Men Against the Stars - [Adventures in Science Fiction 01]

by Edited By Martin Grrenburg

  With the first sharp wail came the familiar sensation of falling—pure illusion yet no less convincing for that. The Medusa seemed to be sliding down a precipitous slope at gathering speed. The feeling would last for hours, but its coming eased that other, psychological tension that preceded it.

  The subthird spat cheerfully and unzipped his fatigue suit. “That’s that until next time, save the Carlsons! I wonder why I stay on this run anyway.”

  Since the other three couldn’t answer that question for themselves, none tried to answer it for the subthird. But it seemed to make the second oiler even more thoughtful than usual, for he took the pipe out of his mouth. Seeing that he was going to talk, even the subthird paused in the act of rolling into his bunk.

  “Save the Carlsons!” muttered the oiler. “They’ll hold up this trip and a hundred more. You can spend a lifetime on these tubs and never run into anything tougher than a hard-boiled second. Dangerous? You should have been a wildcatter back in the old days. There was the run to Rhea— If you want to kill part of the off watch, I’ll tell the yarn.”

  “Aye, tell it,” said the subthird for all of them. The second oiler hadn’t always been a forecabin hand, and sometimes his yarns were worth hearing.

  Deliberately he knocked the ashes from his pipe into the refuse well. The soft rustle of air through the ventilator grille grew out of the stillness, only to fade again before the oiler’s voice.

  “Nowadays you don’t hear much about Rhea. The main liners still run to Titan, but there’s not enough beyond Saturn to keep traffic lively out there, and the Carlsons make it easier to get to Antares in a subship than to reach Uranus in a jet ship. Even Titan’s just a tourist stop today, and Rhea’s pointed out to the rubbernecks as a moon to steer clear of. The guides tell ‘em what would happen to ‘em six hours after grounding there, and they enjoy a few shivers before going back to their bridge games.

  “That’s all Rhea means now. Bismullah’s a cargo you never hear about, and Interplan Council sends the Rheans all the salt and sodium they want by a B-g automatic. Which is cheaper and lots safer than sending a crew ship.

  “But in the old days it was different. Titan itself was a pretty tough place for a youngster green from navigation school, like Jimmy Rodgers. It was tough enough without the news he had to hear when he landed from the big Blue Star ship at Titan dock—”

  ~ * ~

  “So that’s it, son,” Matthews was saying. “And I never hated to tell anything more than this. Your dad was a fine, honest man and a good navigator, God rest his soul.”

  Jimmy Rodgers swallowed dryly. The bustling scene all around him, the hurrying foot traffic of a great space dock, the fussy activity of automatic unloadeer, all seemed suddenly as unreal and absurd as the news Matthews had brought him— alive, moving, noisy, but not actual, like a stereograph sound film. It couldn’t be true that his father was dead. Things couldn’t happen that way, after all the years of planning toward this day.

  But in a coldly sober compartment of his mind he knew that it was so. Men didn’t live forever, not even men like Ben Rodgers, the father he hadn’t seen in seven years. Funny how much the same he felt as on the day he’d left Titan, a kid of sixteen, alone and awkward and self-conscious in his new whipcords and plastoid cap. But most of all alone. Now he had master’s papers and a certificate of competency but felt just as alone. Bitterly he wished he’d never left Titan. To come back to this!

  Matthews was studying him anxiously. Now he saluted —the same offhand yet respectful gesture he’d used toward the elder Rodgers. “Beggin’ your pardon, son, we can’t stay here. Would ye . . . would ye let me stand you to a drink?”

  Rodgers nodded, followed the grizzled engine man through the ordered confusion of the landing stage, down a long plank walk, and into a dark little tavern. Afterward he couldn’t remember the way they had come.

  A glass was set before him. He swallowed its stinging, tasteless contents while his mind remorselessly rehearsed the news. The funeral had been three days ago—he’d missed it by that much. He wished he were sixteen again, and just feeling the hard clasp of his father’s hand in that good-by seven years ago.

  Matthews was blinking at him across the table. The old spaceman leaned forward. “Guess I know how ye feel, son. He was my friend. But now we’ve got to get on course—it’s what he’d ask of ye if he were here. And there’s not much time.”

  The words penetrated a haze of self-pity. He’d been acting, Rodgers saw, exactly as that kid of sixteen would have. Time he took himself in hand.

  “Sorry. Of course I’ll carry on. How long since your last voyage?”

  “Too long, son. I’ve had the devil’s time with the Interplan Council. The beacon isn’t good for much longer. And I hadn’t authority to take cargo without ye, even if I’d had a navigator.”

  “We’ll load at once. I’ll see the council right away, too. My papers are in order. Are the beacon batteries aboard?”

  Matthews swallowed visibly, his gnarled fingers tracing an intricate scroll pattern on the dirty tablecloth. “No, son, they ain’t. Fact is, I’ve got to tell you some things I’d rather not. Ye got here just in time, but it’s not all clear landings. First off—”

  “Blast me if it isn’t young Rodgers,” roared a bull-like voice as a bulky figure loomed over the table. “Remember me— Nappy Ames? Say, I’m sorry about your dad. Swell chap. One of the best.”

  The man pulled a chair out, sat down so hard it creaked in protest. He was fat, but hard beneath the fat, his face-space tanned, the eyes full of a shrewdness that belied his blustering good humor. Rodgers remembered him vaguely as a wildcatter who hauled ore from Japetus, outermost moon but one of Saturn. His father had written once that Ames had offered to buy a share in the Stardust, although the man already had a ship of his own.

  “You were a kid when I saw you last,” the man bellowed amiably. “Just a raw kid. Now you’re all set, hey? A real navigator. Going to show us old chaps a few things.” He winked broadly at Matthews, who made no response. “Well, I hope you do. We can stand it. Competition’s the life of this racket, I always say.”

  Rodgers forced himself to look at the other squarely. He disliked what he saw, resented Ames’ manner, the offhand reference to his father’s death.

  “I don’t suppose I’ll add to your competition,” he told Ames. “The Stardust is sticking to the Rhea run. So far as I’m concerned, the other moons are all yours.”

  The big man’s eyebrows shot up in exaggerated surprise-He turned to Matthews. “Mean to tell me you haven’t explained things?”

  “Haven’t had the chance, with you buttin’ in,” Matthews growled. “If you’ll get out, maybe I can make ‘em clear.”

  “Sure. Sure. No harm meant.” The big man heaved himself up off the chair. “Sorry, Rodgers, to have butted in too soon. Matthews will tell you my proposition. Better think it over.”

  He walked off with the mincing gait of a spaceman accustomed to low gravity. Rodgers waited until he was out of earshot, then turned to Matthews, who spread his broad hands flat on the tablecloth in a gesture of finality.

  ~ * ~

  “O.K., here it is. The council isn’t transferring the beacon run to you just like that. Ames has bid in for it. Would have had it by now if you weren’t your dad’s son. But you’ll have to race Ames for it.”

  “Race?”

  “That’s it. After all, son, you’re new in this game, even though your dad pioneered on Rhea. The council doesn’t know you. And that beacon’s got to be serviced regular. They know Ames can deliver. But they agreed to wait until you got here to take over the Stardust, and to let you and Ames start neck and neck. First one to reach Rhea and flash a code signal from the beacon gets the contract.”

  “Who else is bidding?”

  “Nobody. Them other wildcatters wouldn’t land on Rhea for all the bismullah the Rheans can dig up. Takes nerve to ground on a moon you can’t stay healthy on more than six hours. Too mu
ch can go wrong. Three of Ames’ men quit, but he’s, got a legal crew left—although I don’t think there’s another spaceman this side of Mars will sign up for the run. Of course, Ames has plenty of guts—he’d go to Hades and back if there was. profit in it. Only reason he never tried to butt in before was that your dad had the beacon contract, which paid eighty percent of the expenses and would make it plenty tough for anybody to undersell him on the bismullah end. Which Ames figures will work two ways—if he can get that contract.”

  “What’s that proposition he talked about?” asked Rodgers.

  Matthews cracked his knuckles. “Didn’t figure you’d be interested in that, son. But maybe you will be, after you’ve applied for cargo. Your dad could get credit any trip for salt and sodium to trade the Rheans. Well, I asked for cargo, but they said no. Trouble is, son, they don’t know ye or what kind of navigator you are. You’ll have to put up the Stardust as security for cargo.”

  “What’s Ames’ proposition?” asked Rodgers again.

  “He’ll buy the Stardust,” Matthews told him, “for eighty thousand credits. And he has the gall to offer to let you captain her on the Japetus run—hauling fertilizer.”

  ~ * ~

  Titan was dwindling behind. Ahead lay the glory of ringed Saturn, a fantasy of the heavens, pale-yellow in color, its surface just now leprous with white spots that betokened a storm in its atmosphere. Against the brilliant disk Rhea was a black dot.

  A smell of hot condenser oil and jet fuel permeated the Stardust. The engines were working hard, but they were giving Ames a good run for his money. The ‘scope still showed his Comet abreast of the Stardust about one hundred miles away. The ships were too closely matched for either to win much advantage on this long leg of the journey. Closer in to Rhea, when landing approaches had to be plotted, better spacemanship would count. Rodgers had worked out that part of the trip with special care.

  The aft bulkhead door creaked open, letting the roar of the engines well out from the after part of the ship. Matthews entered the navigation cubby, his face troubled.

  “We’re pushing her hard, son,” he complained. “The turbos are heatin’. They won’t take any overload on deceleratin’.”

  “Won’t have to. We’ll cut in the gravity screens in reverse.” Rodgers jabbed a thumb port wise. “Ames is shoving his ship, too. And if we don’t win, there won’t be any Stardust left, so far as we’re concerned.”

  “Bad as that, son?”

  “It’s a one-shot proposition, as you expected. I got cargo by putting the ship up as security. If we don’t move it, I’ll have to take a market loss, and there’s nothing to pay it with. Dad spent all his ready cash putting me through school, and was blasting on pretty thin jets financially. But we’ve got the cargo and the beacon batteries and a coded identification tape. All we have to do now is beat Ames.”

  Matthews grunted and vanished into the smelly depths of the engine room. For the fifth time Rodgers checked course and speed.

  The council, he pondered grimly, was getting a good race and a long one. Rhea and Titan had been three days’ journey apart when the two ships started. The smaller moon’s baleful disk was growing ever larger now against the huge one of Saturn. Rhea, second of the planet’s two alien moons, beautiful at this distance, treacherous, deadly. Rodgers was proud that his father had been first deliberately to risk a landing on the green moon, first to establish an understanding with its non-human inhabitants, even though he had had to leave a few hours later, in obedience to the grim warning of his radiation detectors.

  For Rhea was a moon of death to mankind. The other moons—Titan, Japetus, Thetys, Dione, were normal. A ship caught in Saturn’s gravitational net might, with good fortune, land on any of them and await rescue. But Rhea in such a case offered safety with one hand and death with the other. Some theories had it that the green moon was a wanderer from Outside captured by Saturn, whereas the other satellites were born of the planet’s own vast bulk.

  Rhea was dangerously radioactive. Far harder than X-rays, more penetrating even than cosmic rays, its emanations disintegrated brain tissue after a few hours’ exposure. No personal armor, no ship’s hull, offered safety from them. Before the beacon was set up, more than one ship had made its last landing on Rhea to become the sarcophagus of its crew. Biological experiments had since set the maximum safe exposure at six hours. Successive exposures had to be at least two hundred thirty hours apart to avoid a cumulative effect. Hence the beacon to warn ships away from this treacherous haven. Hence also the periodic inspection and servicing of the beacon, at a safe interval of two hundred forty hours.

  ~ * ~

  A sudden hooting of the collision indicator roused Rodgers from these thoughts. Three blasts, followed by four shorter ones—the universal interplanetary danger signal. It was followed by the code signal for Rhea. Few spacemen would continue on the course the Stardust now held.

  He took a reading on the intensity meter, checking its findings against his navigation figures. Twelve hours from Rhea. On the astrogator he deftly set up the co-ordinates for the first landing crew. The machine rumbled, transmitted a series of signals to the course comparator, and directional jets stuttered spasmodically as they forced the Stardust on a new tack. Hardly had she come about when, against the rim of blackness beyond datum’s disk, Rodgers saw the blue-white blasts of the Comet’s jets turning her also. He grinned confidently. It would take more than follow-the-leader tactics to beat the Stardust down.

  A sudden hubbub from beyond the engine room bulkhead brought him up tense. Along with Matthews’ voice, shrill above the heavy step of the spaceman’s boots on the engine-deck catwalk, rose another and strange voice. The door was flung open. A slight, begrimed figure tumbled in after it. Matthews followed, his broad red face clouded with anger.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, sir. A bit of trash I found in the after tank compartment.” His use of formal address, a bit of sheer showmanship for the benefit of the shivering stowaway, made Rodgers smile inwardly. “Shall I clap him in irons, sir?”

  “Presently, Mr. Matthews.” Rodgers turned to the man, and at once felt something of Matthews’ contempt. The fellow was no spaceman, certainly. A ragged beard, bleary eyes, spindly legs that trembled under every thrust of the ship’s directional jets, stamped him as one of those human derelicts common to every port.

  “No irons, mister, please. I didn’t mean no harm,” the man whined. “Just a bit of cop trouble, y’know. Titan was getting too hot for me, so a friend, he tells me how to get away for a bit. I didn’t mean no harm, honest, guv’nor.”

  “You know the rule about stowaways?” asked Rodgers. “Irons in the brig, or the toughest work aboard ship, port to port. Take your pick.”

  “Oh, I’ll work, cap’n. Anythin’ you say, mister. I ain’t afraid of work. It’s drink did me in, nothin’ else.” The man’s manner underwent a subtle change, now that his fate was settled. “You wouldn’t have just a wee drop about, would you, admiral?”

  Matthews clouted him on the back so that he almost fell on his face. “Get below, ye worthless scum,” roared the engine man, “and be thankful if we don’t leave ye to rot on Rhea. Drink indeed it is!”

  In the very act of getting to his feet the stowaway froze, while the color seemed to drain out of his wizened face. “Rhea? Heaven forbid, we ain’t goin’ to Rhea?” he croaked.

  “And does your ticket say otherwise?” asked Matthews. “Did ye maybe get on the wrong ship by mistake? Maybe it’s a luxury liner to Terra ye meant to board all along?”

  “No!” yelped the man, plainly terrified. “You ain’t for Rhea? Not Rhea, mister? He never said you was for Rhea. Japetus, he said. It ain’t too late to head for Japetus, is it?”

  “No, sir,” snorted Matthews. “We’ll change course immediately, now you’ve ordered it. Get below!”

  Rodgers lifted a hand. “Hold a moment, Mr. Matthews. I’d like to know where this man got his misinformation. Surely every soul at Titan port
knows the Stardust and her run. Who told you Japetus?”

  “This friend—we call him Charlie—who told me how to ditch the cops,” panted the man. “I ain’t long on Titan—I’m from Inside. He wasn’t wrong, was he, commodore? You’re for Japetus, sure?”

  “Rhea,” said Rodgers. “Course is set for her now.”

  The stowaway’s face went a trifle whiter under parchment-yellow skin. “He didn’t tell me that. He lied, the dirty—”

  “What have you done?” snapped Rodgers.

  “I don’t get you, commodore.”

  “What were you put on this ship to do? Talk fast. It’ll soon be too late to alter course.”