The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “And miss your bonus and retirement?”

  “Getting socked with an asteroid is retirement without bonus.”

  “You’d get picked up if you jumped ship. There’s not a chance,” the veteran, Parker, declared. “Garrett tried it once.”

  This was something that had been omitted from the first officer’s dossier, Carson told himself, as he grimaced and gulped his tamarisk gin.

  “If the old man got cold feet,” one began, hopefully.

  “That knothead hasn’t sense enough to change his mind,” Roswell growled; “we must’ve all been doped to get us signed up.”

  As far as Carson could remember, this was the first piece of clear and independent thinking that any Standard Citizen had ever done. Unfortunately, it came at the wrong time.

  “…if something happened so we’d have to put back to the shops to refit… Well, that’d be grand, but you’d play hell pulling anything…the job is wired with alarms… Hell, it’s easy, jumping an alarm… Who’d want to stay on Mars, even if he’d not be picked up… Well, the liquor is rotgut, but I could go for some of the native gals… You can have ’em! they’re not really human… What’s the matter with that one over there?…”

  The “one over there”, the Martian girl sitting by herself at the corner table, changed the direction of the talk.

  “Looks like she’s waiting for someone.”

  “She looks lonesome…”

  “There’s three of us…”

  “Match to see…”

  As nearly as drifting smoke and the deceptive lights permitted Carson to see, the girl in the corner was not on the prowl for spaceway-pickups. She wore the usual tunic, which gave an exaggerated appearance of slenderness. Her features, finely-modeled, had the repose of a mask. However, the characteristically-slanted eyes were all alive. Her hands were unusually graceful, long and slender. Even for a Martian, her feet, shod with gilded sandals, were small. A velvet hood with spangles and pendants outlined the shape of her head; her blue-black hair was twisted into a gleaming knot at the nape of the neck.

  Just another Martian—yet, somewhat different from all those others with glistening hoods, and painted fans, and tinkling ear-pendants.

  Her glance shifted toward the door. The finely-penciled brows moved as in recognition. But by then, the three spacemen had done matching to see who would be the lucky man; Parker crossed the small dance-floor to claim his prize.

  An elderly Martian, wearing a skullcap, knee-length tunic, and flopping black pants, approached just in time to explain that his daughter was going home, and at once.

  “Sit down, she’s dancing with me,” Parker announced.

  The girl broke away from his grasp. Objecting, the old man got a backhanded slap that knocked him against a vacant table. Glassware spilled; he took a back flip over a chair. Two Martians pounced from a booth, to close in on Parker. Landis and Roswell came on the run. Superior in bulk, they knocked the two volunteers groggy.

  The old man was trampled underfoot. A patrol came in from the street, and in time to keep the riot from becoming general; there were two Terrestrials and two Martians in the police party, all armed with shock guns and night sticks.

  “Get back,” they yelled, menacing the infuriated spectators. “These boys are visitors with the keys of Galgorra.” Then, to the girl, “All right, what the hell were you trying to get away with?”

  This was something Carson had seen before; the victims of the brawl would be lucky if they did not land in jail. He yanked off his mask, thrust a patrolman aside, and caught Parker by the shoulder. “Put up your dukes and see how you like it!”

  Carson measured the man and knocked him cold. Then, “You two, get him out of here and take him aboard.”

  The patrol, recognizing authority, made a swift change of front. “Get going,” the chief said, “before I run you in.”

  Carson gave the old man a hand. “Come along, I’ll call you a car.”

  “Thank you,” he sing-songed. “Ours is waiting. Be pleased to come with us. We will take you wherever you may be going.”

  * * * *

  During the brief glide to the suburb in which they lived, Carson learned that Samgan and his daughter, Alani, worked in the offices of the mining company.

  “Such things will happen,” Samgan said, philosophically. “Merely one of the disadvantages of being near a spaceport.” And then, when he had poured several rounds of well aged tamarisk gin, smoky and smooth, the old fellow said, “Now, where do you wish to go? Alani will be happy to drive you.”

  The moons of Mars were rising when Alani cleared the outskirts of town. “I like you better without your mask,” she finally announced. “Why were you wearing it?”

  Carson told her, and added, “If it hadn’t been for the patrol, I’d’ve beaten those roughnecks loose from their eye teeth.” Then gesturing toward the abandoned hull which had aroused his curiosity that afternoon, he changed the subject. “I was wondering about that. My chauffeur on the way out wasn’t saying all he knew.”

  Instead of answering at once Alani swerved from the traffic-lane and swung toward the wreck. She set her cruiser down on a low dune near the shell, and raised the plastic dome.

  “You’ll freeze in this wind,” Carson said, speaking as much for himself as for the girl.

  She drew a robe from the compartment and whipped it about them both. “I’m used to the wind, but even so, this is more comfortable.” Then, snuggling up, “For a Terrestrian, you’re awfully civilized.”

  The masklike repose of the face was gone; her delicate features were all alive, magnolia-amber in the double moonlight. She was close enough to make it delightfully clear that the straight line effect of her tunic was purely an illusion of styling.

  “You’re dangerous bait, Alani. Quit looking at me that way.” Instead, the upturned lips reshaped to match the invitation of her eyes. Carson kissed her; she responded with an ardor that was new in his experience.

  “Once more, and I won’t stay civilized,” he warned.

  And since she had been kissing for keeps, he mentioned that he did have obligations back home. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “And it makes no difference at all; I like you.”

  He pondered on both meanings. “You’re pretty sure I won’t be coming back—going back home? What do you know, about that hull? It never was built by anyone on earth. Right?”

  She nodded. “We are a very old people. A long time ago, when our planet was young, we travelled into space. To your planet; we were too crowded here then. Others went the way you are going; none of them came back.”

  “But those from earth did come back?”

  “A few ships, yes. Those who didn’t like it there.”

  “And your people ended by forgetting how to travel in space?”

  “In a way, yes—no reason to leave. Poor fuel. And the scientists had all left, except a few. That simplified our lives; science was a mania with us for ages, till we became weary of it. Your people will learn, one day, perhaps—when your earth is old and feeble as ours is now.”

  “But we’re bringing new life to Mars,” he protested. “Trade benefits us both. The kind of people we send, well, that is something else, of course, but the trade itself—the work we’re doing—”

  “You are all amusing yourselves. Some of you are annoying us. Now, I guess you’ll want to see the inside of the ancient hull.”

  She flung the light robe over her arm, and handed Carson a flashlight. The drifting sand was still warm; so was the metal shell, and its dark interior.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Where’ve you been all this time?” Tweed demanded, when Carson finally stepped into the cabin.

  “Studying trans-Martian space.”

  “You smell like it,” Tweed scoffed, and plucked a long black hair from Carson’s collar. “What did you hit
Parker with?”

  “Everything I had. Why?”

  “He still doesn’t know his own name.”

  Carson clipped into his pocket and took out a piece of smooth metal perhaps a quarter of an inch thick, and about the size of his hand. “Take a look at that,” he said, and produced several egg-sized chunks of grayish ore.

  “Where’d you get all this?”

  Carson told him, and in concluding demanded, “Ever see any fuel like this?”

  “Neither did anyone else.”

  “Now take a good look at the bits fused into this piece of porthole shutter.”

  “Same stuff!”

  “Catching on?”

  Tweed nodded. “Meteorites, peppering the cruiser with the same kind of fuel she carried in her bunkers. Three times the specific gravity of anything we’ve ever seen before.”

  “The Martians,” Carson resumed, “are enough like the modern Chinese to account for old legends of fire-breathing dragons. Dragons coming from the sky… Nothing but the final flights of space cruisers that brought the beginnings of the Terrestrian-Chinese race to Asia. The Gobi was green and fertile, ages ago. A good spot to land. Alani’s story makes sense.”

  “And this heavy ore fuelled them for the hop?”

  “Very likely. They went to Jupiter—or beyond—to get it; that’s what we’re going to do.”

  “Letting the crew in on this?”

  “Might buck up the morale.”

  “Oh, before I forget it skipper.”

  “What?”

  “Get yourself some solvent and take off that borrowed lipstick; it may be radioactive.”

  * * * *

  In the morning, Carson had all hands assembled. He told them of the evidence that ultra-Martian cruises had been made in the past: and that they would be getting their bonus for apparently pioneering in what had been done so long ago that the knowledge of it persisted only in Terrestrian mythology. “The chance of a lifetime,” he concluded, “to get something for nothing.”

  There was hearty cheering at this, and at the prospect of staking valuable ore claims.

  At take-off time, Martians and Terrestrials gathered at the space port. Carson caught a glimpse of Alani, pressing against the cable that marked the limits of the safety zone. She was not expecting him back. But on his return, he would see her…for the last time. It would be better that way; it had to be that way. Yet, because of Alani, the Martians and their way of life had become very real to Carson. Insidiously, her words persisted in his mind: that the gadgets of science had become the master of Terrestrials, instead of their servant; and that the slave of toys and robots would inevitably be somewhat less than human, with manners to accord.

  Then the jets roared, and the Hyperion rose on a column of flame. Carson was busy with his instruments until, well under way, he could quit them to turn to the latest charts of the asteroid belt.

  There were more than 11,000 charted planetoids. The Martian observatory has added enormously to the number of those visible from Terra. Though most of the final 5000 were little more than chunks and pellets of planetary debris, there were large ones, also, which had escaped terrestrial observation. Astronomers were still divided: some flatly denied the existence of such anomalies—others solemnly explained.

  The going was worse than he had anticipated. The hull vibrated from the peppering of fragments long before the Hyperion came within the charted limits of the zone. The repulsion-field, however, mitigated damage from fragments too small to register on radar-screens.

  The directional-jets got their first real workout. A good many asteroidal orbits proved to be more steeply inclined to the ecliptic than observation had indicated. The zone had at least as much extension in depth as in breadth.

  There were dark bodies which, but for radar, would have knocked the Hyperion into a blob of incandescent vapor. She pitched and wove and yawed from the gravitational drag of spheres too-closely approached. Instead of the blackness of interplanetary space, there was a confusing haze.

  From time to time, Carson took samples. “Planetary dust-bowl,” he declared. “And the stuff is activated.”

  The Hyperion was not operating as efficiently as before; there was too much drag. The temperature of the compartments increased by fifteen degrees.

  When he was not busy checking the radioactivity of spatial dust—with the idea of determining how much it might throw his instrument-observation out of balance—Carson kept an eye on the infra-red spying system. From time to time, he spotted groups in one compartment or another, huddled up in the dark. Intercom microphones brought no sound; the men were either whispering, or had used one of several simple tricks to block transmission.

  Tweed grimaced and said, “Any jerk who wants to mutiny and take command ought to have his head examined.”

  “They don’t know what a job navigation can be.”

  “I wish I knew what they are huddling up about. No telling what those knotheads might cook up… And blow us up by mistake, themselves included, of course.”

  Carson’s eyes narrowed. “Watch the infra-visor while I try something.”

  He stepped to the disaster-control panel and actuated solenoids that operated moveable bulkheads, which sealed off the various compartments.

  Tweed exclaimed, “That broke it up! Man, man!”

  “Keep watching.”

  Eye on the pressure-dial, Carson cracked a valve. There was a hissing and whining. “Hold it!” Tweed called, having recognized the sound. “They’re blacking out. All but one—now he’s out!”

  Carson opened a purge-valve and fed in oxygen at the same time. The wake of the Hyperion trailed long as a comet’s tail for a moment as the expelled gases flared up in the exhaust. The intercom buzzed, first officer, Garrett, was fairly babbling. Carson shouted, “Well, do something, mister! I’ll be out directly.”

  He jerked the damage-control switch.

  Tweed chuckled. “All clear. Now you hustle, and I’ll listen.”

  * * * *

  The four spacemen were beginning to revive when Carson came to the now-lighted compartment. He was on Garrett’s heels; the pharmacist’s mate was dashing along with a first aid kit.

  The half-conscious men were muttering and mumbling. “…It’s got to work soon… We’re finished if we don’t go back… We’ve gone too far… They’ve got to clog up soon…”

  The first to regain his wits sufficiently to realize that they had an outside audience let out a yell. “He’s a damn liar! I didn’t have a thing to do with it! I just happened to see them and came in.”

  “Dargan said it wouldn’t be long—”

  “I didn’t either! I didn’t say—”

  In a few minutes, each crewman was insisting that he had not said anything. Carson demanded, “What were you fellows doing here?”

  “We thought we heard a noise.”

  There was the drumming of interference-beats, the normal sound. Carson, however, caught a faint undertone; a manhole cover, not tightly secured, was vibrating. Instead of taking up on the handwheel, he slacked off, and lifted the cover. Fumes billowed out. A ruddy glow broke the darkness. Carson said to Garrett “Let’s have a look.”

  Once in their hot-suits, they entered the passageway. Holes had been drilled through the insulation, and into the exhaust-tube jacket. The tube itself had a dangerous glow: sparks showered up from it. The alloy was on the point of failing; it was on the durability of the metal that the entire cruise depended.

  While there were spare tubes, the unexplained failure of even one would make it foolhardy to continue.

  Garrett shook his head. “They’re not standing up, sir.”

  Carson knelt and picked up some crystals scattered on desk. “Sulphur and salt,” he said. “A pound of that, and the alloy is shot. Bad as putting lead on platinum. Some of these sons are trying
to make me put about; you make it clear to whoever is up to tricks that I am not going back.

  “I do not know who did it, and I do not want to know. If I did know, I’d have to give him Penalty VVI-A. Not even a Standard Citizen can get away with sabotage on that scale; the fumes could make the whole tube housing crumble.”

  Garrett’s color changed. “I don’t remember that from the manual.”

  “I know you don’t, mister; this alloy was made up from a formula that didn’t exist when the manual was printed. Unless you crave to finish your days aboard a space derelict, you put a stop to whatever is cooking. One thing more, Garrett!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Find out what the beef really is. Those fellows bumping their gums about the funny noise had a lot more on their minds than they wanted to spill. You can tell me—and mention no names.”

  An hour later, Garrett reported, “Self-luminous asteroids have got them worrying. They’re about ready to blow their head-gaskets; they think you’re lost, and are too stubborn to admit it.”

  Carson sighed. “Those knuckleheads might know there’s nothing wrong with an asteroid’s being self-luminous. They’ve been too busy reading too much muck written by astronomers who know nothing except what they think they see, while pratt-sitting in an observatory. Listen here—our radar beam could make some of these spit-balls glow; it is the dark ones that we have to worry about. We’re not lost.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Now that there had been a showdown, Carson brought Tweed from cover. The Hyperion’s efficiency had been so impaired that there were only two choices: return to Mars for refitting, or land on an asteroid and do the work.

  The gravitational-detectors presently indicated a mass quite out of keeping with established notions as to the size of asteroids.

  “Unless the detector is haywire,” Tweed declared, “we’re nearing something a lot bigger than Ceres.”

  Frowning, Carson indicated the chart. “If this course we’ve plotted is anywhere near right, the gravitation of Ceres, Pallas, or Vesta can’t have any such effect.”

  Tweed grimaced. “Difference between telescope-squinting, and getting out into things.”