Planet Patrol: The Interplanetary Age (Star Service Book 1)

by Charles Lee Jackson II

"Yeah," Sandy agreed, "so who saved me? If Hollywood didn't send him, who did? And if he knew where I was, why didn't he tell you guys?"

  "Well," Eyes-that-shine said, approaching from inside, "if we had just come running in, it wouldn't have crushed Walks West's hold over his Lakota."

  "I suppose, but it still seems mysterious."

  "Well," Wild Bill suggested, "you said bullets bounced off his chest, and he pulled some sort of fancy trick to get behind Walks West when attacked."

  "Maybe. Smoke got in my eyes, after all. I might be mistaken."

  "Or maybe not. It doesn't sound like the original Thunder Bird to me, but it does remind me of somebody else."

  Sandy goggled. "…You think it was...?"

  "It's just his style, except for the mask."

  (I must interrupt at this juncture – they’re suggesting it was me! But I don’t see how it could be… could it? The future is even more mysterious than I thought.)

  "Enough of this fretting," Eyes-that-shine said. "Dinner is ready. Shall we go inside?"

  In a few minutes they were sitting down at the big table inside the old lodge. The faces of the Presidents loomed in the big picture windows as Eyes-that-shine rose.

  "Let us give thanks to the deer, who gave his life that we might eat. And to the Great Spirit, who watches over us all."

  Sandy stood, raising her glass. The others joined in her toast, as she added, "And let us not forget Thunder Bird – whoever he was!"

  Book Four

  THE MARS 5000

  Chapter One

  The Willing Victim

  THE WHOLE PLACE was done up in fairy lights, which shone brilliantly in the thin atmosphere, twinkling dotted perimeters around the pressurized grandstand and hangars. Crowds flocked up the gangways to the airlocks, where they could doff their breathing gear and relax in air-conditioned comfort. Loudspeakers blared an assortment of lively tunes, while candy butchers roamed the aisles, hawking their wares.

  Outside, on the throughway apron, assorted citizens scrounged the incoming visitors for spare tickets, but there was no one willing to lose his seat. It was the event of the year – and the year lasted one and seven-eighths as long as on earth.

  For this was the planet Mars, red neighbor to the blue home of Mankind, and, by the twenty-second century, one of several outposts on Man's journey to the stars.

  The big event was the Mars Five-Thousand, Areannual race from Heinlein to Bradbury, by way of Olympia and the old Martian town of Purplost, five thousand miles of thrills and spills.

  Beginning in the small town of Heinlein, in the shadow of Elysium Mons, the course runs north of east, straight to Olympus Mons, where the racers have the choice of going over the top of the huge extinct volcano or around the slope to the new capital, Olympia. There, after a lay-over, the race continues south to Purplost, capital of the old Martian civilization, at the edge of the vast Noctis Labyrinthus. Turning east again, the course fractures as each flyer picks his own course through the network of canyons, draws, and arroyos that make up the labyrinth. Here, going over the top is a no-no. Finally, the flyers are debouched into the clear for the final sail into Bradbury City.

  The vehicles used in this race are ultralight aircraft, small airplanes with broad wingspans that require careful handling to soar in the thin Martian atmosphere. At only about five ounces of pressure per square foot, gliding on the breeze is nearly impossible. But since the combined weight of plane and pilot is only about three hundred pounds in the puny Martian gravity, they have at least a chance.

  Though primarily a gliding race, each entrant does have power available, a small old-style airplane engine, with enough gas and air mixture to go about one-fifth the distance. This gives each racer enough oomph to soar high enough to gain the necessary angle for the long glide down.

  This was the sixth running, and excitement was high. Last year – that is to say, two Earth years earlier in twenty-one twelve – no one had won, the longest lasting entrant sliding to a stop twenty miles short of the finish line.

  Since then, engineers had been busily modifying here, shaving there, adjusting this wing, that strut, each trying to get his ship down to just over the lower weight-limit. This race would show how well they'd done.

  ACROSS THE TARMAC from the grandstand, in the hangars, these engineers had their last-minute conferences with the pilots, while owners tried to re-phrase the pep-talks they'd already given several times each.

  A number of major corporations had entries this time, and the logotypes of Krupp, Oldsmobile, Hertz, Douglas, and FoMarsCo festooned banners that fluttered feebly in the breeze. A few private citizens were entered, including Jack Yeagar of Earth, Roger Dalton of the Venus colony, and even one Slanths of Sangar (who had converted to human form, at the request of the judges, to level the playing field).

  At the end of the hangar, Jerry Cabanne, youngest offspring of that wealthy clan, was adjusting the timing on his engine. He had no engineer to tell him what to do, and only his mother to give him a pep talk. But she wasn't around. He'd sort of expected her, but she'd left their hotel suite before he'd gotten up that morning.

  "Gentlemen," a loud-speakered voice called out. (There happened not to be any women in this year's race.) "All vehicles to the starting line."

  Slipping on his breathing mask and goggles, Jerry Cabanne climbed into the cockpit of his ultralight plane. When all of the other pilots were ready, and the other people in the hangar likewise masked, the air pressure was lessened and the heavy-gauge plastic doors opened.

  Robot trucks ferried each aircraft to its starting position. The crowd let out a cheer, and television correspondents began whipping the home audiences into a fever-pitch. A few minutes later, Earth audiences viewed the race with varying degrees of interest.

  MUCH CLOSER THAN Earth, a small group watched the race with a particularly high degree of interest. Parked on the far side of the Martian satellite Phobos, His Majesty's Space Ship Thetis, a Star Service corvette, was on full automatic, all of its crew in the Ward Room, watching the pre-race show on their big-screen receiver.

  The lone woman present issued an unladylike snort as she entered the room. "What is this, ugly night at the bowling alley?"

  The men looked up, then at each other, then down at themselves. Actually looking at their state of dress, they all acted ashamed.

  The men were all dressed sloppily, jackets off, T-shirts showing. A couple of them even had their space-boots off. Beer cans and chip bags littered the table.

  By contrast, the woman wore her full uniform, though even she had conceded to the point of leaving her jacket unsnapped.

  "Keep yer shirt on," one of the men said. Then the inappropriateness of the remark struck him, and he cleared his throat, saying, "I mean, don't worry, Your Grace. We're just relaxin'. We can be to battle stations in half a minute, if you need us."

  "Well, all right. Because I just might. That's why we're here, after all."

  Though the job of most of the people in the room was the propelling of the space vessel, two of them were Justice-enforcement operatives of The Empire, the one-time entertainment complex that had grown to be the governing body of outer space. Though each fully established planet had its own governments and police forces, The Empire's Star Service provided law and order for frontier planets, which included Mars and Mercury. Mars, with seven major population centers and numerous tourist attractions, had its own system of local police forces and courts, but for major problems – such as a race involving three cities and thousands of miles of wasteland – Service Command was called for.

  And so "Wild" Bill Webbe, Sky Marshal, and Her Grace, Space Princess Allesandra Pendragon, were on hand to provide any necessary emergency assistance.

  Her Grace, or plain old Sandy to her friends, was one of an elite group of women selected for their talent, skill, aptitude, and above-average fairness to be the space equivalent of the old-time circuit rider judges, able to convene court and dispense Justice at will. Wild
Bill, as a space lawman, was empowered to handle any and all criminal matters.

  Sandy, a pretty blonde girl with bright eyes and a striking smile, looked more like a movie star than a combination judge and Ambassadress Extraordinary. Bill, however, looked every inch the frontier lawman. It was a tradition that went back many generations in his family. One ancestor had been an old-west sheriff, two others masked Swashbucklers in the twentieth century.

  These two, with the lean and ruggedly handsome Jack Flynn, captain of Thetis, formed a sort of "three musketeers" of the spaceways, always looking for new adventure – often to the annoyance of the rest of the crew.

  Thetis had lucked into this assignment, having only recently handled a rare Earth-bound mission. Of the several Service corvettes on patrol, said assignment had put them closest to Mars by about eighty million miles.

  Having slipped into orbit with Phobos, they circled the red planet every seven hours, and relaxed while waiting for the seemingly inevitable call to action.

  AND THAT ACTION couldn't be far ahead, given the activities of another group of men in a disreputable grog-shop on the edge of a town called Garrick.

  The low-rent district of Garrick attracts the sort of people who want to keep a low profile wherever they go. People like Space Pirate Cap'n Morgas and his scurvy crew. These were the unworthy members of the grog-shop crowd that watched the race.

  Chased from their home base, the pirate hide-out Astra Nova, which had proved to be an artificial satellite of Saturn, Morgas and his small band of twenty cut-throats had knocked about the system for over an Earth year before alighting on Mars.

  Morgas figured, with all the hub-bub about the race, there'd be something a pirate could do to turn an honest pirate buck.

  "Arrrgh, yer plan's a bust, Cap'n," one of his spacedogs grumbled. "Stupid race's about t' start, and we've got nowhere."

  "Shaddap, Skunky," Morgas addressed the speaker, whose name, fortunately, derived not from any odor problem but from the black with white-striped leather jacket he wore. "Sumpin'll come up."

  Grizzled and nasty but dressed in fine Earth silks and leather, Morgas stood out from his band. And so the barmaid was already watching when he gestured for another round of ale, and brought the booze on the double. She didn't want to miss the start of the race.

  But miss it she did. Just as the flag dropped, she was summoned by one of the private customers, a woman who was seated in one of the "cages" that lined the mezzanine of the tavern. These small boxes afforded a measure of privacy for customers with a little more money.

  Gritting her teeth as the patrons rose up in a cheer, the waitress entered the cage. There, spine ram-rod stiff, sat a woman of about fifty, graying hair pulled into a chignon at the back of her neck. She wore a dress that was obviously too expensive for this dump, and yet was somehow not out of place.

  "The gentleman with the tangled beard and the fancy suit over there," she said, using a rather flexible definition of "gentleman". The waitress grunted an acknowledgement. "Give him this note, if you would be so good."

  Given that the note was presented with a ten-sovereign coin, the waitress thought she could be that good.

  Morgas took the note and read it carefully, looked up to see the woman in her box, then read the note again, grumbling to himself.

  Then he noticed the two bottles of wine on her table, and decided to have a go at it.

  HE ENTERED HER cage with an expansive gesture, and took a seat without being invited. He also grabbed up a bottle and helped himself, guzzling the grape juice with lip-smacking relish.

  The woman, at first visibly repulsed by his vulgarity, quickly relaxed. A cruel smile formed on her face, the smile of a cartoon cobra that's just figured out where its next meal is coming from.

  Morgas thumped the bottle down onto the table, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. "Now, lady, whut's all t'is about makin' me a fortune and gettin' me revenge?"

  She smiled. "It's very simple. I want you to pretend to kidnap me and hold me for ransom. I'll let you decide on the price, and don't worry, my lawyer will pay it."

  "What's t' point?"

  "Before you receive your payment, the authorities will certainly send in a Star Service team to try to rescue me."

  Morgas snorted. "An' I'm serposed t' like t'at?"

  "Certainly. For the team sent in will consist of Space Princess Allesandra and the crew of Thetis."

  Morgas growled, scratched his chin. "T'em badgers cost me a good hideout. I been wantin' t' get back at t'em."

  "And this is the perfect way. The Princess can be captured, and you can ‘negotiate’ my release with my legal staff. The Star Service people will lose a valuable agent and get a black eye when they fail to rescue me without the ransom being paid."

  Morgas's scratching moved to his greasy skull. "‘At don't sound too bad, lady. It'll make my crew feel a lot better.

  "But why are ye doin' this? What's in it for ye?"

  The woman leaned forward. "That so-called princess and her boys cost me a valuable mining contract, and made me look like a fool on Mercury last year. I want to see them disgraced almost as much as you do.

  "That's why, when I learned what she'd done to you, I spent several weeks tracking you down."

  Morgas started in surprise.

  "Oh, don't worry. I have much more efficient sources than the law. And I don't share with them what I know."

  "How d' ye— Who are you, anyways?" The pirate took another pull on the wine bottle.

  The woman sat up straight again. "I am Esther Cabanne, of Cabanne Mining and Manufacturing."

  Morgas's jaw dropped, spilling wine all down his shirt-front.

  CAMERAS SPOTTED ALONG the course kept the audience current on the locations of the race entrants. The Sangan had taken an early lead, having cut down his weight by dumping his breathing mask in favor of a simple tube stuck in an air bottle. But the FoMarsCo flyer, who had had the advantage of weeks of practice along the course, was right on his tail.

  The Cabanne boy, unaware of his mother's plotting, was giving it everything he had, but was still way back in the pack. Bringing up the rear for the third time in a row was Joey Murdock, flying the entry from Dodge and Company. The town-car manufacturer was upset at their poor finish each year, and the black eye it gave them, but they didn't dare drop out. And so once again their boy Joey was plugging away at it.

  In the Thetis Ward Room, two of the crew were engaged in a heated debate about the Dodge.

  "I tell ya, Prof, there's a reason for the old phrase, ‘Leave a Dodge in your garage’!"

  "Prof", otherwise known as Theodore Garrison Morfett, chief cook, bottle-washer, and pharmacist's mate, leaned back in his chair, hooking his thumbs into his braces, and smiled a wolfish smile. "Ernie, my boy, are you prepared to back that up with money?"

  Ernest Scammera, last man on the Thetis totem pole and Prof's assistant, immediately grew wary. "You think he can win?"

  "Well, let's not go that far. But I'll bet you he doesn't come in last. How's that?"

  "We-ell-ll," Ernie drawled. "OK. A double saw-buck?"

  "Done," Prof replied. He slapped down a silver twenty-Sovereign coin on the table, sealing the bet. A Sovereign being the basic currency of Space, set to equal a dollar and a half American, it represented a good dinner he might miss. Ernie immediately regretted his decision, now that he was stuck with it.

  But before he could say anything, an alarm bell sounded. With an assortment of groans and complaints, the crew began to climb into their uniforms.

  The voice of the Princess was heard through the ship. "All hands. I'm taking you at your word. We've got a big problem. Set course for Olympia Spaceport!"

  OLYMPIA, CAPITAL OF modern Mars, lies in the shadow of Olympus Mons, highest mountain and greatest volcano in the entire solar system. With a caldera some fifty miles wide, it looms ninety thousand feet above the city. Sensors ringing the volcano are set to give a warning of incipient vulcanism, but since
the mountain hasn't made a sound in three millennia, the local residents feel fairly safe.

  Olympia itself is a city of some seven thousand souls, and boasts a huge spaceport and facilities for tourists. Created from a single pre-fabricated bungalow, in which a stereo-compositor – a sort of three-dimensional printer that built up walls and structures from processed Martian rock and sand – had spent months building the city a piece at a time. Though breathable air is in short supply in the atmosphere, water-ice cracking plants and careful re-cycling provide more than enough for everyone in the cities.

  Laid out in the standard frontier grid, the city is entirely encased in what is essentially a box of plastic some five inches thick (which was the first structure built, of course). With a glass-like clarity, the plastic allows the feeble rays of the sun in, but traps the heat like a hot-house. Careful circulatory equipment maintains a pleasant temperature all year around.

  Like most frontier cities, Olympia has its central area, its high-rent residential neighborhood, and the poor section. The last of these provides shelter, sustenance, and recreation for the poorly paid miners, laborers, and drifters who make up much of the population of any such outpost.

  At the moment, such of these as had any space to call their own had made a few bucks renting said space to the tourists, for the low-rent neighborhood looked out over the Spaceport, where the Mars Five Thousand flyers would be laying over between the two legs of the race.

  As the gleaming arrowhead – or, as some less charitably called it, the flying flat-iron – of HMSS Thetis dropped out of the sky, ground crews went nuts. Batsmen tried frantically to wave the boat aside, out of the race area. This space had to be kept clear – racers would need it soon.

  Pat Carrol, Executive Officer and navigator of Thetis, said, "Dave? Don't you see those guys?"

  Dave Armstrong, the pilot, said a rude word, then added, "'Course I see 'em. I assume they can see us, too. Let them move."