[Steady on, Hardeign. Think. Think. Major W. turned. I looked about No apparitions, spooks, goblins. Just Major W. and myself. He looked at me and made a curious sort of face. No. Nonono. Can't be. Oh, my God! I was the—Fault all mine. Duel, feud. Traitor to dear Eleusis. Feel sick…
. HS]
DOCUMENT TWO
Being a note delivered by Mrs. Irving McGuinness, Domestic, to Miss Agnes DeW. Stolp, President, the Tuscarora Township Historical Society
"The Elms"
Wednesday Dear Miss Stolp,
Pray forgive my failure to attend the last meeting of the Society to read my paper. I was writing the last words when —I can tell you no more.
Young Dr. Scantt has been in constant attendance at my bedside, and my temperature has not fallen below 99.8 degrees in the past 48 hours.
I have been, I am, a sick and suffering man. I abjectly hope that you and everybody in Eleusis will bear this in mind if certain facts should come to your attention.
I cannot close without a warning against that rascal, "Dr." Caspar Mord.
A pledge prevents me from entering into details, but I urge you, should he dare to rear his head in Eleusis again, to hound him out of town as he was hounded out of Peoria in 1929. Verbum sapientibus satifc.
Hardeign Spoynte
[Super Science Stories - May 1940 as by S. D. Gottesman]
King Cole of Pluto
1 Leigh Salvage, Incorporated
Sunlight gleamed on the squat, stubby spaceship. Its rocket exhaust flared once; then paled into nothing. It was drifting through the meteor zone though not the undirected object it seemed to be. Captain Jerry Leigh had his scow under control; the control of a man who was born in the space-lanes, and knew them like his own face.
Captain Jerry was in the cramped cabin of the ship, scribbling at endless computations. "Allowing for Black's constant," he muttered,
"plus drift, plus impetus, less inertia …" He turned to a calculator, stabbed at its keys, and read the result. He yanked a bell pull and a clangor sounded through the ship. Men filed in—a full crew meeting.
Jerry rose.
"As I estimate it," he said, "the Argol lies in quadrant III of the meteor belt. Its coordinates are alpha—point oh oh four; beta—seven point three oh two; gamma—zero!" There was a shocked pause, and a big man stepped out of the crew. "Will we go through with it, Captain?
Gamma—zero is a small margin of profit, to say nothing of safety." He spoke slowly and precisely; the flat "a" of his English indicated that his tongue had once been more used to the Scandinavian languages.
Jerry smiled: "Sven, caution is caution, and maybe the salvage money isn't worth the risk." His face hardened. "But I'm not working for money alone, and I hope that none of you others are."
A voice spoke from the floor, "Glory's glory, but space-bloat is a damned nasty way to die!"
Jerry frowned. There were troublemakers everywhere and all the time.
"Wylie," he said, "if you've ever seen a wrecked liner you'll know what we're here for, and what our job is. We salvage and tow the ships wrecked by meteors or mechanical flaws, and we get paid for it. But—
and it's a big but—if we didn't do our job, those ships would run wild.
With no crew, tearing through space at the whim of the governor, plowing through the shipping lanes, never twice in the same place, and finally coming to rest as permanent menaces to trade and life—that's our job! They carry water condensers to Mars; they carry radium to Earth. Para-morphium from Venus, and iridium from Neptune. Without us salvagers there would be no shipping; without shipping the structure of the interplanetary union would topple and fall. This isn't a job or even a career—it's a sacred duty that we do for each and all of the nine worlds of the solar system!
"Coordinates, I said, are alpha—point oh oh four; beta—seven point three oh two; gamma—zero. Carry on; full speed ahead."
The exhausts flamed; the stubby, rusted prow turned once more—into the meteor zone!
Jerry droned figures to the helmsman with his eyes glued at the vision plate of pure fused quartz. "Meteor in our third quadrant—distance about five hundred kilos. Deflect into first …back on course.
"Cloud of aerolites ahead. Carry through." Ahead loomed a blotch of darkness. "Unknown particle in second quadrant. Our coordinates, helmsman."
Sven, at the tiller, read off, "Alpha—point oh oh four; beta—seven point four oh oh; gamma—point oh oh two."
"Hulk Argol ahead. Carry through into gamma—zero." The big man wet his lips and deflected the steering bar. "Carried through, sir," he said.
Jerry, his eyes never leaving the plate, whispered tensely, "Cut steering to master's board." Sven snapped a switch. "Cut, sir." Delicately Jerry fingered the firing switch. A blocky black mass boomed down on the ship from the east; violently the little scow looped over and down, clearing the path of the particle. This was just one of the reasons that men were prejudiced against gamma—zero. Too much loose junk zipping around for comfort.
The Argol was squarely on the cross-hairs of the vision plate. Captain Jerry studied the battered piece of wreckage. It had been a supertransport once—loaded to the observation blister with para-morphium from Venus to Earth. She had encountered an unexpected cloud of meteorites, probably too big to run away from, and so had been riddled and gone under. From then on her career had been a terrible one of shooting wildly through space on almost full fuel tanks; demolishing a refueling station a million kilos off Mars; smashing into a squadron of police rockets and shattering them into bits—and finding rest at last in the meteor zone to upset orbits and hurl cosmic rubbish into the trade lanes. He examined this corpse of a ship, estimating its size and Martian weight. He thought he could handle it. Through the annunciator he said, "Make fast with magnet plates." And to Sven,
"Take the master's board for emergencies. I'm going over to supervise."
Jerry crawled into his spacesuit, a terrible cumbersome thing of steel alloy and artificial membrane, and dropped lightly down the shaft of the ship to the big space lock that characterizes the salvage vessel.
"Wylie," he ordered, "take Martin and Dooley with a cutting torch to open their sides and then look at their fuel tanks. If they have any left we can use it. I don't believe they're empty, from the lie of her.
"Macy, take Collins and Pearl. Secure grapples, and allow as much slack for towage as you can get. If you allow too little, you'll never know it, by the way—we'd be smashed like an eggshell on the first turn bigger than thirty degrees.
"Dehring and Hiller, come with me. You need supervision. Take cameras and film."
The boarding parry bolted their helmets on and swung open the space lock. Wylie, unrecognizable in his swathing overall, braced the cutting torch against his middle and turned on the juice. The powerful arc bit through the wall of the Argol as if it had been cheese, and the men filed through. They had cut one of the cargo rooms, piled high with metal cylinders of para-morphium, the priceless Venerian drug of sleep and healing. A few of the containers were sprung open and the contents spoiled; still, seventy percent of the remaining cargo went to the salvager, and eighty percent of the hulk.
Jerry took his crew of two to the steering blister that bulged from the top of the ship, picking his way between damaged bodies. In the blister he found the captain, staring permanently at a hole in the observation plate where a meteorite—one of many—had pierced the armor of his vessel. With a crowbar Jerry pried off the top of the recorder and photographed the tracing needles on the graph that charted the course of the ship with all its crazy tacks and swerves through space.
"Dehring," he ordered, "take up that corpse. We're going to stack them and see that they get decent burial when we reach a planet." And with the callousness of years of space travel and the coldness that the hard life of the salvager instills, the man obeyed.
Jerry wandered at random through the ship. It had carried some passengers. One of the cabin doors was open, and the figu
re of an old woman, face mercifully down, was sprawled over the threshold. She had heard the alarm in her little room as the air drained out of the ship; unthinkingly she had flung open her door—gasped for breath when there was nothing to breathe—and fallen as she was.
He picked up her tiny frame, and carried it to the stern of the ship. He wondered who she was why she was returning to Earth from Venus at her age. Perhaps she had wanted to pass her last years among the green and brown fields and again see a mountain. Perhaps—he thought he knew how she felt, for he, too, had once been homesick.
Mars—red hell of sand and cloudless sky. Home of "wanted" men and women, where the uncautious were burned in the flaming bonfires of the Martian underworld. Haven of every swindler and cutthroat in the system, it was but a dull gem in Sol's diadem. Some day they would clean it up—raid the sickening warrens that snaked through and under its cities; fill them in with dynamite. That day would be a good one …
Gently he deposited the body among others; brushed away his random thoughts and called, "Macy! Grapples fixed?" Macy's thin voice trickled through his earphones, "Yes, sir. I gave them twelve hundred meters."
"OK" he snapped. "Return to the ship, all except Wylie. You'll stay aboard, Kurt, to stow displaced cargo."
"Yes, sir," said Wylie, in a growl. "And shall I comb the corpses' hair, sir?"
Jerry grinned. "Why not? And see that it's done or I'll fire you and bust your rating on every scow out of Mars." Discipline, after all, was the thing.
Jerry resumed his place at the firing board. "Stations all," he called sharply over the annunciator. "Brace for seven Mars gravities in seventeen seconds. One—"
His hands flew over the board, setting up the combinations of rocket discharges that would be able to stir the huge Argol out of its inertia and snap it after the scow of Leigh Salvage, Incorporated, like a stone on a string, at the end of a ponderous osmiridium cable.
"Nine!" The men were strapping themselves into hammocks.
"Eleven …
"Fourteen!" He tensed himself, sucking in his stomach muscles against the terrible drag. "Sixteen!
"Fire!"
And the ship roared sharply up and out of the asteroid belt, its powerful rocket engines—designed to move twenty times the weight of the scow alone—straining to drag the ponderous cargo hulk behind it. Soon the initial speed lessened, and they were roaring along at an easy thousand K.P.S. The captain rose and set the automatics; tried to shake some of the blood from his legs into his head. He could rest now.
Assembled, Jerry and the men drank a toast to the trade in ethyl alcohol—"To salvaging: the greatest game of all!" They drained their cups. The big Sven rose, some of his Norse reticence vanished in the universal solvent. "My brothers in labor," he began. "We have gone far on this trip, and there is no one here who will not agree with me when I say that we could not have done it without Captain Jerry. I give you our boss and the best of them all, Jerry Leigh, of Leigh Salvage, Incorporated!"
The flask went the rounds, and when it was emptied there was another and yet another. In just a few hours Jerry was standing alone in the middle of the room, looking owlishly about him at the collapsed forms of the crew. There was a cup in his hands—a full cup. He spurned a nearby body with his foot.
"S-s-sissies!" he said derisively, and drained his drink. Slowly he deflated onto the floor.
An alarm bell smashed the silence into bits; men dragged themselves to their feet. "Mars," said one, absently.
"Don't land easy, Captain," another urged Jerry. "Smear us all over the field. It's about the only thing that'll do this head of mine any good."
Jerry winced. "That's the way I feel, but I'd like to get that hulk in before I die. Landing stations, all men."
Their ship and its huge running mate hovered over the red planet.
Irritably Jerry dove it near the atmosphere and blearily searched its surface for the landing field. "Damn!" he muttered. "I'm in the wrong hemisphere."
The ship roared over the face of Mars, and slowed above the Kalonin desert. Jerry found Salvage Field beneath him, and cut the rockets sharply to one side, swinging the Argol like the lash of a whip. They swooped down, and Jerry, drunk or sober, shifted his salvage neatly above the ponderous pneumatic cargo-table and cut it loose. It fell the thousand feet with a terrible crash, landing comparatively easy. At any rate he had not missed it. "So much for Wylie," he muttered.
The exhaust sputtered and died; the ship dove to within a hundred feet of the surface. On rockets! And down she drifted, landing without a jar.
Jerry held his head and groaned.
2 An Unexpected Rival
The owner, manager and founder of Leigh Salvage, Incorporated, was only human. In turn he visited the offices of the other salvage companies and said, in effect, "Ya-a-ah!" Or that was the plan.
Burke was first on his list: a sullen, red-headed man with a grudge against everybody. He threw Jerry out of his office before half the "Ya-a-ah" was out. The captain was too happy at the moment to start or finish a fight, so he brushed himself off for a call on Rusty Adams, of the Bluebell Salvage Company.
He entered their office and what appeared to be a secretary or receptionist or something said to him, "Can I help you?"
"Yes," he said absently, looking for Adams. "What are you doing tonight?" She scowled prettily. He noticed her hair, blonde. He noticed her eyes, blue-grey. He noticed, moreover, her face and figure, very neat—but this was business. "Is the proprietor of this ramshackle space-tuggery in?"
"Yes," she said, "the proprietor is in."
"Then drag the old dog out; I would have words with him."
"I," she said, "am the proprietor."
Jerry smiled gently. "Enough of this," he said. "I refer to the illustrious Francis X. Adams, alias the Rusty Nut, alias the Creaking Screw—"
He paused. Her eyes were full of tears. She looked up. "He was my father," she said, "You're Leigh, aren't you? They told me of your ways.
Father died while you were in space. I've come from Earth to take care of his business." She blew her nose on a silly little handkerchief, and said, "If there's anything I can do for you—"
Jerry felt lower than a snake's belly. He stammered an apology of some sort and went on, "As a matter of fact I did have a deal to talk over. I want to buy out your concern." As a matter of fact he had wanted to do nothing of the sort, but he thought it out quickly. The expense would cripple him for a while, but he'd be able to dispose of the Bluebell at a loss and get some operating capital, and one more job like that Argol and he'd be right back where he was now with only a little time wasted and she did have blue-grey eyes and what did a woman know about salvage anyway—
"Not for sale, Mr. Leigh," she said coolly.
That shocked him—he had thought that he was doing her a favor. He decided to be a big brother. "Miss Adams, I think you ought to accept.
Not for my sake, but for yours. You have had no experience at the work; you'll be at the mercy of your employees, and salvage men are the toughest mob in space. Your father could handle the company, but—"
She set her pretty jaw. "Just that," she said. "My father could handle them and so can I."
What was a man to do in the face of such madness? Perhaps—"What about a shipmaster, Miss Adams? Your profits will all run into his salary."
"No, Mr. Leigh—my father did it and I can do it. I'm going to pilot my own ship."
With that he exploded—no woman had ever piloted a rocket ship, he said; and also he said that no woman ever would pilot a rocket ship, and that if she thought she was going to learn to pilot a ship she was just plain crazy to try and learn on a salvage scow; and further he said that the salvage scow is notorious throughout all space as the crankiest, most perverted, perverse and persnickety brand of vessel that flies; that to run a scow you had to be born in the space-lanes and weaned on rocket-juice-
"I don't know about the rocket-juice," she said, "but I was born on the Jupiter-Earth
liner." Jerry gasped for breath.
"Is there anything else?" she said. "Because if there isn't I'd like to get some work done on my father's accounts."
"No," said Jerry thickly. He was dangerously near apoplexy. "Nothing else." And he walked out of the office muttering, "Accounts …get some work done on my father's …" Dammit! A woman couldn't fly a scow, and she wouldn't believe that very obvious fact until she was smeared over half of the landing field.
Like a man in a dream he found himself at the offices of the Salvage Field Commission, paying his field dues. An official, dazed, asked if anything was wrong. Did he expect to die, or something?
"No," said Jerry thickly, "but I expect to get potted in about twenty-five minutes. Would you mind coming along?"
"Not at all," said the official. In fact he felt the need of a drink after having beheld the ungodly spectacle of the Leigh Salvage Company paying up on time.
Many hours later all that was left of the two was a very small noise in the corner of a saloon on Broadway, at the corner of Le Bourse. Half of the small—very small—noise was saying to the other half at intervals,
"Wimmin can't never fly …Wimmin can' never fly …Wimmin can' never fly …" And the second half of the very small noise was replying to the first, " Yeh …they cer'nly don't …" At length the proprietor told a hackie to please take them away, and what happened to the official nobody ever found out, but Jerry awoke next morning in his hotel room with a pair of blue eyes wavering in front of his face. They weren't real, though—vanished with the first draught of bicarb.
His phone rang, and he winced. It was the Salvage Field Commission, and they wanted to know what he had done with Sweeny. Sweeny? Oh, yeah—no; he didn't remember a thing. To hell with Sweeny. Were there any jobs to be done? He wanted to get off Mars before he got drunk again. There was a long pause while the commission looked up today's sheet. Yes—one bullion ship wrecked between Mercury and Venus.
His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Page 88
