Hellflower (1957)

by George O. Smith

  Two light years an hour … Farradyne ran the Lancaster for exactly three hours and then cut the super-drive. Together they inspected the heavens and found a brilliant yellow star on their quarter. Farradyne turned the ship to face it and pushed the toggle up and down. The star reappeared without change. He kept his eye to the point-of-flight telescope and raised the toggle slowly. Sol changed color, racing toward the blue and the violet first and then tinning a dull red and rising through the spectrum again until it became violet once more. It went through another spectrum change and started to increase in size.

  Whatever caused this phenomeon could not be explained by Farradyne; perhaps by no living Solan physicist until many years of research brought forth a theory.

  But regardless of the theories-to-come, Sol grew in size like a toy balloon hitched to a high-pressure air line until its flare frightened the pilot. He shoved the toggle down and Sol winked back into the familiar disc of blinding sun, about the size as seen from Mars.

  Farradyne oriented himself with his knowledge of common celestial navigation, consulted the spaceman’s ephemeris and pointed at a large unwinking spot. “Home,” he said.

  Two light years an hour … Farradyne went to the computer and made some calculations. He returned, pointed the Lancaster at Terra and flicked the toggle up and down, counting off a few seconds for drive. Sol whiffled past, changing in color as its position changed in the astrodome, and when Farradyne drove the toggle down, Terra was a distant disc in the sky above them.

  Farradyne turned the outgoing gain on the intercom. “Terra dead ahead,” he called to the prisoners below. “Still want to bet?”

  Brenner growled. “You’ve got your bet. It’s our lives against yours.”

  “Done!”

  “Don’t try to collect too soon,” snapped Brenner. “You’re not leading your squadron of spacebombers yet.”

  Farradyne picked up his throat-whistle and put it in his mouth. He worked it back with his tongue and said, “The hell you say, Brenner.” The result was a humming, whining, groaning travesty.

  21

  “We’ll not repeat.” said Farradyne. “Norma, hike below and see that our visitors stay taped to their chairs. I’m going to land this crate without interference.”

  Norma nodded and went down to the salon. “They’re still secure,” she reported over the intercom.

  Farradyne replied, “Aye-firm,” and then made his first ranging-radar contact with Terra. He set his deceleration drive accordingly and the integrator-needle crept over to the center-scale zero, informing Farradyne that zero separation from the surface of the spaceport would result in zero velocity of the Lancaster.

  Then Farradyne fired up the radio and called: “Washington Tower. This is a Lancaster Eighty-One requesting landing instructions. Registry Six-Eight-Three. Farradyne piloting.”

  “Tower to Six-Eight-Three. Take Beacon Nine at one twenty thousand, Landing Area Five. Traffic is zero-zero, but eight repeat eight Spaceguard cutters are in formation at sixty thousand.” The voice changed in tone slightly. “Space-guard, Code Watchung. Calling Watchung.”

  “Watchung to Tower, go ahead.”

  “Tower. Watchung, ware away from Beacon Nine. Lancaster Eighty-One coming in. Give position and course.”

  “Watchung to Tower. Position azimuth six seven zero, altitude sixty thousand, distance nine miles. Course twenty-seven North azimuth. Will miss Beacon Nine by thirty-three miles. Recheck?”

  “Recheck and aye-firm, Watchung. Tower to Six-Eight-Three: Did you follow that?”

  “Aye-firm!” called Farradyne.

  “Watchung to Six-Eight-Three: Pilot identify yourself.”

  “Pilot Farradyne here, Watchung.”

  “Aye-firm. Watchung Five, assume command of Six, Seven and Eight. Take alert pattern at two hundred thousand feet and stand by. Watchung Two, Three and Four compute and take closing course on Six-Eight-Three and convey to Landing Area Five. Farradyne, prepare to accept convoy.”

  “Deny, Watchung. Request reasons.”

  “Prepare to accept inspection, Six-Eight-Three.”

  Farradyne growled angrily and dropped the radio formalities. “Why?” he snapped.

  “You are suspected of hauling a cargo of hellflowers. Prepare to stand inspection upon landing.”

  From down in the salon came the sound of cynical laughter. Brenner said, “We’ll let your own people punish you, Farradyne. Hellblossom running, resisting arrest, kidnapping, operating with a forged license, operating a ship with a questionable registry. I’ll bet that life you offered.”

  Farradyne knew what Brenner meant Taped tight in his ship were Carolyn Niles, daughter of one of Mercury’s leading citizens, and a schoolteacher supposedly named Hughes. There would no doubt be a lot of other witnesses prepared to perjure him into three hundred years of hard labor on Titan. He wondered how they had managed this; certainly they had not been prepared for losing their captured spacecraft so quickly. Yet the counter-preparation looked as though such an eventuality had been expected.

  “Six-Eight-Three, respond!”

  Farradyne snapped his mike-switch and said, “I resent the accusation and demand an explanation!”

  “There is no accusation. We have an anonymous tipoff. You are not accused of illegal operations, only suspect Will you permit inspection?”

  “No!” snapped Farradyne. “Deny!”

  “Code Watchung: Intercept Six-Eight-Three. Prepare to fire.”

  “Fire and be damned,” said Farradyne in a growl. His hand reached for the toggle and shoved it home for ten seconds. When he turned the ultradrive off, they were far a-space and the radio was silent.

  “Give it up, Charles,” said Carolyn from below.

  “Go to hell!”

  Brenner said, “You might as well, Farradyne. No matter how you figure it, you’ll either be grabbed by your own people or get picked up by ours. We can’t lose.”

  Farradyne went below and faced them. “And what happens if I dump you out of the spacelock and your cargo with you?”

  “You could do that to Cahill,” said Carolyn, “because Cahill was not registered as a paying passenger. I am, and when the authorities find me missing—as they will very soon if they haven’t been so informed already—you’ll be called to account for me.”

  “Just what sort of act do you suggest?” Farradyne asked cynically.

  “Surrender and turn this ship over to us. You will be detained as a prisoner of war and imprisoned among your own kind.”

  “Doing what kind of prison labor? Growing hellflowers?”

  “Not at all. We wouldn’t consider that ethical.”

  “What a cockeyed code of ethics you have!”

  “Let’s not discuss ethics now. Surrender and you’ll be placed on a Terra-conformed planet with every freedom among your own kind except the right to space flight.”

  “No, thanks,” said Farradyne drily. “I had four years of slogging in a fungus marsh because of your kind. I’m disinclined to give up after one miss. It—”

  “Charles!” cried Norma through the squawk-box. “Come up here! Radar trace!”

  Farradyne raced up the stairs just in time to see the long green line of the radar settling down to a solid signal pip at the extreme end. He flipped the switch that coupled the telescope to the radar and looked through the eyepiece. At the extreme range of the radar beam was a spacecraft, either the same starship that had chased him before or its sister ship. It was closing the range fast Farradyne dropped into his chair and snapped the belt. He turned the Lancaster by ninety degrees and grasped the toggle on the ultradrive. Ten seconds later he resumed normal flight for a few seconds and then, at another angle, he used the ultradrive some more.

  He paused here long enough to take his space bearing, then plunged the ship down between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, far to the south of the ecliptic with a flick of the enemy switch.

  “Norma,” he asked quietly, after he had inspected the sky to be
certain of their freedom, “who is Howard Clevis’ boss?”

  “Howard reports to Solon Forrester directly.”

  “Oh fine,” groaned Farradyne. “Getting to the Solon is no picnic. How do we go about it?”

  From the intercom came a suggestion: “Walk into his fourth under-assistant sub-secretary’s office wearing a hellflower and ask for an audience.”

  A flick of color caught Farradyne’s eye and he turned to look at the radar. The line had wiggled slightly and, as he watched, its extreme end formed into a signal pip. He looked through the telescope and saw the starship again. Whether they had one with supervelocity tracking methods or several hundred covering the solar system like an interception net, it made no difference. They were on his trail.

  Farradyne played with the high-space drive again, cutting some more didoes back and forth across space, ending up this time not too far from Mercury.

  “Having fun?” asked Brenner.

  “Shut up!” snapped Farradyne.

  From below there came a rapid conversation in multitones, like someone dusting off the keys on a pipe organ played in mute.

  Farradyne swore as he sat there looking at the big chronometer on the wall, counting off the seconds. Seventy of them went under the sweep hand before the radar trace hiked up into the same, familiar extreme-range warning.

  Deliberately, Farradyne turned his ship toward Terra and hit the ultradrive. “They called me a hot-pants pilot,” he gritted. “Now I’ll really be one!”

  Yellow-green Terra raced up and up and up through the spectrum and burst in size from an unwinking pin-point of light to a shockingly large disc that zoomed toward them frighteningly. They saw its roundness come out of the sky in a myriad colors until it filled the dome above them. Norma screamed, but by the time her voice had stopped echoing through the control room, Terra was past them by a good many miles of clean miss and Farradyne had cut the ultradrive. He grunted unhappily because he was now as far from Terra on the other side as he had been before he took the chance. This mad use of the enemy ultradrive in ducking around the solar system was something similar to trying to make a fifty-ton clam-shell digger split a cigarette paper; at two light years per hour, their speed was enough to take them from Sol to Pluto in one second flat. He could not control it finely enough to do more than zoom off out of sight. Without a doubt the big star ship could maneuver at ultra-velocity with their drive cut in at microsecond intervals mechanico-electrically, of course, which was a setup that Farradyne did not have.

  He shrugged, and then he patted Norma on the shoulder. “I don’t think that my aim is good enough to hit the thing.” he said. He turned the Lancaster end for end abruptly and tried a quick flick of the toggle. Once more Terra leaped at them, a swirling kaleidoscope of color, looming into monster size, flicking past.

  When they came out of it Terra was again behind them by a few million miles. Farradyne thought for a moment, started to say, “Maybe we—” when he reached out and pressed the red button on the auxiliary panel, “—are being traced by the generator doodad they put below.”

  “But what are we going to do now?”

  “Hit for Terra!”

  Farradyne set the drive for Terra and then sat there, tense and waiting. He had not long to wait. The radar wiggled its warning trace almost dead ahead.

  They moved to intercept him, but Farradyne raised the drive to four gravities and plunged on. The starship grew and behind it Terra grew, but slower. The radio burst into sound and Farradyne grabbed the microphone and said, “Come and get me, fellows!”

  “Stop,” came the demand, “or we fire!”

  “Start a shooting match here and you’ll have all of Terra wondering why the fireworks,” Farradyne said.

  “Stop!”

  “No!”

  “One last warning. Stop!”

  Farradyne touched a lever. “Maybe you’d like to polish a few rivets?”

  The Lancaster turned ever so slightly until the starship was directly on the point-of-drive. His other hand touched the drive and the acceleration increased a bit. Caustically, Farradyne said, “Go ahead and shoot! You’ll find your own living room full of by-products if you do!”

  He was right. The Lancaster was on collision course with the starship and if the Lancaster was blasted at this moment shards and fragments of the spacecraft would spread like a shotgun charge, and if the star ship escaped being hit with a rather uncomfortably large mass of jagged metal it would be because of sheer luck.

  “Veer off!” came the strident cry.

  “I’m going to ram you, damn you!” roared Farradyne.

  The star ship flared at its tail and at the same time a torpedo-port winked as a missile blasted off. Farradyne gauged the missile and the star ship and kept his nose on the star ship’s lead. Gritting his teeth he watched the missile come at him as he held his course by sheer nerve. At the last moment the missile veered aside, obviously controlled by the enemy to keep from hitting him. It was a war of nerves.

  The star ship loomed big in the astrodome and Farradyne aimed the Lancaster amidships. The interstellar monster grew rapidly until the individual plates could be seen. Then with a silent, dark flicker that was as shocking as a loud blast and a searing flare might have been, the star ship quietly ceased to exist as an obstacle in front of them. They had resorted to the ultradrive at the last moment. The sky was clear …

  Except for the missile, seeking them and with no control to stop it.

  It had curved in a vast circle behind them and was now closing in from behind. The radar pip leaked across the screen; the missile must be. coming at them by several thousand gravities.

  “You’ll have to take this,” gritted Farradyne to Norma. “Hunker down in the seat.”

  His hands ran across the board and the Lancaster turned in space slightly while the drive went up to six gravities. The flare behind them lengthened with the increased power, and the Lancaster took a slight side-vector to its course as the flare was aimed at the seeking-missile that was homing on them.

  Insensate, unable to understand the maneuver, the missile followed its finding-gear and roared up into the long trail of reaction flare. The flare was a by-product of water, stored in its tank as a reaction-mass. It was heated by the atomic pile to an energy that destroyed the molecular affinity of hydrogen for oxygen and then stripped the electrons from their orbits, and when that was done, the nucleus of the oxygen broke up into eight protons and eight neutrons and added their binding energy to the drive. The flare was sheer gamma and sheer bombardment and the word “heat” had no real meaning, until the reaction blast touched something that was massive enough to absorb the energy.

  The missile absorbed this energy, was bombarded back from the Lancaster, and ultimately melted to join with the flare because its mechanism could not function to start the fission of the atomics in the warhead.

  There was a sparkling burst from behind, like a monster signal flare. That was all.

  Farradyne cut the drive back to a more comfortable level and relaxed a moment to let his body rest. Norma had blacked out briefly, but came to as soon as the drive had been cut.

  Ahead of them Terra loomed moon-sized in the middle of the astrodome, and behind them the radar wiggled its tail at extreme-range again. The range closed, and Farradyne with a grunt juggled his levers. The drive rose once more and the pressure increased. The range closed more slowly, but still the starship came on.

  “You can’t make it, Farradyne,” the radio blared exultantly.

  Farradyne laughed into the microphone and cut it dead with a flick of his hand. “We may not make it,” he told Norma, “but we won’t end up as live cowards!”

  Terra loomed larger and larger as the range closed between the Lancaster and the ship behind it. Norma cried out, and Farradyne looked through the telescope to see the giveaway annular flare. The enemy had fired another torpedo.

  He laughed and Norma touched his arm; he turned to smile at the deep concern and puz
zlement on her face.

  “They know we can louse it with our drive,” he said. “And they know that while that thing is coming up from behind we cannot possibly make a turnover and start decelerating for a landing. It’s a thoughtful tactic on their part—they hope.”

  “But I don’t see—”

  “Well, they know I won’t pile up on Terra. I’ll steer to miss. No doubt they have another starship on the other side of the planet, waiting to intercept us out here after I elude the missile. Maybe they have a whole space net flung out. So hunker down, while I cut some didoes.”

  The radar showed the picture. The starship, now fearful of being detected by one of the long-range jobs on Terra, veered away on a tangent, while between them came the missile. Before them, the huge, solid-looking pip that indicated the bulking Terra, crept closer and closer. Farradyne cranked the rate-of-charge dials and looked at the figures and nodded; the enemy had computed their missile’s drive beautifully. It would meet the Lancaster at about the same time the Lancaster met Terra. Since everybody knew that Farradyne was not going to plow into Terra head on, he would have to steer to one side, but in order to keep from being hit by the missile, he would have to keep on driving right past Terra and out into space again—into the arms of the net on the other side, waiting outside the radar range from Terra.

  The alternative was to cut the drive and try to land, and if this were tried the missile would blast the Lancaster far above Terra, long before the ship could signal its home planet that there was danger in space.

  The missile’s range closed home and Farradyne hiked the drive until the reaction-trail was a sun-bright fury and consumed the missile in its fierceness.

  He cut the drive dead just in time to hear the first screaming complaint of the superstratosphere. Farradyne hit the upper reaches of Terra’s air blanket at a point so high that the air there was a fairly hard vacuum, but the speed of the ship was high enough to pile quite a bit of air in front of it. The accelerometer went crazy, reading peg-stop against the end of the scale to the left. Their seat belts cut their thighs and the blood rushed to their heads. Norma’s arms were flung above her head, but Farradyne fought the pressure that tried to lift his arms; he kept his hands on the control panel and caressed his levers gently so that the Lancaster pinwheeled.