Destiny's Orbit

by Donald A. Wollheim (as David Grinnell)

  But Radio Ajax was ready for operation in due course the next day, a sleeping period later. It stood in the open, high on the ridge, and the generators and wires were open and exposed so that it looked quite odd to a landbound eye. Its antenna was directional—a large wire basket-shaped device, many feet in diameter, directed inward towards the solar planets.

  "There should be no leakage at all outward towards the orbits of Saturn. Uranus and the others on the far rim," said Ajax. "You see, Emily," he went on to the girl as they stood surveying their finished work, "in spite of our differences I am giving EMSA the first opportunity to make its peace with me."

  "You'd better," she replied. "And they'll make peace with you—little pieces, you bet."

  "Hummph," said Ajax. "Anyway, let us go inside to the palace, and there I shall formally initiate the station."

  They returned to the ridge chambers and doffed their spacesuits. The mike and the controls of the huge station had been installed in the central living room—the throne room, Ajax insisted on calling it.

  "Where's the Wuj?" asked Ajax.

  "Your eight-legged henchman has discovered the delights of exploration," Emily replied. "He has gone out hunting artifacts with Anton. It seems that the miners found several bits in the dirt excavated for some of their dugouts. It looks as of broken clay and some pitted fragments of worked metal, if the Fore-Trojans may be one of the best sources of the great pre-explosion culture in the whole asteroid belt."

  "If it's my kingdom, it stands to reason that it will naturally have the lead in everything that's good," replied Ajax dead seriously. He ignored the sarcastic glance Emily threw at him in answer.

  Ajax seated himself before the transmitter. He opened the switches, listened to the powerful hum of the atomic generator, and when the dials registered the carrier beam full on, he switched on the mike.

  "Radio Ajax calling all stations," he spoke proudly and clearly. "Radio Ajax now opening transmission daily from the capital city of the Fore-Trojan Union."

  After repeating this three times, he read out a carefully prepared proclamation of independence, defining his basis for sovereignty, and offering the inner planets a treaty of peace and commerce on equal grounds.

  Emily sat in a comer of the room, one shapely foot crossed over the other, shaking her head and making exasperated expressions as Calkins spoke. When Ajax completed his reading, he switched the transmitter to automatic sending. It would repeat his taped message regularly for the next six hours.

  There was no reply the next day. "We may have to wait quite a while," decided Ajax on scanning the tape and finding it blank. "Doubtless, they will have to relay our message to the governments of Earth and Mars, who will then have to sit in solemn session and decide how to exchange diplomatic missions."

  "Hal" snorted Emily. "You should live that long. You’ll have a wait before that happens. In fact, it might last a lifetime—if you don't get blown out of here in the next week."

  "That's enough out of you!" snapped Ajax. He had been hoping for a prompt and cordial answer. "I have work to do. I am planning to draft my laws and regulations for the kingdom, and I shall have to take consultation with my prime minister, Anton Smallways. I plan to erect several sealed cities on these worlds, and begin the creation of a true wonder community."

  "Well," asked Emily, "what do yon want me to do-applaud? Or maybe work out a system of lampposts and sewers? . . . Since you're going to be so busy, do you mind if I go out and look these worlds over?"

  Ajax looked at her. "You may go exploring if you will, but you must be accompanied by the Wuj. He will keep an eye on you, and keep you out of mischief. Besides, he wants to go exploring, too."

  "Good," said Emily. "It will be a pleasure to get into the company of something that's sane."

  She found her spacesuit and got into it, while the Wuj climbed into his complex space stroller. Soon the two of them were outside the ridge, beginning their day of exploration.

  The two oddly assorted creatures—the Earth-girl in her official EMSA outfit and the weird figure of die arachnoid Martian—moved across the narrow landscape together, and found conversation of interest.

  Emily Hackenschmidt was a recent graduate of the EMSA training academy. She had studied Martians, but this was the first time she had ever really met a Martian on speaking terms. There was something that seemed to spark interest between the two. The Wuj was not without his curiosity about humanity.

  So, as they wandered, they talked and found much that was quaint between them. The Wuj explained something of the system of his clan on Mars; and, as he pointed out, "I owe Ajax a debt of loyalty such as you cannot understand on Earth. Among our people, I am in a special tribal testing period—a time in which all that I do must be perfect, and nothing must be' allowed to go wrong. This trial does not allow for accidents or anything else which may be beyond my control. The terms with which I must comply are unyielding. This is rigid. This is fact. And if I cannot immediately find a new commitment upon the occurrence of any disaster, then I become Webless, and must go back years in my life in order to start again.

  "When Ajax rescued me from my failure as a buswheel operator, it gave me the one chance I had. I will serve out the full term of my trial with him, and when I return it will be with fulfillment instead of shame. The Web will vibrate for me."

  Emily nodded to herself. "As for me," she said, "I, too, am going through a trial. This is the first assignment in my career, and my career is devoted to keeping the peace between the worlds, to serving intelligence and civilization, and to patrolling the spaceways. There weren't many women in my graduating class at the academy, and most of them were going on to desk jobs.

  "All my life I have dreamed of space and adventure. EMSA was my path to it. And when they assigned me to patrol this spoiled young man with too much money, they thought it was just an easy job—one they could safely pass off on a girl. But it turned out to be a real poser.

  "You know, they wanted to take it away from me when Ajax actually took off for Mars, but I stood on my rights. We of the Canadian branch of EMSA have taken for our motto the ancient, traditional rallying cry: We always get out man! I absolutely refused to turn over my file to that stuffy branch chief, Pierre MacHeath. And he had to give in."

  The Wuj stopped by a pile of loosely jumbled meteoric rocks and began to poke around in them with a crowbar. "I understand. You know, that makes us opponents—for we of Mars never let our man down."

  Emily watched the crowbar idly. "I know. It's too bad in a way. I find you rather interesting, and your loyalty admirable; but as for that Calkins—he needs a taking down."

  She sighed. "But let us be friends for the moment," she added. "What's this?" She pointed at something the crowbar had revealed.

  The Wuj shot down a spidery implement and picked up a piece of carved metal out of the rocks. He held it up, and they both looked at it.

  "It's a synthetic manufacture," the girl said.

  "Pre-explosion artifact," decided the Wuj matter-of-factly. "The asteroid is crawling with them." He shoved the piece into the pack he was carrying.

  In another couple of hours, they had assembled quite a collection of such items.

  The planetoid was not as rugged as most of these chunks of planetary debris. In fact, they found that it was quite symmetrically smooth, allowing for the pitmarks of meteor craters here and there.

  Emily remarked, "I wonder whether this world is a hollow shell. They have found several asteroids with large, shell-like interiors. They seal these in, fill them with air, and make very satisfactory habitations out of them. Radio Pallas is established in such a bubble under the surface of the asteroid."

  The Wuj remarked, "I have heard Anton Smallways say that the miners have radar-probed the interior briefly and believe it to have a metallic core. But the weight of this asteroid is not sufficient to be solid metal, so they think that Ajax must have hollow spaces beneath the surface. My great leader, Ajax, is going to look into
the possibility of establishing a better colony underground."

  Emily shrugged. "The only underground he's going to see is the basement cells in Deimos Prison. Just wait until the EMSA catches him."

  The Wuj made no reply to this. They went on, and the two commandeered a small mining spaceship at one of the workings. The sullen miners made no objection to this when they learned that the two planned to visit a neighboring worldlet that was now passing overhead in the ebon sky.

  On Achilles—which was the neighboring world of the Fore-Trojans they landed on—they found something more like the typical asteroid formation. Achilles was a chunk of a world, more like a hunk of coal than a rounded sphere. As they walked over its weird, pitted, burned surface, they could feel the pull of its gravity altering, for they were never strolling on a level with the gravitational center. It was uphill against that center—and up what would look like the sheer cliff of a huge mountain—until suddenly, as they reached the top, their viewpoint would shift, dip, and they would see themselves atop a flat and level plain.

  The effects of walking on such a non-spherical world were most odd, and the next few hours went by with great interest to the explorers.

  In one place, they seemed to be perched upon a point of land with the world dropping out from under them into a towering abyss of empty space, with the stars reeling almost beneath their feet. At another spot, near the center of gravity, it was like being in a vast bowl, with curving walls rising all about them and shutting the stars away from them.

  They searched for artifacts, but on this world they found none.

  "This is just as it was when it was ripped apart by the great explosion," said Emily softly, as they climbed the edges of that illusory bowl. "This little world was ripped from a chunk of the inner shell. Well find no artifacts or fragments of them here, for no living beings ever dwelled here when the planet was whole."

  "It's depressing," said the Wuj. "I like to think that I walk where the ancestors of my race first dwelt."

  "Not on Achilles," said Emily. "This place, named after a famous warrior of Earth, never saw a war. It's a frightening place."

  They returned at last to the spot where they had left their miner's spaceship, and sent it back to Ajax again. Navigation between such closely connected worldlets was not difficult. It required no elaborate data and calculations, and could be done by hand and eye.

  The day was done at headquarters on Ajax, and there had been no reply to Calkins' message. Ajax himself had been busy turning out sheafs of careful notes for laws, and plans for cities. The next day, Emily did not accompany the spidery Martian outside, but let the Wuj go exploring alone.

  The Wuj came back from his trips across the surface of the small world elated with discoveries. He had brought back quite a mass of chunks of things manufactured before the great explosion, and Ajax thumbed through this junk with a certain amount of interest.

  It was known that the thousands of tiny worlds making up the asteroids were the results of a cosmic calamity that had taken place for unknown reasons some five or six million years before. A few artifacts had been found on the main asteroids, but it seemed that Ajax was indeed one of the most amazing sources of all. The planetoid itself was sort of egg-shaped—in fact remarkably so—and in the crust of dried dust, meteoric debris, scaly rock, and cement hard mud, were a multiplicity of remnants.

  The Wuj had taken a fancy to one piece of shiny metal— a sort of triangle of bluish-green alloy with a hole in its sharp end—and had hung it about its upper first arm as an ornament. This had occasioned some comment as to the vanity and decoration of the spider-type Martians.

  "Isn't decorating yourself a rather feminine thing to do?" inquired Emily curiously during one meal. "I thought only the female of die species did that."

  "Not so," said the Wuj. "In our pre-connubial years we all do it occasionally. Only when we know positively whether we are eggers or spinners do we specialize."

  "And don't you know?" asked Ajax, surprised. "Why I took it for granted you were a male—a spinner."

  "Why?" For once the Third Least Wuj looked startled, and its big eyes opened their thousands of tiny eyelids in full amazement. "Of course I don't know. It doesn't concern me now, and it will be a dozen years or more before I have achieved status sufficiently to go to the Main Web and proclaim myself. I haven't the faintest idea of my sexual status. Personally I don't understand how you Earth people ever got anywhere, having to know your own sex from the very start. I should think it very distracting."

  "It is," said Ajax, glancing over at Emily. "It certainly is."

  Emily, for once, said nothing, but a faint blush tinged her face.

  Fortunately at that moment a buzz from the board called their attention away. Ajax went over, flipped on the receiver. There was a squawking sound, and then a voice came on:

  "Radio Juno calling Radio Ajax. Come in please, we have a message for you."

  The three jumped to their feet in excitement. From another room, Anton Smallways came quietly in also.

  Ajax slipped into the seat before the mike, switched it on. "Radio Ajax acknowledges your call. Come in Radio Juno."

  He waited. Radio Juno, the huge station operated by EMSA on the large planetoid Juno, was one of the four major EMSA control points in the asteroid belt. The other three stations—Radio Ceres, Radio Vesta, and Radio Pallas-were far away at that time, probably half an orbit away. There was need for four such stations so that at almost all times one such major station would be in hearing of any of the asteroids.

  Radio Juno, obviously, was the one nearest them now. It took about twenty minutes for Radio Juno to return the call, so great was the distance from Ajax. In that period, the four in the room said nothing, but waited in tension to see what the reply would be.

  There was a buzz, then the call came in. "Radio Juno calling Radio Ajax. Here is an announcement directed to Ajax Calkins. Here is an official announcement. Stand by."

  They tensed. Then a voice began to speak, a voice of authority, speaking in a tone of command. The speech was short but to the point. The Earth-Mars Space Administration could not and would not recognize any claims to independence. Its authority extended to all asteroids regardless of orbital quibblings, and Ajax Calkins was ordered to cease and desist, to turn over his administration to die nearest EMSA official, and to return at once to headquarters at Juno and account for himself.

  When the voice ceased, Ajax, angry, sat down, and barked out defiance of the order; he repeated his own declaration, and demanded recognition. When he shut down the transmitter, he turned around, and banged his hand down.

  "They have their nerve! They'd better recognize me, or I'll sue 'em through every court on two planets!"

  Emily stood up, looked at Anton Smallways and the Wuj. "You heard the words of Radio Juno," she said, "and if you are law-abiding beings you will obey them. As the nearest EMSA official, I am in command here."

  The Wuj looked at her, then looked at Ajax. Anton merely stroked his green beard, then shook his head. "Sit down, Hackenschmidt," he said. "Ajax the First is king here and you are still our prisoner."

  Emily began excitedly to argue with them, but she gave it up after encountering their stony refusals to heed her.

  They sat around in silence for a while, Wondering whether Radio Juno would reply to them once again. An hour passed and still there was no incoming call. Then the buzzer sounded.

  The four of them turned once again, and Ajax snapped on the speaker. There was the whistling sound of a carrier wave. Then a voice came on, a thin, high-pitched voice carefully sounding out its words:

  "Calling Radio Ajax. Calling Radio Ajax. This is the Imperial Transmitter, Voice of Saturn, speaking. We acknowledge your broadcast and we welcome you to the family of fraternal nations. We transmit greetings from the Imperial Collegium of Saturn and extend our recognition to the free banner of the Fore-Trojan Union. Hail to King Ajax the First. Hail to the free and independent people of the six world
s of the Jovian Orbit I

  "We are sending an ambassador and an Imperial escort of honor to your capital to draw up treaties and cement our friendship. Hail to Ajax! This is the Voice of Saturn speaking. Your friends on Saturn congratulate you."

  Ajax sat, white-faced, as the curious clipped words rolled out of his speaker. Emily held a hand to her mouth, wide-eyed in horror. Anton Smallways was inscrutable as usual, and the Wuj was once again wide-eyed.

  "But . . . but . . ." stammered Ajax, for once caught off base. "How did they know? How could they have heard our directional broadcast? It was beamed inward. They couldn't, they couldn't have picked it up!"

  "And what are we going to do about that ambassador and his escort of honor," shrieked Emily. "Ajax Calkins, what have you done!"

  CHAPTER NINE

  There was a heated discussion, and for once Ajax Calkins was nonplussed. He was quite prepared to be neutral with Saturn and the EMSA, but he was not prepared as it were to be "neutral on Saturn's side." He realized suddenly that he was now facing the same difficulty that had beset many of the famous men he so lionized and hoped to follow—the position of a small and weak ruler caught between two mighty empires.

  "You must give up your claim at once, call on our EMSA forces to take over and hold these asteroids!" urged Emily. "The Fore-Trojans are too important a base and in too strategic an orbit for them to fall into Saturnian hands!"

  The Third Least Wuj asked slowly, "Can you trust the Saturnians? If you can, then you can play one against the other. Urge them to keep hands off, or you will call in EMSA."

  "That's pretty sound advice," agreed Ajax, "but can we trust the Saturnians? I am.-told they are very treacherous. They learned our ways of civilization too fast to know how to temporize or compromise."

  "I think you can trust them," said Anton Smallways slowly, stroking his green beard. "I have never met any of them hut I have met miners who know them, and they have always spoken highly of the Saturnian mind. In my opinion, the things you have heard of them from the EMSA authorities can be discounted as propaganda."