“Yes, I have,” Andy told me, and I felt a curious little shock of apprehension. “He admitted it. Said he fell asleep on the job. Up too late the night before, tearing up Broadway.”
“Fell asleep?” I repeated. “Jim said that?”
“Yeah.” Andy squeezed my shoulder in a grip that made me wince. I could hear his breathing. “Mike, if Jim had been in the right I’d have backed him to the limit. You know that. But this thing—”
He tried to say more, broke off suddenly, and turned to go striding off down the field.
I didn’t follow. Instead, I went back to the administration buildings and in past a lot of glass doors and startled secretaries and vice-presidents till I blew into a big room filled with reporters, televisor-men, and officials.
There was only one man I wanted to see—J.C. Gayley, the director—the man who held the administration of STC in his well-manicured hands. He was standing beside his big desk, chewing a cigar, face stern and angry. I liked his frown better than his smile—the frown looked real, anyway.
He turned and saw me. “Harrigan! What’s the matter? I’m busy—can’t see you now.”
“Just wanted to give you notice, Gayley,” I said. “I’m quitting.”
I saw his eyes flicker to the reporters. “Er—you’re under contract, Harrigan. You can’t resign. I’ll discuss this with you later.”
“You won’t release me?” I asked.
He waved an impatient hand. “No, no! Don’t bother me now. I’ve enough trouble on my hands with the Caribee and Sloane—”
“Trying to think up a good alibi?”
I interrupted.
GAYLEY’S plump face turned a mottled yellow. He glared at me.
“That’s enough!” he shouted. “Get out!”
“Gayley,” I said, “you may be the boss of STC, but you’re still a dirty, cheap doublecrosser. And this’ll show you I mean it.”
I let him have one. My knuckles cracked under the impact, and I felt his jaw give. He went crashing back against the wall, blood spurting from his mouth, knocked out cold as an iceberg. Flashbulbs blazed and popped. Somebody yelled for the police.
And a reporter jumped past me, grabbed the phone, and dialed his copy-desk. He kept looking at me and saying over and over:
“What a story! What a story!”
I didn’t bother with the autogyro; it was a rented one anyhow. The taxi-rank was full when I blew out on the boulevard, and I hailed a supercharged, streamlined job.
“Times Square,” I said loudly, for the benefit of the loungers who were watching me. But after we’d gone a block I gave the driver another address and told him to take the middle lane on the Skyway. There’s no speed limit there, and we whizzed across the. bridge and blazed down the Hudson at more than a hundred.
Fifteen minutes later I stepped out of the elevator, hurried along the hall, and went into Jim Sloane’s apartment without knocking. The kid was talking to a short, fat little guy with a bald dome and spectacles.
I caught the tail end of a sentence. “—won’t take long. I’ll board her tonight.”
Then Jim looked up, saw me. His lips tightened. He still wore his olive-drab uniform, and his face was pale and strained. He had the same gray, cool eyes as his brother, but Jim’s hair was a tousled taffy color, instead of blue-black. He didn’t have Andy’s husky build, either, but he was rangy and tough as a greyhound.
“Hi, fella,” I said. “Busy?”
Jim looked sidewise at the short guy. “Fix yourself a drink,” he said, jerking his thumb at the sideboard. “Come on in, Mike.” He led me into the kitchen.
“Well,” I said, “what’s the low-down?”
“You’ve seen Andy?” he asked, “Yeah, then you got the whole story.”
“Fell asleep on the job, eh?”
“Right. Thanks for coming, Mike, but it’s—just one of those things.” He looked meaningly at the door.
I didn’t take the hint. “So you fell asleep,” I said. “Jim, you’re a cockeyed liar. I knew that when Andy told me about it. You must have put it over swell to make him believe you.” Jim went white. “What the devil are you talking about?”
I lit a cigarette, watching the kid under my lashes.
“You didn’t fall asleep. The Detectors went out, didn’t they?” I read the answer in his face.
“Yeah. The usual lousy equipment of STC ships. If you’d seen the red lights, you’d have rocketed out of the meteor’s orbit, but the danger signals didn’t flash, did they?”
“You didn’t—”
“I didn’t tell Andy—no. I guessed what you were up to. If Andy knew the truth, he’d have raised merry hell, and his career would have eclipsed with yours. It’s your business, kid.”
“Thanks, Mike,” Jim said. “I owe plenty to Andy. More than—well!” He shrugged. “There was Bette, too.”
SURE—there was Bette, and a swell girl, at that. Jim and Andy had both fallen for her, but Andy had won out, and they were to be married in a few months. Just another reason why Jim had taken it on the chin without dodging.
“What are you figuring on now?” I said.
He didn’t meet my eyes.
“I dunno—”
“Who’s the fatty in the other room?” Jim looked right at me, daring me to raise an objection.
“I’m joining the Suicide Squad,” he said.
CHAPTER II
The Suicide Squad
MY stomach jumped up and came down with a thud. Because, right there in front of me, Jimmy Sloane was lifting a loaded revolver to his forehead and squeezing the trigger. He was jumping out a spaceport—running in front of a rocket-pet. In other words, the kid brother of my best friend was telling me, in so many words, that he was going to kill himself.
Nobody ever comes out of the Suicide Squad alive, you see.
I’ll explain. Way back in the thirties, when Oberth and Goddard were fooling around with rocket fuels, they were making motion pictures and using airplanes in them. And, to give the audience a thrill, the studios hired stunt flyers to perform aerial gymnastics.
Ever so often one of the stunt men would wash up, because airplanes had a habit of hitting the ground unexpectedly—arid hard.
The old-style planes, with their rudders, ailerons, and props, went out when practicable rocket fuels were discovered. But the motion pictures went on. Audiences still wanted thrills, and the studios began to use rockets instead of planes in their air and interplanetary stuff.
At first they stuck to models. That had worked well enough with the old-type planes, with montage, double exposures, and stereoscopic effects; but you can’t make model rockets convincing. Not with the tremendous drive they’ve got in their jets. All hell is bottled up in those reinforced liquid-fuel tanks, and you can do things with rockets you never could have done with a plane.
I’ve seen films that would lift the hair right off your head. Nerve-cracking shots of space-stunting that made me shudder when I thought of the poor devils in the piloting seats. Men are only flesh and blood—even the desperate, tough babies who are the only ones who’ll join the Suicide Squad—the space-stunters. And It’s nesh and blood pitted against—
Power!
Brother, you don’t know the meaning of the word! The commercial rockets build up acceleration slowly; they have to, or passengers and crew alike would be killed. But the movie ships unleash the tremendous inferno of energy bottled up in their fuel tanks, and the heart-wrenching strain of that super-dynamite can split your eyeballs, collapse your lungs, and pull your insides right through your skin. Power! My God!
I grabbed Jim’s shoulders. “You crazy fool,” I snapped. “You can’t—”
“My business, Mike,” he said coldly. “Not yours.”
If he got mad I might have handled him. But in the face of that icy determination I knew I was licked. So I grinned crookedly, let him go, and went into the other room. Fatty blinked at me over the rim of a glass.
“Listen, fella,”
I said. “I hear you need rocket-fodder for the Squad. How’s chances?”
“Who did you kill?” he asked. Before I could answer Jim grabbed me and swung me around.
“Don’t try it, Mike,” he warned. “I said keep out and I meant it.”
I laughed. “I’m doing you no favor,” I told him. “I just broke J. C.’s jaw. The Squad’ll be a rest cure compared to what’d happen if I stayed on Earth.” And that’s how Mike Harrigan joined the Suicide Squad.
A PASSENGER ship took us out to Callisto, passage paid and contracts signed. Not that the contracts meant anything. No court of law would force a man to stay in the Squad if he didn’t want to stay. But, somehow, few of the stunters quit. The pay wasn’t much, but occasionally there’d be some extremely risky job with a high price tagged on it. There was always some sucker who’d take it on, and usually he got a swell funeral as a reward.
The studios had their space headquarters on a sparsely-settled equatorial island on Callisto, Thaler Island, it was called, after a Dutchman who had cracked up his rocket on it in the old days. Thaler was a roaring border-town, without any law but the studios’. And they didn’t give a damn what the men did, as long as they could take up the rockets when a picture had to be canned. Quite a little city!
Jim and I found our passage booked on one of the ocean liners, and it wasn’t long before a taxi let us out at the studio offices. I showed a guard our credentials, and we were ushered into a big chromium room where a bull necked, gray-haired man sat behind a desk, running strips of film through his fingers. He looked like an army sergeant. His blue-jowled face was the color of raw beef.
“Harrigan and Sloane,” he said without looking up. “Right. I’ll get a man to show you around. My name’s Dancey.”
He pressed a button and then gave us the full battery of a pair of curiously vivid pale blue eyes.
“You’re transport men, I think. Well—just forget that. You won’t have any passengers to pamper here. You’ll have your jobs, and they’ve got to be done right. Retakes are too damn expensive. We tell you just what to do, and it’s up to you to do it. No excuses. If you get an order to blast off full power from a dead stop, don’t tell me it’s dangerous. I know it is. Yeah.”
The pale eyes watched us keenly.
“You knew what you were getting into before you signed up. If you want to back out now, okay. I won’t stop you. If you don’t like the idea of seeing your insides splashed around the control room, say so and get the hell out. Well?”
“It sounds swell,” I said. “Anyway, my insides are tied down pretty tight.”
Jimmy grinned. “I’m staying,” he chimed in, “I want to show you shavetails some real stunting.”
Dancey grunted, his red face impassive. The door opened and a short, heavy-set man came in briskly. He had a face like a bulldog and his head was bald as an asteroid.
“Teague, some hew men,” Dancey said. “Take ’em over.”
Teague jerked his thumb at us and we followed him out.
“We’re canning that transport crack-up tomorrow, Teague,” Dancey called after us. “Line up your pilots for it.”
Our guide stopped short.
“Tomorrow!” he said angrily. “We heed another week of rehearsal!”
DANCEY made an impatient gesture. “Can’t do it. Got to shoot it before we’re scooped. Apex is rushing through their space-mutiny flicker, and if they release it first it’ll hit our box-office hard.”
Teague’s jaw jutted out stubbornly.
“It’s too risky,” he said. “Give me two more days.”
Dancey stood up, his hard mouth twisting in a sneer.
“Sure! Take a month while you’re at it. I’ll send somebody In to serve tea while you play with your charts. Take all the time you want. Then we’ll shoot it with models.” The pale blue eyes were cold as death. “We’re canning that scene tomorrow, Teague. If you don’t like it—”
“Okay!” Teague barked. “You’ll get your scene—tomorrow. And you’d better order a couple of nice big funerals for the day after!”
There were two factors that were to affect us a great deal during our apprenticeship in the Suicide Squad. One was the nerve-taut tension of the flyers, a carefully-concealed, but terrific nervous strain that gave a curiously distinctive look to men’s eyes. The other factor was Morgan Daly.
If Teague was the unofficial captain of the Squad, Daly was his lieutenant. The two men were opposite as the poles. We found Teague to be hard-boiled, hot-tempered—and a man we could like and trust. We never liked Daly; we distrusted him.
He was built like a steer, with the biggest shoulder-span I’ve ever seen, and, perched atop that great body, an incongruously small head. His eyes, cold and black, had the same strained appearance of the other men’s; under high cheekbones there were cadaverous hollows, and his lips, usually retracted in a mirthless smile, showed broken, discolored teeth.
Daly was a victim of space shock and it was slowly breaking him down in body and mind. So far his only symptom, aside from his appearance, was a certain absent-mindedness which would later develop to dangerous proportions.
If Teague had lived, matters would have been different, I think. But he died—washed up out there in space, piloting the big transport liner that he wouldn’t let anyone else handle. Daly, actually, was scheduled for the job, but for some reason we didn’t know till later Teague shunted him on to a minor job and took his place.
The truth was, Daly was full of his drug—doped to the eyes, his reactions slowed down, his synapses blocked by the poisonous neural inhibitions of the alkaloid.
Teague died. Daly took charge. And from the start a bitter rivalry sprang up between Jimmy and our new captain.
Daly had been in the Squad a long time, as such things go. Once a noted pilot, he still felt that his reputation was tops, and he looked on new recruits as intruders trying to oust him from his job.
Subconsciously he knew that he couldn’t last much longer, with his weakened body and brain, and he was determined to hang on as long as he could.
That he did this at the expense of the other men didn’t worry him. When a pilot showed too much promise, he’d be assigned to a job that might kill or cripple him, or, worse, cause space-shock—something fifty times worse than shellshock.
I saw the feeling steadily growing between the two men. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. Jimmy and I were kept busy learning the business—all strange, all new to me.
Stunting wasn’t as I had vaguely thought, a matter of going out into space and piloting haphazard. Every move was planned in advance, as far as possible. There were expert calculators who spent days and weeks over their charts, plotting courses, estimating reaction and recoil, testing with their model Tiling and super-Mirak rockets. Then the pilots’ work would begin.
I remember the first time I tried what they called a ground-flight. Daly took me along a corridor and into a room which was an exact replica of a space-ship’s control chamber. It was complete with instruments, guide-panels, vision-screens, and all. Tacked up before the pilot’s seat, I saw as I slid into it, was a typewritten sheet of instructions.
“Just follow that,” Daly said briefly. “And use your head.”
HE waited till I’d scanned the paper, and then shoved over a lever. The screen before me paled and then showed the star-brilliant ebony of space.
“Visual reception isn’t, so good on a real flight, you know,” Daly grunted. “You can’t go by the screens alone.” The first instruction said, “Speed 350. Transection 6-14-901. Check for silver ship in tsn. 7-13-880. When it rockets, release starboard tubes 4, 5, 8; stern tubes 9 and 5.”
I waited. My instruments checked; a silver craft slid into view on the screen. I saw its rockets jet rosily against the black. I played the switchboard, felt a sickening jar as the room seemed to jerk against the recoil.
“You’ll be bandaged up on the flight, of course,” Daly said. “And strapped in. Necessary.”
Necessary—sure! I’d seen the pilots go out, wrapped and padded until they looked like nothing human, their eyes set and strained; men who knew that such precautions were useless against the terrific shock, the tearing agony and strain, of the mighty rockets. Flesh and blood against pure power—and the dice were loaded.
I followed the typewritten instructions before me, playing the groundship delicately among the tangled chess-game of space-craft the vision-screens showed, until there came a time when I realized that one of the vessels was off its course.
I was due to jet past a liner in a few seconds, but, estimating swiftly, I saw that if I attempted it, I would stand a good chance of being crushed between it and the off-course ship. I readjusted the course, sent my ground-ship apparently flashing on the liner’s starboard instead of the port side.
A big hand smashed down on mine, crushing it against the guide-panel.
“Can’t you read!” Daly snarled. “It says port—port, not starboard!”
I pulled my hand away. “Port meant crackup.”
“Yeah? Listen, Mister Harrigan, that shot was faked purposely. There was room enough left between the ships for you to squeeze through. That was your course, and—you’ve got to follow your course! If there’s any chance at all of doing it without a crackup, take that chance!
“All the cameras are set up, all of ’em focused, all of ’em grinding. You get out of the picture and it means a retake. That costs money.”
It also means a call-down for Daly, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.
“Just remember that, Mister. It may be tough for a transport man to remember, but try and remember it anyway. If there’s a chance, take it! And if there isn’t—” He looked at me keenly—“then make one!”
CHAPTER III
Space Stunter
SO the training went on, at high tension always. Eventually Jimmy and I went out in space and learned the ropes there. It was queer for me, a master pilot, to be going to school again. But I had plenty to learn. I realized that. This was far different from the careful, painstaking handling of transport liners.
Collected Fiction Page 109
