Future Wars . . . and Other Punchlines

by Hank Davis

  Kurt gulped. No place could be that far away. Not even Imperial Headquarters! He tried to measure out the distance in his mind in terms of days’ marches, but he soon found himself lost. Thinking wouldn’t do it. He had to see with his own eyes where he was. “How do you get outside?” he asked.

  Ozaki gestured toward the air lock that opened at the rear of the compartment. “Why?”

  “I want to go out for a few minutes to sort of get my bearings.”

  Ozaki looked at him in disbelief. “What’s your game, anyhow?” he demanded.

  It was Kurt’s turn to look bewildered. “I haven’t any game. I’m just trying to find out where I am so I’ll know which way to head to get back to the garrison.”

  “It’ll be a long, cold walk.” Ozaki laughed and hit the stud that slid back the ray screens on the vision ports. “Take a look.”

  Kurt looked out into nothingness, a blue-black void marked only by distant pinpoints of light. He suddenly felt terribly alone, lost in a blank immensity that had no boundaries. Down was gone and so was up. There was only this tiny lighted room with nothing underneath it. The port began to swim in front of his eyes as a sudden, strange vertigo swept over him. He felt that if he looked out into that terrible space for another moment he would lose his sanity. He covered his eyes with his hands and staggered back to the center of the cabin.

  Ozaki slid the ray screens back in place. “Kind of gets you first time, doesn’t it?”

  Kurt had always carried a little automatic compass within his head. Wherever he had gone, no matter how far afield he had wandered, it had always pointed steadily toward home. Now for the first time in his life the needle was spinning helplessly. It was an uneasy feeling. He had to get oriented.

  “Which way is the garrison?” he pleaded.

  Ozaki shrugged. “Over there some place. I don’t know whereabouts on the planet you come from. I didn’t pick up your track until you were in free space.”

  “Over where?” asked Kurt.

  “Think you can stand another look?”

  Kurt braced himself and nodded. The pilot opened a side port to vision and pointed. There, seemingly motionless in the black emptiness of space, floated a great greenish-gray globe. It didn’t make sense to Kurt. The satellite that hung somewhat to the left did. Its face was different, the details were sharper than he’d ever seen them before, but the features he knew as well as his own. Night after night on scouting detail for the hunting parties while waiting for sleep he had watched the silver sphere ride through the clouds above him.

  He didn’t want to believe but he had to!

  His face was white and tense as he turned back to Ozaki. A thousand sharp and burning questions milled chaotically through his mind.

  “Where am I?” he demanded. “How did I get out here? Who are you? Where did you come from?”

  “You’re in a spaceship,” said Ozaki, “a two-man scout. And that’s all you’re going to get out of me until you get some more work done. You might as well start on this microscopic projector. The thing burned out just as the special investigator was about to reveal who had blown off the commissioner’s head by wiring a bit of plutonite into his autoshave. I’ve been going nuts ever since trying to figure out who did it!”

  Kurt took some tools out of the first echelon kit and knelt obediently down beside the small projector.

  Three hours later they sat down to dinner. Kurt had repaired the food machine and Ozaki was slowly masticating synthasteak that for the first time in days tasted like synthasteak. As he ecstatically lifted the last savory morsel to his mouth, the ship gave a sudden leap that plastered him and what remained of his supper against the rear bulkhead. There was darkness for a second and then the ceiling lights flickered on, then off, and then on again. Ozaki picked himself up and gingerly ran his fingers over the throbbing lump that was beginning to grow out of the top of his head. His temper wasn’t improved when he looked up and saw Kurt still seated at the table calmly cutting himself another piece of pie.

  “You should have braced yourself,” said Kurt conversationally. “The converter’s out of phase. You can hear her build up for a jump if you listen. When she does you ought to brace yourself. Maybe you don’t hear so good?” he asked helpfully.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full, it isn’t polite,” snarled Ozaki.

  Late that night the converter cut out altogether. Ozaki was sleeping the sleep of the innocent and didn’t find out about it for several hours. When he did awake, it was to Kurt’s gentle shaking.

  “Hey!” Ozaki groaned and buried his face in the pillow.

  “Hey!” This time the voice was louder. The pilot yawned and tried to open his eyes.

  “Is it important if all the lights go out?” the voice queried. The import of the words suddenly struck home and Ozaki sat bolt upright in his bunk. He opened his eyes, blinked, and opened them again. The lights were out. There was a strange unnatural silence about the ship.

  “Good Lord!” he shouted and jumped for the controls. “The power’s off.”

  He hit the starter switch but nothing happened. The converter was jammed solid. Ozaki began to sweat. He fumbled over the control board until he found the switch that cut the emergency batteries into the lighting circuit. Again nothing happened.

  “If you’re trying to run the lights on the batteries, they won’t work,” said Kurt in a conversational tone.

  “Why not?” snapped Ozaki as he punched savagely and futilely at the starter button.

  “They’re dead,” said Kurt. “I used them all up.”

  “You what?” yelled the pilot in anguish.

  “I used them all up. You see, when the converter went out, I woke up. After a while the sun started to come up, and it began to get awfully hot so I hooked the batteries into the refrigeration coils. Kept the place nice and cool while they lasted.”

  Ozaki howled. When he swung the shutter of the forward port to let in some light, he howled again. This time in dead earnest. The giant red sun of the system was no longer perched off to the left at a comfortable distance. Instead before Ozaki’s horrified eyes was a great red mass that stretched from horizon to horizon.

  “We’re falling into the sun!” he screamed.

  “It’s getting sort of hot,” said Kurt. “Hot” was an understatement. The thermometer needle pointed at a hundred and ten and was climbing steadily.

  Ozaki jerked open the stores compartment door and grabbed a couple of spare batteries. As quickly as his trembling fingers would work, he connected them to the emergency power line. A second later the cabin lights flickered on and Ozaki was warming up the space communicator. He punched the transmitter key and a call went arcing out through hyperspace. The vision screen flickered and the bored face of a communication tech, third class, appeared.

  “Give me Commander Krogson at once!” demanded Ozaki.

  “Sorry, old man,” yawned the other, “but the commander’s having breakfast. Call back in half an hour, will you?”

  “This is an emergency! Put me through at once!”

  “Can’t help it,” said the other, “nobody can disturb the Old Man while he’s having breakfast!”

  “Listen, you knucklehead,” screamed Ozaki, “if you don’t get me through to the commander as of right now, I’ll have you in the uranium mines so fast that you won’t know what hit you!”

  “You and who else?” drawled the tech.

  “Me and my cousin Takahashi!” snarled the pilot. “He’s Reclassification Officer for the Base STAP.”

  The tech’s face went white. “Yes, sir!” he stuttered. “Right away, sir! No offense meant, sir!”

  He disappeared from the screen. There was a moment of darkness and then the interior of Commander Krogson’s cabin flashed on. The commander was having breakfast. His teeth rested on the white tablecloth and his mouth was full of mush.

  “Commander Krogson!” said Ozaki desperately.

  The commander looked up with a startled express
ion. When he noticed his screen was on, he swallowed his mush convulsively and popped his teeth back into place.

  “Who’s there?” he demanded in a neutral voice in case it might be somebody important.

  “Flight Officer Ozaki,” said Flight Officer Ozaki.

  A thundercloud rolled across the commander’s face. “What do you mean by disturbing me at breakfast?” he demanded.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” said the pilot, “but my ship’s falling into a red sun.”

  “Too bad,” grunted Commander Krogson and turned back to his mush and milk.

  “But, sir,” persisted the other, “you’ve got to send somebody to pull me off. My converter’s dead!”

  “Why tell me about it?” said Krogson in annoyance. “Call Space Rescue, they’re supposed to handle things like this.”

  “Listen, Commander,” wailed the pilot, “by the time they’ve assigned me a priority and routed the paper through proper channels, I’ll have gone up in smoke. The last time I got in a jam it took them two weeks to get to me; I’ve only got hours left!”

  “Can’t make exceptions,” snapped Krogson testily. “If I let you skip the chain of command, everybody and his brother will think he has a right to.”

  “Commander,” howled Ozaki, “we’re frying in here!”

  “All right. All right!” said the commander sourly. “I’ll send somebody after you. What’s your name?”

  “Ozaki, sir. Flight Officer Ozaki.”

  The commander was in the process of scooping up another spoonful of mush when suddenly a thought struck him squarely between the eyes.

  “Wait a second,” he said hastily, “you aren’t the scout who located the Imperial base, are you?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the pilot in a cracked voice.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” roared Krogson. Flipping on his intercom he growled, “Give me the Exec.” There was a moment’s silence.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “How long before we get to that scout?”

  “About six hours, sir.”

  “Make it three!”

  “Can’t be done, sir.”

  “It will be done!” snarled Krogson and broke the connection.

  The temperature needle in the little scout was now pointing to a hundred and fifteen.

  “I don’t think we can hold on that long,” said Ozaki.

  “Nonsense!” said the commander and the screen went blank.

  Ozaki slumped into the pilot chair and buried his face in his hands. Suddenly he felt a blast of cold air on his neck. “There’s no use in prolonging our misery,” he said without looking up. “Those spare batteries won’t last five minutes under this load.”

  “I knew that,” said Kurt cheerfully, “so while you were doing all the talking, I went ahead and fixed the converter. You sure have mighty hot summers out here!” he continued, mopping his brow.

  “You what?” yelled the pilot, jumping half out of his seat. “You couldn’t even if you did have the know-how. It takes half a day to get the shielding off so you can get at the thing!”

  “Didn’t need to take the shielding off for a simple job like that,” said Kurt. He pointed to a tiny inspection port about four inches in diameter. “I worked through there.”

  “That’s impossible!” interjected the pilot. “You can’t even see the injector through that, let alone get to it to work on!”

  “Shucks,” said Kurt, “a man doesn’t have to see a little gadget like that to fix it. If your hands are trained right, you can feel what’s wrong and set it to rights right away. She won’t jump on you anymore either. The syncromesh thrust baffle was a little out of phase so I fixed that, too, while I was at it.”

  Ozaki still didn’t believe it, but he hit the controls on faith. The scout bucked under the sudden strong surge of power and then, its converter humming sweetly, arced away from the giant sun in a long sweeping curve. There was silence in the scout. The two men sat quietly, each immersed in an uneasy welter of troubled speculation.

  “That was close!” said Ozaki finally. “Too close for comfort. Another hour or so and—!” He snapped his fingers.

  Kurt looked puzzled. “Were we in trouble?”

  “Trouble!” snorted Ozaki. “If you hadn’t fixed the converter when you did, we’d be cinders by now!”

  Kurt digested the news in silence. There was something about this super-being who actually made machines work that bothered him. There was a note of bewilderment in his voice when he asked: “If we were really in danger, why didn’t you fix the converter instead of wasting time talking on that thing?” He gestured toward the space communicator.

  It was Ozaki’s turn to be bewildered. “Fix it?” he said with surprise in his voice. “There aren’t a half a dozen techs on the whole base who know enough about atomics to work on a propulsion unit. When something like that goes out, you call Space Rescue and chew your nails until a wrecker can get to you.”

  Kurt crawled into his bunk and lay back staring at the curved ceiling. He had thinking to do, a lot of thinking!

  Three hours later, the scout flashed up alongside the great flagship and darted into a landing port. Flight Officer Ozaki was stricken by a horrible thought as he gazed affectionately around his smoothly running ship.

  “Say,” he said to Kurt hesitantly, “would you mind not mentioning that you fixed this crate up for me? If you do, they’ll take it away from me sure. Some captain will get a new rig, and I’ll be issued another clunk from Base Junkpile.”

  “Sure thing,” said Kurt.

  A moment later the flashing of a green light on the control panel signaled that the pressure in the lock had reached normal.

  “Back in a minute,” said Ozaki. “You wait here.”

  There was a muted hum as the exit hatch swung slowly open. Two guards entered and stood silently beside Kurt as Ozaki left to report to Commander Krogson.

  XIII

  The battle fleet of War Base Three of Sector Seven of the Galactic Protectorate hung motionless in space twenty thousand kilometers out from Kurt’s home planet. A hundred tired detection techs sat tensely before their screens, sweeping the globe for some sign of energy radiation. Aside from the occasional light spatters caused by space static, their scopes remained dark. As their reports filtered into Commander Krogson he became more and more exasperated.

  “Are you positive this is the right planet?” he demanded of Ozaki.

  “No question about it, sir.”

  “Seems funny there’s nothing running down there at all,” said Krogson. “Maybe they spotted us on the way in and cut off power. I’ve got a hunch that—” He broke off in midsentence as the red top-priority light on the communication panel began to flash. “Get that,” he said. “Maybe they’ve spotted something at last.”

  The executive officer flipped on the vision screen and the interior of the flagship’s communication room was revealed.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir,” said the tech whose image appeared on the screen, “but a message just came through on the emergency band.”

  “What does it say?”

  The tech looked unhappy. “It’s coded, sir.”

  “Well, decode it!” barked the executive.

  “We can’t,” said the technician diffidently. “Something’s gone wrong with the decoder. The printer is pounding out random groups that don’t make any sense at all.”

  The executive grunted his disgust. “Any idea where the call’s coming from?”

  “Yes, sir; it’s coming in on a tight beam from the direction of Base. Must be from a ship emergency rig, though. Regular hyperspace transmission isn’t directional. Either the ship’s regular rig broke down or the operator is using the beam to keep anybody else from picking up his signal.”

  “Get to work on that decoder. Call back as soon as you get any results.” The tech saluted and the screen went black.

  “Whatever it is, it’s probably trouble,” said Krogson morosely. “Well, we’d better get on with
this job. Take the fleet into atmosphere. It looks as if we are going to have to make a visual check.”

  “Maybe the prisoner can give us a lead,” suggested the executive officer.

  “Good idea. Have him brought in.”

  A moment later Kurt was ushered into the master control room. Krogson’s eyes widened at the sight of scalp lock and paint.

  “Where in the name of the Galactic Spirit,” he demanded, “did you get that rig?”

  “Don’t you recognize an Imperial Space Marine when you see one?” Kurt answered coldly.

  The guard that had escorted Kurt in made a little twirling motion at his temple with one finger. Krogson took another look and nodded agreement.

  “Sit down, son,” he said in a fatherly tone. “We’re trying to get you home, but you’re going to have to give us a little help before we can do it. You see, we’re not quite sure just where your base is.”

  “I’ll help all I can,” said Kurt.

  “Fine!” said the commander, rubbing his palms together. “Now just where down there do you come from?” He pointed out the vision port to the curving globe that stretched out below.

  Kurt looked down helplessly. “Nothing makes sense, seeing it from up here,” he said apologetically.

  Krogson thought for a moment. “What’s the country like around your base?” he asked.

  “Mostly jungle,” said Kurt. “The garrison is on a plateau though and there are mountains to the north.”

  Krogson turned quickly to his exec. “Did you get that description?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Get all scouts out for a close sweep. As soon as the base is spotted, move the fleet in and hover at forty thousand!”

  Forty minutes later a scout came streaking back.

  “Found it, sir!” said the exec. “Plateau with jungle all around and mountains to the north. There’s a settlement at one end. The pilot saw movement down there, but they must have spotted us on our way in. There’s still no evidence of energy radiation. They must have everything shut down.”

  “That’s not good!” said Krogson. “They’ve probably got all their heavy stuff set up waiting for us to sweep over. We’ll have to hit them hard and fast. Did they spot the scout?”