It was the First Officer of the STS-52 who finally got the story straight. As soon as Clayton was in condition, the medic and the quartermaster officer who had found him took him up to the First Officer"s compartment.
"I was checking through the stores this morning when I found this man. He was asleep, dead drunk, behind the crates."
"He was drunk, all right," supplied the medic. "I found this in his pocket." He flipped a booklet to the First Officer.
The First was a young man, not older than twenty-eight with tough-looking gray eyes. He looked over the booklet.
"Where did you get Parkinson"s ID booklet? And his uniform?"
Clayton looked down at his clothes in wonder. "I don"t know."
"You don"t know? That"s a h.e.l.l of an answer."
"Well, I was drunk," Clayton said defensively. "A man doesn"t know what he"s doing when he"s drunk." He frowned in concentration. He knew he"d have to think up some story.
"I kind of remember we made a bet. I bet him I could get on the ship. Sure--I remember, now. That"s what happened; I bet him I could get on the ship and we traded clothes."
"Where is he now?"
"At my place, sleeping it off, I guess."
"Without his oxy-mask?"
"Oh, I gave him my oxidation pills for the mask."
The First shook his head. "That sounds like the kind of trick Parkinson would pull, all right. I"ll have to write it up and turn you both in to the authorities when we hit Earth." He eyed Clayton. "What"s your name?"
"Cartwright. Sam Cartwright," Clayton said without batting an eye.
"Volunteer or convicted colonist?"
"Volunteer."
The First looked at him for a long moment, disbelief in his eyes.
It didn"t matter. Volunteer or convict, there was no place Clayton could go. From the officer"s viewpoint, he was as safely imprisoned in the s.p.a.ceship as he would be on Mars or a prison on Earth.
The First wrote in the log book, and then said: "Well, we"re one man short in the kitchen. You wanted to take Parkinson"s place; brother, you"ve got it--without pay." He paused for a moment.
"You know, of course," he said judiciously, "that you"ll be shipped back to Mars immediately. And you"ll have to work out your pa.s.sage both ways--it will be deducted from your pay."
Clayton nodded. "I know."
"I don"t know what else will happen. If there"s a conviction, you may lose your volunteer status on Mars. And there may be fines taken out of your pay, too.
"Well, that"s all, Cartwright. You can report to Kissman in the kitchen."
The First pressed a b.u.t.ton on his desk and spoke into the intercom. "Who was on duty at the airlock when the crew came aboard last night? Send him up. I want to talk to him."
Then the quartermaster officer led Clayton out the door and took him to the kitchen.
The ship"s driver tubes were pushing it along at a steady five hundred centimeters per second squared acceleration, pushing her steadily closer to Earth with a little more than half a gravity of drive.
There wasn"t much for Clayton to do, really. He helped to select the foods that went into the automatics, and he cleaned them out after each meal was cooked. Once every day, he had to partially dismantle them for a really thorough going-over.
And all the time, he was thinking.
Parkinson must be dead; he knew that. That meant the Chamber. And even if he wasn"t, they"d send Clayton back to Mars. Luckily, there was no way for either planet to communicate with the ship; it was hard enough to keep a beam trained on a planet without trying to hit such a comparatively small thing as a ship.
But they would know about it on Earth by now. They would pick him up the instant the ship landed. And the best he could hope for was a return to Mars.
No, by G.o.d! He wouldn"t go back to that frozen mud-ball! He"d stay on Earth, where it was warm and comfortable and a man could live where he was meant to live. Where there was plenty of air to breathe and plenty of water to drink. Where the beer tasted like beer and not like slop. Earth. Good green hills, the like of which exists nowhere else.
Slowly, over the days, he evolved a plan. He watched and waited and checked each little detail to make sure nothing would go wrong. It couldn"t go wrong. He didn"t want to die, and he didn"t want to go back to Mars.
n.o.body on the ship liked him; they couldn"t appreciate his position. He hadn"t done anything to them, but they just didn"t like him. He didn"t know why; he"d tried to get along with them. Well, if they didn"t like him, the h.e.l.l with them.
If things worked out the way he figured, they"d be d.a.m.ned sorry.
He was very clever about the whole plan. When turn-over came, he pretended to get violently s.p.a.cesick. That gave him an opportunity to steal a bottle of chloral hydrate from the medic"s locker.
And, while he worked in the kitchen, he spent a great deal of time sharpening a big carving knife.
Once, during his off time, he managed to disable one of the ship"s two lifeboats. He was saving the other for himself.
The ship was eight hours out from Earth and still decelerating when Clayton pulled his getaway.
It was surprisingly easy. He was supposed to be asleep when he sneaked down to the drive compartment with the knife. He pushed open the door, looked in, and grinned like an ape.
The Engineer and the two jetmen were out cold from the chloral hydrate in the coffee from the kitchen.
Moving rapidly, he went to the spares locker and began methodically to smash every replacement part for the drivers. Then he took three of the signal bombs from the emergency kit, set them for five minutes, and placed them around the driver circuits.
He looked at the three sleeping men. What if they woke up before the bombs went off? He didn"t want to kill them though. He wanted them to know what had happened and who had done it.
He grinned. There was a way. He simply had to drag them outside and jam the door lock. He took the key from the Engineer, inserted it, turned it, and snapped off the head, leaving the body of the key still in the lock. n.o.body would unjam it in the next four minutes.
Then he began to run up the stairwell toward the good lifeboat.
He was panting and out of breath when he arrived, but no one had stopped him. No one had even seen him.
He clambered into the lifeboat, made everything ready, and waited.
The signal bombs were not heavy charges; their main purposes was to make a flare bright enough to be seen for thousands of miles in s.p.a.ce. Fluorine and magnesium made plenty of light--and heat.
Quite suddenly, there was no gravity. He had felt nothing, but he knew that the bombs had exploded. He punched the LAUNCH switch on the control board of the lifeboat, and the little ship leaped out from the side of the greater one.
Then he turned on the drive, set it at half a gee, and watched the STS-52 drop behind him. It was no longer decelerating, so it would miss Earth and drift on into s.p.a.ce. On the other hand, the lifeship would come down very neatly within a few hundred miles of the s.p.a.ceport in Utah, the destination of the STS-52.
Landing the lifeship would be the only difficult part of the maneuver, but they were designed to be handled by beginners. Full instructions were printed on the simplified control board.
Clayton studied them for a while, then set the alarm to waken him in seven hours and dozed off to sleep.
He dreamed of Indiana. It was full of nice, green hills and leafy woods, and Parkinson was inviting him over to his mother"s house for chicken and whiskey. And all for free.
Beneath the dream was the calm a.s.surance that they would never catch him and send him back. When the STS-52 failed to show up, they would think he had been lost with it. They would never look for him.
When the alarm rang, Earth was a mottled globe looming hugely beneath the ship. Clayton watched the dials on the board, and began to follow the instructions on the landing sheet.
He wasn"t too good at it. The accelerometer climbed higher and higher, and he felt as though he could hardly move his hands to the proper switches.
He was less than fifteen feet off the ground when his hand slipped. The ship, out of control, shifted, spun, and toppled over on its side, smashing a great hole in the cabin.
Clayton shook his head and tried to stand up in the wreckage. He got to his hands and knees, dizzy but unhurt, and took a deep breath of the fresh air that was blowing in through the hole in the cabin.
It felt just like home.
Bureau of Criminal Investigation Regional Headquarters Cheyenne, Wyoming 20 January 2102 To: s.p.a.ce Transport Service Subject: Lifeship 2, STS-52 Attention Mr. P. D. Latimer Dear Paul, I have on hand the copies of your reports on the rescue of the men on the disabled STS-52. It is fortunate that the Lunar radar stations could compute their orbit.
The detailed official report will follow, but briefly, this is what happened: The lifeship landed--or, rather, crashed--several miles west of Cheyenne, as you know, but it was impossible to find the man who was piloting it until yesterday because of the weather.
He has been identified as Ronald Watkins Clayton, exiled to Mars fifteen years ago.
Evidently, he didn"t realize that fifteen years of Martian gravity had so weakened his muscles that he could hardly walk under the pull of a full Earth gee.
As it was, he could only crawl about a hundred yards from the wrecked lifeship before he collapsed.
Well, I hope this clears up everything.
I hope you"re not getting the snow storms up there like we"ve been getting them.
John B. Remley Captain, CBI THE END.
Contents
HAWK Ca.r.s.e.
By Anthony Gilmore
CHAPTER I.
The Swoop of the Hawk Hawk Ca.r.s.e came to the frontiers of s.p.a.ce when Saturn was the frontier planet, which was years before the swift Patrol ships brought Earth"s law and order to those vast regions. A casual glance at his slender figure made it seem impossible that he was to rise to be the greatest adventurer in s.p.a.ce, that his name was to carry such deadly connotation in later years. But on closer inspection, a number of little things became evident: the steadiness of his light gray eyes; the marvelously strong-fingered hands; the wiry build of his splendidly proportioned body. Summing these things up and adding the brilliant resourcefulness of the man, the complete ignorance of fear, one could perhaps understand why even his blood enemy, the impa.s.sive Ku Sui, a man otherwise devoid of every human trait, could not face Ca.r.s.e unmoved in his moments of cold fury.
His name, we know, enters most histories of the period 2117-2148 A. D., for he has at last been recognized as the one who probably did most--unofficially, and not with the authority of the Earth Government--to shape the raw frontiers of s.p.a.ce, to push them outward and to lay the foundations of the present tremendous commerce between Earth, Vulcan, Pluto, Neptune, Ura.n.u.s, Saturn and Jupiter. But, little of his fascinating character may be gleaned from the dry words of history; and it is Hawk Ca.r.s.e the adventurer, he of the spitting ray-gun and the phenomenal draw, of the reckless s.p.a.ce ship maneuverings, of the queer bangs of flaxen hair that from a certain year hid his forehead, of the score of blood feuds and the one great feud that jarred nations in its final terrible settling--it is with that man we are concerned here.
A number of his exploits never recorded are still among the favorite yarns spun by lonely outlanders in the scattered trading posts of the planets, and among them is that of his final encounter with Judd the Kite. It shows typically the cold deadliness, the prompt repaying of a blood debt, the nerveless daring that were the outstanding qualities of this almost legendary figure.
It began one crisp, early morning on Iapetus, and it ended on Iapetus, with the streaks of ray-guns searing the air; and it explains why there are two square mounds of soil on Iapetus, eighth satellite of Saturn.
Ca.r.s.e pioneered Iapetus and considered its product his by right of prior exploration. One or two men had landed there before he came to the frontiers of s.p.a.ce and reported the satellite habitable, possessed of gravital force only slightly under Earth"s, despite its twelve-hundred-mile diameter, and of an atmosphere merely a trifle rarer; but they had gone no further. They had noticed the forms of certain strange animals flitting through the satellite"s jungles, but had not investigated. It was Ca.r.s.e who captured one of the creatures and saw the commercial possibilities of the pointed seven-inch horn that grew on its head, and who named it phanti, after the now extinct Venusian bird-mammal.
There were great herds of them, and they const.i.tuted Iapetus" highest form of life. The s.p.a.ce trader cut off a few of their opalescent and green-veined horns and sent them as samples to Earth; and, upon their being valued highly, he two months later established his ranch on Iapetus, and thus laid the foundation for the grim business that men sometimes call the Exploit of the Hawk and the Kite.
No doubt Ca.r.s.e expected trouble over the ranch. To protect the valuable twice-yearly harvest of horn from Ku Sui"s several bands of pirates, and other semi-piratical traders who roamed s.p.a.ce, he built a formidable ranch-house with generators for powerful offensive rays and a strong defensive ray-web, and manned it with six competent men. Moreover, he came personally twice a year to transport the cargo of horn, and let it be known throughout the frontiers that the sign of the Hawk was on that portion of Iapetus, and that all who trespa.s.sed would have to answer to him. This should have been, ordinarily, enough. But there was always the sinister, brilliant Dr. Ku Sui, plotting against him and his belongings, and reckless others to whom the ranch might look like easy pickings. From these Ca.r.s.e had long antic.i.p.ated a raid on Iapetus.
And now he was worried. Clad as usual in a faded blue tunic, open at the neck, soft blue trousers and old-fashioned rubber soled shoes, he showed it by pulling occasionally at the bangs of flaxen hair that had been trained to hang down his forehead to the thick, straw-colored eyebrows. In his new cruiser, the Star Devil, he was within an hour"s time of Iapetus, which lay before the bow observation ports of the control cabin like a giant buff-tinted orange, dark-splotched by seas and jungles, on the third of his semi-annual voyages for the harvest of horn. Away to the left, scintillating and flaming in the blackness of s.p.a.ce, whirled Saturn, his rings clear-cut and brilliant, his hard light filling the control cabin. Ca.r.s.e was staring unseeingly at the magnificent spectacle when the giant negro standing nearby at the s.p.a.ce-stick rumbled: "Well, suh, Ah cain"t think they"s anything wrong--no, suh. They"s n.o.body"d dare touch that ranch! No, suh--not Hawk Ca.r.s.e"s ranch."
This was "Friday," the herculean black Earthling whom Ca.r.s.e had rescued years before from one of the Venusian slave-ships, and now a member of that strange trio of totally dissimilar comrades, the third of whom was Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow, now absent and at work in his secret laboratory. Friday thought the Hawk just about the greatest man in the Solar System, and many times already had he given proof of his devotion.
Ca.r.s.e looked full at him. "You"re a good mechanic, Eclipse," he said, "but in some ways very innocent. Crane hasn"t replied to us for seventy minutes. He knows we"re coming and he should be on duty. That cargo"s valuable, and it"s all ready and packed."
"Hmff," Friday grunted. "But who you think"d dare try an" swipe it when we"re so close? One o" Ku Sui"s gang, maybe?"
"Perhaps. I haven"t heard anything of Ku Sui for some time, and he"s never more dangerous than when he keeps silent," said the Hawk thoughtfully. "But Crane might be sick. Or his radio might have broken down temporarily. Still--"
It was then that the third man in the cabin, Harkness, the navigator, straightened abruptly and put a sharp end to the trader"s last word by calling out: "Radio, sir!"