Collected Short Fiction, page 404
Her quick smile, and the eager pressure of her arms, were all the answer that he needed.
Trent was young again, and all things were possible.
He kissed her.
“I knew,” she breathed. “Even when you were old, and I was in the bottle!”
THE END
Racketeers in the Sky
His name, appropriately enough, was Bull. Pompous and round and rosy-faced, he was the King of Quacks—a chiseling faker who had built a patent-medicine racket into a cosmic swindle. Then came the moment when death tapped him on the shoulder, and he knew he had a whole life to pay for. An unforgettably powerful novelet
I
DR. BULL was swimming in his private pool, on Taurus, when the space attacker was discovered. The crystal-walled pool, on the doctor’s infinitesimal, independent planetoid, was proportionately as big as a respectable sea.
Dr. Bull was a stout little man, with a smooth pink globe of a head. He had a clean professional white beard, merry blue eyes, and a considerable paunch. Soft pink flesh bulged out above his swimming trunks—which were embroidered with gold, Doctor Bull. Altogether, he suggested an incongruously aged and weighty cupid.
Under the sky’s depthless, inky blue, ruby tiles and gold rails glittered luxuriously. The white Sun struck with invigorating force through the thin, cool synthetic atmosphere. A graviscreen under the pool halved the force of the gravity generators at the tiny moon’s core, so that one swam with an exhilarating and luxurious ease.
Oblivious of the shadow of menace approaching, Dr. Bull was floating on the warm bright water, watching his companion in the pool. She was a svelte blond nurse, in a green bathing suit. At forty-seven, Dr. Bull still possessed an acute appreciation, and Vera Frame was worthy of it.
The Sun glinted on her limbs as she dove. She came up, and made a playful splash. But a mellow gong had chimed over the pool, and the little doctor’s eyes went to a hooded telescreen above the water. The nurse looked over his shoulder—wondering a little at his continued interest in a telecast that had been repeated, with minor variations, every hour on the hour for thirteen years.
The dark screen lit with the red outline of an extremely masculine bull, branded with the zodiacal sign. That faded into the neatly bearded face of Dr. Bull himself, telecast from a prepared sound-film.
“Hello, all the planets!”
The little doctor’s canned voice was brisk and friendly. Above the starched-looking white beard, his blues eyes twinkled confidently through gold-rimmed glasses. (He didn’t really need the glasses, but they lent an air. The beard was important, too. In the old days, before he could grow his own, he had used a false Vandyke to launch the original Dr. Bull’s Interplanetary Carnival, Clinic, and Medicine Show.)
The image smiled on the screen, with professional cheer. “This is Dr. Bull, the Planeteer, bringing you good news and good health over TAU, the most powerful telecast station in the system—good news of how Taurium and my radiogenic reactivation treatment can bring good health to you.”
The telecast power of TAU, indeed, was calculated to penetrate the ionosphere of every planet. Patrol spacemen and ICC officials raged at its roaring, image-blurring interference. But meteor miners and remote colonists depended on it for news of the system, and came to regard Dr. Bull as a crusading saint. Any inhabitants of the hypothetical worlds of the nearer stars were doubtless becoming familiar with the astounding curative powers of Taurium and the radigenic reactivation treatment.
Dr. Bull was in very bad odor with the Interplanetary Medical Association.
The IMA claimed that Taurium was common mud, manufactured from plain water and the blue clay of Taurus—and now largely adulterated with clay from Earth, since the extraordinary demand had threatened to use up the entire little planet. Outraged and impotent officials of the Interplanetary Communications Commission made unkind puns on. his name. He had been forbidden to practice medicine or operate a telecast transmitter anywhere within the jurisdiction of the Solar League.
But—
The pink little man floating contentedly beside the feline nurse was the only physician in the system—if, in defiance of the baffled IMA, you agreed that he was a physician—who was also undisputed dictator of a sovereign planet.
TAURUS once had been a dead and useless rock. Exiled from the League, by the combined wrath of the IMA, the ICC, and the Sun Patrol, Dr. Bull had spent hundreds of millions, to convert the bleak asteroid into “the moon of health.” In a shaft drilled to the little world’s heart, planetary engineers installed gravity equipment and geodesic drive.
After Dr. Bull had pulled sufficient strings to insure the continued independence of Taurus, they had steered it into a new orbit, as Earth’s inner moon. Now the naked stone was clothed with lawns and groves and gardens. Taurus glittered with expensive modernistic hospitals, clinics, hotels, casinos. Dr. Bull was always coining new descriptive slogans for it. Jewel of Space. Hub of Fun. Wonder-moon.
To the relief of the handsome nurse, he touched a golden button on the wall of the pool, to shut off the telecast receiver. After a few thousand repetitions, even the most effective spiel loses novelty. Floating, with his eyes closed, Dr. Bull sighed contentedly. Softly, he murmured three words:
“Imagination. Audacity. Victory.”
He was thinking back to the very beginning of his career—when he was just a six-dollar-a-week soda jerker, in a dusty small-town drug store, back on Earth, studying a mail-order course in dramatics, propped out of the view of his patrons behind the counter. Dramatics, he had decided, was more important than pharmaceutics.
Imagination. Audacity. Victory.
Those three words, he was thinking, were the key to his success. Maybe he could work them into the telecast. They had earned him just about everything that any man could want.
It was then that the bad news arrived, brought by a gaunt gray man in the silver uniform of the Planeteers—so Dr. Bull called the two hundred men who formed the military and police force of his private planet. General Berg burst furiusly through the crystal door at the end of the pool, shouting:
“Oh, doctor!”
Dr. Bull lifted his pink round head out of the water. His smooth face made an annoyed little frown against the Sun—which drove hard even through the filter-gases in the artificial atmosphere.
“Berg,” he protested, “I was not to be disturbed.”
General Berg teetered on the ruby brink, desperately fought for his balance.
“A ship—” he gasped. “A ship coming!”
TAURUS boasted a modern space-port, with docks ample to accommodate the largest interplanetary liners. Vessels arrived every day. They brought the millions of illiterately addressed orders for bottles of Taurium, the thousands of passengers that ranged from honeymooners to tottering oldsters seeking new youth through Dr. Bull’s reactivation treatment.
“A ship,” said Dr. Bull. “Another million dollars!”
General Berg recovered balance and breath. “A warship, sir,” he amended stiffly. “It’s a patrol cruiser, proceeding from the direction of Appenine Base. It is showing no lights, and refuses to acknowledge the signals from our forts. It has already entered our territorial space.”
The continued independence of Taurus, in the face of the patrol’s open hostility, was a major political riddle. But Dr. Bull, with the magical combination of Imagination, Audacity, Victory—plus millions, cannily spent—had made it a fact.
The Sun Patrol was bound by several interplanetary treaties to respect the-territorial zone of Taurus, a sphere extending a hundred miles from the tiny moon’s surface.
Dr. Bull’s head abruptly went under the water, and came up looking more red than pink. He splashed furiously with his hands—half-gravity had awkward consequences, when one forgot oneself. Sputtering, he gasped:
“They can’t do that!”
The glassy-eyed officer said: “They have done it. The men in the forts are uneasy. And panic is spreading in the hotels and hospitals—some rumor has got out. The telephones are swamped with questions.”
Dr. Bull surged out of the pool. “Signal them again,” he snapped. “If they don’t answer, open fire.”
Taurus was not undefended. Since the daring raid of the pirate, Iron Scarr, ten years ago—when the patrol had refused its aid until after Taurus had been looted—Dr. Bull had spent millions to build two massive forts, at the little world’s poles. Their twenty-four-inch rifles were capable of dropping shells on Earth itself.
Berg gulped apprehensively. “Our rangefinders have identified the cruiser, sir. It’s the Valiant.”
Dr. Bull turned a little pale. Coming from over the graviscreen, he staggered violently to the full attraction of the generators, and caught himself against the crystal wall. He stared at Berg, dripping and gasping.
For the Valiant was the newest and mightiest cruiser of the patrol—built in direct answer to the threat of Dr. Bull’s two forts. Her rifles were also twenty-four-inch. The two thousand feet of her armored length exactly equaled the diameter of Taurus. She was invincible and invulnerable.
Dr. Bull’s trepidation lasted but a moment, however. “Get back to your post. Prepare the forts for action.” He shook water out of his beard. “I’ll order Carstairs to cancel all departures from the port. Mustn’t let the suckers be scared away. I’m going to speak to the Valiant, on my own telebeam.”
General Berg saluted and departed.
THE situation appeared extremely alarming to Vera Frame. But she admitted that Dr. Bull—whether she considered him as physician, actor, statesman, op warrior—was a very remarkable man. She regarded him with the confidence of love.
In the steamy luxury of the glass-and-chromium bathhouse, Dr. Bull took a quick hot and cold shower, and slipped into the scarlet-and-silver of the Captain-General of the Planeteers. He refused to be thrown into a panic, but he was alarmed.
He couldn’t understand the menacing approach of the Valiant.
The IMA and the ICC, true, were yammering for his scalp—but they had yammered in vain for thirteen years. The patrol had been alarmed by the construction of his two powerful forts, covering in their theoretical range both Earth and the impregnable patrol base on the summits of the Moon’s Appenines. But Dr. Bull, with his fountain of millions, had deftly developed and exploited the venality existing in the patrol.
“If Batson has crossed me,” he muttered, “I’ll raise a stench with TAU that will smoke him out of the base like a rat out of a hole.” Batson was commander of the Appenine Base, and virtually a silent partner in Dr. Bull’s far-flung enterprises.
Out in the open again, striding along a palm-shaded walk toward the graceful white tower that housed the studios and main transmitter of TAU, Dr. Bull shivered with sudden realization of the vulnerability of Taurus.
The sky was almost black. Beneath it, everything was bright. Fountains glittered with the Sun. Sprays on the lawns made rainbows. Green leaves were luminous. Colored glass made the buildings into monster jewels. But the midnight sky was suddenly dead and oppressive. Dr. Bull had an unpleasant sense of the nearness of the cold forbidding mystery of space.
The Valiant was armored against twenty-four-inch shells. But the hospitals and hotels and casinos, the gardens and shops and warehouses, the power and atmosphere plants, TAU and the laboratories and the huge mail-order building and Dr. Bull’s several luxurious dwellings—these were protected only by a few thousand feet of gaseous oxygen and helium.
Resolutely murmuring, “Imagination. Audacity. Victory,” he squared his plump shoulders again, in the natty uniform, and strode briskly into the telecast tower. He paused for a moment to look up at the huge telecast receiver screen at the end of the first floor hall.
For he found new courage there.
Out of a montage of colliding planets, embattled space-craft, tremendous weird machines, and extra-terrestrial monsters, Dr. Bull’s own face grinned from the screen. The beard was dyed a youthful black, and a space-helmet had replaced the glasses. An ion-gun rose in his heroic hand, flamed straight from the screen.
The announcer was saying:
“This is TAU, Dr. Bull’s own independent station, on Taurus, the hub of health. Now we present—through the courtesy of Taurium and Dr. Bull’s radiogenic reactivation treatment—your thrilling serial of interstellar adventure, Captain Planeteer. This favorite character, played by Dr. Bull himself, is based on the true facts of his own youthful adventures, in the days when he was an interplanetary exile, hunted from planet to planet by his jealous persecutors, the IMA, the ICC, and the Sun Patrol—”
Dr. Bull lifted his white-bearded chin. Captain Planeteer, in the serial, never admitted defeat. That was the spirit. Imagination, Audacity, Victory. He hurried into the private automatic elevator that whipped him up to his luxurious penthouse on top of the telecast tower.
II
PLATINUM and enamel shimmered richly. The terrace garden was bright and fragrant with blooms from several planets. Looking up at the black hostile sky, Dr. Bull shivered again. Here on Taurus he had made the dream of his life come true—but one salvo from the Valiant could shatter it like a bubble.
The white dome of his observatory gleamed above the garden. Already panting and perspiring, he stumbled into it, and seated himself at the long thirty-inch refractor.
He picked up a telephone, and called General Berg. There was a little delay, and a harried operator told him that a panic among the guests had jammed the system. At last Berg’s voice, sounding breathless and worried, gave the Valiant’s position.
He found it. A sleek black shadow against the silvered black of space, sliding down toward Taurus in a menacing spiral. Even at the lowest magnification, it looked huge. The details of the turrets, with jutting rifles and rocket-torpedo tubes, were alarmingly visible.
His knees were wobbling, as he hurried down to the tight-beam communicator in his penthouse office below the silver dome. He sat down in front of the screen between the staring iconoscope lenses. An engineer’s crisp voice told him that the private telebeam was tuned on the cruiser’s communicator.
“Hello, Patrol-cruiser Valiant.” He tried to swallow the shaky rasp in his throat. “Dr. Bull of Taurus, calling Patrol-cruiser—”
The prompt reply startled him:
“Hello, Bull.” The voice sounded insolent and amused. “I’ve been waiting for you. Tune your screen to Code N-89.”
With trembling fingers, Dr. Bull depressed a series of keys on the console. His small eyes blinked at the suddenly illuminated screen. The face he saw there didn’t belong to any patrol officer. But he knew the massive forehead, the sullen lips, the high cheeks, the close-set, piercing eyes.
“Scarr!” he gasped.
The seamed, ray-blackened visage was grinning at him. “Yes, Bull, it’s Iron Scarr.” The pirate appeared to enjoy Bull’s stunned bewilderment. “We’ve come up together, you and I. You peddled bottles of dirty water, and I cut throats in the meteor miner’s dives—and your lies, Bull, probably killed more men than my ion-gun ever did.
“We came up together, Bull—and our games are still the same. Now you can hypnotize all the system with TAU, but still you peddle mud and water. I still kill men honestly, for what I want. But now, I’m looting planets.”
Dr. Bull gulped again, and tried to stop the trembling of his white beard.
“You won’t loot Taurus—not this time, Scarr.” His voice was hoarse and desperate. “I’ve got a new safe, down at the core of Taurus, that even you can’t open. I’ve got most of my valuables cached safely—elsewhere. And I’ve got two new forts, strong enough to fight off the Valiant.”
Scarr flung back his iron-gray, close-cropped head. His mouth opened cavernously, and his laughter thundered from the screen.
“It isn’t Taurus, Bull.” The violence of laughter and voice were overdone, Dr. Bull thought uneasily. “I’ve come up, along with you. I have come merely to offer you an extraordinary opportunity. I need you for an ally to help me conquer and loot the Earth!”
DR. BULL’S mouth fell open. “Scarr, you’re insane,” he said in a dry faint whisper.
The pirate grinned. “Other great conquerors have been called crazy. I know, because once, when I lay for twelve years in a patrol prison, I devoted myself to a study of Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, the Red Nemesis, and the rest. I know how they succeeded, so far as they did, and why they failed. I have simply perfected a technique that has been three thousand years in development.
“The problems are not essentially different from those met in taking and looting a ship. The technique is necessarily more elaborate, but the reward is in proportion. There’s no call, Bull, for your outraged stare. Not when you’ve been looting the whole system, in your own way.”
On the screen, Scarr leaned forward.
“I need you, Bull.” His voice was swift and persuasive. “The first principle of attack is to secure communications, and TAU is the most effective instrument of communication in the system. Time is vital. I’m going to explain in a few words what I have done, and what remains to be done to make me master of Earth. When you understand, you’ll join me gladly.”
Dr. Bull’s eyes narrowed. “Go on.”
“Conquest, by my technique, requires money, men, weapons, military skill, carefully planned fifth column cooperations, timing for surprise, scientific propaganda, and a deliberately ruthless leadership.”
Dr. Bull’s pink head nodded. Perhaps there was no danger to Taurus, after all. His breathing became easier. He was able to appreciate the cool application of intelligence to the solution of unusual problems.
“Money.” The pirate began checking items, on his blunt scarred fingers. “You yourself, Bull, contributed nearly two hundred million dollars.” Dr. Bull winced, in memory of the raid; his eyes narrowed again. “The officials of the Moon Syndicate—a reactionary group, afraid of the liberal labor movement—put up a billion more.
