Four-Day Planet.
by Henry Beam Piper.
1
THE SHIP FROM TERRA
I went through the gateway, towing my equipment in a contragravity hamper over my head. As usual, I was wondering what it would take, short of a revolution, to get the city of Port Sandor as clean and tidy and well lighted as the s.p.a.ceport area. I knew Dad"s editorials and my sarcastic news stories wouldn"t do it. We"d been trying long enough.
The two girls in bikinis in front of me pushed on, still gabbling about the fight one of them had had with her boy friend, and I closed up behind the half dozen monster-hunters in long trousers, ankle boots and short boat-jackets, with big knives on their belts. They must have all been from the same crew, because they weren"t arguing about whose ship was fastest, had the toughest skipper, and made the most money.
They were talking about the price of tallow-wax, and they seemed to have picked up a rumor that it was going to be cut another ten centisols a pound. I eavesdropped shamelessly, but it was the same rumor I"d picked up, myself, a little earlier.
"Hi, Walt," somebody behind me called out. "Looking for some news that"s fit to print?"
I turned my head. It was a man of about thirty-five with curly brown hair and a wide grin. Adolf Lautier, the entertainment promoter. He and Dad each owned a share in the Port Sandor telecast station, and split their time between his music and drama-films and Dad"s newscasts.
"All the news is fit to print, and if it"s news the _Times_ prints it," I told him. "Think you"re going to get some good thrillers this time?"
He shrugged. I"d just asked that to make conversation; he never had any way of knowing what sort of films would come in. The ones the _Peenemunde_ was bringing should be fairly new, because she was outbound from Terra. He"d go over what was aboard, and trade one for one for the old films he"d shown already.
"They tell me there"s a real Old-Terran-style Western been showing on Volund that ought to be coming our way this time," he said. "It was filmed in South America, with real horses."
That would go over big here. Almost everybody thought horses were as extinct as dinosaurs. I"ve seen so-called Westerns with the cowboys riding Freyan _oukry_. I mentioned that, and then added:
"They"ll think the old cattle towns like Dodge and Abilene were awful sissy places, though."
"I suppose they were, compared to Port Sandor," Lautier said. "Are you going aboard to interview the distinguished visitor?"
"Which one?" I asked. "Glenn Murell or Leo Belsher?"
Lautier called Leo Belsher something you won"t find in the dictionary but which n.o.body needs to look up. The hunters, ahead of us, heard him and laughed. They couldn"t possibly have agreed more. He was going to continue with the fascinating subject of Mr. Leo Belsher"s ancestry and personal characteristics, and then bit it off short. I followed his eyes, and saw old Professor Hartzenbosch, the princ.i.p.al of the school, approaching.
"Ah, here you are, Mr. Lautier," he greeted. "I trust that I did not keep you waiting." Then he saw me. "Why, it"s Walter Boyd. How is your father, Walter?"
I a.s.sured him as to Dad"s health and inquired about his own, and then asked him how things were going at school. As well as could be expected, he told me, and I gathered that he kept his point of expectation safely low. Then he wanted to know if I were going aboard to interview Mr. Murell.
"Really, Walter, it is a wonderful thing that a famous author like Mr.
Murell should come here to write a book about our planet," he told me, very seriously, and added, as an afterthought: "Have you any idea where he intends staying while he is among us?"
"Why, yes," I admitted. "After the _Peenemunde_ radioed us their pa.s.senger list, Dad talked to him by screen, and invited him to stay with us. Mr. Murell accepted, at least until he can find quarters of his own."
There are a lot of good poker players in Port Sandor, but Professor Jan Hartzenbosch is not one of them. The look of disappointment would have been comical if it hadn"t been so utterly pathetic. He"d been hoping to la.s.so Murell himself.
"I wonder if Mr. Murell could spare time to come to the school and speak to the students," he said, after a moment.
"I"m sure he could. I"ll mention it to him, Professor," I promised.
Professor Hartzenbosch bridled at that. The great author ought to be coming to his school out of respect for him, not because a seventeen-year-old cub reporter sent him. But then, Professor Hartzenbosch always took the att.i.tude that he was conferring a favor on the _Times_ when he had anything he wanted publicity on.
The elevator door opened, and Lautier and the professor joined in the push to get into it. I hung back, deciding to wait for the next one so that I could get in first and get back to the rear, where my hamper wouldn"t be in people"s way. After a while, it came back empty and I got on, and when the crowd pushed off on the top level, I put my hamper back on contragravity and towed it out into the outdoor air, which by this time had gotten almost as cool as a bake-oven.
I looked up at the sky, where everybody else was looking. The _Peenemunde_ wasn"t visible; it was still a few thousand miles off-planet. Big ragged clouds were still blowing in from the west, very high, and the sunset was even brighter and redder than when I had seen it last, ten hours before. It was now about 1630.
Now, before anybody starts asking just who"s crazy, let me point out that this is not on Terra, nor on Baldur nor Thor nor Odin nor Freya, nor any other rational planet. This is Fenris, and on Fenris the sunsets, like many other things, are somewhat peculiar.
Fenris is the second planet of a G_{4} star, six hundred and fifty light-years to the Galactic southwest of the Sol System. Everything else equal, it should have been pretty much Terra type; closer to a cooler primary and getting about the same amount of radiation. At least, that"s what the book says. I was born on Fenris, and have never been off it in the seventeen years since.
Everything else, however, is not equal. The Fenris year is a trifle shorter than the Terran year we use for Atomic Era dating, eight thousand and a few odd Galactic Standard hours. In that time, Fenris makes almost exactly four axial rotations. This means that on one side the sun is continuously in the sky for a thousand hours, pouring down unceasing heat, while the other side is in shadow. You sleep eight hours, and when you get up and go outside--in an insulated vehicle, or an extreme-environment suit--you find that the shadows have moved only an inch or so, and it"s that much hotter. Finally, the sun crawls down to the horizon and hangs there for a few days--periods of twenty-four G.S. hours--and then slides slowly out of sight. Then, for about a hundred hours, there is a beautiful unfading sunset, and it"s really pleasant outdoors. Then it gets darker and colder until, just before sunrise, it gets almost cold enough to freeze CO_{2}. Then the sun comes up, and we begin all over again.
You are picking up the impression, I trust, that as planets go, Fenris is n.o.body"s bargain. It isn"t a real h.e.l.l-planet, and s.p.a.cemen haven"t made a swear word out of its name, as they have with the name of fluorine-atmosphere Nifflheim, but even the Reverend Hiram Zilker, the Orthodox-Monophysite preacher, admits that it"s one of those planets the Creator must have gotten a trifle absent-minded with.
The chartered company that colonized it, back at the end of the Fourth Century A.E., went bankrupt in ten years, and it wouldn"t have taken that long if communication between Terra and Fenris hadn"t been a matter of six months each way. When the smash finally came, two hundred and fifty thousand colonists were left stranded. They lost everything they"d put into the company, which, for most of them, was all they had. Not a few lost their lives before the Federation s.p.a.ce Navy could get ships here to evacuate them.
But about a thousand, who were too poor to make a fresh start elsewhere and too tough for Fenris to kill, refused evacuation, took over all the equipment and installations the Fenris Company had abandoned, and tried to make a living out of the planet. At least, they stayed alive. There are now twenty-odd thousand of us, and while we are still very poor, we are very tough, and we brag about it.
There were about two thousand people--ten per cent of the planetary population--on the wide concrete promenade around the s.p.a.ceport landing pit. I came out among them and set down the hamper with my telecast cameras and recorders, wishing, as usual, that I could find some ten or twelve-year-old kid weak-minded enough to want to be a reporter when he grew up, so that I could have an apprentice to help me with my junk.
As the star--and only--reporter of the greatest--and only--paper on the planet, I was always on hand when either of the two ships on the Terra-Odin milk run, the _Peenemunde_ and the _Cape Canaveral_, landed. Of course, we always talk to them by screen as soon as they come out of hypers.p.a.ce and into radio range, and get the pa.s.senger list, and a speed-recording of any news they are carrying, from the latest native uprising on Thor to the latest political scandal on Venus. Sometime the natives of Thor won"t be fighting anybody at all, or the Federation Member Republic of Venus will have some nonscandalous politics, and either will be the man-bites-dog story to end man-bites-dog stories. All the news is at least six months old, some more than a year. A s.p.a.ceship can log a light-year in sixty-odd hours, but radio waves still crawl along at the same old 186,000 mps.
I still have to meet the ships. There"s always something that has to be picked up personally, usually an interview with some VIP traveling through. This time, though, the big story coming in on the _Peenemunde_ was a local item. Paradox? Dad says there is no such thing. He says a paradox is either a verbal contradiction, and you get rid of it by restating it correctly, or it"s a structural contradiction, and you just call it an impossibility and let it go at that. In this case, what was coming in was a real live author, who was going to write a travel book about Fenris, the planet with the four-day year. Glenn Murell, which sounded suspiciously like a nom de plume, and n.o.body here had ever heard of him.
That was odd, too. One thing we can really be proud of here, besides the toughness of our citizens, is our public library. When people have to stay underground most of the time to avoid being fried and/or frozen to death, they have a lot of time to kill, and reading is one of the cheaper and more harmless and profitable ways of doing it. And travel books are a special favorite here. I suppose because everybody is hoping to read about a worse place than Fenris. I had checked on Glenn Murell at the library. None of the librarians had ever heard of him, and there wasn"t a single mention of him in any of the big catalogues of publications.
The first and obvious conclusion would be that Mr. Glenn Murell was some swindler posing as an author. The only objection to that was that I couldn"t quite see why any swindler would come to Fenris, or what he"d expect to swindle the Fenrisians out of. Of course, he could be on the lam from somewhere, but in that case why bother with all the cover story? Some of our better-known citizens came here dodging warrants on other planets.
I was still wondering about Murell when somebody behind me greeted me, and I turned around. It was Tom Kivelson.
Tom and I are buddies, when he"s in port. He"s just a shade older than I am; he was eighteen around noon, and my eighteenth birthday won"t come till midnight, Fenris Standard Sundial Time. His father is Joe Kivelson, the skipper of the _Javelin_; Tom is sort of junior engineer, second gunner, and about third harpooner. We went to school together, which is to say a couple of years at Professor Hartzenbosch"s, learning to read and write and put figures together.
That is all the schooling anybody on Fenris gets, although Joe Kivelson sent Tom"s older sister, Linda, to school on Terra. Anybody who stays here has to dig out education for himself. Tom and I were still digging for ours.
Each of us envied the other, when we weren"t thinking seriously about it. I imagined that sea-monster hunting was wonderfully thrilling and romantic, and Tom had the idea that being a newsman was real hot stuff. When we actually stopped to think about it, though, we realized that neither of us would trade jobs and take anything at all for boot.
Tom couldn"t string three sentences--no, one sentence--together to save his life, and I"m just a town boy who likes to live in something that isn"t pitching end-for-end every minute.
Tom is about three inches taller than I am, and about thirty pounds heavier. Like all monster-hunters, he"s trying to grow a beard, though at present it"s just a blond chin-fuzz. I was surprised to see him dressed as I was, in shorts and sandals and a white shirt and a light jacket. Ordinarily, even in town, he wears boat-clothes. I looked around behind him, and saw the bra.s.s tip of a scabbard under the jacket. Any time a hunter-ship man doesn"t have his knife on, he isn"t wearing anything else. I wondered about his being in port now. I knew Joe Kivelson wouldn"t bring his ship in just to meet the _Peenemunde_, with only a couple of hundred hours" hunting left till the storms and the cold.
"I thought you were down in the South Ocean," I said.
"There"s going to be a special meeting of the Co-op," he said. "We only heard about it last evening," by which he meant after 1800 of the previous Galactic Standard day. He named another hunter-ship captain who had called the _Javelin_ by screen. "We screened everybody else we could."
That was the way they ran things in the Hunters" Co-operative. Steve Ravick would wait till everybody had their ships down on the coast of Hermann Reuch"s Land, and then he would call a meeting and pack it with his stooges and hooligans, and get anything he wanted voted through. I had always wondered how long the real hunters were going to stand for that. They"d been standing for it ever since I could remember anything outside my own playpen, which, of course, hadn"t been too long.
I was about to say something to that effect, and then somebody yelled, "There she is!" I took a quick look at the radar bowls to see which way they were pointed and followed them up to the sky, and caught a tiny twinkle through a cloud rift. After a moment"s mental arithmetic to figure how high she"d have to be to catch the sunlight, I relaxed.
Even with the telephoto, I"d only get a picture the size of a pinhead, so I fixed the position in my mind and then looked around at the crowd.
Among them were two men, both well dressed. One was tall and slender, with small hands and feet; the other was short and stout, with a scrubby gray-brown mustache. The slender one had a bulge under his left arm, and the short-and-stout job bulged over the right hip. The former was Steve Ravick, the boss of the Hunters" Co-operative, and his companion was the Honorable Morton Hallstock, mayor of Port Sandor and consequently the planetary government of Fenris.
They had held their respective positions for as long as I could remember anything at all. I could never remember an election in Port Sandor, or an election of officers in the Co-op. Ravick had a bunch of goons and triggermen--I could see a couple of them loitering in the background--who kept down opposition for him. So did Hallstock, only his wore badges and called themselves police.