by Various
From this hiding place, Dollard withdrew two loaded hydroflame pistols. These he strapped under each armpit. Next, he brought out a palm-sized stunner which he concealed in his hand by aid of a wrist-strap. The fourth object to emerge was a small chunky bag from which dangled tightly-drawn leather thongs. Dollard opened the pouch and poured the contents on to his sweaty palm; a thousand carats of glistening "Syrtis diamonds" from his own private mines. The rarity and value of these jewels, he knew, would be increased by the collapse of the terrestrial civilization that had refined them and cut and polished their rainbow facets.
These gleaming objects of unfixed price were the guardians that would stand by him during the months it would take to reestablish himself among the colonies on Venus. Not only would they purchase luxuries, but also new servants, fabrication plants, ore boats; possibly, even governments. Above all, they would serve to bribe Dollard's way through the tight network of Venusian immigration officials who might seek--in accord with the laws of their sparsely-settled but independent world--to forbid his landing as a refugee from a diseased planet.
* * * * *
A full hour passed before Garth returned, an hour that Edwin Dollard spent pacing the narrow confines of the lodge's central room. His eyes constantly consulted the slow march of minutes on the luminescent dial of his platinum chronometer ... for while it was not imperative that the space yacht he had refurbished should soar starward at the precise hour agreed upon, there did reign a crucial period of four or five hours immediately at hand, during which the most advantageous passage to Venus should be commenced.
When Garth finally reappeared through the steel doorway, his thin long face reflected the strain he also felt as departure time neared.
"I checked the roadway two miles up the valley," he reported. "No activity in sight. There was a riot at Leevining, or so one of your guards told me--and a big pitched battle in Bishop between lowlanders and highlanders."
"Another day or two and they'd be swarming all over this region," Dollard said.
"You can bet their first reaction would be to dismantle the ship at sight," Garth informed him. "Lucky we're getting out in time. If the mobs couldn't pilot the vessel themselves, it'd be human nature to see to it that nobody else got to do so, either. Misery loves company--even in the face of death."
"The scum," said Dollard. He donned a jaunty space cap he had often worn on pleasure flights to his outlying holdings. Hooking his thumbs in his belt, he grinned: "Well, Garth, shall we go?"
Garth nodded. He detached a torch that was clasped to his waist, then opened the tunnel door that was carved out of a braced section of the rear wall where the lodge had been built to shore into the mountainside. Entering, the two men threaded a winding route through a narrow dripping passageway, guided by the thin yellow beam of Garth's light. They emerged several hundred feet farther on in a valley of long shadows, cut off from the world on three sides by abrupt cliffs. No ravines opened on this valley. Only by a desperate climb over the surrounding peaks could it be reached--and hence it had been immune to spying eyes. Here, amounting to a feat of superb pilotage in itself, Dollard's vessel had been landed weeks earlier in anticipation of just such a need as it now served.
Sturdy shrubbery screened the tunnel exit, although concealment had not proved to be necessary. As they broke into the light, Dollard and Garth pushed aside stunted conifers and half-stumbled, half-ran down a shale-strewn incline which led them to the valley's floor.
A short northward walk brought them in view of the refitted space craft. Based on stubby fins, it pointed vertically at the sky.
The high sharp ridges surrounding the valley blotted out the late afternoon sun, casting gloom upon the sheer rock walls and overhanging escarpments, and, despite his previous acclimatization to Sierra altitudes, the thin sharp air made breathing difficult for Dollard.
A short distance from where the vessel was cradled, the bodies of five coveralled workmen lay in stiff huddled forms. At the sight, Dollard grunted. "Efficient toxin," he commented. "Good work."
* * * * *
Walking contemptuously past the bodies, the tycoon approached a work shack which had housed the space ship mechanics. He picked up an aluminum platform-ladder which rested on the trampled grass. Swinging it above his head, he brought it back to the vessel and hooked it against the rear fin so that the tubular platform lodged itself against the ship's lowest loading hatch.
He turned to Garth. "Too bad we can't run an engine-to-mech check, before taking off. But no mechanics."
Garth said, "Knocking off the men was your idea."
"My conscience'll rest easy with it," Dollard returned. "I was making a joke."
"Very funny joke," said Garth.
"Very funny for you, too," said Dollard.
His fingers squeezed the rubber-mounted grips of the stunner concealed in the palm of his left hand. A slight eye-stinging flash burst in the fading light. As the wave moved outward from the tiny device, Garth stiffened and pitched forward, bouncing perceptibly before his body finally succumbed to the compulsion of gravity.
Dollard aimed the hard toe of his metallic shoe and kicked him viciously in the temple. Garth's body did not stir.
"I would have liked an engine-to-mechanic check very much," Dollard said thoughtfully. "But these things can't always be planned neat enough to meet every detail. There has to be leeway for diversive action--should the situation merit it. In this case, the situation seems to have merited it rather fully."
He began to climb the narrow aluminum rungs of the propped-up ladder. After reaching the platform, he stood on the grilled support, his fat panting bulk braced against the upper chord of the stabilizer fin. He looked back briefly at Garth's unconscious form on the ground.
"You were a fool, Garth! A fool to believe that I would take you along with me--to share a new empire. Know when I lost complete respect for your intelligence? It was when you banked that past services for me would assure you of future salvation. Very stupid. Didn't you know your usefulness would end for me the moment I left Terra? Why should I have dragged you along to drink up my oxygen, eat my food ... and undermine me later on? No, friend Garth, you were--all along--just as much a tool as those uniformed carcasses you poisoned on my behalf. May you join them in the sad reflection they must now be experiencing...."
Garth's paralyzed body lay still.
Dollard pressed against the outer panel of the hatch and stepped into the opening that was made by the sliding section. He disappeared into the bowels of the ship, and the hatch closed after him.
A few seconds later, a rumbling inside announced the vessel's engines had come to life. Stubby atmospheric wings unfolded into place on the shining metal sides. Rocket vents below the scorched tail surface began to glow a cherry red as fused gases bit into the pitted ground. The ship's entire length trembled slightly as it left the surface. Climbing into the blue with an ever-increasing whoosh, it described an arc over the jagged peaks and vanished.
* * * * *
Another half hour passed, before the cataleptic effect of the stunner eased sufficiently for Garth to sit up and rest his chest and arms upon his knees. He rubbed his forehead, felt the bruise at his temple and gazed speculatively at the sky. Then, he studied the bubbling earth only a few feet away from him and realized how close he had been to death from the space vessel's back-blasts. He shuddered a moment.
After his head cleared, he struggled to his feet and walked over the damp grass to the work shack. Entering, he searched through a chemical cabinet until he found the vials he wanted. From them, he compounded a liquid mixture which he forced into the ampoule of a hypodermic needle.
When he stepped outside again, he saw the sky had darkened quickly with evening. He walked over to the stricken mechanics and administered an injection into the neck muscles of each man. The counter-toxin took hold, speedily erasing the depressant effect of the drug Garth had originally fed the men--a non-fatal dosage of an irritant similar to the on
e Dollard had ordered be used to slay them.
He'd supervised a lot of Dollard's underhanded work for him, Garth told himself as he waited for the hypo stimulant to react. But murdering helpless men had been something he had rebelled at. And now that Dollard had deserted him, at least he would have company on Terra during his last days of life. It was an outcome Garth had anticipated, although he had been unable to predict just when Dollard would launch his surprise attack.
The men came to sluggishly, their reactions pathetic and confused. The first thing they appeared to notice when their conscious minds took hold of their environment was the empty circle of terrain where the space yacht had formerly stood.
"Dollard took off," Garth explained. "He drugged us all, after we'd gotten the vessel in shape for him."
"The dirty swine--he promised he'd take us!" the men protested.
"Like so many other promises he never intended to keep," said Garth. "He told you men--for instance--the ship was headed for Luna. Me, he told, he was bound for Venus. I think his destination is Venus, but he'll never get there."
"Not get there--why?"
"Because of a little secret I never let him know," Garth replied, rubbing his nose and grinning wryly. "My wife is on Venus, where the plague can't reach her. And I promised myself days ago that Dollard should never be given the opportunity to infect that planet. That's one promise that has been kept. At least, I know now that Ellen will be safe--for a while longer."
"But, sir, the big boss has gone! What can you do--with him flown the coop?"
"Do now? I've already done it. Dollard thought of me as a fool, but instead--I've shown him up as the real fool. A simpleton, tricked by carelessness. There's a damned big surprise waiting for him in space."
Garth looked up into the twilight sky where a few brilliant stars were now shining. His face bore an expression of exultant triumph. "Yes," he said softly, "a real surprise is just around the next curve for you, Edwin Dollard. I hope you enjoy it as well as you've enjoyed buying and selling men's souls...."
* * * * *
Five hundred miles above the sun-mirroring Pacific Ocean, Dollard wiped great beads of perspiration from his shiny jowls. His thick hands tugged and wrestled with stubborn knobs that finally yielded, enabling him to apply greater thrust to his stern rockets.
From the moment of take-off, it had seemed to him that the grim bowl of Terra below him was taking a bigger bite out of his acceleration than it should. Naturally, he hadn't expected his craft to operate with one hundred per cent efficiency, considering the caliber of the technical help employed on its refitting; but still, his tau curve should have brought him to his first coasting point four or five minutes earlier.
By virtue of being his own pilot, he was obliged to astrogate by rule-of-thumb and occasional directive spurts from the course-calculator. If mechanical troubles piled on top of him now, he'd have to surrender control to his gyromatic pilot, while he moved aft to track down the power-robbing malfunction. No mean task, armed in this case only with a slide rule and what engineering knowledge remained to him after thirty years of high finance.
Whatever the gremlin was, it wasn't exactly an auspicious start for a fifty million-mile hop. He grunted and pressed his secondary firing buttons, boosting space velocity by a percentage that should shake the kinks out.
At the four thousand-mile mark, the earth had retreated to a green ball that floated atop a stream of unbearably bright stars. From this height above the planet's surface, not even the most powerful telescope would have revealed the scenes of rampant disease and flaming destruction being enacted on the broad continents below.
The entire vessel shook in a kind of bone-cracking vibration, lurching and lumbering as if some malign influence had tampered with every rivet and seam-weld in her plates.
More apprehensive than ever, Dollard finally yielded to his fears and surrendered his controls to the robot pilot. His huge body rendered almost weightless, he pulled himself along the rail guards of a catwalk that led to the unmanned engine room. Here he inspected every instrument dial to be found although the readings on many of them were repeated on duplicates in the bow.
It was then, while the ship was still a thousand miles from the no-pull point where free-wheeling alone had been known to carry vessels out of Terra's gravitational range and into Venus' orbit, that disaster struck. The fuel being fed to exactly half of the rocket tubes choked out, and the blast from the remaining tubes increased proportionately.
Under this new impetus, the vessel's frame shuddered. Its nose suddenly described a wild arc among the gyrating stars. The diversion of inertia was a more severe blow than a meteor collision would have been. Thrust was an exceedingly difficult thing to plot in free space. Dollard, screaming in panic, was flung against a network of metal braces; despite his weightlessness, his mass was great as ever and a sharp steel corner gouged a deep bleeding slash in his puffy cheek. Sickened, he crawled forward through the spinning ship until he was once more able to pull himself up into the pilot's chair.
There, he discovered the second battery of tubes had ceased firing about a minute after the first. But the changed vectors had already done their damage to both ship and heading.
* * * * *
A quick run-through on the course-calculator soon revealed to Dollard how desperate his position was. Mathematically, Venus was now a goal impossible to attain. To re-correct his altered heading would require more fuel than his tanks had carried at take-off, thanks to sabotage. He also had the vast gravitational field of the sun to battle--a powerful sucking force, which if left to work its will could grow insidiously from a gentle tug of a few millimeters per second to a powerful acceleration eighty times terrestrial escape velocity--and this, without ever once relinquishing its hold on the slightest particle of mass in its grip.
Cursing and fuming, Dollard plotted and re-plotted, some of the rustiness of his brain wearing off as he matched his wits against the prospect of death by holocaust. But, all the resources of higher mathematics failed to point toward a solution. An artery commenced to throb painfully above his ear.
It was Garth who had engineered this hideous accident, he told himself. The faithful unsuspecting Garth had turned out to be a traitor. He was the one who had rigged the fuel lines so that at a certain predicted point along the course the flow along one set of conduits would be shunted to the other.
He should have killed Garth instead of merely stunning him, Dollard thought angrily.
For the twentieth time, he fed three-body calculations into the astro-computer. Somehow, somewhere, in the maze of the Newtonian science there had to be an answer. The complexities of force and heading analysis weren't so great but what machinery could eventually solve all the variables involved. That is, if only Sol's overwhelming gravitational attraction didn't provide a free-sliding path to hell with no choice of alternates in the meanwhile....
The click-click of the tape as it emerged from the electronic calculator seemed to present a different rhythm to Dollard's ears on the twenty-first try. Picking up the ribbon, he let his reddened eyes run over the printed symbols, translating them into finished equations. Elation suddenly sent his blood pressure soaring, as the meaning of what he read became apparent. There was a solution ... a course he could follow! One, which while it would not guide him to Venus, would prevent him from plunging into the sun.
Eagerly, he punched the figures for the heading onto a magnetized wire that would be fed into the gyropilot. After the heading was set, he crawled toward the ship's stern, dragging with him a hydrojet welding torch, a tool that could sear metal apart or join it by causing regulation of the molten rod protruding from its spring barrel. In the abdomen of the vessel, he found the wrecked fuel lines and removed the obstruction Garth had set up, repairing the channels.
* * * * *
Returning to the pilot chamber, he pressed the firing button and acceleration returned a form of gravity to the ship's interior, giving him weight for the first t
ime since the freakish accident.
Sighing with relief as the heavens slowly rotated in his screen, Dollard slumped back in his chair. He punched new figures into the computer, thinking ... now once safely back into a no-pull zone, a man with a little luck should be able to make--
His chunky fingers froze to the keys. There was another flaw to be dealt with. The discrepancy was one the course-calculator had clearly pointed out, but he had overlooked it in his haste to get underway. The solution he had followed was the only possible one--that was still quite true. But, use of it only plunged him into a second predicament.
This new course, said the equations, a course which would require all the remaining fuel to maintain, would steer the ship into a permanent orbit around the earth--an ellipse with the point of apogee far beyond Luna. He now had the certainty of continued life--for a few more days, until his provisions gave out....
Again he cursed the name of Garth. But for the man's treachery he would be well on his way to Venus. Now, he was a helpless trapped mass of protoplasm, protected from his bitter airless environment only by the same steel walls of the cage that held him....
* * * * *
Throughout the next twenty-four hours, as the nature of the elliptical orbit he had entered became more and more apparent, Dollard fought off sleep while his frightened brain racked and racked again its scattered fund of knowledge for an answer to the new problem.
But at last, the narcosis of cellular exhaustion completely overcame him and he slept.
When he awoke, he was chilled and hungry. The ship had passed into the shadow of Luna and its bulkheads no longer conducted heat to the convecting air envelope inside from the outer plates, generally warmed by solar radiations. It took him sometime to get warm again.
