Collected Short Fiction, page 464
Now Rick felt lost between two conflicting worlds. He had to choose between them, and the choice wasn’t easy. Half of him was eager to go back to his father, to attack the exciting problems of contraterrene research. But Karen Hood, in his troubled indecision, had come to stand for all the world that another rebellious part of him desired. More than a charming, self-willed redhead and a gay, lighthearted companion, she was clothed in all the stately power and the opulence of Interplanet. It wouldn’t be easy to leave her.
On the last evening before his contract expired, Rick telephoned Karen’s apartment, hopefully. He found that she was out somewhere with Captain Anders. Depressed and uncertain of himself, he walked away alone into the rocky wilderness outside the town to think his problem out.
Built on a barren, rounded hill, Pallasport was terraformed with a local unit at the bottom of a shaft only a few miles deep. As he left it behind him, its pull was back instead of down. The gravitation of Pallas itself was very slight. As the direction of attraction changed, the whole starlit desert seemed to tip. At last he was climbing up the cragged dark face of a world turned vertical.
A lonely, seeking giant, he climbed on until the city on the terraformed hill was only a glittering knob of metal and glowing glass, far down the dark wall of the upended landscape behind.
The air grew thin for he had mounted almost out of the paragravity field that held it. He stopped to catch his breath. Clinging with both hands to the dark, toppling cliff, he turned his head to gaze out and up and down into the black, mysterious gulf of open space. If he fell it seemed that he would drop forever and forever into that dark, illimitable chasm of far diamond suns.
He shivered, and his fingers tensed. Yet he enjoyed this eerie sensation—it was what he had climbed to seek. For this was the other half of him. He had learned in childhood to love the splendor and the peril of this strange new frontier against the stars.
Something stirred deep in him, wild and free. He could feel in himself the beginning urge of human might, responding to this dark, tremendous challenge. The call of space was in his blood, as old as his love for his mother, stronger than his love for Earth and Interplanet and even Karen Hood.
He clung there a long time, breathing consciously and deeply to keep alive in the chill thin air. All his confusion seemed washed away in this dark and boundless spatial sea. He felt strong again, strong to say good-by to everything he must.
He was ready to climb down when he saw the new star.
It blazed out suddenly where no star had been—more swiftly, he thought, than any nova could. Hot and blue-white, it dimmed and drowned the other stars. It hurt his eyes and flattened the mystery of this dark, toppled wilderness, and cast harsh shadows.
The new star grew brighter, he thought, than any remote nova could be. The hot sting of its radiation brought him a pang of fear, for he had no leaden spatial armor. He crouched back into the shadow of the cliff.
After a few more seconds, however, it began to fade. It disappeared as suddenly as it had come. At last his dazzled eyes could see the other stars again, but it had left no trace. No nova, he was certain, would have vanished so quickly. He couldn’t understand it.
He shivered again. The dark spatial night had reached out to touch his heart with the bright and chilling finger of its veiled eternal mystery. He felt its awe and dread, yet somehow he was stirred and lifted with a sense of human might and human daring. Humbly, he shared the human greatness that had begun to conquer worlds never meant for men.
Then his icy fingers slipped on the rock and he was conscious of a giddy weakness. He had forgotten to breathe—and the carbon dioxide, at this low pressure, escaped from the lungs too swiftly to stimulate unconscious breathing. He fought for oxygen and strength, and climbed slowly down toward Pallasport again.
II.
Rick’s own vexing problems seemed to grow again as he climbed down from that giddy, fictitious height above the town. Karen’s blue-eyed smile came back to haunt his resolution. By the time he reached his small apartment he had forgotten that oddly temporary star. The telephone roused him, early next morning, from a tired, uneasy sleep.
“Scuse me, Drake.” It was Anders. “Can you come right down to the lab?”
That was all the Earthman said, but his slurred voice had an imperative undertone. Rick omitted breakfast and hurried to the laboratory, just under the crown of the terraformed hill. Still in the dress uniform that he had worn somewhere with Karen, Anders hadn’t been to bed.
“G’day, Drake.” He was swiftly gathering all their notes and plans for the fire-predictor. “My gadget’s got to wait, ’cause we’ve got another job. S’pose you heard about the star last night?”
“I saw it, and wondered—”
Rick’s voice trailed off, for Anders had snapped the brief case shut and suddenly he stared at Rick with some searching question in his hard gray eyes.
“And what d’you think it was?”
“I don’t know.” Rick moved awkwardly, under that cool, piercing gaze. “When the contraterrene drift strikes a normal body the explosion makes a flash. But that looked big enough to have been predicted—”
“But you did know it was seetee?”
“What’s the matter?” Rick heard the snap of anger in his own voice and envied the tall officer’s self-possession. “I don’t know anything. I just happened to see something like a star that flared up and went out.”
The dark, suave smile of Anders made him feel a fool.
“No ’fense, Drake.” His eyes flickered toward the row of books he had caught Rick poring over. “But our mysterious little nova was a contraterrene asteroid. That’s why I called you down.”
“Why me?” Rick felt puzzled and uneasy.
“As a seetee engineer,” Anders said, “I hoped you could solve a riddle for us.”
“I’m not a seetee engineer,” Rick told him. “But what’s the riddle?”
The steel eyes of Anders dropped to some notations on a card.
“You only saw the flash? Well, it came from the seetee asteroid, HSM CT-445-N-812, now about forty million kilometers from Pallas. The Ephemeris & Register lists it as thirteen hundred meters in diameter, with a dagger to indicate it’s probably contraterrene iron.”
“But what did it hit?”
“That’s part of the riddle,” Anders told him. “Happens the area was under observation from the Guard Observatory on Pallas I. Young chap at the three-meter camera was watching through the guide ’scope. This seetee asteroid was in the field, and he could see the flash of the blinker. The glare of that explosion ruined his last plate—and nearly blinded him. But the other plates should have showed anything else in the vicinity, down to twenty meters. There’s nothing.”
Rick’s big brown fingers had begun an absent drumming on the end of the bright glass desk. Anders looked annoyed, and he stopped himself awkwardly. “What do the telescopes show now?” he inquired. “Is the surface still glowing?”
Anders looked at him for half a minute before he said softly, “By no means, Drake. The first bolometer readings were taken less than fifteen minutes after that flash. They average about seventy absolute—two hundred degrees below zero.”
Rick caught his breath in speechless perplexity.
“The ’scope gave us a few more surprises,” Anders went on. “Difference in shape and surface markings. New estimates of mean diameter fifteen hundred meters, instead of thirteen hundred. A change in the orbit—now it’s on a sharp parabola, shooting out of the System at forty-five kilometers a second.” His hard eyes were almost accusing. “What do you make of all that?”
“It doesn’t mean a thing to me,” Rick blurted. “And I don’t know why you think it should!”
Anders didn’t say why. His bland aplomb made Rick feel uncomfortable. Balancing the black brief case on the corner of the desk, he announced deliberately:
“Drake, we’re going to solve this little problem. I have authority to requisition an armed cruiser from the Guard base on Pallas II. I expect to leave tonight, with a picked staff of engineers. I’ll arrange with Mr. Vickers for you to come with me.”
Rick felt another flush of needless anger.
“Vickers can’t arrange it.” He tried to keep the ridiculous quiver out of his voice. “You see, my contract with Interplanet expires today. I don’t intend to sign another.”
The gray eyes of Anders narrowed with a watchful I-thought-so expression. “I’d been wondering, Drake.” His slurred rapid voice didn’t change. “If you quit Interplanet, what are you going to do?”
“That’s my business.”
“Don’t get angry.” With a half-amused smile, Anders offered a long cigarette. “Though p’raps you’ve reason to be.” His voice dropped with an affable candor. “As you may have suspected, my real business here is to investigate the milit’ry possibilities of seetee.”
“I had an idea,” Rick admitted. “But I don’t know anything about seetee.”
“Prob’ly you know as much as anybody,” Anders assured him blandly. “If it’s money, I’ll see that Vickers pays you anything in reason.”
Rick shook his head, not trusting his voice.
“S’long, Drake, if that’s the way you want it.” Anders shrugged, a meaningless graceful gesture. “Hate to see a good engineer go wrong, but I’ve got things to do.”
He took up the brief case and went quickly out. Alone, Rick sprawled across the end of the desk, lost in an anxious study. Anders worried him. Backed by the Interplanet billions, he might win the race to conquer seetee.
Rick’s uneasy thoughts turned to the runaway asteroid. Its contradictory riddle fascinated him. He could see no possible rational explanation. He tried to dismiss it for his own unsettled affairs, but his mind refused to put it down.
“Rick.” Karen spoke behind him, a vivid picture framed in the metal doorway. Her highcheeked face was bright with color, but her husky voice seemed troubled. “Paul just phoned. He says you’re leaving Interplanet.”
Rick tried to smile, and gestured at his own chair. But she came to the end of the desk, so near he caught her expensive perfume. Her eyes were somber pools. His decision was going to be hard to defend.
“Why, Rick?” Something made her breathless. “Did you quarrel with—Captain Anders.”
“Call him Paul.” He managed a brown, feeble grin. “He admitted he came here to spy on me, but still I rather like him. He’s what I’ve been trying to be, Kay.” His big shoulders shrugged. “Just seems I’m not.”
“He’s loyal to Earth and Interplanet.” Under the flame-red hair her face was a tense triangle. “I thought you were, Rick.”
Her vital nearness was a twisting pain.
“Please try to understand.” He drew a long slow breath and envied the finished ease of Anders. “I’ve tried to be an Earthman, Kay, but I was born out here. You can’t be loyal to everything. I’m going into partnership with my father and old Rob McGee. Please, Kay—I tried.”
Her red mouth looked hurt, and her voice was scarcely a whisper. “I’m afraid I can’t understand. You’re doing well with Interplanet. Vickers will give you nearly anything you want. Paul says you have a brilliant future—if you’ll only wake up.”
“I have waked up.” His tense voice quivered. “When I came out here, five years ago, I thought Interplanet was the shining benefactor of the human race. I had ideals, about the calling of a spatial engineer. I wanted to turn these dead little rocks into gardens for men.”
Karen stared at him. Her pointed face had turned a little pale, and something cold was glinting in her eyes, and he knew she didn’t understand.
“Ideals aren’t what you need in Interplanet.” His voice dropped to a bitter rasp. “Get all you can as soon as you can. Sweat and tax and graft the last dollar out of the damned asterites, and take it back to buy a penthouse and a mistress and the gout in Panama City.” Her face went white, as if he had struck it. “Well, that’s not for me. I’m sick of Interplanet, and the rotten Mandate politics—sick of spying and intrigue and corruption. I’m quitting, now.”
Then he saw that she was crying, blinking at her angry tears and biting her full, trembling lip. He relaxed his tanned awkward hands from gigantic fists and said more gently:
“I’m sorry, Kay. I didn’t mean to tell you all that—but it’s still the truth. I don’t belong in your world. I’m just another asterite, and I’m going back to Obania with old Rob McGee.”
The girl clung with white fingers to the corner of the desk. She tossed a flame-colored strand out of her wet face with an angry gesture and mopped with a useless little handkerchief.
“You’re unjust, Rick—dreadfully unjust.” Her hurt set a numb longing in him. “Such talk is almost treason. Interplanet needs you, Rick. It needs us all, now when the rebel planets are scheming for another war, to wipe it out this time. I know some men are selfish grafters. But there have been, and will be, others loyal and noble enough to die for Interplanet. I thought you’d be one of them.”
She looked at him with blue-black eyes, angry but yet hopeful. He shrugged unhappily. It wasn’t really any use to speak, because he knew she would never understand. But he tried.
“You have to feel that way,” he said, “because that’s the world you belong to. And I don’t.” Awkwardly, he caught her small tense hand. “I’m sorry, Kay. I really tried to be an Earthman, but it isn’t any use.”
She freed her cold hand and turned away from him. He thought she was going to run out of the room. He took a long, impulsive stride after her.
“Wait, Kay. I mean . . . I’ll see you again before I go?”
She paused in the doorway, mechanically pushing back the stray bright wisp of hair. Her eyes were dark and thoughtful, dry again.
“I don’t suppose it matters.” Her voice was dull and husky. “I’m having lunch with Paul.” She caught her breath and came back a step.
“Rick, why don’t you go out with him—out to study this runaway rock?”
“My contract expires today.”
“Please, Rick!” Her tone of urgent appeal set a slow pain in him. “That rock’s a danger to Earth and Interplanet. It seems to be breaking all the known laws of science. Because, Paul says, it obeys an unknown law. And that unknown law may be a key to power.”
Her eyes were dark and imploring.
“Interplanet is still in terrible danger, Rick, because the Treaty of Space didn’t really end the war. All the Mandate is torn with a secret battle for power between us and the Martians and Venusians and Jovians, and even the Free Space Party of the asterites.” Her low voice trembled. “Won’t you go out with Paul?”
Rick wanted to go. The runaway fascinated him and Karen was hard to refuse. She saw him hesitate, and the hope on her bright, pointed face caught his breath. He gulped.
“No, Kay.” Her expression hurt like a wound. “I guess I belong with the Free Space Party.”
“Traitor!” She sobbed the word and ran.
Rick slumped wearily behind the glass desk and tried to be a philosopher. After all, he told himself, you can’t have everything. But philosophy began to crumple. Perhaps he could join Anders without signing a new contract. He was reaching for the telephone to call Karen at the office when it rang.
“Richard Drake?” he heard the operator. “Photophone calling you from the Good-by Jane. Will you receive the call—five dollars for two minutes?” He said he would. “Then please stand by, sir. It will be a few minutes, for the ship is nearly forty million kilometers away.”
Rick stood by, wondering. He had supposed that Rob McGee would come straight to Pallasport—what could have carried him so far away? Memory, while he waited, brought a picture of the thickset little spaceman, brown and squinted, with a black pipe clamped in the middle of a square, stubborn face.
“Hello, Rick.” The gentle drawling voice came at last along the endless thread of light. “I think your Interplanet contract expires today, and your father says you want to be a partner in our own little firm of spatial engineers. So welcome to Drake, McGee & Drake!
“We really need you, Rick. I’ve been Jim Drake’s partner since before the war. I think we’ve made a good team, too, though I’m just a plain rock rat and he’s the engineer. But now we’re getting old, and your father’s plans will want a man—the sort of man we think you are.
“But two minutes isn’t long, and this is why I called you, Rick.” The soft, quiet voice seemed to hurry and it held a tired excitement. “Something’s happened. I left Obania with a cargo of bad news for you. I started out to tell you that Drake & McGee were ruined and we didn’t have a chance to build that metallurgy lab. But something happened, on the way, and things are different now.”
Rick sat up and listened desperately.
“I can’t tell you much about it now,” the hurried drawl continued. “But you know your father’s estimate on the cost of the metallurgy lab. Well, it seems that you and I have got a chance to make some money, Rick—all the money we’ll need.
“I can’t tell you everything.” Rick thought he was trying to speak indirectly for the benefit of spies. “But I’ll be landing at Pallasport tonight. Better get your space bag packed and kiss your girl good-by, because it’s quite a job that you and I have to do!”
Rick caught his breath. The rustle of interference reminded him that McGee was forty million kilometers away, and he couldn’t possibly be landing tonight. The ancient little tug would take something like a week to cover such a distance. He gripped the receiver, frowning.
“You’ll come to understand why I can’t tell you everything,” McGee hastened on. “You wouldn’t believe it if I tried. But there’s a fortune waiting for us on that runaway rock. We’ll have to solve the riddle of it and beat out Captain A.
“It’s really quite a job, but don’t give up too soon. Remember that the last shall be first, and first the last. I may even stare and say I didn’t call you, but pay no attention to that. Because the prize is waiting for us. Perhaps we’ll meet more riddles, but we can finally crack them all.” The two minutes were gone and McGee finished hastily: “Better not reply.”
