Collected Short Fiction, page 471
“Eh!” Rick tried not to shudder, but he felt as if the puzzle of the runaway planetoid was still a net of contradictions set to snare his very sanity. “The whole thing seems too impossible—maybe just because I haven’t got your special sense of space and time. It’s hard for me to put it all together—and I can’t believe it when I do. Won’t you please explain it all to me, Cap’n Rob?”
“Later.” McGee set down his empty teacup and started toward the ladder well. “Now I’ve got a sort of appointment to make a very important photophone call. I don’t believe in defying fate. If I didn’t make this call we might have to land on that rock again.” Some dread made a brief tremor in his voice. “Watch the eggs, will you?”
Nimble as ever, he mounted into the pilothouse. Rick watched the eggs and set another plate on the wardroom table. He had left the three bags of diamonds there, and now he saw that McGee had poured a little mound of black dust and limpid fire from one of them. He pushed the treasure back against the wall—and then hurried to take up the eggs and drop a huge slice of ham into the sizzling pan.
At last McGee came back down the ladder with a singular smile in his squinted brownish eyes. He said softly, “I’ve just made that call to you at Pallasport, Rick—the one I hadn’t made before. I told you to have your space bag packed and tried to warn you what to expect—without saying anything you wouldn’t believe.” With a brown, quizzical grin, he added: “That’s how I knew we were going to escape that collision. I simply had to be alive to make that call!”
“Oh—” Rick’s mouth fell open but he recovered suddenly. “Of course!” He caught his breath. “And those eighteen men below—I suppose we’ll meet Anders in about two days, and let him take them back to Pallasport?”
McGee nodded. Seating himself at the table he stirred a million dollars’ worth of diamonds with a stubby forefinger and poured himself another cup of tea. He grinned appreciatively. “No wonder he tried to find out where we got them!”
“Please tell me how it all happened, Cap’n Rob.” Rick was frowning again in baffled concentration. “I can see that the rock must have carried us back a week or so in time while the chronometer was running forward. But still it’s hard to understand all that happened.”
McGee tore the wrapper off a box of dry space biscuit and heaped his plate with eggs and bacon. His fork wavered in the air while his tanned brow creased with his search for words.
“You’ve seen movie film run backward,” he said at last. “So that broken dishes seem to put themselves together and a burned match is whole again and divers come out of the water and float back to the springboard?”
Rick nodded, breathless.
“That’s what was happening, all the way.” The fork still wavered. “The rock was simply moving the other way in time. I don’t see how such a thing is possible—I haven’t read the book. That’s what upset me. But that single fact is the answer to everything that happened.”
“I see,” Rick put in eagerly—though he wasn’t quite sure he did. “There must be parts of the Universe—stars or maybe even galaxies—made of the minus-time matter the old professor was guessing about. And that rock was just a stray fragment, out of some blown-up minus-time planet!”
“No doubt it was.” Reluctantly, McGee put down his fork. “It must have been drifting through space for millions of years—of our future and its past. It came plunging into our system. At ten on the evening of March 23rd, it happened to collide with the seetee asteroid, HSM CT-445-N-812. Since the invader was normal matter they were both annihilated.”
Rick was leaning across the table, hunger forgotten.
“That collision was the last moment in the history of the minus-time rock,” McGee’s soft voice went on, quietly confident. “But we were looking at it in reverse, like a film threaded wrong, so that collision seemed the beginning of it to us, instead of the end.”
“I see!” Rick’s bronze head nodded. “After the collision it seemed to be plunging out of the System instead of coming in, just because we were looking at it backward.”
“Until we landed on it.” Frowning at something, McGee sipped his bitter tea. “Then something happened to us. Then we were carried back through time, along with the rock—back toward the collision on March 23rd. I don’t know how.”
“Some kind of induction effect,” Rick suggested. “In the book, the old professor works out a theory that time is just another sort of force, on the same order as magnetism and paragravity. If he’s right the rock would be surrounded with a minus-time field, extending out for several radii. That field simply carried us along.”
“Must be.” McGee rediscovered his plate and reached for his fork again. “That explains the whole thing.”
“Wait!” Rick protested. “There’s still a lot I don’t see. For instance, how did the Guard cruiser come to vanish? . . . Oh, I see!” He answered his own question. “When it dropped into the minus-time field of course it was carried back in time, while the plus-time of our own system swept us on ahead. And that shadow—that black outline I thought was a shadow—that was really the cruiser, too, beginning its backward loop in time. And . . . eh?”
Rick gasped for breath, half rising.
“So that’s what it was!” He stared at little McGee, with an expression of dazed comprehension. “That other cruiser—the one Anders fought—weren’t they really both the same?”
With a mild gleam of enjoyment in his squinted eyes, the little spaceman calmly set down his teacup. “Yes, I’m afraid Captain Anders had the misfortune to attack his own ship,” Rob McGee said softly. “Since he was going to land on the rock he was already there when he arrived.”
“Say that again,” Rick demanded. “Slow!”
“Captain Anders evidently found it a little confusing, too.” McGee grinned. “He was following the customary Guard procedure, of asking questions first and shooting when he failed to get a satisfactory answer. But, since the film was running backward for the cruiser that happened to be going the other way in time, the order of events was reversed in each case. The shooting came first and then the questions. And even when the questions did come nobody could understand them—any more than you can understand a sound-track in reverse.”
“Oh—” Rick caught his breath again. “So that was the unknown language?”
McGee nodded cheerfully.
“Captain Anders just got himself involved in a kind of vicious circle. He fired on his own ship because his ship was firing on him.” McGee grinned in pleased expectation. “He’ll be a little upset, I imagine, when he comes out of the ametine and finds what day it is.”
“Let him figure it out for himself.” Rick’s drawn, bronze-stubbled face broke into a slow answering grin. “When the cruiser was burned up in that collision the evidence of my safecracking job must have gone along with it. He couldn’t prove we’ve got the diamonds back.”
“He was a little too cocky, anyhow,” McGee solemnly agreed. “Best thing in the world for a smart young man to meet something he can never be certain about. But now I’m starving and my eggs are getting cold.”
He attacked his plate, but Rick was too thoughtful to eat. His brown finger stirred the little pile of dust and diamonds. In the dull soapy glitter of the uncut stones he could see the rising outlines of future great machines to harness and subdue the hostile wonder of contraterrene matter. He could see a thousand airless rocks, terraformed with these same diamonds to make the rich, inviting islands of tomorrow’s brave empire. Again Rick Drake was the spatial engineer, a young and daring giant reaching out to push the new frontier of men one farther step against the challenge of the stars.
Late next day their photophone calls brought acknowledgment from the Guard cruiser, driving out to meet them from the ragged new moon of Pallas. Anders seemed puzzled and disturbed to speak them here, and at first he didn’t want to stop.
“Never mind how we got here.” Rob McGee was quietly serene. “But we’ve got eighteen men aboard, the survivors of a wrecked Guard cruiser. Some of them are injured and they’re all under ametine. You had better take them back to Pallas.”
“Impossible.” Anders was annoyed and curt. “What cruiser, and how was it wrecked?”
“You had better ask the men when they wake up,” McGee told him softly. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But they’re in urgent need of hospitalization, captain, and you have speed enough to get them back to Pallasport two full days ahead of us.”
“We’re on an important special mission,” Anders rapped. “Refuse to be delayed by any tricks.”
“This isn’t our trick,” McGee assured him gravely. “And the lives of these men are in danger unless they get attention. One of them is a very important officer. When you find out who he is you won’t regret stopping.”
“I must refuse.” But Anders seemed a little worried. “I’m sorry but we can’t take the time—”
“But you can,” McGee interrupted cheerfully. “I happen to know you’re going to stop. Perhaps you’d better talk to Drake.”
Rick listened to his questions.
“No, Captain McGee hasn’t lost his mind,” Rick insisted. “And we didn’t need seetee power to beat you here from Pallas—even if we were twice delayed on account of a separator-manifold. But you had better take these eighteen men. They really need attention. We can’t tell you anything about them, but I believe they know something about the runaway rock.”
“Then we’ll take them,” Anders snapped at last. He put the cruiser’s astragation officer on the photophone to fix the rendezvous. Six hours later the two ships came gently together. Men from the cruiser sealed a fabric pipe between the air locks. Rick saw some of them staring, with half recognition on white, sick faces, at the deathlike forms they carried out of the holds.
“I’d swear, Mike,” he heard a spaceman mutter fearfully, “one o’ them half-stiffs is a ringer for you.” And the other answered, “Hell, Smitty, that one’s you!”
Anders mounted the ladder into the tug’s pilothouse. Rick and little McGee listened calmly to his brittle-voiced demands for information. Who were these drugged men, he wanted to know, and what had happened to their ship?
“Since when,” Rick asked hotly, “is it a crime to rescue the survivors from a wreck at space?” McGee spoke more softly, urging: “They’ll soon be waking up, captain. They can tell you all about it. It wasn’t us that wrecked their ship.”
“Then who did?” Anders demanded.
They didn’t tell him. When he refused to believe that the Good-by Jane could have got here without seetee power, however, McGee let him inspect the ancient uranium—and his brown face turned hard when he saw the patched-on manifold. He muttered one grim word:
“Wreckers!”
“No,” said McGee. “We didn’t do it—the men will tell you that.”
Anders was in a hurry, and even a secondhand manifold was not conclusive evidence. When an ill-looking rating told him that all the men had been transferred aboard, he went down the ladder. But he wasn’t satisfied.
XI.
It was four more days back to Pallasport for the drift-pocked tug. Rick and McGee spent them sifting the dusty black gangue from the diamonds, sorting out the perfect tuning crystals and weighing them into discreetly small parcels. Rick tried to estimate the total value.
“It’s hard to believe!” His voice was awed. “Even if we have to sell the most of them for half what they’re worth on the black exchanges, they bring enough to build the seetee shop—with plenty left over for taxes and graft.”
Early on the morning of March 30th, the Good-by Jane landed on the terraformed hill of Pallasport. Shaved again, rested from his long ordeal on the rock, a tall, spaceburned giant in crisp white slacks, Rick walked across the curving street from the spaceport to the Guard hospital. He found a worried-looking nurse at the reception desk and inquired about the survivors from the wreck.
“Do you know them, sir?” Her expression was oddly haunted. “You see, sir—they have upset the whole hospital. They’re beginning to wake up from the ametine—” Her voice turned shrill and breathless. “And—what do you think, sir—they claim to be the crew of the same ship that brought them here! Some of them have identification—it’s all very peculiar!”
“I know Captain Anders,” Rick told her. “May I speak to him?”
“I’m afraid not today.” She made a troubled shrug. “There’s one of them that says he’s Captain Anders. But—well, you see, sir—” Her haunted eyes darted back along the corridor, and she dropped her uneasy nasal voice. “Confidentially, sir—they’re all displaying mental symptoms. Collective hallucination, the doctors say, due to ametine shock. Our psychiatrists have them under observation. I’m afraid that Captain Anders—if he is Captain Anders—can’t be allowed to receive any visitors for several days at least.”
That afternoon Rick took the first small parcel of diamonds to the office of the Venusian Trading Co. He was afraid of trouble because the Mandate government strangled all private business in red tape to favor the great monopolies. He half expected arrest and seizure of the diamonds for the want of some license or permit.
The Venusians and the Jovians and the Martians, however, and even the agents of mighty Interplanet, were all in savage competition. And terraformer crystals were the vital key to further conquest. The delicate task proved easier than Rick had expected. All the buyers were eager to pay eight thousand dollars a gram with a winking assurance of secrecy.
Next morning Rick put through a photophone call to his father on Obania. His mind could see the roan-haired elder giant, gaunt and stooped perhaps, but yet a giant. His eager voice was breathless and a little incoherent.
“Hello, dad! I just called to tell you that Cap’n Rob got here—well, a few days ago. And I’m really leaving Interplanet. We’ll be starting back to Obania as soon as we get a few things done.”
He tried to veil his words with caution.
“By the way, dad, I’ve just paid up the taxes on Freedonia. And we’ve got a little money left. I mean, there’ll be plenty to build that metallurgy lab. So you can start making out the orders for all the new machines we’ll need to buy—for Drake, McGee & Drake.”
Next day a hospital orderly brought a brief monogrammed note to the Good-by Jane, begging Rick to call at the hospital on Captain Paul Anders. Walking slowly across from the spaceport, Rick prepared himself for a fighting interview.
He didn’t know what Anders wanted. But a Jovian diamond buyer had told him the rumor of a court-martial pending to investigate the cruiser’s loss. Did Anders intend to press his charges against him and McGee—of wrecking and treason? Rick wondered uneasily how much he could explain without losing the diamonds to the greedy hands of a Mandate court.
At the hospital a nurse showed him to a large private room. The first thing that caught his eye was the name engraved on the card beside a huge vase of expensive hydroponic flowers: Karen Hood.
Rick hadn’t seen Karen and he didn’t mean to see her. He had put her declining world behind him, resolutely. Now, however, the flame of a huge Venusian orchid brought back the color of her hair, and with it all the ache of longing he had been trying to forget. He looked hastily away, glad that Anders hadn’t read the bleak pain on his face.
For the tall guardsman, propped in a reclining chair, had his back to the door. He was staring out across the cruel landscape of uneroded mountains beyond the huge window. Because the hospital was well down the slope of the terraformed hill, that cragged desert seemed to tip insanely. Every peak was a flat cut-out of savage incandescence, edged with ink-black shadow.
Rick spoke and Anders started nervously. He looked pale and stern, one arm was slung, and his brooding eyes seemed to reflect the ominous sky. Unexpectedly, Rick felt a little sorry for him. For all his evident bitterness, however, he hadn’t lost his old self-command.
“H’lo, Drake.” He waved easily at a chair beside the window, motioned at the nurse to leave them and deftly mixed two whiskey-sodas—all with the unslung arm. Rick set down the drink and waited, on his guard.
“Good of you to come.” Anders read the implications of the untasted drink and smiled as he explained: “I asked you for two reasons. One is gratitude—because I gather you must have saved our lives?” Rick didn’t respond to that half interrogation. “The other is that I’d like to ask some questions.”
Rick felt surprised to find himself at ease. Still Anders seemed a dangerous opponent, for nothing had shattered his iron assurance. But, somehow, out on that runaway rock, Rick had discovered a new self-confidence of his own.
“No, captain, you don’t owe us anything,” he said gravely. “The rumors about your rescue are all a little confusing, but I understand you were brought in by a Guard cruiser—under your own command.”
“That’s what I’m told.” Anders smiled slightly, “And what I want to ask about.”
“I’m afraid your questions will have to wait until McGee and I have hired a lawyer.”
But Anders didn’t wait and the first question took Rick’s breath. Watching him with hard steel eyes, the Earthman put it in a slurred, careless voice:
“Un’erstand you’re selling diamonds?”
“A few.” Rick tried to conceal his consternation. “Family heirlooms.”
“No business of mine”—Anders actually grinned—“because I’m in your debt on several counts. All apologies, if you’ll just answer my questions. I admit that I was stupid. But I’ve been thinking—since they managed to convince me of the date.” With a sardonic little chuckle, Anders moved his dark head at a calendar on the wall. Rick saw that the first day of April was surrounded with a heavy black mark. He could feel the growing, anxious tension under that careless-seeming voice.
“Just tell me if I’m right, Drake, and you won’t need a lawyer. The answer won’t be used against you. Maybe you heard the talk of a court-martial. But I imagine it would be a little hard to get all this through the brass hats, and I managed to pull the wires to get it killed.”
