(1/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  He rose, shaggy grey hair tousled, grey eyes alight.

  "I told the IPA those men weren't criminals. And I was right. They can't deny me the charter now. No matter how much Caron of Mars would like to get his claws on this radium."

  He took Jill by the shoulders and shook her, laughing.

  "Three weeks, girl, that's all. First crops ready for harvest, first pay-ore coming out of the mines. In three weeks my permanent charter will have to be granted, according to agreement, and then....

  "Jill," he added solemnly, "we're seeing the birth of a world."

  "That's what frightens me." Jill glanced upward as the first flare of lightning struck down, followed by a crash of thunder that shook the dome.

  "So much can happen at a birth. I wish the three weeks were over!"

  "Nonsense, girl! What could possibly happen?"

  She looked at the copper cables, burning with the electricity running along them, and thought of the one hundred and twenty-two souls in that narrow Twilight Belt--with the fierce heat of the Sunside before them and the spatial cold of the Shadow side at their backs, fighting against wind and storm and heat to build a world to replace the ones the War had taken from them.

  "So much could happen," she whispered. "An accident, an escape...."

  The inter-dome telescreen buzzed its signal. Jill, caught in a queer mood of premonition, went to it.

  The face of Dio the Martian appeared on the screen, still wet and dirty from the storm-soaked fields, disheveled from his battle across the plain in the chaotic winds.

  "I want to see you, Miss Moulton," he said. "There's something funny I think you ought to know."

  "Of course," said Jill, and met her father's eyes. "I think we'll see, now, which one of us is right."

  * * * * *

  The barracks were quiet, except for the mutter of distant thunder and the heavy breathing of exhausted men. Tom Ward crouched in the darkness by Mel Gray's bunk.

  "You ain't gonna go soft at the last minute, are you?" he whispered. "Because I can't afford to take chances."

  "Don't worry," Gray returned grimly. "What's your proposition?"

  "I can give you the combination to the lock of the hangar passage. All you have to do is get into Moulton's office, where the passage door is, and go to it. The ship's a two-seater. You can get her out of the valley easy."

  Gray's eyes narrowed in the dark. "What's the catch?"

  "There ain't none. I swear it."

  "Look, Ward. I'm no fool. Who's behind this, and why?"

  "That don't make no difference. All you want ... ow!"

  Gray's fingers had fastened like steel claws on his wrist.

  "I get it, now," said Gray slowly. "That's why I was sent here. Somebody wanted me to make trouble for Moulton." His fingers tightened agonizingly, and his voice sank to a slow drawl.

  "I don't like being a pawn in somebody else's chess game."

  "Okay, okay! It ain't my fault. Lemme go." Ward rubbed his bruised wrist. "Sure, somebody--I ain't sayin' who--sent you here, knowin' you'd want to escape. I'm here to help you. You get free, I get paid, the Big Boy gets what he wants. Okay?"

  Gray was silent, scowling in the darkness. Then he said.

  "All right. I'll take a chance."

  "Then listen. You tell Moulton you have a complaint. I'll...."

  Light flooded the dark as the door clanged open. Ward leaped like a startled rabbit, but the light speared him, held him. Ward felt a pulse of excitement beat up in him.

  The long ominous shadows of the guards raised elongated guns. The barracks stirred and muttered, like a vast aviary waking.

  "Ward and Gray," said one of the guards. "Moulton wants you."

  Gray rose from his bunk with the lithe, delicate grace of a cat. The monotony of sleep and labor was ended. Something had broken. Life was once again a moving thing.

  * * * * *

  John Moulton sat behind the untidy desk. Dio the Martian sat grimly against the wall. There was a guard beside him, watching.

  Mel Gray noted all this as he and Ward came in. But his cynical blue eyes went beyond, to a door with a ponderous combination lock. Then they were attracted by something else--the tall, slim figure standing against the black quartz panes of the far wall.

  It was the first time he had seen Jill Moulton. She looked the perfect sober apostle of righteousness he'd learned to mock. And then he saw the soft cluster of black curls, the curve of her throat above the dark dress, the red lips that balanced her determined jaw and direct grey eyes.

  Moulton spoke, his shaggy head hunched between his shoulders.

  "Dio tells me that you, Gray, are not a volunteer."

  "Tattletale," said Gray. He was gauging the distance to the hangar door, the positions of the guards, the time it would take to spin out the combination. And he knew he couldn't do it.

  "What were you and Ward up to when the guards came?"

  "I couldn't sleep," said Gray amiably. "He was telling me bedtime stories." Jill Moulton was lovely, he couldn't deny that. Lovely, but not soft. She gave him an idea.

  Moulton's jaw clamped. "Cut the comedy, Gray. Are you working for Caron of Mars?"

  Caron of Mars, chairman of the board of the Interplanetary Prison Authority. Dio had mentioned him. Gray smiled in understanding. Caron of Mars had sent him, Gray, to Mercury. Caron of Mars was helping him, through Ward, to escape. Caron of Mars wanted Mercury for his own purposes--and he could have it.

  "In a manner of speaking, Mr. Moulton," he said gravely, "Caron of Mars is working for me."

  He caught Ward's sharp hiss of remonstrance. Then Jill Moulton stepped forward.

  "Perhaps he doesn't understand what he's doing, Father." Her eyes met Gray's. "You want to escape, don't you?"

  Gray studied her, grinning as the slow rose flushed her skin, the corners of her mouth tightening with anger.

  "Go on," he said. "You have a nice voice."

  Her eyes narrowed, but she held her temper.

  "You must know what that would mean, Gray. There are thousands of veterans in the prisons now. Their offenses are mostly trivial, but the Prison Authority can't let them go, because they have no jobs, no homes, no money.

  "The valleys here are fertile. There are mines rich in copper and pitchblende. The men have a chance for a home and a job, a part in building a new world. We hope to make Mercury an independent, self-governing member of the League of Worlds."

  "With the Moultons as rulers, of course," Gray murmured.

  "If they want us," answered Jill, deliberately missing the point. "Do you think you have the right to destroy all we've worked for?"

  Gray was silent. Rather grimly, she went on.

  "Caron of Mars would like to see us defeated. He didn't care about Mercury before radium was discovered. But now he'd like to turn it into a prison mining community, with convict labor, leasing mine grants to corporations and cleaning up big fortunes for himself and his associates.

  "Any trouble here will give him an excuse to say that we've failed, that the Project is a menace to the Solar System. If you try to escape, you wreck everything we've done. If you don't tell the truth, you may cost thousands of men their futures.

  "Do you understand? Will you cooperate?"

  Gray said evenly, "I'm my own keeper, now. My brother will have to take care of himself."

  It was ridiculously easy, she was so earnest, so close to him. He had a brief kaleidoscope of impressions--Ward's sullen bewilderment, Moulton's angry roar, Dio's jerky rise to his feet as the guards grabbed for their guns.

  Then he had his hands around her slim, firm throat, her body pressed close to his, serving as a shield against bullets.

  "Don't be rash," he told them all quietly. "I can break her neck quite easily, if I have to. Ward, unlock that door."

  In utter silence, Ward darted over and began to spin the dial. At last he said, "Okay, c'mon."

  Gray realized that he was sweating. Jill was like warm, rigid marble in his ha
nds. And he had another idea.

  "I'm going to take the girl as a hostage," he announced. "If I get safely away, she'll be turned loose, her health and virtue still intact. Good night."

  The clang of the heavy door had a comforting sound behind them.

  * * * * *

  The ship was a commercial job, fairly slow but sturdy. Gray strapped Jill Moulton into one of the bucket seats in the control room and then checked the fuel and air gauges. The tanks were full.

  "What about you?" he said to Ward. "You can't go back."

  "Nah. I'll have to go with you. Warm her up, Duke, while I open the dome."

  He darted out. Gray set the atmosphere motors idling. The dome slid open, showing the flicker of the auroras, where areas of intense heat and cold set up atmospheric tension by rapid fluctuation of adjoining air masses.

  Mercury, cutting the vast magnetic field of the Sun in an eccentric orbit, tortured by the daily change from blistering heat to freezing cold in the thin atmosphere, was a powerful generator of electricity.

  Ward didn't come back.

  Swearing under his breath, tense for the sound of pursuit in spite of the girl, Gray went to look. Out beyond the hangar, he saw a figure running.

  Running hard up into the narrowing cleft of the valley, where natural galleries in the rock of Mercury led to the places where the copper cables were anchored, and farther, into the unexplored mystery of the caves.

  Gray scowled, his arrogant Roman profile hard against the flickering aurora. Then he slammed the lock shut.

  The ship roared out into the tearing winds of the plain. Gray cut in his rockets and blasted up, into the airless dark among the high peaks.

  Jill Moulton hadn't moved or spoken.

  Gray snapped on the space radio, leaving his own screen dark. Presently he picked up signals in a code he didn't know.

  "Listen," he said. "I knew there was some reason for Ward's running out on me."

  His Indianesque face hardened. "So that's the game! They want to make trouble for you by letting me escape and then make themselves heroes by bringing me in, preferably dead.

  "They've got ships waiting to get me as soon as I clear Mercury, and they're getting stand-by instructions from somebody on the ground. The somebody that Ward was making for."

  Jill's breath made a small hiss. "Somebody's near the Project...."

  Gray snapped on his transmitter.

  "Duke Gray, calling all ships off Mercury. Will the flagship of your reception committee please come in?"

  His screen flickered to life. A man's face appeared--the middle-aged, soft-fleshed, almost stickily innocent face of one of the Solar Systems greatest crusaders against vice and crime.

  Jill Moulton gasped. "Caron of Mars!"

  "Ward gave the game away," said Gray gently. "Too bad."

  The face of Caron of Mars never changed expression. But behind those flesh-hooded eyes was a cunning brain, working at top speed.

  "I have a passenger," Gray went on. "Miss Jill Moulton. I'm responsible for her safety, and I'd hate to have her inconvenienced."

  The tip of a pale tongue flicked across Caron's pale lips.

  "That is a pity," he said, with the intonation of a preaching minister. "But I cannot stop the machinery set in motion...."

  "And besides," finished Gray acidly, "you think that if Jill Moulton dies with me, it'll break John Moulton so he won't fight you at all."

  His lean hand poised on the switch.

  "All right, you putrid flesh-tub. Try and catch us!"

  The screen went dead. Gray hunched over the controls. If he could get past them, lose himself in the glare of the Sun....

  He looked aside at the stony-faced girl beside him. She was studying him contemptuously out of hard gray eyes.

  "How," she said slowly, "can you be such a callous swine?"

  "Callous?" He controlled the quite unreasonable anger that rose in him. "Not at all. The war taught me that if I didn't look out for myself, no one would."

  "And yet you must have started out a human being."

  He laughed.

  The ship burst into searing sunlight. The Sunside of Mercury blazed below them. Out toward the velvet dark of space the side of a waiting ship flashed burning silver.

  Even as he watched, the flare of its rockets arced against the blackness. They had been sighted.

  Gray's practised eye gauged the stranger's speed against his own, and he cursed softly. Abruptly he wheeled the ship and started down again, cutting his rockets as the shadow swallowed them. The ship was eerily silent, dropping with a rising scream as the atmosphere touched the hull.

  "What are you going to do?" asked Jill almost too quietly.

  He didn't answer. Maneuvering the ship on velocity between those stupendous pinnacles took all his attention. Caron, at least, couldn't follow him in the dark without exhaust flares as guides.

  They swept across the wind-torn plain, into the mouth of the valley where Gray had worked, braking hard to a stop under the cables.

  "You might have got past them," said Jill.

  "One chance in a hundred."

  Her mouth twisted. "Afraid to take it?"

  He smiled harshly. "I haven't yet reached the stage where I kill women. You'll be safe here--the men will find you in the morning. I'm going back, alone."

  "Safe!" she said bitterly. "For what? No matter what happens, the Project is ruined."

  "Don't worry," he told her brutally. "You'll find some other way to make a living."

  Her eyes blazed. "You think that's all its means to us? Just money and power?" She whispered, "I hope they kill you, Duke Gray!"

  * * * * *

  He rose lazily and opened the air lock, then turned and freed her. And, sharply, the valley was bathed in a burst of light.

  "Damn!" Gray picked up the sound of air motors overhead. "They must have had infra-red search beams. Well, that does it. We'll have to run for it, since this bus isn't armed."

  With eerie irrelevancy, the teleradio buzzed. At this time of night, after the evening storms, some communication was possible.

  Gray had a hunch. He opened the switch, and the face of John Moulton appeared on the screen. It was white and oddly still.

  "Our guards saw your ship cross the plain," said Moulton quietly. "The men of the Project, led by Dio, are coming for you. I sent them, because I have decided that the life of my daughter is less important than the lives of many thousands of people.

  "I appeal to you, Gray, to let her go. Her life won't save you. And it's very precious to me."

  Caron's ship swept over, low above the cables, and the grinding concussion of a bomb lifted the ship, hurled it down with the stern end twisted to uselessness. The screen went dead.

  Gray caught the half stunned girl. "I wish to heaven I could get rid of you!" he grated. "And I don't know why I don't!"

  But she was with him when he set out down the valley, making for the cliff caves, up where the copper cables were anchored.

  Caron's ship, a fast, small fighter, wheeled between the cliffs and turned back. Gray dropped flat, holding the girl down. Bombs pelted them with dirt and uprooted vegetables, started fires in the wheat. The pilot found a big enough break in the cables and came in for a landing.

  Gray was up and running again. He knew the way into the explored galleries. From there on, it was anybody's guess.

  Caron was brazen enough about it. The subtle way had failed. Now he was going all out. And he was really quite safe. With the broken cables to act as conductors, the first thunderstorm would obliterate all proof of his activities in this valley. Mercury, because of its high electrical potential, was cut off from communication with other worlds. Moulton, even if he had knowledge of what went on, could not send for help.

  Gray wondered briefly what Caron intended to do in case he, Gray, made good his escape. That outpost in the main valley, for which Ward had been heading, wasn't kept for fun. Besides, Caron was too smart to have only one string to his bow.


  Shouts, the spatter of shots around them. The narrow trail loomed above. Gray sent the girl scrambling up.

  The sun burst up over the high peaks, leaving the black shadow of the valley still untouched. Caron's ship roared off. But six of its crew came after Gray and Jill Moulton.

  * * * * *

  The chill dark of the tunnel mouth swallowed them. Keeping right to avoid the great copper posts that held the cables, strung through holes drilled in the solid rock of the gallery's outer wall, Gray urged the girl along.

  The cleft his hand was searching for opened. Drawing the girl inside, around a jutting shoulder, he stopped, listening.

  Footsteps echoed outside, grew louder, swept by. There was no light. But the steps were too sure to have been made in the dark.

  "Infra-red torches and goggles," Gray said tersely, "You see, but your quarry doesn't. Useful gadget. Come on."

  "But where? What are you going to do?"

  "Escape, girl. Remember? They smashed my ship. But there must be another one on Mercury. I'm going to find it."

  "I don't understand."

  "You probably never will. Here's where I leave you. That Martian Galahad will be along any minute. He'll take you home."

  Her voice came soft and puzzled through the dark.

  "I don't understand you, Gray. You wouldn't risk my life. Yet you're turning me loose, knowing that I might save you, knowing that I'll hunt you down if I can. I thought you were a hardened cynic."

  "What makes you think I'm not?"

  "If you were, you'd have kicked me out the waste tubs of the ship and gone on. You'd never have turned back."

  "I told you," he said roughly, "I don't kill women." He turned away, but her harsh chuckle followed him.

  "You're a fool, Gray. You've lost truth--and you aren't even true to your lie."

  He paused, in swift anger. Voices the sound of running men, came up from the path. He broke into a silent run, following the dying echoes of Caron's men.

  "Run, Gray!" cried Jill. "Because we're coming after you!"

  The tunnels, ancient blowholes for the volcanic gases that had tortured Mercury with the raising of the titanic mountains, sprawled in a labyrinthine network through those same vast peaks. Only the galleries lying next the valleys had been explored. Man's habitation on Mercury had been too short.