Spaceman Go Home

by Milton Lesser

  “Later. Frank will tell you. We are almost there.” Andy leaned forward in his seat and peered out the window. The jet-copter had dropped closer to Earth. Andy saw the flat tundra, a range of low pine-covered hills, a little valley beyond them with the glistening silver thread of a river twisting through it … and in the valley surrounded by row after row of tiny rectangles that Andy realized were small buildings, a single enormous spaceship.

  It stood, tail down, near the girders of its gantry, proud slim nose pointing at the sky. It seemed poised and expectant, as if ready to blast off momentarily.

  “That is the old ‘Thule HI’,” Freya said. “Your brother’s ship on his last command. An accident was arranged when it was sent to a European base for dismantling, and the authorities think ‘Thule III’ lies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, as you can see, it is here. In it we will win our way back to space again.”

  “A single spaceship, against the rockets of the Monitor Satellites?”

  “Yes, Andy. A single spaceship. But we have a weapon Reed Ballinger never thought of.”

  “Then you are going to blast your way back into space,” Andy said, trying unsuccessfully to check the anger in his voice.

  “Perhaps you can call it that. ‘Thule III’ has been renamed. Now it is the ‘Nobel,’ named for the nineteenth century Swede, Alfred Nobel, who gave the world dynamite and lived to regret it and to establish the prizes given in his name.”

  “Nobel?” Andy repeated the man’s name. It sounded familiar.

  “Yes. And the most coveted prize conferred in his name was the Nobel Peace Prize. That will be our secret weapon, Andy.”

  “What will? I don’t understand.”

  “Ballinger showed the Galaxy the violence we human beings are capable of and, if he has his way, will do so again. Nobel invented dynamite in the pre-atomic age and lived to see the world ravaged by terrible wars his invention made possible. Alfred Nobel established his peace prize to honor the greatest achievements of mankind in his time.” Freya finished, “The ship which is his namesake will take into space a record of humanity’s proudest achievements. Not achievements for war and destruction, Andy, but for peace. Our secret weapon will be the history of mankind. Despite the Genghis Khans and Neros and Hitlers and Stalins and Ballingers, we think it is a good history and a glorious one. We will offer it to the Galaxy as our answer to the Edict.”

  Freya was breathless when she finished speaking. A moment later, the little jet-copter landed in the shadow of the huge spaceship “Nobel.”

  A single figure came running toward them, taller than Andy but not so lean.

  It was Frank.

  “Just stand there a minute. Let me look at you. By space, you’ve grown,” Frank said exuberantly in his deep voice. “You’re almost as tall as I am. Stand still, will you?” Frank grinned. “Are you going to slobber all over me or something? Let me have a look at you.” Andy didn’t say anything. He couldn’t talk. He pounded Frank’s arms, one hand on each side of ^him, until his brother said, “Hey, go easy. They were broken once.” Then he stood back and just stared at Frank and had a wild impulse to throw his head back and laugh. But he knew if he did that he’d probably bawl like a baby. Finally he managed to say, “I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead. I thought… .”

  “I get the idea,” Frank said, still grinning. “You thought I was dead.” Andy was grinning, too, by then, and he felt the tears on his cheeks, but he didn’t care. Frank turned to Freya and said, “This specimen of composed teen-ager is my brother Andy.”

  “As if I didn’t know,” said Freya with a smile. “You practically look like twins.”

  “Who, us?” Frank said. “Sometimes I almost feel old enough to be his great-grandfather. Why, I was all of eleven years old when he uttered his first cry. Nobody could understand it, except of course me. What he was bawling about was that he wanted to go to space.

  Freya laughed. “Two men, and they are so happy to see each other again that one can hardly talk and the other can’t stop talking long enough to… .”

  “Oh yeah,” Frank interrupted her. “A minor detail I forgot to mention, sprout. This Viking-style woman over here is Freya Olafson. One of these days now— say as soon as we clear up this Edict business—she’s going to be Freya Marlow.”

  “Can you do it?” Andy said.

  “Well, she claims she’ll have me.”

  “No, I mean the Edict. Can you … did you say you were going to get married?”

  “Don’t look so surprised, sprout. It happens to the best of spacemen.”

  It was almost midnight. The sun hung low on the horizon but did not, and would not, dip below it. Here only fifty miles below North Cape, the northernmost tip of Scandinavia that looked out across the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole, the sun remained above the horizon for more than six weeks from early June to late July. Now with its lambent light streaming in through the windows of Frank’s room, Andy and his brother and Lambert Strayer were talking. They had been at it for hours, and instead of feeling sleepy as he should have, Andy felt exhilarated.

  “… can imagine how I felt when I received word that Frank was still alive,” Strayer said. “My job was placement of the reaming Cadets, not just at White Sands but all over the world. I was always on the move, and even though the base here in Norway has an underground communications network on every continent, it’s good but it’s not that good. So by the time the news that Frank was still alive caught up with me, you’d already left White Sands, Andy. I tried to find you but couldn’t.”

  Strayer shrugged. “You’ll have to forgive me, boy. Not knowing any different myself, I told you your brother was dead. Add that to the fact that you looked so … well, so unsettled and mixed up, as if you didn’t care what happened to you, and you wound up doing what so many ex-Cadets did. You joined one of Reed Ballinger’s camps.”

  “But why didn’t Ruy Alvarez tell me Frank was still alive?” Andy protested.

  “You’ll have to forgive Captain Alvarez for another reason. He was concerned about you. From what you said he was afraid you still had strong ties with some of Ballinger’s men. And Captain Alvarez is dedicated, boy. He took it on himself to decide that a little more uncertainty would help you. Though he could have told you in Mexico that Frank was still alive, he figured a dramatic meeting, like the one you had today, would go a long way toward opening your eyes.” “From what you’ve seen so far, sprout,” Frank asked, “how do we shape up compared to Ballinger?” “Why ask me?1 I”m just… .”

  “Freya said you were ready to accuse us of taking a page out of Ballinger’s book,” Frank reminded him.

  “Sure, but I didn’t know then what I know now. Ballinger takes ex-Cadet pilots like my friend Turk and makes gunners out of them. From what I’ve been able to gather, you’re collecting a kind of … uh, graphic history of humanity’s achievements. Right?” “Right,” said Lambert Strayer.

  “Then I guess that answers your question.”

  Frank said, “They’re repairing the Star Brain, sprout. When it’s in business again, we want to be there. We’ve assembled all the top men in all the sciences and arts who’ll listen to us. Each one is preparing a summary of what’s been done in his own field through five thousand years of history. They’re going to help us tell Earth’s real story to the Star Brain, because like us they’re convinced if they’re just given the chance to tell it, no single rash act of a Captain Ballinger could possibly cancel out all that’s worth-while in the past, present, and future of our planet. If we’re right and if they’re right … we hope the Star Brain will give us another chance in space.” Frank scowled. “Don’t mind the speech, Andy. I’m all wrapped up in this business.”

  “After all,” Lambert Strayer said, “the one thing the

  Star Brain fears more than anything else is war on a vast interstellar scale. That’s why we’ve been ruled out of space. What we hope to prove is that Earth’s left its days of warfare far behin
d.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Andy asked. “Such as what?” Frank said.

  “Reed Ballinger. If his fleet blasts off, they’ll undo whatever good you can do. As far as the Star Brain’s concerned, they’ll prove the Edict was justified.” “There’s one thing you’re forgetting,” Frank said. “The Monitors, sprout. If a single ship like the ‘Nobel’ ventured into space, they’d blast it to dust in seconds. But if Ballinger’s fleet blasts off and we time our takeoff to match his, Ballinger’s ships would decoy the Monitors. We’d have a chance to get through.”

  The idea hadn’t occurred to Andy, but now he could see the logic in it. Still, he thought, there’d be trouble, and he voiced his objection aloud. “But if some of Ballinger’s ships get through, and if they attack the Star Brain again… .”

  “Whoa, slow down,” Frank said. “First place, Ballinger’s fleet probably will get through. If we didn’t think it would, we couldn’t go ahead with our plans. We don’t want to see thousands of ex-spacemen slaughtered needlessly by the Monitors, even if they are Ballinger’s crews.”

  “The Monitors are geared to stop minor violations,” Lambert Strayer said. “A single ship, two or three of them perhaps, but not a ship armed to the teeth and certainly not a fleet of more than four hundred ships.” “Ballinger’s whole fleet,” Frank pointed out, “is armed to the teeth. Isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Andy agreed.

  “Okay. They take care of the Monitors for our own passage. They wouldn’t have killed anyone, because the Monitors are not manned.”

  “Back to somebody forgetting something,” Andy protested. “What about the fleet that guards the Star Brain? It’s manned.”

  “Sure,” Frank said. “The Star Brain’s going to give us trouble. It has, all along, since the Capellan dispute, even forgetting Reed Ballinger for the moment.” “What do you mean?” Andy asked.

  “Normally, the Brain maintains radio communication through subspace with every civilized world in the Galaxy. But after the Brain ruled in favor of Capella and against Earth—this was before Ballinger bombed it, remember—Earth sent through a protest. It was ignored. We tried again, and again the Brain didn’t answer us. From its point of view it had no reason to: its decisions are irrevocable. Then along came Ballinger with his bomb, and then the Brain was put out of commission. Obviously, if it ignored our protest before Ballinger came along, it has a hundred times the reason to ignore any radio message we send now that the Edict’s been enforced. We are outlaws here on Earth. As far as the Star Brain is concerned, we’re just the little planet that isn’t there.

  “So the only way we can get through to the Star Brain is, literally, by getting through to it in space. And of course the guardian fleet is manned. We’ll just have to take our chances with it. But remember this: we hope that by the time we get there every ship in Ballinger’s fleet will be on our side.”

  “You’re kidding,” Andy blurted. “How’s that going to happen?”

  “Like this. Ballinger needs all the recruits he can get. Some of his defectors are going to start filtering back to his bases. When the time comes, they’ll take over his ships.”

  “They will?” Andy said.

  And Frank nodded. “You will, sprout. Because you’re going to be one of them.”

  Chapter 9 Peace Plans

  The high tundra country above the Arctic Circle had never seen anything like it. Even the sun, here in this summer of perpetual daylight, seemed to stand still in awe and watch.

  Mankind was assembling the strangest weapon ever devised.

  In the bustling camp south of Hammerfest on the North Cape, under the thrusting spire of the waiting spaceship “Nobel,” scientists from all over the world had come in answer to Frank Marlow’s and Lambert Strayer’s summons. Their task: in a few short weeks to assemble a history of humanity to show the Star Brain and the other civilized races of the Galaxy as proof that Earth had earned its place in the concert of worlds.

  Andy was put to work under a small, bespectacled Austrian named Dr. Seys. He had a chirping, birdlike voice and infectious energy and enthusiasm. He had been an expert in Greek and Roman civilization at the University of Vienna.

  “They tell me you know some archaeology, yes?” he asked Andy on their first meeting.

  “Well, sir, just a little.”

  “A little? Bah, there is no such thing. Either you know archaeology, or you do not know archaeology. Would you fly with me if I said I knew a little astogation?”

  “No, but… .” Andy started.

  “Is archaeology any different?”

  “No, but they said you needed a technician who… .”

  “I cannot make an archaeologist of you. Do not expect me to make one of you in a few days. Are you clever with your hands?”

  “Well, I… .”

  “We are building a scale model of the Acropolis, the High City, of Athens, as it was at the end of the fourth century B.C. By then, of course, my young friend, the light of Athens had begun to wane, but there were still some buildings on the Acropolis which … did you say you were clever with your hands or not?”

  “You didn’t give me a chance to say so,” Andy told Dr. Seys boldly, and the little man smiled.

  “Yes, that is true. Indeed I didn’t. The model is of plaster, Mr. Morrow.”

  “Marlow, Dr. Seys.”

  “Morrell, Morrow, what is the difference? The plaster model will be built to an exact scale of one to one-thousand. We want it to be perfect, and it will be perfeet. Do you know why I have agreed to do this?” Before Andy could answer, Dr. Seys chirped on, “After all, you must realize that I left Vienna in the middle of the summer semester, and my students do not even know where I have gone or why. Well, Mr. Morrell, don’t just stand there gaping. Do you know why I have agreed to help?”

  “No, sir,” Andy managed to say before Dr. Seys was talking again.

  “Because of the hundred worlds that have produced a reasonably high order of civilization in the Galaxy, we know absolutely nothing about the history of any of them. It is as if they have all appeared, full blown, with the advent of the interstellar spaceship.” Dr. Seys was pacing in a rapid circle around Andy with his small, frail hands clasped behind his back. “Spaceships, bah. I hate them. They bring alien peoples together, they bridge unthinkable chasms of space—a hundred light years, two hundred, a thousand—and what do we know of each other? We know that the Arcturans can produce cobalt bombs as deadly as ours. We know that the Sirians have a vast store of nerve gas to contaminate the atmosphere of any world foolish enough to attack Sirius.”

  “Yes, but… .”

  “We do not know one solitary fact about the past history of the Arcturans. We know nothing of the Sirians as a civilization. We do not know their past greatness or their future hopes. We do not know if their civilizations are as old as ours or older or only

  Chapter 10 War Plans

  AT THE secret spaceport in Mexico, Turk was sweating.

  He stood rigidly at attention in a little office just off the tarmac of the field. He was facing Captain Ballinger’s desk, and behind Ballinger, who sat for a long time studiously ignoring him, the dazzling tropic sun burned in through the window.

  It was an age-old trick. With the sunlight behind Ballinger, every expression that crossed Turk’s face would be clear to ^him, but all Turk could see was the ex-Space Captain’s silhouette.

  The silhouette went on pretending Turk wasn’t there, and in the stifling heat Turk felt the sweat drip. ping off his chin. Turk didn’t know why he’d been sent for. He’d been standing stiffly at attention for half an hour, waiting to find out.

  Finally Ballinger leaned back in his chair. “The name is Ayoub, right?”

  “Backy Ayoub, yes, sir,” said Turk.

  More silence. Then:

  “A citizen of Turkey, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “Lieutenant Odet tells me you’re making fine prog
ress in gunnery.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, sir.”

  The silhouette leaned forward. When its arms moved out of the direct sunlight, Turk could see the markings of a senior Space Captain on the sleeves.

  “Do you like it here, Ayoub?”

  “Begging your pardon, sir?”

  “Do you like it here?”

  “No,” Turk said frankly, and Ballinger laughed. “Then why do you stay?”

  “You said you’d lead us back to space, sir.”

  “And you want to return to space?”

  “More than anything under the sun.”

  “Why don’t you like it here?”

  For a while Turk said nothing. “1 don’t know if 1 ought to say,” he finally answered.

  Another laugh from Ballinger. Turk wished he could see the Captain’s face. “Go ahead, and stand at ease.”

  Gratefully, Turk stood at ease. “Well, I guess it’s a little like being in prison. We’re all cut off from the world; we can’t go anywhere; we’re … like, living in a vacuum.”

  “That’s because we’re waiting to go the one place we want to and the one place we’re not permitted … back to space. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.” Turk added boldly, “It’s why I’m still here.”

  “You would have fled otherwise?”

  “Escape is the word we use, sir. It’s happened before.”

  Captain Ballinger sighed. “I know it has. That’s why you’re here.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  There was a long pause. “What was the name of the Cadet you bunked with on Luna?”

  “Marlow, sir. Andy Marlow.”

  “To use your word and not mine, he escaped last week.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you know he was going?”

  “Do I have to answer that?”

  Ballinger stood up abruptly and came out from his shield of sunlight. It was a calculated move; he looked every inch the spaceman, tall, ruggedly handsome, his face severe, but the suggestion of a smile on his lips. In a friendly voice he said, “Cadet Ayoub, nothing you say here will prejudice you. That’s a promise. Only silence will.”