He smiled. “You can get so used to an obstacle that its sudden ending is like the giving way of a prop.”
She looked at him searchingly. “No, it’s something more than that.”
“You’re right,” he said quietly. “It’s a feeling. I haven’t worded it yet, but I’ll try. It seems to me this is one of those turning points. Man comes upon a strange seed. He doesn’t know into what sort of thing it will sprout. Something about it throws a scare into him. But because he’s Man he goes ahead and makes it germinate.
“Now here we have tovh. We don’t really know what we’re dealing with, what forces we’ll loose. A few of the brains believe that planet may wrench itself out of our space-time matrix. Nearly all its substance—from the animal and vegetable life fuzzing its surface to the core itself—would vanish. Nearly all. Remains to be seen if wraiths of Crevbnod would be going on about their business on a ghost of a globe, haunting the old orbit and making that sector of space taboo. Hum. Let’s talk of something else.”
She pressed his arm sympathetically. Her eyes marveled at him. “All right, how do you remember and piece together so many things?”
He smiled. “Sometimes mnemonic devices help. For instance, ‘Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Right Now—’”
Jet tattooing drowned out the sound of the kiss.
AND WE SAILED THE MIGHTY DARK, by Frank Belknap Long
Originally published in Startling Stories, March 1948.
CHAPTER I
Graveyard of Old Ships
You’ve seen them—the old ships, the battered and ruined ships, the ships that have made one voyage too many, and are so ancient you can’t remember their names or the reputations they’ve earned for themselves in deep space! Sure you’ve seen them! Black hulls stretching away for miles into the red sunset—ships that can be bought for a song if you’ve a song left in you and still want to go adventuring on the rim of the System.
Do you know how it feels not to have a song left in you? Do you know how it feels to be a legend without substance—the lad who broke the bank at Callisto City and walked out two days later without a penny to his name?
Pete knew and he kept harping on it. “If you’d quit that first night, Jim, instead of pushin’ it all back across the board!”
There was awe in his eyes when he looked at me, and then he’d look at the ships, and I could guess what he was thinking. Good old Pete! When he shut his eyes I was still wearing a golden halo, Lucky Jim Sanders, strong as an ox and coming along fine—born lucky and loving life too much to worry his head about the future. But when life rises up and wallops you and lays you out flat you forget the good times and your own recklessness, and the inner strength and the laughing girls, and you just want to sit down and never get up!
I’d met Pete down in the valley, sitting on a rock. He didn’t want to get up either. He wanted to croak.
A wiry little cuss with blue eyes and a fringe of beard on his chin that had just grown there and stayed. Clothes that made him look like he was trying to spin a cocoon about himself.
You bet he had a story! A hard luck story that would have made Sinbad look like a quiet family man. But when I like someone straight off, his past is just so much water over the dam if he wants it that way.
I never did find out the truth about Pete—right up until we parted. I had a lot of fun kidding him about it. “Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years, but you slept a thousand, Pete! You crawled out of an old ship and went to sleep in the desert.
“Did you get tired, Pete? Of the roar and the dust and the night—the crocus-flower faces of Venusians, the gopher-girls of Mars and the pin-wheeling stars—of the night and the dust and the roar? Couldn’t you take it in the old days, Pete, when ships kept bursting apart at the seams and there was an ant hill on Callisto called a colony, with twenty living dead men in it?
“The ant hill’s a city now, Pete. And you’re still Pete, still around, and I’m just cutting my wisdom teeth on my first streak of hard luck! Hard like a biscuit, Pete! A dog biscuit flung to a dog!”
I was raving even more wildly as I stared out over that graveyard of old ships, feeling sorry for myself, envying Pete because he didn’t seem to care much whether he lived or died.
But I was wrong. Pete did care.
“If we could just get back to Earth, Jim!” he pleaded. “If we could smell the green earth again, after it’s been rainin’! If we could just get a whiff o’ the sea!”
I swung on him. “What chance have we? You don’t value dough so much when you’ve got it to toss around. But when you’re stony broke you get to feeling like a stone. Weighed down, petrified! You can’t do anything without dough!”
Pete made a clucking sound. “All right! You got trimmed, Jim—and bad! But last night you had another streak of luck!”
I stared at him, hard.
He gestured toward the old ships. “There’s a yardmaster down there with a list of ships a yard long. If you want to buy a ship you just stand around twiddling your thumbs until he notices you. If he sizes you up right—you get a bargain!”
“You mean if he thinks you’ve got some dough, but not much?”
“Uh huh!” Pete winked. “But if he thinks you’ve got a lot of dough you could get a bargain too. Without shelling out a cent!”
It didn’t take me long to get what Pete was driving at. I’d taken a beating, and everyone knew it. But everyone knew my face top! I was still Lucky Jim Sanders, wearing a golden halo!
Pete’s eyes were shining like Halley’s Comet when I got through coaching him. It was his idea, but when I tossed it back at him wrapped up in dialogue the sparkle took his breath away!
We went down into the valley where the ships stood row on row, shouting and reeling as though we’d been celebrating for a week. The yardmaster heard us before he saw us. But he saw us quickly enough.
His lips tightened as he came striding toward us—a bushy-browed, hard-bitten old barnacle with a crusty stare. I could tell the-exact instant when he recognized me. His jaw dropped about six inches; then closed with a click.
“Now!” I whispered to Pete.
Pete raised his voice. “You’re higher than a kite!” he shouted. “Why buy a flying coffin when you could own the sweetest little job in the System?”
“What I do with my dough is my own business!” I shouted back. “They knew how to build ships in the old days!”
“I tell you—you’re crazier than a diving loon!”
“Sure I’m crazy!” I agreed. “Only a baby with curvature of the brain could win back a cool eighty thousand on one spin of the wheel! But I’m sane enough not to want to thin out my take!”
“You’d flip a coin for one o’ those flyin’ coffins?”
“Why not?” I roared belligerently. “I’ve got five thousand that says I know what I’m doing! Five thousand against—the right to pick my own ship!”
I tripped myself then, deliberately by accident. I went sprawling over Pete’s out-thrust right leg. When I picked myself up I must have looked as helpless as a newborn babe, because the yardmaster was gripping my arm and refusing to let go.
“You were saying, mister?”
He was seeing the halo, of course, the rim of gold about my head. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t even ask me to cover my bet.
The copper piece on my palm seemed to fascinate him. He couldn’t take his eyes from it.
“What will it be?” I asked.
He swallowed hard. “Heads!” he said.
I flipped the coin.
“Tails it is!” I told him.
He stared at my palm suspiciously. I grinned and handed him the copper piece. There was nothing wrong with it.
“I never cheat!” I said.
I walked over to where she stood collecting rust in the red Jupiterlight—the ship I’d picked out. She wasn’t so ancien
t as old ships go. She must have been built around 2097, just a hundred years before I’d won her. We were riding hard on your luck!
“Got a navigator’s license?” the yard-master asked.
“Sure! Want to see it?”
He shook his head. “Never mind! Take her and get going before I start telling myself I’m the System’s prize sap!”
The control room was as musty as a tomb, and when I switched on the cold lights our shadows looked like black widow spiders dangling from the overhead.
“She’ll never hold together!” Pete groaned.
“Don’t be like that!” I chided. “All of these ships have to pass a rigid inspection.”
Pete blinked. “You sure of that?”
“Well…maybe the inspectors skip a ship here and there,” I conceded.
I went over her from stem to stern, to make sure she wouldn’t fly about when I gave her the gun. While I inspected the atomotors Pete kept giving me uneasy looks, like he was dying to ask me where I’d picked up my knowledge of ghost ships, but was scared I’d say something to shake his confidence in me.
I wasn’t worried. I can be awfully sure of myself when I’m around anything mechanical, from an inch-high rheostat to the guide lines on a sixty-foot control board.
The ship had the right feel about her. I’d have trusted my life to her, but Pete kept sniffing like he could smell the odor of charred flesh. To make him feel better I thumped him on the back and told him not to worry, that he’d appreciate what a fine ship she was when he saw the green Earth filling the viewpane, misty with spring rains. He’d lived alone so long he’d become suspicious of everything.
Eaten up by his own fears, tormented by shadows, an old man before his time. Some of my confidence seemed to seep into him as I talked. He didn’t look so old when he looked up.
He was sitting on a bulkhead chronometer, which meant that time was ticking away right under him. He was a dead ringer for old Father Time himself, but for an instant as he returned my stare there was a strange look in his eyes. As though he’d shrugged off his woes, and was gazing straight back across the years at his lost youth.
“Maybe you’re right, Jim,” he said. “When do we take off?”
“Before the yardmaster visiphones Callisto City to find out if I really did make a killing last night!” I told him.
I was standing close to the control board, my thumb on the oscillatory circuit. There are two ways of starting an atomotor. You can test out the strength of the circuit by letting the power drum through the board before you give the dial a full turn.
Or you can switch the power on full blast, reaching peak in ten seconds and letting the ship do its own testing. I liked the second way best. A ship that can’t absorb the shock of a take-off at sixty gravities will almost certainly fly apart in space.
I switched the power on full strength. From the corner of one eye I had a brief, soul-satisfying glimpse of Pete stiffening in utter consternation. A mean trick to play on a pal? No. I don’t think so. I wasn’t asking him to take the plunge alone. I was sharing the risks, and I was doing him a favor.
When you’re taking a swim you just prolong the agony by sitting around on a diving raft wriggling your toes in the icy water. It’s best to jump right in, and get it over with.
We must have been twenty thousand feet up when. Pete’s startled face slipped out of focus, and I found myself on my hands and knees on a deck that was revolving like a centrifuge. Cathode rays were darting in all directions, and everything in the path of the rays glowed with fluorescent light. I knew that the ship was X-raying itself while fog condensed on the negative ions of its hull and dissolved into sizzling steam.
I didn’t try to get up immediately. I waited for the deck to stop gyrating and the strength to return to my wrists. My right arm was numb and tingling. When I raised my hands I could see the bones in my fingers. All pilots have skeleton hands when they take off. It’s a second-order cathode ray effect which vanishes after a minute or two. It doesn’t mean a thing. Not if you’re sound of mind and limb, and the ship you’ve, picked is spaceworthy.
But Pete seemed to take a different view. He was staring at me in horror. I knew what he was thinking. If I was pinch-hit-ting for Death—I’d got off to a good start.
He, too, was on his knees on the deck, his shoulders swaying, his face turned toward me in bitter reproach.
Suddenly his eyes blazed with anger. “Son, I ought to get up and bust you one on the jaw! If you’d warned me, I could have braced myself!”
I hadn’t thought of that. But before I could tell him how sorry I felt, he was chuckling!
“It’s all right, Jim! No bones broken! She sure took it beautifully, eh?”
“She sure did!” I muttered.
I watched him get to his feet and go reeling toward the viewpane. Mr. Chameleon was the name for him! He could change his moods so fast, his mental outlook must have been as dazzling as a display of fireworks.
A guy like that just couldn’t hold a grudge. If you poked him in the ribs he’d blacken your eye and give you his last ounce of tobacco. Good old Pete! Insatiably curious he was too, like a little boy at a circus side show.
He just couldn’t wait to see how far up we were, had to look out the viewpane before his brain stopped spinning.
I was satisfied just to sit on the deck and watch him.
For an instant he stared out, his face pressed to the pane, the pulse in his forehead swelling visibly.
Then, abruptly, he turned and flashed me a startled look. “Jehoshaphat, Jim! We—we can’t be travelin’ that fast! Callisto’s just a little crawlin’ red gnat in the middle o’ the sky!”
CHAPTER II
Planet Shift
I stared at him uneasily. He was talking like an idiot. I knew that Jupiter itself would have to dwindle to a small disk before Callisto could become a pin point of light. When you take off from a little moor the glare of its primary magnifies its surface features: For about one hour Callisto would look like a black orchid dwindling in a blaze of light. Then it would whip away into emptiness to reappear as a glowing dot.
“Jupiter looks funny too!” Pete muttered. “Mighty funny! like a big slice o’ yellow cheese with golden bands around it, spreadin’ out—”
That did it! I got up and walked to the viewpane, slapping my hands together explosively. I had to let off steam in some way. My steadiness surprised me. My eyelids felt a little heavy, but there was nothing wrong with my space legs.
When I started out I didn’t see the red gnat. But I saw something else, something that gave me a tremendous shock. What I saw was a great ringed planet swimming in a golden haze!
When I turned my face must have given Pete a jolt. He gulped so hard I was afraid he’d swallow his Adam’s apple and choke on the rind.
“What is it, Jim?” he asked huskily. “You look like you’d seen a ghost!”
I laughed without amusement. “I did! A ghost planet! And we’re not moving away from it! It’s getting larger!”
Pete stared. “Sure you feel okay, son?”
“Not too good!” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “Take another look!”
I gestured toward the viewpane. “Go on! See for yourself!”
Pete stood for a long time with his face pressed to the pane, his shoulders hunched. I thought he was never going to turn.
A crazy thought flashed through my mind. I’d seen men in a state of collapse on their feet, their faces blanched, unable to move or speak. Had Pete been shocked speechless?
I was sweating as he turned. His face was blanched, all right, but he could speak, and did!
“I’ve got to sit down, Jim!” he choked out.
He reeled to the bulkhead chronometer, sat down and started tugging at his chin. After a moment he whipped his hand from his face.
“You�
��re an educated man. Jim,” he said. “I’m not! If you tell me we’re headin’ straight for Saturn, I won’t call you a liar!”
“You won’t?”
“No, Jim. Say a guy brings you a watch. The hands go in the wrong direction, the tickin’s so loud it drives you nuts. ‘Buddy,’ he says, ‘if you want to know what time it isn’t, this watch will tell you.’
“Well, say you’ve got to know the time, say your life depends on it. What do you do, Jim? Lift him up by his seat and toss him out the door? Shucks, no! You listen while he talks. You ask him to take the watch apart and show you what makes it tick.”
“Fine!” I said. “So I’m the man with the watch! I put Saturn outside the viewpane just to torture you!”
He looked so miserable I felt sorry for him. “I didn’t mean it that way, Jim,” he apologized. “But I’m plumb scared! Somethin’s happenin’ to space! Somethin’ ghastly awful! You must have some idea what’s causin’ it!”
“Don’t kid yourself!” I told him. “A wild guess isn’t an idea.”
“Let me be the judge o’ that, son!”
“Well—all right. Maybe we’re seeing Saturn as a magnified image—through some kind of magnifying space drift. A big, floating lens in space, made up of refractive particles spread out in a cloud. A lens with more magnifying power than the five-hundred inch! It isn’t as haywire as it sounds, if that’s any comfort to you!”
“But no pilot’s ever seen anything like that, Jim!” Pete protested, with unanswerable logic.
He tapped his brow. “It could be in here, Jim! That’s what I’m afraid of! A sickness of the mind—”
“Don’t start that!” I warned, striking my knee with my fist. “Don’t even think it!”
My voice was getting out of control. I was yelling at him, and there was no reason for it.
He had every right to his opinion.
“What are we goin’ to do, Jim?”
“Check up first!” I snapped. “If I have to use every instrument on the ship—”
I stopped. The door into the pilot room had opened and closed, and a clumping figure was coming toward us across the deck.
The Space Opera Novella Page 28
