Spaceman Go Home

by Milton Lesser

  He moved among the hammocks. His eyes caught and held Andy’s. “I see we both made it,” he said softly, and then went to his assigned hammock. Across the room Charlie Sands was staring at Andy.

  All Andy could do was wait. If Gault wanted to stop him, wanted to betray him and his mission before blast-off, he had to act within the next few seconds. Instead, he was busy with the buckles of his straps. He grinned again, this time straight at Andy.

  “Spacemen, check your hammocks,” blared the amplifier.

  Mechanically, Andy checked out his straps and buckles. The sight of Gault had sent him plummeting from preblast-off exhilaration to despair. Why Gault was playing a waiting game, though, he didn’t know.

  Except for the occasional creak of a leather strap, there was no sound in the hammock room.

  The amplifier blared:

  “Blast-off minus fifteen… . fourteen… . thirteen… . twelve… . eleven … . ten… .”

  Seconds after blast-off, they would reach escape velocity and the first-stage rocket would burn out. Seconds after that, they would be within range of the Monitor Satellites. Perhaps, thought Andy, Gault was waiting to denounce him until after the battle was won.

  “… five… . four… . three… . two… . one… . OFF!”

  There was a whine, and then a whining roar, and then a screaming banshee howl through the thin skin of the “Goddard.” Andy felt a huge unseen hand thrust him back and down against the acceleration hammock, felt the fingers contorting the skin and flesh of his face, felt the tremendous pressure against his ribs and arms and legs… .

  The “Goddard,” along with all the ships of Reed Ballinger’s fleet, rising from their pads at all the secret bases, was spacebound.

  Chapter 14 Battle in Space

  “SPACEMEN, man your battle stations!”

  They were in space, and weightless in free fall. Andy unstrapped the buckles and removed the hammock straps. The brutal pressure of acceleration had vanished, as had the screech of the thinning upper atmosphere rushing past the hull of the “Goddard.”

  As an astrogator, Andy’s real job wouldn’t begin until they were ready to plot a subspace orbit for the “Goddard.” Destination: Canopus and the Star Brain, hundreds of light years across the Galaxy. On a normal ship of the line, Andy knew, an astrogator would have been supercargo, checking out the crates of supplies in the hold, ascertaining what damage blast-off had done, repairing it, making himself generally useful until his unique training as an astrogator was needed.

  But the “Goddard” was preparing for battle. Weightless, Andy floated up from his hammock. He turned lazily against what was now the ceiling of the hammock room, though up, down, and sideways were meaningless terms of orientation in a spaceship in free fall.

  “First priority,” blared Ballinger’s voice, “gunners. Gunners, man your rockets.”

  Andy saw Turk and a dozen other Cadets swim through air toward the hatches.

  “Second priority, rocketeers.”

  Another eight Cadets swam from the hammock room. As rocketeers, Andy knew, they would man the small auxiliary rockets used to correct the “Goddard’s” orbit in normal space. In battle, they would pit their skill against enemy missiles, their fingers darting over the keys of the firing boards, constantly altering the “Goddard’s” course, making it a difficult target.

  “Third priority, radar technicians.”

  The radar technicians floated to their waiting screens, where the flashing green pips would herald the arrival of the rest of the fleet … and of the Monitor Satellites.

  “Fourth priority, astrogators. Astrogators, man the viewscopes.”

  Instinctively, Andy found himself obeying the command. The viewscopes, he knew, were refracting telescopes mounted flush with the hull of the “Goddard.” Their lenses would be adjusted automatically for distance and direction by the radar screens; so it would be Andy’s job, as an astrogator, to follow the course of the battle in space, to announce when a hit had been made, when a Satellite had been destroyed, when—to confirm the radar findings—a missile was launched at the “Goddard.”

  Andy saw Lieutenant Odet ahead of him. “Have I been assigned a scope?” he called.

  “We can use a man starboard. Follow me.”

  Andy swam after Lieutenant Odet, wondering how long it would take the Monitor Satellites to respond to the infrared warning device that would send them homing in on the ships of Reed Ballinger’s illegal fleet.

  All at once, on the viewscope, what had been blurry dots swam into focus. Andy counted twenty of them, twenty projectile shapes hurtling toward the “Goddard.”

  “Do they reflect sunlight?” Lieutenant Odet asked behind him, after Andy announced the approaching fleet.

  “No, sir. They’re dark.”

  Lieutenant Odet was correlating viewscope data and radioing it to the gunnery rooms. Andy could picture Turk and the other gunners waiting tensely at their firing controls. Triumphantly, Lieutenant Odet said, “Then they’re our drones. They’re overage ships and crewless. They’re fueled with too much liquid oxygen so their exhaust is hotter than ours. They ought to attract the satellites like a magnet attracts iron filings. They’re expendable, and while they’re being shot out of space by the Satellites we’ll go to work.”

  The image changed again as the radar technicians, unseen, altered direction and focal length of Andy’s scope. Andy saw another fleet, fifty projectile shapes at least, silver in the sunlight and against the velvety black of space.

  “Fifty ships,” Andy reported. “Silver.” He looked again and saw behind them, blurred and not quite in focus, the green-gray globe of Earth a hundred thousand miles away. “Coming from Earth’s day side.”

  “Our Asian contingents,” Lieutenant Odet said. “We had three bases in Asia.”

  After the Asian, the South American and Oceanic contingents appeared. And behind the thirty-odd ships from Oceania, Andy saw hundreds of midge-like silver motes in pursuit.

  “The Monitors,” Lieutenant Odet said nervously, and the information was relayed to gunnery.

  Now that the battle was about to be joined, Andy wondered if he would remain at the scope to see its outcome. A few words from Harry Gault, he realized, and he would be revealed as an agent provocateur.

  In the first stage of the battle, the crew of the “Goddard” were no more than spectators.

  Andy saw the Monitor Satellites fan out in long columns as they neared the drone fleet. The columns formed a net to ensnare the drones, and one by one, as atomic-warhead missiles homed in on them, the dark ships disappeared in brilliant flashes of light and energy.

  Suddenly there was a lurch as the “Goddard,” cruising at two hundred miles a second in free fall, changed direction. In his scope, Andy saw the fifty ships of the Asian fleet wheel sunward in a long double column. Motes that were Satellites and black projectiles that were drone ships went out of focus and then grew larger, silhouetted against the glare of the sun.

  Reed Ballinger’s Mexican fleet was now swiftly approaching the automated battle with the “Goddard” as vanguard.

  The next half-hour was one Andy would never forget. The ships swam ever closer, and soon the Satellites became gray globes worrying the bigger ships of the drone fleet like a swarm of bees. As their position and distance changed, the scope kept going in and out of focus.

  Captain Ballinger’s voice blared: “Gunners, fire at will!”

  Salvo after salvo of rockets streaked away from the “Goddard,” each carrying its lethal atomic nose cone, each orbited and triggered to meet a Satellite in collision course. As each salvo left, the “Goddard” rocked and swayed in reaction. Andy had to strap himself to a stanchion near the viewscope.

  First one Satellite and then another … and then scores … disappeared in a burst of raw energy. The Monitors broke their net-like formation about the drone ships.

  “Monitors heading this way!” Andy heard one of the other astrogators shout, and the image on his ow
n scope changed so that he could see them, too.

  At least a hundred Satellites streaked toward the “Goddard” and the other ships of the Mexican fleet.

  They were spectators no longer.

  “Two o’clock forward!” Andy would cry, and Lieutenant Odet would relay the message to gunnery and the Satellite homing in on the “Goddard” would be blown from space.

  “Three o’clock forward. They’ve fired a salvo.”

  And the “Goddard” would shudder as its direction was changed, and changed again.

  The sweat poured off Andy’s face. His eyes could barely follow the rapid sequence of images on the viewscope. He saw more Monitors blown from space; saw a collision between a Monitor and the ship next in line behind the “Goddard”; saw three ships of the Mexican fleet blown apart by the Monitors’ missiles; saw clear space and then the last of the drones enter the scope at six o’clock and the Monitors enter at seven in interception-course, saw the dark drones blasted asunder.

  His voice became hoarse, his ribs ached because the full weight of his body under three or more G’s pulled against the stanchion strap every time the “Goddard” altered course. If they were hit, he knew, there might be a micro-second in which to register disaster, a micro-second and no more. It seemed as if he had been glued forever to his station at the viewscope. His mouth was dry. He found it hard to swallow.

  “… Satellites,” he heard after a long time, and again, clearer, “No more Satellites.”

  He watched the scope images changing. Drones and Satellites alike had been swept from space, but the Ballinger fleets were in ragged formation.

  The command went out: “Fleet Captains, report your losses.”

  The grim news trickled back. Oceania, six ships; Asia, twenty-three; Mexico, eleven; Africa… .

  Reed Ballinger himself made the announcement. “Men,” and his voice was husky with emotion, “we’ve won. We’re in space again, where we belong. To get here, our brave companions on fifty-eight ships perished. But they did not die in vain, for the way to Canopus and the Star Brain is now open. And our remaining ships are more than enough to blast the Brain’s guardians out of space when we get there.”

  Andy had a terrible sense of loss. Fifty-eight ships, with how many men aboard each? Dying so that Reed Ballinger could return to space against the law… .

  Abruptly, Andy was thinking of the “Nobel.” Had it managed to get past the Monitors, too? Or, weaponless, had it been destroyed in battle?

  “… Ballinger deceived us,” Lieutenant Odet was saying bitterly. “The ‘Goddard’ was a first-rate ship, fast and armed to the teeth. Maybe we had fifty like it, and they’re among the survivors. But in the last few days, ships as overage as the drones began to join the fleets assembling at the spacefields. We needed them, Ballinger said.” He added bleakly, “We needed them just as we needed the drones, as decoys. They added to the size of our fleet, sure; but Ballinger sacrificed their crews so the rest of us could get through.”

  “Didn’t he tell you he… .”

  Lieutenant Odet cut Andy off, “1 guess he did what he had to do. That’s all. 1 talk too much.”

  Andy unstrapped himself from the stanchion. His fingers were trembling with reaction. When he started to turn, he saw Harry Gault and two Cadets behind him.

  Gault said, not wasting words, “You’re under arrest, Marlow.”

  Andy didn’t have to ask why. Nor did he have to ask why Gault had waited until the battle was won. They’d needed every man they could get to fight it.

  The two Cadets took Andy’s arms. They wouldn’t meet his eyes. One of them looked as if he were about to speak and then changed his mind.

  They led Andy away from the viewscope.

  Even if the “Nobel” had managed to get through, there was nothing he could do now to help Captain Strayer and Frank.

  Chapter 15 Prisoners

  Even though he was locked in a small storeroom with no windows and a single faint fluoro-tube burning in the ceiling, Andy knew the exact moment when the “Goddard,” apparently beyond Luna’s orbit, cut in its subspace drive and went shimmering into subspace.

  Shimmering was the only word for it, though this time Andy didn’t see the effect which, looking out aboard the “Goddard,” would have been to see the stars of space blurred and even near-by Luna, the Earth, and the Sun would have gone out of focus, until suddenly all would be gone, along with the deep black of space, to be replaced by the murky shifting grayness of subspace.

  As a Cadet on Luna, Andy, squinting into a small Academy viewscope, had more than once watched an outbound interstellar ship suddenly shimmer and become insubstantial, like a double exposure on a photographic plate or a slow dissolve on a motion picture film, until it was gone.

  Like so many of the world’s greatest scientific discoveries, starting with magnetism and electricity, subspace drive still was not understood clearly. This much was known: in order to bridge the unthinkable abysses between the stars, even the speed of laggard light was too slow, for though light traveled at 186,000 miles per second, it still took 4.3 years to reach Earth from Alpha Centauri, the nearest star; and the distance to stars like Deneb, Antares, and Canopus was measured in hundreds of light years.

  Some theorists claimed the subspace drive employed the distance-spanning attributes of time without recourse to the one attribute which would have made interstellar travel impossible: duration. Others claimed that subspace was a completely separate and alien space-time continuum, where the natural laws of time, space, and motion did not apply as we understood them. Still others avoided any ultimate explanations of what they claimed was essentially inexplicable and merely said that the atoms of a spaceship, and everything aboard it, that entered subspace were speeded up in their inter- and intra-atomic relations.

  All agreed that, by analogy, to travel through subspace was like avoiding the linear distance between two points on opposite ends of a sheet of paper by the process of folding the paper exactly in half and thus placing the points adjacent to each other. The analogy further said that if a sheet of paper can be considered a two-dimensional space-time continuum and the real world a three-dimensional space-time continuum, then subspace could be considered a continuum of four dimensions. Just as the third dimension of thick­ness was used to bridge the distance between two points on opposite ends of a sheet of paper by folding it, so the unknown fourth dimension of the subspace continuum was used to bridge the infinitely vaster distance between the stars.

  Most important, Andy knew, was the fact that subspace worked. You entered it at a point in normalspace, traveled incredible distances in an elapsed time of just a few days, and emerged hundreds of light years away.

  In this case, destination, Canopus.

  Where the Star Brain would be bombed a second time, this time thoroughly.

  After the transit into subspace, Charlie Sands, off duty until the next watch, gathered a group of his ex­ Luna classmates in his cabin; Charlie had been the Cadet Captain of his class. The only comparative stranger among them was Turk, whom Charlie Sands had included in the council of war because he knew Turk and Andy were friends.

  “Men,” Charlie Sands began, “you all know that Andy Marlow joined the crew of the ‘Goddard’ at the last minute. What you don’t know is that he came here on direct orders from the commanders of Project Nobel.”

  “What’s Project Nobel?” someone asked.

  Charlie Sands explained. He finished, “So you see, I’ve been in contact, through Ruy Alvarez, with the Project Nobel people all along. But Andy’s been working with them on the inside. He was sent here to do a job, and it’s got to be done. Both Captain Ballinger and Captain Strayer, who commands Project Nobel, want Earthmen to return to space. The only difference is, Ballinger wants war and Strayer wants peace: Charlie Sands took a deep breath and looked at each of his friends in turn. “If Andy Marlow remains a prisoner, Captain Ballinger will get his way. If we free Andy Marlow, there’s a chance Captain Stray
er will get his way.”

  Someone demanded, “You really think the Star Brain will pay any attention to a history of Earth? Do you think it would even give Captain Strayer a chance to present his history?”

  “Captain Strayer thinks so. And you already saw a sample of what we can expect if Ballinger gets his way—his way being war from here to Canopus and back.”

  “But what can Marlow do, even if we set free?” someone else asked.

  “There’s only one way to find out, by freeing him,” Charlie Sands said. “Are you with me?”

  One after another, the ex-Cadets agreed to follow wherever Charlie Sands led. All of them had just witnessed the first space battle since the advent of the Galactic Confederacy; companions of theirs, boys they had lived with and studied with and played with on Luna, had died. If Marlow knew another way out, they said, they were all for it.

  Only Turk held back. He was scowling, and his broad shoulders were slumped. “Look,” he said slowly, choosing his words with an effort because the ideas they represented came hard, “now that we’re back in space, do you want to stay or be exiled to Earth again?”

  “Of course we want to stay,” Charlie Sands said. “We belong in space. We’re spacemen.”

  “Captain Ballinger led us this far,” Turk pointed out. “This is probably the hardest speech I ever made in my life. Andy’s my friend. My best friend, I guess, and I’d do just about anything for him. But that’s just it; he’s my friend, and I know him better than any of the rest of you do. What I’m trying to say, Andy Marlow’s, well, a dreamer. He’s an idealist. In theory maybe he has the best ideas in the world; when we first entered the Academy together, they said he was the smartest kid in the class. They made class Captain right away, and… .”

  “Just like they made Charlie,” one of the ex-Cadets said. “And Charlie doesn’t look like a dreamer to you, does he?”

  “That’s what I’m getting at. Andy was only class Captain about three months. Any Cadet would have given his eyeteeth for the honor, and Andy resigned it during the first semester. You know what he said? He said he didn’t come to Luna to wear a fancy uniform and lead his classmates on parade. He said he came to Luna to be a spaceman, and that was a fulltime job. But half the time that meant, for Andy, sort of daydreaming and staring off into space and wondering what the other races of the Galaxy were like.” “I don’t see anything wrong with that,” Charlie Sands said, a little coldly.