Walt & Leigh Richmond

by Phoenix Ship

  Earth had everything going for it. Not only was the mother planet top dog in the solar system—her weak colonies hanging on by the skin of their teeth had to heed her every whim.

  Her spaceships were tops; her armament invincible; and she had just developed a new method of computerized schooling that seemed certain to develop an army of superminds to do Earth's bidding.

  Yet, if all this was truly so, then how was it that the pesty little mining ships of the poorest colonial offshoot of all—the barren rocks of the Asteroid Belt —had beaten Earth's fleet to a frazzle and her homemade strategists were outthinking the best of the whole High Earth command?

  Turn this book over for second complete novel

  WALT and LEIGH RICHMOND

  AN ACE BOOK Ace Publishing Corporation 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036

  PHOENIX SHIP

  Copyright ©, 1969, by Walt & Leigh Richmond All Rights Reserved

  Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

  The Richmonds have also written:

  SHOCK WAVE THE LOST MILLENNIUM

  EARTHRIM

  Copyright ©, 1969, by Ace Publishing Corp.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  Lullaby for our Space Children

  Parameter, perimeter, and pir-

  There's a trace in the space past the sky that is I There's a me in the lee of this starred infinity

  That is out to prove the ethic that the universe is free. We're a shout in the snout of eternities of doubt—

  We're a spit in the mitt as we take our aim to hit—in

  the eye—

  The multitude of factors that will try to nullify.Our parameters, perimeters, and pi.

  Astronomy and chemistry and math—

  If you know where to go and your slipstick's not too

  slow (don't be slow!) Where electrons meet the nucleus of mass And protons go along the selfsame path Where the multiples of decimals that mark the whirling

  sphericah

  Indicate there may be trouble coming past-It's a laugh . . . tf you're fast

  With astronomy and chemistry and math.

  Diameter, circumference, and sphere-Space may not yet have noticed, but we're here—Space,

  we're here!

  With spectrographs dazzle and a certain yen to travel And the love of work that brings the concepts clear. When the know-how got to flowing, we made ourselves the

  knowing

  And we left behind the Earthbound who don't care for

  the rare

  Relativities that measure an incomparable treasure when

  you steer

  By diameter, circumference, and sphere.

  Maneuver is a cone too far to see

  Out where motions only relativity— Where inertia is the stronger of the forces, and no longer

  Subject to the biting laws of gravity. Want to brake? That's a fake! But if planetfall you'd make

  Turn your tail—raise your thrust—you're falling free Through vectors of a factor known as V

  With dimension governed by your A times T.

  Now E must equal M times C the square

  If you really think you're headed anywhere And you care—to get there.

  For a proton or an atom that exists as just a datum Does not wear—cannot care ...

  But the manner of his travel to a human who can ravel Is decidedly a different affair. So beware.

  For that E will always equal MC square.

  His NAME WAS Stanley Thomas Arthur Reginald Dustin, and the acronym was intentional, "bought" for him by an uncle at a price. The name had been registered, the price accepted; but when his mother died and his uncle returned to the Belt his father's disapproval had registered as well, and he could be known only by his first name, Stan.

  "Ruffians make up the bulk of the planeteers," his father assured him as soon as he was old enough to ask. "Ruffians and ne'er-do-wells who can't make it on Earth and have to flee. There is the occasional adventurer like my brother, but that is the exception," he had added carefully. "Even so, your Uncle Trevor has behaved beneath the dignity of the family."

  The red hair, the set chin and the gangling length that he had inherited from his uncle could not be disavowed so easily, but the heritage was offset by a pug nose and freckles; and with that his father had to be content

  There had been friction between the stern, unbending father and the easygoing, carelessly alive boy from the beginning. It was Stan's father's determination that one adventurer in the family was more than sufficient, that Stan should be schooled to the responsible position in his own community that his father had created for him. This determination had nearly obviated the possibility of Stan's entering the school on the Arctic slopes where he now sat in a learning cubicle answering test questions on the computer screen before him.

  Interminable questions. They made up almost the entire curriculum of the school. Questions, with nothing on which to base his answers. Questions that leaped from subject to subject; that sometimes centered whole concepts and assumed not only knowledge from top to bottom of the field involved, but, Stan decided, intuition within it

  Given the lens configuration in the diagram above, specify the index of refraction required in lens C, and select from the following list the type and weight percentage of materials required, to formulate such a lens for operation in an environmental temperature range of 220 to 260 degrees Kelvin.

  Stan glared at the sentence as though it were an enemy, but it refused to go away. Yet, as though his body had a will of its own, he began estimating angles by eye and sliding the slipstick—his sole allowed tool of computation —while he shifted decimals in his head.

  With a computer and about six months' time perhaps, I might be able to come up with some sort of answer, that part of his mind which refused to be disciplined considered. The things they expect you to know on a test like this, he thought ruefully.

  It had been a compromise on both his and his father's part. Stan wanted, perhaps because it was denied him, abjectly and unreasoningly but absolutely, the training necessary to ship on the interplanetary lines. At least that was his stated ambition—to go out in the ships that plied the system.

  What he really wanted, the secret desire that gnawed his vitals with a deep, unreasoning yearning, was to explore the stars. But before that became possible, the Einstein formulas would have to be rewritten; and they'd been proved long ago and over and over. That desire was hopeless, and, he told himself severely, it was a sign of immaturity to continue to harbor it. The fact that his father did not even suspect its existence was hardly surprising. Stan hid it from himself whenever possible.

  His father was not only adamantly against anything that smacked of space, but actually anything that smacked of technical training.

  "You shall indeed go to the planets; explore the entire system," Stan's father had explained carefully, "but as a tourist, free to explore; free to sample the best of everything that is offered; free of the slave-labor that marks the life of a"—the word was distasteful in his mouth—"a planeteer, or a Belter."

  The school here was a compromise, his acceptance into its five-year course a surprise to both of them. And Stan was not even sure how that compromise had been reached.

  The Mentor who had had him called for conference during a late afternoon of his final high school year had been a stranger, and strangely dressed even by the most flamboyant standards. Stan had entered the conference room cloaked in the normal long gray cloak of privacy over his own almost-colorful dark blue singlet and matching hose, to be received by an older man in silken gold tunic and trousers and soft gold kid slippers. It was his face that kept Stan's attention: it was uncreased, smooth, almost featureless.

  "I am Katsu
Lang," the Mentor greeted him with. "Won't you throw off the cloak? I expect we will be friends, and no privacy between us."

  Startled, Stan had removed the cloak and folded it carefully over a chair.

  He had been accepted, Dr. Lang told Stan slowly, in a newly organized school set up under rather special conditions, teaching a "newly developed engineering course." Designed, the Mentor had said, to best equip a candidate for a general understanding of the society and possible usefulness in its further technological development.

  "Accepted?" Stan had asked, and been assured that the criteria had been rigorous; that he had been found acceptable under the most exacting standards.

  He wasn't at all sure how it was that he had quite suddenly become convinced that this five-year course was what he wanted; but he had been quite sure that it was something his father would refuse.

  "If you will permit us," the Mentor had assured him, his strange, nearly poreless face without expression, "I believe that this part can be handled for you. If you accept this assignment. . ."

  Stan had accepted, and though he was not sure after he'd arrived at the school itself that it was what he wanted—he was here; he had been at the school for over four years.

  But it wasn't a school, Stan told himself. It was a series of tests. It was nothing but tests, actually, with occasional lectures that seemed more designed to puzzle than inform. The first day's schedule had consisted of nothing but tests, in this same cubicle, on subjects that ranged from engineering to sociology to anthropology . . . any and every subject you could think of. At the end of the tests he had learned that the next day would consist of a similar series, and that he could study for it or not as he liked.

  But study what? There had been several areas in the first tests that had left him blank and curious. He started on those in the tiny library cubicle assigned to him; and he'd found that each tape he'd worked through had led him on to other tapes; and pure curiosity had kept him going, on and on. ...

  He'd fallen asleep in his small room, expecting to be called for the next day's assignments, and had not wakened for nearly fourteen hours.

  Without even pausing to find out what meals he'd missed, he'd gone straight to the classroom cubicle, where the impersonal quiz program had simply begun on his arrival and continued until he left.

  Famished, puzzled, uncertain, he'd left the cubicle and searched until he'd found an office. His knock was answered and he'd entered to face again the Mentor in the golden suit with a gold belt embossed with entwined snakes.

  "I. . . overslept."

  "Filing time is important, too," the Mentor had said soft-

  "I ... I haven't eaten. Dr. Lang, I don't know the schedule, I don't know what to study. I haven't met my classmates. I. . ." His voice had run down.

  "You will find your classmates in the common room, whenever you care to go there. Your studying seems to have followed a very well selected pattern. The meal schedule is posted in the common room."

  "But. . . lectures? Classes?"

  "They are posted."

  "On what terms will I be kept or dropped? I assume that you don't keep all the students. You said that the course was competitive."

  "It is competitive. We expect to drop at least three-quarters of the students to lesser courses within the five years."

  "You ... I guess you're sort of leaving it up to each of us how we study and what we do?"

  "Isn't that advisable? In selecting for the best, that is? Those dropped will have fine courses and careers ahead of them."

  There was no use asking questions, Stan realized. He took a deep breath.

  Tour questions—your tests—cover subjects with which I am completely unfamiliar. How do you expect me to answer the questions? How can you expect us to pass the tests?"

  "Have you found it impossible to answer the questions?"

  Stan found himself blank for a minute. Then, with an effort, he forced himself to recall one of the tests he'd had the day before. It was a mathematical quiz, and he'd watched himself sitting before the board, the questions arising one from another, across the screen, as he'd answered them. There were long pauses before each answer; pauses in which he'd strained every mental muscle he possessed to . . . remember? Grasp? Analyze? And the answers had come, feebly and unsurely, but they had come. Correct or incorrect, there had been answers there when he'd reached deep and strained to . . . remember.

  He felt exhausted, as though he'd been running for miles and was wilting. Standing there before the smooth-faced Mentor, he tried to frame the question that would give him the answer to the school itself.

  "If a test selection asks something that you do not know," the Mentor said softly, "you can always answer that you do not know. That would be quite a valid answer, would it not?"

  Tve come this far, Stan told himself grimly. I wont he licked by the prospect of endless examinations. And I wont be one of those relegated to merely fine courses and careers.

  "You have had your inoculations?" Again the soft voice carried no inflection other than the question.

  Stan was startled. Inoculations had been part of the entrance proceedings. He nodded, mutely.

  "You will have them weekly," he was told. "They will .. . help."

  And the answers had come. Almost invariably, if he reached hard enough. The answers seemed to grow out of the pyramidal structure of the questions—and yet, they didn't. He was calling on information he had not known he possessed, and it puzzled him; and yet the catholicity with which he pursued information during the free hours of the day must be ths source, he told himself.

  The hours between exams—and outside the sleep that seemed to claim him willy-nilly and occupy far more hours than he liked to waste this way—were in the nature of a race. He never had any idea what the next day's tests would cover. So he found himself grabbing for information in those off-hours in so helter-skelter a manner that he was attempting eveiything and acquiring nothing.

  Five years was a long time, he finally decided. If a subject was dropped today it would probably be resumed in the forseeable future. And he began following the subject of each day's tests in that day's studying. It seemed to pay off.

  It was the sleep that he continued to fight After that first night, it hadn't been a normal sleep, not for a long time. It had been a feeling of sleep that built an increasing tension within until it would seem as though he were bursting; and as it seemed inevitable in bis dreams that he would burst, he'd wake; he'd fall asleep again almost instantly and go through the increasing tension again horn-after hour; and he'd wake exhausted.

  He found himself increasing his study hours to avoid sleep; found himself fighting to keep his attention on the library tapes to the point of exhaustion. But exhausted as he might be, at the moment he fell asleep the tension would begin to build and build . . . until one night he didn't wake and there was what he remembered later as an internal explosion that had continued for some time as a series of minor explosions. They wafted him forward and back, forward and back, as on a constantly reversing current, until he drifted peacefully with it, no longer fighting, no longer tense.

  Waking, he'd felt refreshed for the first time since coming to the school. That night he'd returned to his sleeping room expectantly and had fallen asleep to the old tensions, but almost immediately an explosion had occurred—a lesser explosion this time. Then came the forward and backward motion that was as restful as a rocking chair.

  The process had gone on for a week, until finally the tensions and the explosions had dropped out and the rocking motion had begun the instant he'd fall asleep. He looked forward to it now: to the refreshment, greater than any he'd ever known; to the soft currents themselves, and the satisfied feeling with which he'd wake.

  His life had taken on a similar alternating-current rhythm. The tests were a flow in one direction: if he relaxed and let his subconscious work, the answers came easily; whereas if he strained they seemed to be stopped.

  Studying was an alternat
e flow, a pursuit of knowledge that was a furious, instinctive demand he found within himself for knowledge that came from his conscious and pursuing mind. It was a competitive urge that claimed him daily as he left the testing cubicle and took him direct to the library and its concentrations.

  The race left him little time for the common room, though there were games and conversation to be had there. On the occasions when he did appear, it seemed to be full of students, uncloaked and informal as Stan now was, in variations of the dark singlets and hose that were stylish. He rather assumed that the other students were taking the same hours he did for studying, and didn't worry about it What they did was their business, he decided.

  Mostly, though, when he allotted himself time off—and no one in authority seemed in the slightest interested in setting hours or schedules except for the occasional lectures, meals, and weekly inoculations—he went topsides. He'd discovered the entrance to the outside once when he went determinedly exploring the school plant, originally an oil refinery complex abandoned when the age of oil ended. There'd been heavy outside wear—quilted boots and trousers; hooded and gloved tunics—in the small room beyond the door that was marked simply OUTSIDE; and he'd helped himself and gone out into the arctic wastes.

  That first time he'd not intended to go far, but the empty spaces beyond the small entrance held an enchantment. The sun was on the horizon, bright and small, and making a gold path across the white expanse. He followed the path almost blindly, drinking in the lonely sweeps of snow; a loneliness that he'd never found before; that created a hunger in his entrails. The cold air bit into his lungs, and he fastened his hood to cover his mouth and nose and went on.

  Abruptly the sun was gone, and a wind rose violently to sweep snow into his eyes. He kept on for a bit, but the wind gusted harder; he turned to find the white expanse on all sides, his tracks covered, and no sign of the entrance through which he'd come. A near-panic gripped him, and he stood stock-still for a minute, feeling it wash over him, feeling his body react to panic, the urge to run pulling at his legs.