Hellflower (1957)

by George O. Smith

  Here at least he was on an equal footing with the other spacer. It was obvious to Farradyne that interstellar velocities did not depend in any way upon reaching that speed by plain acceleration. A force field of some unknown kind was needed, and this force field must not be one that permitted the body to stand, say a thousand gravities or this force field would go on and the other ship would catch him as easily as a greyhound could catch a rabbit—and here in space there were no brambles in which to hide.

  He snapped his Lancaster around and crossed behind the course of the other ship. Again he widened the gap.

  He had only one thing to worry about. To the present moment and until it became evident that he would get free of pursuit this new and sudden enemy was hoping to take him alive. So until it became evident that be could make his escape he had nothing to fear. Once he was free of them, he would have to face the terror of target-seeking missiles capable of several hundred gravities of acceleration and equally capable of turning in midflight if he managed to make them miss him.

  He wished desperately for a cargo of bowling balls or steel castings that he could strew in his wake. He cursed his lack of foresight in not having the control rods replaced, because a few of them might have done the trick.

  Farradyne stopped cursing. He struggled to the computer and played a long tune on the keys, ignoring the fact that the enemy had finally lined up on his course from behind again and was closing range. Recollection of Brenner-Hughes and the depredations in the pilebay had started a train of thought that Farradyne followed with growing interest. It was long and involved and it depended upon a large amount of luck, good planning and ability. He hoped all three were with him.

  The Lancaster made one more complex turn as the end of the punched tape entered the autopilot. Then, if Farradyne’s computations were correct, the Lancaster’s nose was pointed at Terra.

  The spaceliner behind, fooled again, made a turn and began to pick up the space that had been lost.

  Farradyne saw that he had plenty of time. He waited until the punchings on the tape cut the drive a bit, and then he went below and came back into the control room with Brenner-Hughes’ space suit. He got out patching material and carefully repaired the triangular rip. He cleaned out the strong-locker, putting the greenbacks into one of the many pouches of the suit. Then he set about checking it, testing the air-supply and purifier, filling the food pouch and the water tank. Men had been known to last seventy-two hours in a suit like this without any discomfort other than the confinement. The primary danger was running out of oxygen and the secondary danger was thirst How much longer than the three days depended upon the character of the man and when he had last eaten and taken his fill of water.

  The suit was checked to Farradyne’s satisfaction and he started to put it on. “How handy are your friends with that big spacer?” he asked.

  “Good enough,” she said.

  “You’d better pray for them to be better,” he said. “Because your life depends upon how handy they are.”

  “Charles, you can’t possibly make it.”

  Farradyne paused; he wanted to take time for a last cigarette. He lit one and puffed before he said, “Honeychild, I could outguess that gang until Sol freezes over, except that sooner or later they’ll get sick and tired of the chase and end it by launching a target-seeking missile and that would be that. I have no intention of sitting here and letting them catch me, either.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  Farradyne reached up and stopped the clock. “I’ve punched a very interesting autopilot tape. It’ll dodge and swoop along at about four gravities and lead your pals a long and devious way after you and I part company. Four gee is enough to keep you flat on your attractive behind so you can’t louse it up. Since you can’t measure time too accurately, when they grab you, you won’t be able to tell ‘em just when I took off and they’ll have a fine time combing space for a mansized mote, making his course to Terra.”

  “Charles?”

  Farradyne snubbed his cigarette out and dropped on his hands and knees so that he could look down into her face. “You’ve pitched me many a low, soft curve to the inside,” he told her quietly. “Now you are lying there looking helpless, with those big eyes telling me that I am leaving you here to die. Good act, Carolyn, but this time you didn’t think it out far enough. By now you should have known Farradyne well enough to realize that staying here will kill us both because I won’t be taken alive! By scramming, maybe we’ll both live. This is one battle you lose. And the last. But maybe we’ll meet somewhere again to take it up later.”

  He bent down with a cynical smile and kissed her on the lips. To his surprise he found her lips responsive, but he had neither the time nor inclination to carry the emotion any further.

  “So long, Carolyn,” he chuckled.”

  “Some of this has been a lot of fun.”

  He finished donning the space suit and then with a careless wave of his hand he went down the stairs. She was not looking at him, but at the ruined microphone and the raw cord-ends, and the radio equipment far out of her reach. Panic showed in her face and it gave her some strength, but not enough to fight the four gravities that held her flat.

  Then as Farradyne lost sight of her, his jaunty self-confidence faded. Up until not too long ago he had been complimenting himself on being able to find out more about the hellflower operation than the Sandmen. Now he knew the hellflower gang had been using him in a more efficient manner than Clevis and the Solar Anti-Narcotics Department. It became obvious to Farradyne that fighting a gang of cutthroats and fighting an enemy race of intelligent people were about as different as he really was from the brilliant operator he imagined himself to be.

  It also required that he change his plans for escape. He knew that he could flee the big ship and had a fine chance of being picked up by a Space Guard scooter as soon as he could get within calling distance of Luna.

  But the chances were high that the hellflower people would have their entire undercover outfit alerted and at the first touch of radio call they would be swarming the neighborhood to pick him up. He would call and several ships would answer; there would be a lot of calling back and forth with the result that some “commercial spaceliner” would pick him up, reporting the incident to the Space Guard, who would not even take off from the station on Luna. Then Farradyne would be delivered right back to the place he was leaving now.

  He paused by the spacelock and cracked the big portal, and stood there eyeing the huge starship, a tiny dot in the distance below, visible only because its reaction flare limned the ship, making an annular object against the cold twinkling stars. He kept the spacelock open long enough to make it look like a real escape to Carolyn, who would be watching the indicator lamp and marking the time.

  Then he closed the spacelock and went down and down in the Lancaster until he found the lowermost inspection cubby. He crawled in and closed the hatch behind him. He settled down to wait with about the same amount of wandering concern as the school boy summoned to the principal’s office without being told why.

  Even the small amount of evidence that he now could use had been given to him as bait to catch the one man who would be willing to listen to him. He groaned and swore aloud and the sound of his voice echoed and reechoed within the confines of his helmet.

  Time creaked past and the Lancaster turned and curved according to the punchings on the autopilot tape. Farradyne had only one prayer—that the enemy would not get tired of the chase and fire a missile that would end the whole game with a wave of intolerable heat and indescribably bright light. Only Carolyn’s presence aboard might prevent that until the last moment.

  Then the hour-period ended with the Lancaster pointing up and a quartering course from Terra and Sol and a long, long way from the point of supposed escape. Not long after that Farradyne felt the clink of the magnetic grapples.

  He tensed again. Would they fine-comb the Lancaster? Or would the inevitable question a
nd answer session that must ensue, once they found Carolyn alone, convince them that he had abandoned ship? Would they take her off and blast the Lane’ or would they deem it of value and keep it?

  His mind went on and on—how good was the radar? How alert was their radar operator? Were both good enough to state unequivocally that there had been no minute object leaving the ship on a tangential course, or would there have been the usual clutter of noise and interference and lack of anticipation so that someone could assume that he had left the ship? Someone was going to get chewed for it in any case. Then assuming that the enemy considered the ship valuable, where would they take it and what would they do with it?

  Far from feeling gratified at his maneuver, Farradyne was only satisfied to be alive and temporarily out of the hands of the enemy. What happened from here on in must be played by ear against an unknown score for three voices.

  The drive of the Lancaster dropped from four gravities to about one, and Farradyne could hear, dimly, the clumpings of heavy feet coming in through the rooms above him. Then the drive diminished again, remaining at about a quarter-gravity or maybe less, and there were sounds of feet above his head. He tensed and he tasted the acid in his mouth; he found his heavy automatic and clutched it clumsily in the heavy space-glove. Capture might be preferable to death, except that Farradyne was fairly well convinced that the enemy could not permit him to stay alive with what he knew about them, even though it was precious little and unsupported.

  The cubby he was hiding in was angularly shaped; to one side was space beyond the hull-plates. Inside was the water-jacket that cooled the throat of the reaction motor. Farradyne moved quietly around the central pillar until he was on the opposite side from the inspection hatch and settled down again.

  On the plates above his head there were footsteps and the scraping of something heavy being hauled across the deck.

  He heard the sound of triple-tongued voices barking musical and discordant sounds, distorted and muffled by the deck and the helmet he wore. One fiddled with the inspection hatch and Farradyne found the scuttlebutt and valved the air out into space knowing the enemy would have a hard time cracking the hatch against the pressure of one atmosphere. They gave up after a moment; then came the sound of drilling on the deckplates above him. A cloud of whitish vapor spurted downward and the sound of alien voices rose sharply as the drill came through. Three more spurts of escaping air blasted downward and skirred around the room to go in a fading draw toward the scuttlebutt.

  Plugs filled the four holes and Farradyne turned his head torch on them. They were heavy self-tapping bolts being turned in from above.

  The maneuver was repeated three times, ninety degrees apart. Then there was a softer sound of scraping and gradually the clumping of feet and the sound of men at work faded away.

  Farradyne took a deep breath and realized that his skin was itching from the cold perspiration of fear that bathed him. The taste in his mouth was brackish and his heart was pounding, his breath shallow and rapid. He opened his mouth to gasp and discovered that he had been clenching his teeth so hard that his jaw ached and his molars hurt.

  He closed the scuttlebutt, but did not valve any air into his hiding place. He put the top of his helmet against the deckplate above him and listened. Far above he could hear them, still at work but they were going higher and higher in the ship. He relaxed, waiting…

  Three more hours passed, as nerve-wracking a three hours as Farradyne had ever spent. Then, with absolutely no warning the drive went off completely. He floated from the deck and scrabbled around to grab a stanchion. He held on, finally getting his magnetic shoes against a girder where they held him at an odd angle.

  The drive went on to a full one gravity and hurled Farradyne flat against the bottom of the cubby, wrenching his ankles slightly. The drive went off again, on and finally off. This time it stayed off.

  Floating free, with only his feet for mooring, was like resting in a tub of body-temperature water, and as the lulling muscle-freeing sensation went on and on, Farradyne dozed. From the doze, which was fitful for quite some time, he dropped off into a deep slumber.

  16

  Farradyne awoke to the pressure of about one gravity and he consulted his watch. Either fourteen hours had passed, or thirty-eight, but he could not believe the latter. A full clock-around was hardly possible for Farradyne, even when he was dead tired, so one clock-around plus fourteen hours was unthinkable.

  He put his slumber at fourteen hours and then set his mind on other, more important things.

  The ship was silent. His suit hung from him limply, indicating that air had seeped into the cubby again. He tried the scuttlebutt but no hiss of air came. The Lancaster was a-planet.

  It might be Terra, Venus or Pluto according to the pull of gravity, but Farradyne did not think it likely to be any one of the three. He suspected that whatever the gizmo was the enemy had installed on the deck above him, it had something to do with transcending the limiting velocity of light. He was probably grounded on enemy soil … somewhere.

  For a moment his mind grappled with the problem of interstellar travel and lost the fight. It was possible, proven by the starship of the aliens. But to come aboard with a gadget under one arm and install it, like putting in a radio set, seemed entirely too simple. On the other hand, Farradyne was sufficiently aware of basic physics to understand that anything that could be used to create a condition where gross matter could exceed the velocity of light would be something that did not have to perform in conjunction with a matter-operated reaction motor. He remembered, dimly, some fanciful theories written by some of the white-tower boys in one of the big universities. These had been experiments in field-theory and group-theory which had indicated that under certain conditions, some rather minute spherical volumes of space could be made to misbehave.

  The difference was that with the physicists and their operations, a vast room full of gear had been used to make a five millimeter sphere, and the contrast was marked.

  The meat of this matter was that the gizmo that made it possible to travel faster than light must be some sort of field-generator, and such a field-generator might well be packaged in small form for installation. Whatever the science and whatever the location, Farradyne could not hope to learn anything penned up here.

  Again he listened. The ship was silent as the proverbial grave. He cracked the inspection hatch and peered out. It was dark as the grave, too.

  Boldly he opened the hatch and stepped out. Under the light of his headlamp, Farradyne inspected four rectangular metal boxes, painted a nondescript gray. Cables led from one to another, terminating in white metal connectors. The boxes were bolted to the deck by the self-tapping bolts that had come through his ceiling.

  From one of the boxes ran a cable that led to a wall-connector.

  Like all other Solarian spacecraft, the Lancaster was well supplied with a network of cables running up and down the length of the ship to serve as test connections and spares for this or that equipment This made it possible to install some bit of gear for pleasure, comfort or added maneuvering without having to tear half the ship apart to run the necessary wiring.

  The enemy had re-connected their multi-line cable to one of the standard Terran connectors and plugged the cable into the Lancaster’s cable-plate.

  Farradyne could see nothing about the metal boxes that would tell him anything, so he left them and went aloft, cautiously. He doffed the space suit at the next level and hung it in a suit locker, and continued to walk up the stairway that would lead him to the spacelock and the salon.

  Out of one porthole he could see the spaceport. It was broad and dark except for a bouquet of searchlights that drilled into the sky around the rim, a wash of floodlamps that surrounded one of the vast starships many miles distant, and the far-off blur of bright, red light that probably read “Spaceman’s Bar” in whatever the natives used for a printed language.

  He left the viewport and went higher in his ship until he
came to the salon. He peered into it from floor level, but it was dark and untenanted. The spacelock was open and Farradyne looked out of the large round opening across the field to another starship standing a few hundred yards from the Lancaster. The other ship was just as dark as his, except for one small porthole that gleamed like a headlight in the darkness.

  The problem of where he was called him to the control room.

  He looked into the sky, hunting for familiar constellations. The Pleiades were there, but warped quite a bit and Farradyne found that, while he knew they were distorted as an aggregation of stellar positions, he could not remember their proper relationship. Orion was visible, but the hero had hiked his belt up after a swing of his sword at the mythical enemy. The Great Bear was sitting on his haunches instead of prowling and the smaller Bear had lost his front feet. Cassiopeia had gained some weight, enough to squash her throne and Sirius no longer blazed in Canis Major. Procyon had taken off for parts unknown, while several other bright stars dotted the skies in places where no stars had been on Terra. It was likely that some of these were merely displaced stars, but no one could tell Sirius from anything else without a set of astronomical instruments and a few years of study unless he knew which way Sirius was from this position.

  Coldly and calmly Farradyne scanned the skies. Providing they had not travelled more than forty or fifty light years, the constellations before and behind the direct line of flight should be reasonably undistorted, except for those stars that would have been bypassed en route. This would only add a star or two to a constellation behind and subtract the same from a constellation dead ahead. The ones to the side of the line of flight would be misshapen and warped.