-to-gloves, suit-to-helmet and helmet-to-face-mask hook-ups. Then he lumbered stiffly across the room and plugged in to the test modulator.

  The over-all inflation went on, squeezing his body equally from all directions. He jiggled the manual control— in flight the pressure would compensate automatically with acceleration—and it responded perfectly.

  He cut in the sectional controls, and felt the familiar yet eerie rippling sensations as a multitude of tiny compartments in the suit began rhythmic fluctuations in response to his body’s needs as reported by built-in blood pressure and pulse and respiration meters. The suit’s action had been patterned after the peristaltic movements of a digestive system, using the same idea of progressive, serially applied pressures, and his fingertips and toes tingled as the blood was hurried along.

  In tree-dwelling days the human race had developed a reflex response to short-duration, one-G falls. Veins and arteries constricted; blood pressure shot up; and major changes took place in the action of the heart valves. This automatic reaction had minimized the injuries of many a falling man, and it was still right for its original purpose.

  But under the hours-long, multi-G strains of space-light, it became a peril instead of a protection, putting strains on the body that meant permanent damage. Gravinol short-circuited the reflex, but if

  used alone under heavy acceleration, it would bring blood circulation—and the pilot’s life—to a dead stop. The answer, worked out at heavy cost in lives and health, was Gravinol plus a circulation suit.

  The suit felt right, almost as though it were alive and part of his body. He nodded okay, unplugged, then loosened his face-mask for comfort. Then he turned heavily at a sound behind him.

  “Hiya, Bob,” said Merrill friendly enough. This finagling wasn’t Ord’s fault.

  Ord squinted. He was having difficulty focusing his eyes. “Neo?” Merrill asked.

  “Yeah. I still itch.”

  Merrill’s lips tightened. Neogravinol for Ord meant that Slidell was still scheming.

  “What’d Jerry tell you?” he demanded challengingly. “Nothing. Said get the dope from you.”

  Merrill made a face. That smelled like an attempt to appeal to his “better nature.” Nuts to that!

  He was just a bit sick with disappointment. All the while he had handled the Doughnuts, he had dreamed of his first real command, dreamed the day of his first deep space blastoff up into quite an event. Now those dreams had gone bust, and he felt sour and blue, cheated of the exhilaration he had anticipated.

  Slidell’s voice buzzed through the speaker. “You pilots hurry up! We don’t want to recalculate.”

  Merrill was on his feet at once, anxious to give Slidell a hot earful and then climb into Fireball. After this flight, he’d see about a job with Chesapeake on the Venus run.

  The pick-up car was waiting, the driver goosing his engine, and as Merrill climbed aboard, the operations manager thrust both autocontrol tapes into his gloved hands. There was no question which was which, for Doughnut’s tape was much wider than Fireball’s. Still, no tape could handle all the unpredictable variables. That was what made a pilot. Merrill skimmed the visual sheets and trajectory graphs, while Ord peered over his shoulder.

  “What’s the orders?” he asked truculently.

  “Get it out hot and in line,” Slidell said.

  “But—”

  “You know the situation and what’s needed. I wash my hands of it.” Slidell sounded thoroughly disgusted.

  “But—”

  Bubsy leaned across the car door and kissed him. “That’s for luck,” she whispered.

  Then she drew back. “Don’t forget your teeth,” she said aloud.

  “Listen here, Jerry,” Merrill began, ignoring the girl for more important matters.

  Slidell jerked a thumb at the driver, and in a second the car was streaking toward the blast pit.

  “Damn him!” Merrill growled, handing Doughnut’s graph sheets to his companion.

  Ord whistled, then looked pained.

  “You don’t have to rub it in,” he said, still irritable from his shots.

  “Huh?” Merrill’s eyes widened. Bob had nothing to gripe about. Either way, this day’s work would

  get him a Senior Pilot rating, and Interplanet never downgraded a man without very good cause.

  “Damn! This break would have to come now, on an off-standard boost and before I was ready for it!” the junior pilot said bitterly.

  “You mean you actually want—” Merrill demanded incredulously.

  “Why the hell do you think I requested tryout assignment on Doughnut?” Ord snapped.

  Merrill took that idea for what it was worth.

  “Well, okay. If you think you can boost me anywhere near trajectory, I’ll take Fireball. Be glad to.”

  Ord looked grateful but uncertain as the car began to slow, and Merrill wasn’t entirely happy either… .

  Doughnut’s jets were humming and the snoring nimble of Fireball’s five big nozzles reverberated deep in the pit. The heat of the idling drivers sent a stinging breeze against Merrill’s uncovered face.

  Doughnut was nothing but a huge power ring fitting snugly around the middle of Fireball, designed to feed a maximum of fuel through her drivers in a minimum time. Her range was short, but she had a theoretical acceleration, minus ship, of better than forty gravities—which Merrill had never been so suicidal as to test.

  Her thirty-six jets were fixed-mounted four degrees radially outward to save the aft half of the boosted ship from blast effect, and three of them were movable plus or minus one degree annularly for ro
tation correction. There were no vane deflectors, no full-swing jets, no heavy axial stabilizing gyros, no extras whatsoever; and control was accomplished entirely with the fractional throttles. Even turnovers were made without sidethrust or braking rockets, and with the inherently unstable ring design of Doughnut, that took handling. She was an ugly and ungraceful machine, strictly functional, a tug rather than a ship; and with her tremendous power she could easily break the neck of any pilot who made a single wrong move.

  The pick-up car stopped beside the ground trap, and within seconds the two warm-up mechanics emerged from the tunnel.

  “Fireball’s ready. Everything’s normal,” one reported. The other acted uneasy. “Two, five and eleven—” he began. “Tell Bob too,” Merrill interrupted.

  “Two, five and eleven overheating, eleven the worst. Seventeen running incomplete shift as far as I dared try her, but may clear at full throttle. Thirty-two still sputtering as if the nozzle field is out of phase.”

  He turned back to Merrill. “That’s the one you reported, sir. We were going to yank the tube, but didn’t get time.”

  “It adds up how?” Merrill demanded.

  “She’ll be hell to balance.”

  “But she’ll lift?”

  “Yes. The dynes come up.”

  Merrill’s face hardened. “Then we don’t cancel. Well, Bob?”

  Ord’s face was pale. “That ties the ribbons on it,” he said slowly. “Guess I’m plain scared. You’re senior man; you call it.”

  But Merrill knew it was the thought of what a sour lift here would mean on Mars, rather than the chances of a crash, that had Bob Ord frightened. He sighed, feeling as harried as Jerry Slidell usually looked, but admiring Ord’s honesty.

  “Here’s your tape, Bob,” he said. “Luck!”

  Together they ducked into the tunnel leading to the ships. The mechanics tugged the counterweighted trapdoor shut behind them, and ran for the car.

  Around the spaceport perimeter the sirens shrieked their warning to take cover or take the consequences.

  Merrill crowded clumsily into the pilot chair, plugged in his suit, cinched the safety straps, tightened his face-mask,then cursed petulantly as he had to loosen it again to remove his bridgework. He slipped the tape into the robot, threaded the end through the drive sprockets, clipped the visual sheets into the holder where they’d be in sight for reference. He swung his chair back until he lay supine with reference to blast axis, for sitting up during initial acceleration was how pilots got ruptured intervertebral cartilage disks and pinched spinal cords. The control panel on which everything was crowded within fingertip-reach swung with him.