Collected Short Fiction, page 465
The receiver snapped and Rick heard the operator:
“Do you wish to call back, sir?”
“Eh?” Rick muttered vaguely. “No, there’s no reply.”
A mused and wondering giant, he sat with elbows propped on the bare glass desk. He didn’t understand. But he gave up any idea of joining Captain Anders. Even if the Good-by Jane couldn’t possibly arrive tonight, Rick intended to be waiting with his space bag packed.
III.
The telephone blurred again. Karen’s small, stifled voice set a hopeless ache in his throat. “Rick? Mr. Vickers wants to talk to you.”
He waited for the loud, impatient voice of Vickers.
“Drake, Miss Hood tells me that you’re going to leave us. I have no time to argue with you, but I believe you’re still in our employ till six o’clock today. There’s one more job for you to do.”
“What’s that, Mr. Vickers?”
“Change the tuning diamonds in the terraforming units on Pallas IV,” Vickers said. “A prison tender will call for you at the spaceport in an hour. That will give you time to pick up the new diamonds here.” Vickers hung up.
Pallas IV was one of six small terraformed rocks which had been moved into stable positions, sixty degrees apart in the same close orbit, as trailing moons of the minor planet. They served as outposts and bases, and Pallas IV was also site of the Mandate prison.
Rick found a kit of tools and went to the huge blue-glass-and-platinum-plate Interplanet Building to get the extra diamonds. The job was not difficult, and he wondered why it hadn’t been left to the prison engineer.
Karen Hood, at her own important-looking desk in the manager’s outer office, was dictating into a machine. She looked up with a pale, empty smile, and silently handed him the order for the diamonds. Rick wanted to say something friendly but she turned quickly back to the machine.
He took the order to the supply-room wicket. Under the eyes of a guard he had to sign a receipt for the three small diamonds, value seventy-five hundred dollars. They were clear natural octahedral crystals. He dropped them into the little black pouch the clerk gave him and strode toward the spaceport on the crown of the hill.
Their cold soapy glitter reminded him of McGee’s promise of a fortune waiting on the runaway rock, but he shrugged off the thought of a diamond strike. Men had no use for contraterrene diamonds.
An ugly black torpedo, the prison tender was already standing on the convex pavement of the field. An alert, polite young subaltern met him at the Guard office and ushered him aboard. Half an hour later they were landing on the prison asteroid.
Pallas IV was a thousand-meter block of dark nickel-iron. Marker lights picked out the landing field and it had an atmosphere. But the guns and the barracks, and even the prison itself, were all hidden in its natural armor.
They left the ship. Beyond a hidden doorway a guarded elevator dropped them to the terraformer room at the center of gravity. There, between the polar elements, their bodies had no weight, and hand lines were strung about the machinery. Rick asked the young subaltern: “Which unit is giving the trouble?”
“None of them.” The officer gave him a friendly smile. “You’re to change all the crystals. The warden’s orders. A safety measure.”
That seemed odd. The tuning diamonds were sometimes ruined by accidental short circuits, but they simply didn’t wear out. The news ones would be no safer than the old. Rick changed them, however, one by one. He reset and tested the units and gathered up his tools and nodded at the alert subaltern.
“Finished?” the guardsman asked cheerfully. “Say, care to see the prison while you’re here? I must report to the warden and it will save us time if you come with me.”
“Just as you like,” Rick agreed, though he wasn’t anxious to see the prison. He showed the little pouch of used diamonds, all as good as new. “But I’m responsible for these, remember.”
“They’ll be safe,” the subaltern assured him. “We’re only walking through the political cell block.”
A double set of clanging steel doors let them into a wide gallery, cut deep in the living iron. Faced with open bars, the cells were three levels high. Gray steel ladders and catwalks reached the upper tiers. The light from the translucent ceiling was a chill blue glare. There was a stagnant reek of human confinement. A glimpse of dead-white faces peering stupidly through the bars made Rick hurry his long stride uncomfortably.
“Slow,” his guide warned softly. “You might get shot.” Rick checked himself, suddenly conscious of the guns looking out of armored slots. Trying to soften his evident discomfort, the subaltern told him in a brisk undertone:
“This isn’t so bad. These men aren’t abused. This is our model block, really. Political prisoners, you know. They aren’t forced to work. The food is good enough, and we give them all the liberties possible. They leave the cells for meals. They are allowed books and stationery. They get two hours of exercise a day.” His lowered voice had a ring of professional pride. “Modern penology, you know—justice, discipline, and reconstruction.”
Rick managed a sickly grin. “That doesn’t appeal to me—”
“Drake!”
It was a penetrating scream. Startled, Rick turned to see a hollow ghastly face peering at him through the bars of a second-level cell. Thin, bloodless hands rattled the locked door furiously, almost drowning that cracked and terrible voice. “Drake—have you seen my Mary?”
Rick had stopped, but the subaltern touched his arm.
“Come along,” he urged quietly. “You aren’t allowed to talk.”
“I don’t know him.” Rick hurried on again, trying to shake off the agony of that dry scream. “I never saw him.”
That blade-thin voice slashed after him:
“Wait, Drake! My Mary—is she dead?” Rick strode on, hot and breathless. The voice turned thick and foul, cursing him. Then it was thinned again with a frantic mental agony. “Speak to me, damn you, Seetee Drake!”
Rick went on, but now he understood. Old Jim Drake was roan and shrunken now, stooped with sixty years. But the prisoner must have known him long ago when he was as erect and powerful as his bronze-haired son.
“I’m sure you couldn’t know him,” the brisk young subaltern was agreeing. “Because he has been here nearly fifteen years. Life, on a treason charge—he was convicted of membership in the Free Space Party.”
The dry voice cursed again, despairingly.
“Gone simple,” the subaltern said. “He thinks this Seetee Drake is going to make weapons out of the contraterrene drift to overthrow the Mandate.”
Rick shot him a startled glance, but his pink young face was innocent. “Seems there really is an old meteor rat named Seetee Drake,” he went on. “But I guess there’s really no danger he’ll work the drift—or the Guard would have him in here with his friends.”
Silent, Rick tried not to shiver. He felt a little ill from the sharp prison fetor and the harsh blue glare and the crushing weight of the living iron above. That dry scream kept ringing in his mind. He couldn’t help wondering why his guide had brought him this way.
He tried not to hurry. He forced himself to listen to casual statistics, about the prison bake shop and the laundry and the ventilating system. At last they were outside the clanging gates again in air that he could breathe.
“Sorry for that disturbance,” the subaltern said briskly. “Unfortunate. Forget it. Wait here just a moment while I see the warden. Have you back at Pallasport in plenty of time for lunch.”
Rick waited before a silent guard. The subaltern chatted innocently on the way to Pallasport. Rick hurried to the Interplanet Building to unburden himself of the diamonds. Returning his receipt, the clerk at the window said:
“A message for you, Mr. Drake—you are to see Miss Hood.”
Lifted with a wild hope that Karen had recovered from her hurt and anger, he burst eagerly into her office. Beyond the huge busy desk, she seemed small and tired. Her pale triangular face looked up, unsmiling. Her small remote voice crushed his hope.
“Rick, my uncle wants you to have lunch with him.”
Rick was astonished. “Mr. Hood?”
Her flaming head made a spiritless little nod. “One o’clock, at the Mandate House—if you are free?”
“People are usually free to lunch with the chief commissioner.” Rick managed a hopeful grin, but still she didn’t smile. “Tell him I’ll be there.”
Rick went out awkwardly and stopped at a bar for a whiskey-soda—because there was nothing else to do about Karen’s hurt coolness toward him. Back at his apartment, he tried to bathe off that sour prison odor and put on a clean shirt for the chief commissioner. He felt a bleak envy of Captain Anders’ finished social form for he knew that Austin Hood was the most important man in the Mandate.
Still he was puzzled about the invitation. Perhaps Hood was taking time to persuade him to sign a new contract—though Rick didn’t feel that important. Anyhow, he grimly told himself, they all belonged to an enemy world. Even Karen. The prison had convinced him of that.
At one o’clock he was striding through the ornate golden portals of the Mandate House, a tall and resolute giant. Just across the curving street from the capitol buildings, that expensive bar and grill catered to officialdom. The cost of living was high in all the Mandate, because the commissioners refused to let the asterites make themselves independent of imported food supplies. And prices at the Mandate House were fantastic.
Rick paused in the doorway of the bar for he wanted another drink to help ease his social awkwardness. The long room was dimly lit through a red glass ceiling, and paneled with expensive black Venusian ebony. The air was thick with smoke and alcohol and guarded talk in four languages.
The surface atmosphere was friendly, but Rick could sense a watchful tension. The blond, sunburned attaches of the Martian commissioner were gathered at the table of a grim-jawed, bulletheaded visiting general. Nursing heavy steins, all very stiff and courteous, they seemed withdrawn to themselves. Huge, bearded men from the Jovian Soviet were industriously drinking vodka, cheerful and noisy and yet alert. The Venusians, at a table of their own, were sipping rice wine and tea with an air of bland secretiveness.
A group of Earthmen were drinking whiskey-sodas at the bar and they seemed to Rick a little too confident and loud. One of them, a very junior official, beckoned him to join them. After he felt the tension of veiled mistrust in the long, smoky room, however, he decided to keep himself alert to deal with Commissioner Hood.
He waited in the garish, crowded lobby until Hood arrived with Commissioner Rand—Earth held two of the five commission seats. Several uniformed aids accompanied them, but Hood left the group and came across to Rick. He was a heavy, ruddy man, with a thin fringe of red hair around his balding head.
“Glad to see you, Drake.” Karen once had introduced them and he had a politician’s memory for faces. “If you don’t mind, let’s eat alone. We’ve got business to discuss—but not till after lunch.”
Bluff as some old hard-rock miner, he waved affably at his overmannered aids and Rick followed him into a luxurious private room. The order seemed important as a government decision; he finally selected capon with dry Martian wines.
At first Rick felt stiff and diffident. Perhaps the wine helped to melt his awe; as the meal went on he began to regard his host with a mixture of admiration, amusement and unexpected liking.
Hood’s qualifications for his difficult position seemed to consist of an excellent digestion, a ruthless political cunning, and a stock of improper anecdotes. Digestion, evidently, came first.
“You think I’m a hearty man, Drake?” he boomed happily. “Well, it takes a hearty man to fight the war all over again, every day, in the commission chamber. The last three chief commissioners went home with peptic ulcers. It takes a hearty man!”
Rick still wondered what he wanted. He said nothing of any business until the wine was finished and they had lighted rich blond Cuban cigars. Then, in a loud genial voice, he inquired surprisingly:
“Young man, why don’t you marry my niece?”
“Better ask Captain Anders.” Rick had gulped and his tone was slightly bitter. “They’re eating in the grill right now. She’s a little cool to me.”
“Nonsense!” boomed the hearty commissioner. “You’ve simply hurt her feelings. She talked to me this morning. Tell her you’re going on with Interplanet and she’ll forgive you in a minute. Why not, Drake? She has looks and money and brains. Her family, if I may speak—”
“I know what she has.” Rick was too violent. “But she belongs to a different world.”
“Her world owns the Mandate and the System.” Hood was pink and ominous. “I believe you saw another world this morning—out on Pallas IV.”
“Did Kay—” Rick gasped.
“No, it was my idea.” Genial again, Hood exhaled blue smoke. “For your own good, Drake. I want you to see the consequences of your insanity before it’s too late to change your mind.”
Rick caught his breath. This revelation was a jolt to his new liking, yet in the face of Hood’s genial humor he couldn’t feel very angry. He said gravely, “I don’t intend to change my mind.”
The politician gestured amiably with his blond cigar.
“Wait until you’ve heard my proposition, Drake,” he urged. “I’ve talked with Vickers and Anders and my niece, and they’re all agreed that you’re the sort of man that Interplanet needs. And Interplanet will meet your price.”
Rick was not surprised to hear him speak for Interplanet. Officially, he represented the Earth-Moon government, but that government was only a veil for Interplanet’s power.
“These times are unsettled,” he went on. “Uranium is getting scarce, you know, and there’s a scramble for what’s left. The Mandate is only a sort of referee for a four-cornered fight—or five, if you still count the Free Space Party.”
Rick listened uncomfortably. He wasn’t used to smoking much, for Earth-grown tobacco was an expensive luxury, and he decided to abandon the strong cigar.
“Now there’s talk of seetee,” Hood went on. “I thought it was impossible. But Anders says the Martians are experimenting with seetee bombs, and probably the Jovians, too—for they have shot some good intelligence agents. Interplanet is being left behind. We need a good contraterrene engineer. You’re the man I want.”
Resolutely, Rick began: “I don’t know any thing—”
“You’ll be paid to learn.” The blond cigar gestured expansively. “Write your own budget—and I’ll see that it isn’t audited. Interplanet expects to pay for services rendered. You can put a million in the bank—or ten million—if you can give us seetee bombs before the Martians get them.”
“I’m a spatial engineer, Mr. Hood.” Rick stood up at the table, blurting the words in a tight, angered voice. “I came out here to terraform worlds for men to live on—and not to graft a fortune.”
Hood leaned back to watch him with an air of mild curiosity, the bright small eyes interested and shrewd.
“Some things you can’t lock up forever, Mr. Hood.” The surge of long-pent feelings wouldn’t let him stop. “You can keep men buried alive on Pallas IV—but not the ideals of freedom and democracy and right.”
Hood’s small eyes had narrowed, but he plunged on recklessly: “If you were wise, Mr. Commissioner, you would take the brakes off progress in the Mandate. You would let men terraform these rocks and make hydroponic gardens. You would give the asteroids political equality and a seat on the commission. That would change the Mandate from a powder magazine to the beginning of a real union for interplanetary peace.”
“That sounds like treason.” Flushed and angry, Hood stood up. “That’s the program of the Free Space Party. You had better remember what you saw on Pallas IV.” He gulped his anger suddenly and put on a politician’s ready smile. “But I’m grateful for your candor and you won’t suffer for it. I only hope you reconsider your rash opinions before they lead you into some action you’ll regret.”
His eyes, however, were not quite so kindly reassuring as his genial voice, and Rick felt apprehensive as they left the private room. Hood went back to his waiting group. Lost and uneasy, Rick returned to the laboratory to wait for six o’clock.
An unfamiliar guard met Rick at the door and watched suspiciously while he cleared a few personal effects out of the big glass desk. He kept fighting down an impulse to call Karen Hood again because it seemed that there was nothing more for him to say.
No, he couldn’t kiss his girl good-by. At five minutes of eight, however, he was striding into the spaceport waiting room, carrying a big plastic bag packed for several weeks at space. Watching the clock tick off Mandate time, he waited for the impossible to happen.
It did. At one minute of eight a speaker suddenly blasted: “Landing from Obania, the space tug Good-by Jane, Captain McGee. Now coming in to Berth 81.”
Rick burst eagerly out of the room to stare into the blue-black sky whose Sun stood near the zenith—few of the minor planets fitted their days and nights to Mandate time. He found the Good-by Jane, dropping gently toward the convex field. It resembled an oblong box of rusty steel, turned on end. It touched and swayed on creaking ground gear, beyond the yellow ropes.
The air lock opened as Rick came up and Captain Rob McGee descended the accommodation steps on small, nimble legs. He wore the same mildew-green spacecoat that Rick remembered seeing five years ago, and his sturdy shoulders looked heavy with trouble. His square leather face made an effort to smile.
“Glad to see you, Cap’n Rob.” Rick dropped the bag to grip his stubby hand. “I got your call this morning and you see my space bag’s packed. Now can you tell me—”
Rick’s voice faded suddenly, for the little spaceman blinked and a blank bewilderment came into his squinted red-brown eyes. “My call, you say?” His gentle drawl was puzzled. “But I never called you, Rick. Bad news will keep and I had none worth good money to tell.”
