With a shrug I returned to my task, but there were murmurings from others among the crew. One remark evidently reached Casper for he swung round and came forward, hand resting on the butt of his flame-gun.
“What was that you said?” His eyes blazed inquiry.
“I said who in hell do you think we are!” repeated one of the men. “We’ve the right to see where we’re goin’, ain’t we?”
“Not on this ship you haven’t! Your best course is to keep your trap shut and your mind on your job. I’ll be healthier for all of you. Besides—”
Casper broke off and stood aside as the girl herself appeared at the top of the ladder. She came slowly down, looked round on the men.
“Trouble?” she asked Casper shortly.
“They don’t like the window shields being drawn,” he sneered. “Maybe they’d like a few feather beds to lie on too!”
The girl’s stony gaze settled on us. “Perhaps my first-mate hasn’t made things quite clear to you,” she said slowly, “so I will. You will get your money when the trip is over. For that money you’ll sweat your guts out down here watching these rockets. To reach our objective in a reasonable time requires constant acceleration. On board this ship there are no pryings and peepings. You’re here to work to the full, and under my command you’ll do it. If any man dares to show a hint of mutiny, or is found slacking on the job, he’ll be punished without mercy. I don’t mean irons; I don’t mean solitary. I mean death!”
I looked up at her sharply. “You haven’t the authority to do that!”
“The law gives the master of the ship entire jurisdiction,” she retorted. “On this ship there is only one law—Mine! Then she stood eying me reflectively and added, “You sound pretty educated for an ordinary rocket hand. What are you doing here?”
“Money doesn’t last forever,” I said evasively.
She pondered that, her green eyes piercing me. Then with a final warning glance round she retreated up the ladder with Casper behind her. The trap slammed down. Not only that – it was locked. We were virtually imprisoned down in this hell-hole with no conception of how to get out of it.
The big fellow who’d complained spat suddenly. “The dirty sun-fried hell-cat! I’ll be damned if I’ll stand for it! There are rules on all ships!”
“An’ a special one for the ship run by the Granite Angel,” commented another dryly. “I say we should lie low and stop trying to quiz. It’s sticking out our chins.”
This started an argument in which I’d no wish to take part. I had my own immediate problems to work out. The closing of the windows and trap door suggested important moves afoot, moves significant enough to be shut off from a crew anyway. It was essential I see something of what was destined to happen. How to get out of here, though? I looked around me for some sort of weapon with which to perhaps pry the trapdoor, or else unseal the window. But I found nothing.
This problem occupied my mind for a long time afterwards, through several work and rest periods indeed, during which time we must have covered enormous distances across the gulf. Once I fancied I detected the change of course which pilots usually adopt to go around the plane of the asteroid belt. If that was so, we were heading for the outer planets. Jupiter, no doubt, since it was the only known source of critanium.
Finally I made up my mind to take a chance.
“Listen, all of you,” I said to my colleagues, arresting their attention from their work. “We’ve got to get action. Talking’s no use. We’re shut down here and for all we know we may be murdered or something before we ever sniff that money. Am I right?”
They nodded sullenly.
“There’s only one way to get our rights,” I went on. “We’ll cut out the rockets and refuse to start ’em again until this woman conforms to regulations and leaves the windows free and the trap open, so we can go up for a breather every now and again. That’s the law, and we’ll enforce it. Come on, cut off the power! Close the valves!”
Naturally I had my reason for all this and stood watching in grim satisfaction while they earnestly followed out my idea. I had figured that by this time we must be pretty close to the Jovian gravity field, and therefore probably quite close to whatever secret moves Valcine Drew was proposing to make. And perhaps I could escape from down here while the confusion was being sorted out.
It meant leaving the rocket crew to take the rap, but I felt I was justified. I had a job to do – they hadn’t. Casper and the girl couldn’t do much anyway since they were powerless without men to control the rockets.
I stood watching intently as at length all sources of power were cut out and the ship continued to cruise on smoothly of its own momentum. Briefly we became weightless and started to float, until the artificial gravity unit automatically came into action, and we settled back to the deck. But we were no longer accelerating. Then came Casper’s roaring voice from the control room above.
“What the devil’s wrong with you scum down there? Use your forward tubes! What do you want us to do? Crash?”
We maintained a stony silence at that. Sure enough Casper’s heavy feet pounded over our heads along the steel corridor. The trap rattled and clanged as it was opened. He came hurrying down with a raygun in his hand. I took good care to edge my way behind him to the ladder.
“Well, what’s the idea?” he roared, glaring round. “Which of you is responsible for this? Get the hell to work!”
Still nobody answered him, so he strode down among the men and struck out savagely with the butt of his gun. Instantly he became the focus for a concerted rush. I seized the chance to steal silently up the ladder, making no sound in my rubber shoes.
In a moment I had gained the narrow corridor above. Just in time I pressed myself into the recessed doorway of a storage room as Valcine Drew appeared from the control room, obviously bent on discovering for herself what was wrong. She hurried past me, never noticing, and began to descend into the rocket hold, I could hear the noise of a rising altercation, and above it all the roaring voice of Casper, the thud of fist on bone.
Quickly I looked around me. My next job was to find concealment and yet be able to watch what happened. Carefully I edged my way down the corridor to the control room. It was empty, of course, and woefully bare of any chance of concealment. Then I glanced above me—
The very thing! Up there in the roof was the air vent trap leading into the storage containers of the circular ceiling—a kind of loft. Fine! I leaped up to the girders, swung on them quickly, and eased my way through the vent trap into the wide space beyond. Gently I lowered the trap down again and lay full length, peering through its holes. Here indeed was perfect concealment.
From this position I could also see through the broad outlook window near the switchboard. My guess that we were near Jupiter had been right. The giant planet was filling all space outside—banded, clouded, mysterious, his Great Red Spot about the only clear thing in its turbulent atmosphere.
Then there were his moons, all of them but briefly explored because of their inimical conditions. Frozen chunks of rock, most of them, some with vague pretensions to solidified air, as gases escaped their interiors, driven by gravity-induced vulcanism; others entirely without. Right here indeed was a region where few ever ventured. Certainly the ordinary space runs never came this far; and the special ships for the critanium deposits only twice a year.
CHAPTER 2
Slave labour
I looked away from the window view suddenly as there were sounds beneath me. Casper and the girl came into the control room.
“Damned mutinous lot of scum,” Casper breathed savagely, jabbing his gun back in his belt. He moved the controls and since the ship reacted instantly, I presumed he’d enforced order below.
“We’ve a mutinous bunch to hold down, Valcine,” he said at length. “But I’ll do it if I break them one by one!”
I lay watching in some surprise. This struck me as a queer way for a first-mate to address the commander of the vessel. It was an
even bigger surprise to see the girl’s face relax for a moment into a semblance of sympathy.
“I suppose we can’t really blame them,” she said slowly. “After all, pinned down there in that heat, all shields drawn tight—”
“Stop getting so damned sloppy!” Casper interrupted, and slipping the robot control in position for a moment he went over to a water-faucet. “Here,” he said, handing her a glass of water. “Don’t forget your medicine. Time for it.”
Intently I watched. From her belt the girl took a glass phial and shook a tablet from it into the water. She said briefly, “Don’t forget to make me up some more tablets. This is the last of this supply.”
“I won’t forget,” Casper growled, and watched her drink off the draft steadily.
“That’s better,” she said, straightening up. “All right, let’s get busy.”
He nodded and I noticed there was a malignant grin on his face as he turned to the switchboard. I noticed too that Valcine had lost again that temporary look of compassion for the men below and was now standing grim and erect before the outlook port, studying the view.
From my position I saw the vessel was sweeping round to one of the moons of Jupiter. For a moment I had difficulty in placing it since most of them look alike. Then Casper cleared things up for me.
“More I see of this frozen hell of Ganymede the less 1 like it. But we picked a swell spot, Valcine. No guys in their right senses ever start prodding around places like this.”
The girl nodded silently, still gazing outside. I shifted my eyes from her to the window again as Ganymede loomed up in its entirety. Cold, ruthlessly desolate little world; puckered into rumples and folds of rock.
Mountains seemed to be everywhere, riven asunder by bleak gorges and deadly cratered chasms. Slowly, very slowly, this maw reached up to catch the ship as Casper lowered it gently on its underjets. We came to rest at last in the depths of a valley, smeared with the mounds of frozen, congealed volcanic gas. Down here all was dark, Jove himself hidden by the mountain ranges, the only illumination coming from the icy stars.
Silent, I lay watching, wondering what was coming next. Valcine Drew and Casper seemed to be waiting for something; and after a while I saw that Casper was steadily depressing a button on the switchboard. Outside, in response, was the winking of a powerful searchlight. A signal of sorts.
Then I beheld the answer to it. Lights were coming bobbing along the valley, for all the world like miners with head-lamps heading for the pit. Nearer they came, each bearing on his space suited shoulders a heavy packing case of some kind. My mind flashed instantly to illegal critanium, then I realized this could not be since it is radioactive and demands immensely heavy triple-lead containers, far heavier than a man can lift even on Ganymede’s light-gravity surface.
“Open the airlocks,” Valcine Drew said suddenly.
The valves opened one by one so no vital air escaped the control room. The first man entered, dumped his case down, then loosened his space suit. He was not familiar to me, but from his hard-bitten face and tattered uniform I placed him instantly as an ex-pilot of the spaceways, obviously fired for some misdemeanor or other. He stood looking at the girl sullenly.
“There’s a dozen of ’em this time,” he announced. “It’s worth a hundred thousand credits to you.”
“You’ll get fifty thousand and no more,” she retorted, gazing at him. “Fetch them in—the rest of them.”
The man hesitated, burst out suddenly, “Look here, Angel, what in hell do you think me and my buddies are? Why do you think we rot out our bones in this dismal hell? Just for you to cut our prices in half? Like hell! We’ve been stuck here for a year now, looking after these lost souls.”
“And getting paid for it,” the girl interrupted him coldly. “If anything you’re overpaid, the whole lot of you. What more do you want?” she proceeded angrily. “I saw to it you had a comfortable base camp, under your protective dome. Food for years, ample air and water—everything you need. All you have to do is look after your prisoners. In a few more trips you’ll be worth a fortune. You’ll stick it and like it! Don’t forget you can’t please yourselves, either. One word from me and the whole twelve of you are finished. There’s a nice cosy lethal chamber waiting for all of you back on Earth. This is the only place in God’s universe where you’re safe, and you know it!”
The man was silent, biting his lip.
“Bring the rest in,” she added briefly.
He turned and signalled into the airlock pressure room hidden from my view. One by one the space-suited men came in, each carrying a crate. The whole dozen were finally dumped. Then Valcine Drew went to the nearest one and snapped open the side. In the interior was something I had hardly expected to see—a small humanlike creature with a big head and slender green body. The eyes were like those of a cat; the face ridiculously small and screwed up into an expression of obvious fright.
“Queer looking devils these Ganymedians,” Casper grunted, standing looking at the creature. “Queer or otherwise, we’ve plenty of use for ’em, eh? Come on you—out!” and he kicked out his heavy boot, sent the little creature sprawling out of the confinement of the crate onto the floor.
“Always remind me of animated lozenges,” he grinned. “Kick your foot right through ’em if you wanted to.”
He raised his foot to kick again, purely for his own brutal amusement—but the girl stopped him.
“Give them their money,” she snapped; and turning to them, “You can have the crates back when we’re through. Make it in six hours.”
Casper went over to the cashbox and handed over the money, bundled the men roughly from the control room and slammed the airlocks after them. Through the window he watched their lamps go bobbing away into the distance.
To me all this had a definite interest. I wondered what the devil the idea was of Ganymede; even more the purpose of the poor inhabitants of this inhospitable little moon. Frail, brittle looking beings, obviously attuned to temperatures far below zero and an air too thin to ever support an Earthly form of life.
Even now the one Casper had kicked onto the floor was starting to gasp painfully in the pressures of the control room. Noticing it the girl promptly lifted him in her arms and dumped him in an upright glass case in a corner of the room. She clamped down a lid, contemplated his frightened little face for a moment, then shifted a control on the switchboard.
I saw tubes inside the case start glowing with energy. Two particular prongs turned violet and projected almost, but not quite, to the top of the creature’s shiny head. What sort of black magic was she up to now I wondered.
“Listen to me,” she said steadily, holding a microphone to her mouth. “I’m giving you instructions. Since you possess no ears my words will reach you through bone vibrations—telepathically, since that is your way of communicating. Nod your head if you understand what I’m saying.”
The head nodded vigorously.
“Good,” the girl said. “Here are your instructions: In a moment or two you will be put inside a small, globular safety ship. It will be guided by radio from this vessel. You will be sent to Jupiter, to a chosen spot, and once you land you will operate three switches connected to magnetic anchors on the ship’s exterior. I should say levers, not switches, since they are too heavy to be moved by radio and need somebody like you. They will be marked A, B and C, so you cannot mistake them. On landing pull them in that order. Is that dear?”
Again came the urgent nodding.
“When that is done, which will take no more than a few minutes, radio power here will withdraw your ship back. That will end your particular task and you will be released.”
There the girl finished her communication. To me, bits of the puzzle were beginning to fit into place. It was the cold inhumanity of the idea that made me shudder. For Jupiter, biggest of all the worlds, has a gravity field of such overwhelming force that only the smallest of ships and toughest of men had ever defeated that upward drag from the planet
. Going down was bad enough; coming up was sheer hell and had accounted for more pilots and engineers than I cared to remember.
Here, to save herself or her unscrupulous first mate from disaster, the girl was using slave labour. Nothing else. It was cunning—vicious. I began to realize at last how she had collected such huge amounts of critanium. I began to realize too why she had such a reputation for cruelty, and above all why nobody below was permitted to observe what was going on.
At a nod from the girl Casper went over to a valve and unscrewed it. Beyond I could see a small, but quite roomy, globe spaceship of the safety-type—not unlike a bathysphere. Into this the girl lifted the Ganymedian and then shut the airlock on him. Casper closed the valve again and pulled a lever.
“Your father would have given plenty for a system as good as this, Valcine,” he muttered. “Pity he was so sentimental; it killed lots of his chances, and I could never talk sense into him. You and me have done a lot together, eh?”
“Shut up, I’m busy,” she answered tensely.
I could not see immediately what happened but I guessed that explosive forces had driven the globe out through a tube into space. Valcine Drew waited a moment then turned to the radio instruments, watching a visiplate intently as the globe came into view. Carefully she began to operate the remote-control apparatus, Casper watching intently over her shoulder.
Her silence irritated me for I had felt I was on the verge of learning something worthwhile. I looked at the visiplate keenly. There, twirling down toward Jupiter, a mere black speck against his swirling cloud belts, was the solitary globe. At last it vanished in the cloudbanks, but the X-ray television never once lost track of it.
Eventually I saw it land on an unthinkably desolate plateau beneath a sky of twilit dark. The landscape, so far as I could see, was studded with grey lumps rather like dirty snow. Some of them moved visibly as the globe alighted amidst them, began to draw toward it under the pull of the magnetic anchors.
“It’s a masterpiece,” Casper breathed. “A virgin field of critanium. We got it by accident. Rather queer to think of those suckers from Earth prospecting for the stuff twice a year and we know the exact spot where it lies around loose. I tell you, Valcine, you and me have got about the best brains in the System.”
John Russell Fearn Omnibus Page 61
