The loading of cargo was routine. The men had seen too many alien planets to pay much attention to this one. There was no breathable air, so the crew worked in their suits—except for three who had been injured in the crash, and were in sick-bay, in a replenished atmosphere within the sealed compartments of the ship. But only a few compartments were so sealed. La Cucaracha was a sick old lady, and only first aid could be administered here.
Danvers himself superintended that. La Cucaracha was his own, and he kept half the crew busy opening the heat-sealed jets, doing jury-rig repairs, and making the vessel comparatively spaceworthy. He let Saxon act as straw-boss, using the engineer’s technical knowledge, though his eyes chilled whenever he noticed the Transmat man.
As for Hilton, he went out with the other half of the crew to gather the paraine crop. They used strong-vacuum harvesters, running long, flexible carrier tubes back to La Cucaracha’s hold, and it took two weeks of hard, driving effort to load a full cargo. But by then the ship was bulging with paraine, the repairs were completed, and Danvers had charted the course to Silenus.
Hilton sat in the control room with Ts’ss and Saxon. He opened a wall compartment, glanced in, and closed it again. Then he nodded at Saxon.
“The skipper won’t change his mind,” he said. “Silenus is our next port. I’ve never been there.”
“I have,” Ts’ss said. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
Saxon drew an irritated breath. “You know what the gravity pull is, then, Ts’ss. I’ve never been there either, but I’ve looked it up in the books. Giant planets, mostly, and you can’t come from hyper into normal space after you’ve reached the radius. There’s no plane of the ecliptic in that system. It’s crazy. You have to chart an erratic course toward Silenus, fighting varying gravities from a dozen planets all the way, and then you’ve still got the primary’s pull to consider. You know La Cucaracha won’t do it, Mr. Hilton.”
“I know she won’t,” Hilton said. “We pushed our luck this far, but any more would be suicide. She simply won’t hold together for another run. We’re stranded here. But the skipper won’t believe that.”
“He’s insane,” Saxon said. “I know the endurance limits of a machine—that can be found mathematically—and this ship’s only a machine. Or do you agree with Captain Danvers? Maybe you think she’s alive!”
SAXON was forgetting discipline, but Hilton knew what strain they were all under.
“No, she’s a machine all right,” he merely said. “And we both know she’s been pushed too far. If we go to Silenus, it’s—” He made a gesture of finality.
“Captain Danvers says—Silenus,” Ts’ss murmured. “We can’t mutiny, Mr. Hilton.”
“Here’s the best we can do,” Hilton said. “Get into hyper somehow, ride the flow, and get out again somehow. But then we’re stuck. Any planet or sun with a gravity pull would smash us. The trouble is, the only worlds with facilities to overhaul La Cucaracha are the big ones. And if we don’t get an overhaul fast we’re through. Saxon, there’s one answer, though. Land on an asteroid.”
“But why?”
“We could manage that. No gravity to fight, worth mentioning. We certainly can’t radio for help, as the signals would take years to reach anybody. Only hyper will take us fast enough. Now—has Transmat set up any stations on asteroids?”
Saxon opened his mouth and closed it again.
“Yes. There’s one that would do, in the Rigel system. Far out from the primary. But I don’t get it. Captain Danvers wouldn’t stand for that.”
Hilton opened the wall compartment. Gray smoke seeped out.
“This is paraine,” he said. “The fumes are being blown into the skipper’s cabin through his ventilator. Captain Danvers will be para-happy till we land on that Rigel asteroid, Saxon.”
There was a little silence. Hilton suddenly slammed the panel shut. “Let’s do some charting,” he said. “The sooner we reach the Rigel port, the sooner we can get back to Earth—via Transmat.”
Curiously, it was Saxon who hesitated.
“Mr. Hilton. Wait a minute. Transmat—I know I work for the outfit, but they—they’re sharp. Business men. You have to pay plenty to use their matter transmitters.”
“They can transmit a hyper ship, can’t they? Or is it too big a job?”
“No, they can expand the field enormously. I don’t mean that. I mean they’ll want payment, and they’ll put on the squeeze. You’ll have to give up at least half of the cargo.”
“There’ll still be enough left to pay for an overhaul job.”
“Except they’ll want to know where the paraine came from. You’ll be over a barrel. You’ll have to tell them, eventually. And that’ll mean a Transmat station will be set up right here, on this world.”
“I suppose so,” Hilton said quietly. “But the old lady will be spaceworthy again. When the skipper sees her after the overhaul, he’ll know it was the only thing to do. So let’s get busy.”
“Remind me to tell you about Silenus,” Ts’ss said.
* * * * *
The Lunar Refitting Station is enormous. A crater has been roofed with a transparent dome, and under it the hyper ships rest in their cradles. They come in battered and broken, and leave clean and sleek and strong, ready for the Big Night again. La Cucaracha was down there, no longer the groaning wreck that had settled on the Rigel asteroid, but a lovely lady, shining and beautiful.
Far above, Danvers and Hilton leaned on the railing and watched. “She’s ready to jet,” Hilton said idly. “And she looks good.”
“No thanks to you, mister.”
“Tush for that!” Hilton said. “If I hadn’t doped you, we’d be dead and La Cucaracha floating around in space in pieces. Now look at her.”
“Yeah. Well, she does look good. But she won’t carry another paraine cargo. That strike was mine. If you hadn’t told Transmat the location, we’d be set.” Danvers grimaced. “Now they’re setting up a Transmat station there; a hyper ship can’t compete with a matter transmitter.”
“There’s more than one world in the Galaxy.”
“Sure. Sure.” But Danvers’ eyes brightened as he looked down. “Where are you heading, Skipper?” Hilton said.
“What’s it to you? You’re taking that Transmat job, aren’t you?”
“You bet. I’m meeting Saxon in five minutes. In fact, we’re going down to sign the contracts. I’m through with deep space. But—where are you heading?”
“I don’t know,” Danvers said. “I thought I might run up around Arcturus and see what’s stirring.”
HILTON did not move for a long time. Then he spoke without looking at the captain.
“You wouldn’t be thinking of a stopover at Canis after that, would you?”
“No.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Go keep your appointment,” Danvers said.
Hilton eyed the great hyper ship below. “The old lady’s always been a nice, clean craft. She’s never got out of line. She’s always charted a straight course. It’d be too bad if she had to carry slaves from Arcturus to the Canis market. It’s illegal, of course, but that isn’t the point. It’s a rotten, crooked racket.”
“I didn’t ask your advice, mister!” Danvers flared. “Nobody’s talking about slave-running!”
“I suppose you weren’t figuring on unloading the paraine at Silenus? You can get a good price for paraine from Medical Center, but you can get six times the price from the drug ring on Silenus. Yeah, Ts’ss told me. He’s been on Silenus.”
“Oh, shut up,” Danvers said.
Hilton tilted back his head to stare through the dome at the vast darkness above. “Even if you’re losing a fight, it’s better to fight clean,” he said. “Know where it’d end?”
Danvers looked up, too, and apparently saw something in the void that he didn’t like.
“How can you buck Transmat?” he demanded. “You’ve got to make a profit somehow.”
“There’s an
easy, dirty way, and there’s a clean, hard way. The old lady had a fine record.”
“You’re not a deep-space man. You never were. Beat it! I’ve got to get a crew together!”
“Listen—” Hilton said. He paused. “Ah, the devil with you. I’m through.”
He turned and walked away through the long steel corridor.
Ts’ss and Saxon were drinking highballs at the Quarter Moon. Through the windows they could see the covered way that led to the Refitting Station, and beyond it the crags of a crater-edge, with the star-shot darkness hanging like a backdrop. Saxon looked at his watch.
“He isn’t coming,” Ts’ss said.
The Transmat man moved his shoulders impatiently. “No. You’re wrong. Of course, I can understand your wanting to stay with La Cucaracha.”
“Yes, I’m old. That’s one reason.”
“But Hilton’s young, and he’s smart. He’s got a big future ahead of him. That guff about sticking to an ideal—well, maybe Captain Danvers is that sort of man, but Hilton isn’t. He isn’t in love with hyper ships.” Ts’ss turned his goblet slowly in his curious fingers. “You are wrong about one thing, Saxon. I’m not shipping on La Cucaracha.”
Saxon stared. “But I thought—why not?”
“I will die within a thousand Earth hours,” Ts’ss said softly. “When that time comes, I shall go down into the Selenite caverns. Not many know they exist, and only a few of us know the secret caves, the holy places of our race. But I know. I shall go there to die, Saxon. Every man has one thing that is strongest—and so it is with me. I must die on my own world. As for Captain Danvers, he follows his cause, as our Chyra Emperor did, and as your King Arthur did. Men like Danvers made hyper ships great. Now the cause is dead, but the type of men who made it great once can’t change their allegiance. If they could, they would never have spanned the Galaxy with their ships. So Danvers will stay with La Cucaracha. And Hilton—”
“He’s not a fanatic! He won’t stay. Why should he?”
“In our legends Chyra Emperor was ruined, and his Empire broken,” Ts’ss said. “But he fought on. There was one who fought on with him, though he did not believe in Chyra’s cause. A Selenite named Jailyra. Wasn’t there—in your legends—a Sir Lancelot? He didn’t believe in Arthur’s cause either, but he was Arthur’s friend. So he stayed. Yes, Saxon, there are the fanatics who fight for what they believe—but there are also the others, who do not believe, and who fight in the name of a lesser cause. Something called friendship.”
Saxon laughed and pointed out the window. “You’re wrong, Ts’ss,” he said triumphantly. “Hilton’s no fool. For here he comes.”
Hilton’s tall form was visible moving quickly along the way. He passed the window and vanished. Saxon turned to the door.
THERE was a pause.
“Or, perhaps, it isn’t a lesser cause,” Ts’ss said. “For the Selenite Empire passed, and Arthur’s court passed, and the hyper ships are passing. Always the Big Night takes them, in the end. But this has gone on since the beginning—”
“What?”
This time Ts’ss pointed.
Saxon leaned forward to look. Through the angle of the window he could see Hilton, standing motionless on the ramp. Passersby streamed about him unnoticed. He was jostled, and he did not know it, Hilton was thinking.
They saw the look of deep uncertainty on his face. They saw his face suddenly clear. Hilton grinned wryly to himself. He had made up his mind. He turned and went rapidly back the way he had come.
Saxon stared after the broad, retreating back, going the way it had come, toward the Refitting Station where Danvers and La Cucaracha waited. Hilton—going back where he had come from, back to what he had never really left.
“The crazy fool!” Saxon said. “He can’t be doing this! Nobody turns down jobs with Transmat!”
Ts’ss gave him a wise, impassive glance. “You believe that,” he said. “Transmat means much to you. Transmat needs men like you, to make it great—to keep it growing. You’re a lucky man, Saxon. You’re riding with the tide. A hundred years from now—two hundred—and you might be standing in Hilton’s shoes. Then you’d understand.”
Saxon blinked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Transmat is growing now,” Ts’ss said gently. “It will be very great-thanks to men like you. But for Transmat too, there will come an end.”
He shrugged, looking out beyond the crater’s rim with his inhuman, faceted eyes, at the glittering points of light which, for a little while, seemed to keep the Big Night at bay.
FURY
Second of three parts. Sometimes, when a race is slipping slowly into the long, easy twilight toward extinction, a ruthless crook can be a savior—a furious, lying, cheating, totally amoral egomaniac—
SYNOPSIS
Sam Harker was born six hundred years after the Earth’s destruction by an atomic chain reaction. Man didn’t die when Earth did. There were survivors, and they fled to Venus—which was uninhabitable. The cataclysmic fury of semi-Jurassic, nonterrestrial flora and fauna forced the race to retreat to the great impervium domes that were constructed on the sea bottom—the Keeps. There mankind lived—and slowly began to die.
Atomics had changed the race. The majority were short-boned, heavy, and fleshy. But there was a sprinkling of mutants, Immortals as they were called—the powerful Families of the Keeps who had a life-expectancy of more than seven hundred years. Physically they were variants from the norm; they were long-boned, lean, tall, unmistakably Immortals.
Last of the great Marker Family was Blaze Harker. His wife should have known better than to have a child; she was not built for child-bearing. She died when Sam Harker was born. And Blaze, blindly, insanely hating his son for that reason, took revenge. The Keeps had then underworlds and their darker technologies. When Blaze’s father, Zachariah Marker, and his grandfather and greatgrandfather tried to locate the boy, they failed. Blaze would not tell them what he had done, and the Harker heir, with his heritage of nominal immortality—was gone.
An underworld technician, well paid by Blase, worked on Sam. Endocrine surgery. The baby’s physical pattern was altered. He was made hairless, and, when he grew larger, he would be short-boned, heavy, and fleshy. He would not know his real name. He would be Sam Reed.
He grew up in the Keep underworlds, learning the underworld codes. The Slider tutored him, a, fat old Chiron-Fagin wise in his sinful ways. Sam Reed learned. . .
Love between Immortals has many facets. Zachariah Harker, Sam’s grandfather, and Kedre Walton took long vacations front their love, but inevitably they swung together again. Until, when Sam was forty, Kedre saw him at Keep Carnival, and was drawn to him by some quality she could not analyse. Perhaps she sensed that he was an Immortal, though she did not know it, and neither did Sam, who was simply a racketeer, promoter, and operator of whatever seemed most profitable.
He wasn’t apparently impressed by an Immortal’s favors. He was willing, but not eager. For Sam had been a have-not all his life, and automatically he resented the
Immortals—Zachariah, too, when he met him, though he undertook a certain commission Zachariah offered him.
There—were two reasons Zachariah made this offer. Kedre was too interested in Sam, and Sam could be got rid of fairly easily after he had fulfilled his task and killed Robin Hale. Hale was a nuisance. He was organizing a plan to colonise the lands of Venus, and the Families felt that such an attempt would not only be bound to failure at this time, but it would weaken the Keeps for future attempts. Hale was a malcontent. An Immortal, he had been one of the Free Companies that existed for centuries on Venus, hired mercenaries subsidized by the Keeps to fight their wars for them without running risks themselves. The Companies were gone now, but Hale lived on, a purposeless adventurer. He found his purpose when he visited the Temple of Truth and met the Logician, the oracle everyone thought was a thinking-machine.
The Logician, as Hale learned, was simply an Immortal with a curi
ous talent—he knew all the right answers. It wasn’t prescience; it was simply a talent for truth. He advised Hale to colonise land-side . . .
Instead of killing the Free Companion, Sam joined forces with Hale. He saw his opportunity. He was a crook and a promoter. He convinced Hale that he could promote the Colony venture, in the face of the Families’ opposition. By propaganda and publicity, Sam succeeded. The people of the Keeps rose to the glamorous bait of landside colonization. The funds began to pour in.
Sam quietly sold three hundred per cent of the stock. It would make his fortune—if the Colony failed. It couldn’t succeed, he knew—landside was uninhabitable.
Rosathe, a Keep dancer, dropped into his arms with other triumphs. He had wanted her for a long time. Now he had her, and he was winning his fight against the strangely passive Immortals—proving that he, a short-termer, was as good as they were—
Then Kedre and Zachariah struck, using Rosathe as their tool. Sam did not know what had happened until he smelled the terrifying scent of the dream-dust Rosathe puffed into his nostrils. And after that he woke, quite suddenly, in a Keep alley. Dream-dust could put a man to sleep for a long time.
How long?
A passer-by gave him the answer. “The Colony? Oh, the Land Colony! You’re a little late. Its been open a long time now—what’s left of it.”
“How long? How long?”
Sam heard the answer, and found himself hanging on the bar of a vending machine and looking at his face in the mirror. His face hadn’t aged. Not a bit. And that was impossible.
Because he had been drugged—under dream-dust—for forty years.
Part II
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate . . .
Collected Fiction Page 584
