Walt & Leigh Richmond
Page 12
"Commander Dustin, I hear you. We will give you our answer shortly." The voice was stronger now.
Stan grinned to himself. "Commodore Rimes," he said, "while you are considering your answer, you might consider the fact that it is within my power to hit you with a megaroentgen second blast from my drive tubes that would kill everything on board and sterilize your entire fleet. I do not plan to do so."
There was a pause before the answer came back: "Commander Dustin, I have no choice but to take you at your word when you say that you will not sterilize this fleet." "There would be no point to senseless slaughter, sir." "Then I accept your terms. We will send no men to the surface until further notice. However, Earth cannot be too long patient with piratical actions. I hope, Commander Dustin, that you will come to the Aurora immediately to discuss the situation."
"Commander Rimes," Stan said grimly, "Earth Fleet was on its way to take over the Belt when we intercepted. The Belt has no quarrel with Earth. It is Earth that is quarreling with the Belt. We will discuss the matter at our convenience, and will at that time ferry you over here. In the meantime you will be safe only as long as you keep your men inboard."
After he had switched off, Stan leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hand wearily over his eyes. Then he turned to Tobey. "Your K-pilots are not to harm any ship unless and until a man comes to the surface to repair damage. We don't want anybody taking out their desires for personal retribution."
Tobey nodded, his eyes on Stan.
"And, Tobey. Belt City will have to take care of Weed and whatever Earthie garrison he has stashed there. Can you alert them?"
"We'll take care of the cleanup Job, Star," said Tobey quietly. "With Earth Fleet out of the way, there won't be too much of a problem in that They'll be knocked out as soon as the boys on Belt City find out they're there. But, Star ... I don't guarantee there won't be what you call personal retribution in that operation."
The general, Commander Rimes, Stan and Tobey sat around the small desk in Stan's office. Paulsen, Sandra and Dr. Lang sat silent against the walls.
The general, Stan noted, had lost none of his mihtary bearing, and Stan found himself irrelevantly pleased with the fact. There's a dignify about professional military men, he told himself hopefully, and perhaps some common sense. I'd hate to be dealing with Weed or Mallard, he thought
Then he turned to Commander Rimes and silently retracted the idea. Rimes was quite a different breed of cat, even though probably a professional. His bearing was arrogant rather than military; and he was rarrying it to the point of insolence. Frustration, Stan decided; and guilt Both show.
"You understand what has happened, gentlemen?" he asked, opening the conference.
It was the general who answered. "No," he said. "Not really. We know that you have knocked out a small army and then Earth Fleet I am not trained as a physicist Mr. Dustin; but I expect that the military will do well in the future to put physicists into prominent posts. It has been
—well, technological thinking, I suppose, by which the Belters have caught us by surprise each tune."
Stan smiled and shook his head. "You don't need physicists, General. You need individualists. Mallard and Weed were trying to give you robots; and that was the worst sabotage anyone could have perpetrated upon you. It takes a man who has had to fight and win against his own hostile environment to be able to fight and win against the far less serious opposition of an army or a space fleet."
Commander Rimes spoke up brusquely. "Whatever we may need, Commander Dustin, you may be sure we will put our attention to it. Our question is, simply, what do you hope to accomplish now? With us?".
Stan looked him over carefully. "I hope," he said, "to accomplish bloodless cease-fire and surrender terms in which Earth admits the Belt's sovereignty and withdraws all future claim to control of the solar system."
The commander snorted. "You have, sir, in a rather simple technological maneuver, blinded Earth Fleet and now hold it helpless. You fooled me, Dustin. You won't fool us twice, of course. You have also, I gather, captured and now hold a small force of Earth soldiers, captured no doubt by some other unexpected system. But Earth herself is neither stupid nor helpless; nor do I think you can dictate surrender terms to her."
Stan raised one eyebrow, looking at the commander quizzically. "Earth is not helpless? Well, no. Earth is just scared," he said quietly. As the commander started an angry rejoinder, he continued, "Earth has been afraid of space since the first Sputnik back in the mid-Twentieth Century. Earth's establishment has used every weapon at its command, from the top secret label to murder and sabotage, to keep man out of space . . . because Earth is afraid of spacemen. And rightly so.
"But, gentlemen, we are spacemen. And Earth may fear us all she likes; she can no longer control us. The Belt will accept Mother Earth as an equal, but Belters will be no man's servants. Neither, as free men, do we wish to force Earth to her knees, although we are quite capable of doing so."
"Force Earth to her knees? Why, you pipsqueak commander of a one-ship armada, Earth does and must control the solar system. She—"
From trie comer of his eye Stan saw Paulsen stiffen, saw Tobey half rise from his seat
Quicker than either of the other two, he leaned forward and his voice overrode the commander's, his eyes fiercely boring into the—yes, frightened eyes, he realized—before him.
"You don't control any animal but a tame one, mister," he said, and his voice held the grimness of space. "And take this as a dictum: the men of the Belt are not tame-not to you, not to anybody. You don't tame space with tame men, mister.
"The Belt," he added slowly, "the Belt will not now, nor ever again, accept as much as a single gesture of domination from the tame men of Earth. And we have the means to back up our refusal."
Commander Rimes opened his mouth to answer angrily, but the general silenced him with a gesture, and it was the general who spoke quietly to Stan. "You have the means?"
Stan turned with relief to the professional calm of the other. Slowly he nodded. "We have the means," he said; and then he added bleakly, "It is a brutal means. We will not use it unless we are forced to do so. But neither will we let the weaklings of Earth use our ethical sense to enslave us. If Earth forces the question, we will not hesitate to be brutal."
Stan paused a minute, noting that the commander was holding himself in check only by obvious effort, then turned back to the general. "You've seen the Phoenix dive through atmosphere? On Jupiter, where the escape velocity is much higher than that of Earth?"
The general nodded, and Stan went on. "If this ship was taken to about five thousand feet and orbited Earth, only once, at say the forty-five degree parallel, do you know what would happen?"
The general answered slowly: "There would be a rather major disaster from shock wave, I assume; and the forty-five degree parallel would, of course, take you across the major population and governmental areas...."
"Yes," said Stan. "Shock wave. But not just major shock wave damage, General, at the speeds at which this ship travels. Say a shock wave sufficiently deadly to kill anyone within five hundred miles on either side of the ground path zero. We wouldn't be breaking any nuclear test ban treaties. There would be no nucleonics involved whatsoever, other than the nucleonics of our drive. But the effect would be much the same.
"Where that shock wave touches ground, over a wide band, well . . . How much of Earth do you think would withstand a blast of upward of a million degrees of temperature? At that temperature, the very rocks would melt And the ground zero path beneath that shock wave would be as sterilized as any desert you now have.
"I doubt very much that Earth is prepared to pay for attempted domination of the solar system by such a disaster."
The general's face had gone quite white.
The glowing veils of neon light with which Jupiter hides her face from the rest of the solar system danced and shimmered before them as Stan and Sandra stood outside on the nose surface of the huge wad-
cutter bullet that was the Phoenix, staring up at the still distant but approaching planet
"I knew it would be worth coming out to see it but oh, Star, I didn't realize how truly beautiful it could be!" Sandra's voice, even over the speaker in his suit throbbed with a joy that brought a catch to Stan's throat. Then she added, "It seems a shame to dive into that Are you sure we won't spoil the beauty?"
"Not much." He looked down at her trim figure in the P-suit tights that outlined every curve and detail. "Well just look like a big streak of hghtning—and be gone about as quick."
Her voice was hesitant Then, "But, Stan. Why should we bother? Why have we come back? We've won. You're in control at AT. The Belt is free. Earth is whipped."
"What do you mean, 'won,' liebchen?" Stan slipped his arm around the slender figure, holding her lithe suppleness close, though the bubble helmets kept their heads apart, and the heavy cloth of the P-suits made a wall between them.
"Why .. ." She looked up at him, her face showing through the bubble, doubtful. "We nave won, haven't we?"
He laughed, looking down into the bubble of her helmet, separating the blazing reflections from Jupiter on its surface from the stubbornness of her face beneath the clear plastic.
"In words made famous long ago, we have just begun to fight, you know," he said happily, a deep pleasure suffusing him. "Sandra, Sandra—can't you see that we haven't won? Not yet? There will be tensions between Earth and the Belt for as long as there are only the two terminals—two groups of men with different ideas. The only answer is for us to go to the stars, so that there are lots of groups with lots of ideas; then those ideas and groups will be so spread out that it's impractical, ever again, to get man bottled up into one little system where his only way to let off steam is to clobber his nearest neighbor."
"The stars, Stan? I thought that was just . . . just the stuff of dreams. Just talk. Can the Phoenix ... F"
"No. Not the Phoenix. Not to the stars. But see that spark of light over there? That's one of Jupiter's moons. That's Io. And Io falls just within the mass limits necessary to make a planetary starship. Itll take a few years to stock that ship, to get a colony going, to set up the necessary radiation belts and atmosphere, to build the small 'sun' that will be the focus of the magnetic vortex that will power and light our ship. It will take a few years to build her right But we can do it. The equations are all there. They've been there since the mid-Twentieth Century. And it's time somebody put those equations to work.
"Sandra," he said softly over the speaker into her helmet gazing up into the glory that is Jupiter, "Sandra, we can't stay planetbound or Beltbound, or systembound. We're going out to where we'll be a quasar on Earth's telescopes. We're going out to join the other quasars that Earth has spotted in her telescopes.
"We're going to the stars."
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