The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum Part 21

It was some time later that Gustavus Neilan turned to Grant. "I can't thank you," he said. "If there's ever any way I can show my appreciation for-"

"There is. You can cancel my contract."

"Oh, you work for me?"

"I'm Grant Calthorpe, one of your traders, and I'm about sick of this crazy planet."

"Of course, if you wish," said Neilan. "If it's a question of pay-"

"You can pay me for the six months I've worked."

"If you'd care to stay," said the older man, "there won't be trading much longer. We've been able to grow fcrva near the polar cities, and I prefer plantations to the uncertainties of relying on loonies. If you'd work out your year, we might be able to put you in charge of a plantation by the end of that time."

Grant met Lee Neilan's gray eyes, and hesitated. "Thanks," he said slowly, "but I'm sick of it." He smiled at the girl, then turned back to her father. "Would you mind telling me how you happened to find us? This is the most unlikely place on the planet."

"That's just the reason," said Neilan. "When Lee didn't get back, I thought things over pretty carefully.

At last I decided, knowing her as I did, to search the least likely places first. We tried the sh.o.r.es of the Fever Sea, and then the White Desert, and finally Idiots' Hills. We spotted the ruins of a shack, and on the debris was this chap"-he indicated Oliver-"remark-ing that 'Ten loonies make one half-wit.' Well, the half-wit part sounded very much like a reference to my daughter, and we cruised about until the roar of your flame pistol attracted our attention."

Lee pouted, then turned her serious gray eyes on Grant. "Do you remember," she said softly, "what I told you there in the jungle?"

"I wouldn't even have mentioned that," he replied. "I knew you were delirious."

"But-perhaps I wasn't. Would companionship make it any easier to work out your year? I mean if-for instance-you were to fly back with us to Junopolis and return with a wife?"

"Lee," he said huskily, "you know what a difference that would make, though I can't understand why you'd ever dream of it."

"It must," suggested Oliver, "be the fever."

Redemption Cairn.

HAVE You ever been flat broke, hungry' as the very devil, and yet so down and out that you didn't even care? Looking back now, after a couple of months, it's hard to put it into words, but I think the low point was the evening old Captain Harris Henshaw dropped into my room-my room, that is, until the twenty-four-hour notice to move or pay up expired.

There I sat, Jack Sands, ex-rocket pilot. Yeah, the same Jack Sands you're thinking of, the one who cracked up the Gunderson Europa expedition trying to land at Young's Field, Long Island, in March, 2110. Just a year and a half ago! It seemed like ten and a half. Five hundred idle days. Eighteen months of having your friends look the other way when you happened to pa.s.s on the street, partly because they're ashamed to nod to a pilot that's been tagged yellow, and partly because they feel maybe it's kinder to just let you drop out of sight peacefully.

I didn't even look up when a knock sounded on my door, because I knew it could only be the landlady. "Haven't got it," I growled. "I've got a right to stay out my notice."

"You got a right to make a d.a.m.n fool of yourself," said Henshaw's voice. "Why don't you tell your friends your ad-dress?"

"Harris!" I yelled. It was "Captain" only aboard ship. Then I caught myself. "What's the matter?" I asked, grinning bit-terly. "Did you crack up, too? Coming to join me on the dust heap, eh?"

"Coming to offer you a job," he growled.

"Yeah? It must he a swell one, then. Carting sand to fill up the blast pits on a field, huh? And I'm d.a.m.n near hungry enough to take it-but not quite."

"It's a piloting job," said Henshaw quietly.

"Who wants a pilot who's been smeared with yellow paint? What outfit will trust its ships to a coward? Don't you know that Jack Sands is tagged forever?"

"Shut up, Jack," he said briefly. "I'm offering you the job as pilot under me on Interplanetary's new Europa expedition."

I started to burn up then. You see, it was returning from Jupiter's third moon, Europa, that I'd smashed up the Gun-derson outfit, and now I got a wild idea that Henshaw was taunting me about that.

"By Heaven!" I screeched. "If you're trying to be funny-"

But he wasn't. I quieted down when I saw he was serious, and he went on slowly, "I want a pilot I can trust, Jack. I don't know anything about your cracking up the Hera; I was on the Venus run when it happened. All I know is that I can depend on you."

After a while I began to believe him. When I got over the shock a little, I figured Henshaw was friend enough to be en-t.i.tled to the facts.

"Listen, Harris," I said. "You're taking me on, reputation and all, and it looks to me as if you deserve an explanation. I haven't been whining about the b.u.mp I got, and I'm not now. I cracked up Gunderson and his outfit all right, only-" I hesi-tated; it's kind of tough to feel that maybe you're squirming in the pinch-"only my co-pilot, that fellow Kratska, forgot to mention a few things, and mentioned a few others that weren't true. Oh, it was my shift, right enough, but he neg-lected to tell the investigating committee that I'd stood his shift and my own before it. I'd been on for two long shifts, and this was my short one."

"Two long ones!" echoed Henshaw. "You mean you were on sixteen hours before the landing shift?"

"That's what I mean. I'll tell you just what I told the com-mittee, and maybe you'll believe me. They didn't. But when Kratska showed up to relieve me he was hopped. He had a regular hexylamine jag, and he couldn't have piloted a tricy-cle. So I did the only possible thing to do; I sent him back to sleep it off, and I reported it to Gunderson, but that still Ieft me the job of getting us down.

"It wouldn't have been so bad if it had happened in s.p.a.ce, because there isn't much for a pilot to do out there except fol-low the course laid out by the captain, and maybe dodge a meteor if the alarm buzzes. But I had sixteen solid hours of teetering down through a gravitational field, and by the time my four-hour spell came around I was bleary."

"I don't wonder," said the captain. "Two long shifts!"

Maybe I'd better explain a rocket's pilot system. On short runs like Venus or Mars, a vessel couldcarry three pilots, and then it's a simple matter of three eight-hour shifts. But on any longer run, because air and weight and fuel and food are all precious, no rocket ever carries more than two pilots.

So a day's run is divided into four shifts, and each pilot has one long spell of eight hours, then four hours off, then four hours on again for his short shift, and then eight hours to sleep. He eats two of his meals right at the control desk, and the third during his short free period. It's a queer life, and sometimes men have been co-pilots for years without really seeing each other except at the beginning and the end of their run.

I went on with my story, still wondering whether Henshaw would feel as if I were whining. "I was bleary," I repeated, "but Kratska showed up still foggy, and I didn't dare trust a hexylamine dope with the job of landing. Anyway, I'd re-ported to Gunderson, and that seemed to shift some of the responsibility to him. So I let Kratska sit in the control cabin, and I began to put down."

Telling the story made me mad all over. "Those lousy re-porters!" I blazed. "All of them seemed to think landing a rocket is like settling down in bed; you just cushion down on your underblast. Yeah; they don't realize that you have to land blind, because three hundred feet down from the ground the blast begins to splash against it.

"You watch the leveling poles at the edge of the field and try to judge your alt.i.tude from them, but you don't see the ground; what you see under you are the flames of h.e.l.l. And another thing they don't realize: lowering a ship is like bring-ing down a dinner plate balanced on a fishing rod. If she starts to roll sideways-blooey! The underjets only hold you up when they're pointing down, you know."

Henshaw let me vent my temper without interruption, and I returned to my story. "Well, I was getting down as well as could be expected. The Hera always did have a tendency to roll a little, but she wasn't the worst ship I've put to ground.

"But every time she slid over a little, Kratska let out a yell; he was nervous from his dope jag, and he knew he was due to lose his license, and on top of that he was just plain scared by the side roll. We got to seventy feet on the leveling poles when she gave a pretty sharp roll, and Kratska went plain daffy."

I hesitated. "I don't know exactly how to tell what hap-pened. It went quick, and I didn't see all of it, of course. But suddenly Kratska, who had been fumbling with the air lock for ten minutes, shrieked something like 'She's going over!' and grabbed the throttle. He shut off the blast before I could lift an eyelash, shut it off and flung himself out. Yeah; he'd opened the air lock.

"Well, we were only seventy feet-less than that-above the field. We dropped like an overripe apple off a tree. I didn't have time even to move before we hit, and when we hit, all the fuel in all the jets must have let go. And for what hap-pened after that you'd better read the newspapers."

"Not me," said Henshaw. "You spill it."

"I can't, not all of it, because I was laid out. But I can guess, all right. It seems that when the jets blew off, Kratska was just picked up in a couple of cubic yards of the soft sand he had landed in, and tossed clear. He had nothing but a broken wrist. And as for me, apparently I was shot out of the control room, and banged up considerably. And as for Gun-derson, his professors, and everyone else on the Hera-well, they were just stains on the pool of molten ferralumin that was left."

"Then how," asked Henshaw, "did they hang it on you?"

I tried to control my voice. "Kratska," I said grimly. "The field was clear for landing; n.o.body can stand in close with the blast splashing in a six-hundred-foot circle. Of course, they saw someone jump from the nose of the ship after the jets cut off, but how could they tell which of us? And the explosion shuffled the whole field around, and n.o.body knew which was what."

"Then it should have been his word against yours."

"Yeah; it should have been. But the field knew it was my shift because I'd been talking over the landing beam, and be-sides, Kratska got to the reporters first. I never even knew of the mess until I woke up at Grand Mercy Hospital thirteen days later. By that time Kratska had talked and I was the goat."

"But the investigating committee?"

I grunted. "Sure, the investigating committee. I'd reported to Gunderson, but he made a swell witness, being just an im-purity in a ma.s.s of ferralumin alloy. And Kratska had disap-peared anyway.""Couldn't they find him?"

"Not on what I knew about him. We picked him up at Junopolis on Io, because Briggs was down with white fever. I didn't see him at all except when we were relieving each other, and you know what that's like, seeing somebody in a control cabin with the sun shields up. And on Europa we kept to s.p.a.ce routine, so I couldn't even give you a good descrip-tion of him. He had a beard, but so have ninety per cent of us after a long hop, and he said when we took him on that he'd just come over from the Earth." I paused. "I'll find him some day."

"Hope you do," said Henshaw briskly. "About this present run, now. There'll be you and me, and then there'll be Stefan Coretti, a physical chemist, and an Ivor Gogrol, a biologist. That's the scientific personnel of the expedition."

"Yeah, but who's my co-pilot? That's what interests me." "Oh, sure," said Henshaw, and coughed.

"Your co-pilot.

Well, I've been meaning to tell you. It's Claire Avery." "Claire Avery!"

"That's right," agreed the captain gloomily. "The Golden Flash herself. The only woman pilot to have her name on the Curry cup, winner of this year's Apogee race."

"She's no pilot!" I snapped. "She's a rich publicity hound with bra.s.s nerves. I was just curious enough to blow ten bucks rental on a 'scope to watch that race. She was ninth rounding the Moon. Ninth! Do you know how she won? She gunned her rocket under full acceleration practically all the way back, and then fell into a braking orbit.

"Any soph.o.m.ore in Astronautics II knows that you can't calculate a braking orbit without knowing the density of the stratosphere and ionosphere, and even then its a gamble. That's what she did-simply gambled, and happened to be lucky. Why do you pick a rich moron with a taste for thrills on a job like this?"

"I didn't pick her, Jack. Interplanetary picked her for pub-licity purposes. To tell the truth, I think this whole expedition is an attempt to get a little favorable advertising to offset that shady stock investigation this spring. Interplanetary wants to show itself as the n.o.ble patron of exploration. So Claire Avery will take off for the television and papers, and you'll be po-litely ignored."

"And that suits mel I wouldn't even take the job if thingswere a little different, and-" I broke off suddenly, frozen "Say," I said weakly, "did you know they'd revoked my li-cense?"

"You don't say," said Henshaw. "And after all the trouble I had talking Interplanetary into permission to take you on, too." Then he grinned. "Here," he said, tossing me an enve-lope.

See how long it '.

ll take you to lose this one."

But the very sight of the familiar blue paper was enough to make me forget a lot of things-Kratska, Claire Avery, even hunger.

The take-off was worse than I had expected. I had sense enough to wear my pilot's goggles to the field, but of course I was recognized as soon as I joined the group at the rocket. They'd given us the Minos, an old ship, but she looked as if she'd handle well.

The newsmen must have had orders to ignore me, but I could hear plenty of comments from the crowd. And to finish things up, there was Claire Avery, a lot prettier than she looked on the television screens, but with the same unmistak-able cobalt-blue eyes, and hair closer to the actual shade of metallic gold than any I'd ever seen. The "Golden Flash," the newsmen called her. Blah!

She accepted her introduction to me with the coolest possi-ble nod, as if to say to the scanners and cameras that it wasn't her choice she was teamed with yellow Jack Sands. But for that matter, Coretti's black Latin eyes were not especially cordial either, nor were Gogrol's broad features. I'd met Go-grol somewhere before, but couldn't place him at the moment.

Well, at last the speeches were over, and the photographers and broadcast men let the Golden Flash stop posing, and she and I got into the control cabin for the take-off. I still wore my goggles, and huddled down low besides, because there were a dozen telescopic cameras and scanners recording us from the field's edge. Claire Avery simply ate it up, though, smiling and waving before she cut in the underblast.

But fi-nally we were rising over the flame.She was worse than I'd dreamed. The Minos was a sweetly balanced ship, but she rolled it like a baby's cradle. She had the radio on the field broadcast, and I could hear the descrip-tion of the take-off: "-heavily laden. There-she rolls again. But she's making alt.i.tude. The blast has stopped splashing now, and is coming down in a beautiful fan of fire. A difficult take-off, even for the Golden Flash." A difficult take-off! Bunk!

I was watching the red bubble in the level, but I stole a glance to Claire Avery's face, and it wasn't so cool and stand-offish now. And just then the bubble in the level bobbed way over, and I heard the girl at my side give a frightened little gasp. This wasn't cradle rocking any more-we were in a real roll!

I slapped her hands hard and grabbed the U-bar. I cut the underjets completely off, letting the ship fall free, then shot the full blast through the right laterals. It was d.a.m.n close, I'm ready to swear, but we leveled, and I snapped on the under-blast before we lost a hundred feet of alt.i.tude. And there was that inane radio still talking: "They're over! No-they've lev-eled again, but what a roll! She's a real pilot, this Golden Flash-"

I looked at her; she was pale and shaken, but her eyes were angry. "Golden Flash, eh?" I jeered. "The gold must refer to your money, but what's the flash? It can't have much to do with your ability as a pilot."

But at that time I had no idea how pitifully little she really knew about rocketry.

She flared. "Anyway," she hissed, her lips actually quiver-ing with rage, "the gold doesn't refer to color, Mr. Malaria Sands!" She knew that would hurt; the "Malaria" was some bright columnist's idea of a pun on my name. You see, ma-laria's popularly called Yellow Jack. "Besides," she went on defiantly, "I could have pulled out of that roll myself, and you know it."

"Sure," I said, with the meanest possible sarcasm. We had considerable upward velocity now, and plenty of alt.i.tude, both of which tend toward safety because they give one more time to pull out of a roll.

"You can take over again now. The hard part's over."

She gave me a look from those electric blue eyes, and I be-gan to realize just what sort of trip I was in for. Coretti and Gogrol had indicated their unfriendliness plainly enough, and heaven knows I couldn't mistake the hatred in Claire Avery's eyes, so that left just Captain Henshaw. But the captain of the ship dare not show favoritism; so all in all I saw myself doomed to a lonely trip.

Lonely isn't the word for it. Henshaw was decent enough, but since Claire Avery had started with a long shift and so had the captain, they were having their free spells and meals on the same schedule, along with Gogrol, and that left me with Coretti. He was pretty cool, and I had pride enough Ieft not to make any unwanted advances.

Gogrol was worse; I saw him seldom enough, but he never addressed a word to me except on routine. Yet there was something familiar about him- As for Claire Avery, I simply wasn't in her scheme of things at all; she even relieved me in silence.

Offhand, I'd have said it was the wildest sort of stupidity to send a girl with four men on a trip like this.

Well, I had to hand it to Claire Avery; in that way she was a splendid rock-etrix. She took the inconveniences of s.p.a.ce routine without a murmur, and she was so companionable-that is, with the others-that it was like having a young and unusually enter-taining man aboard.

And, after all, Gogrol was twice her age and Henshaw al-most three times; Coretti was younger, but I was the only one who was really of her generation. But as I say, she hated me; Coretti seemed to stand best with her.

So the weary weeks of the journey dragged along. The Sun shrunk up to a disk only a fifth the diameter of the terrestrial Sun, but Jupiter grew to an enormous moon-like orb with its bands and spots gloriously tinted. It was an exquisite sight, and sometimes, since eight hours' sleep is more than I can use, I used to slip into the control room while Claire Avery was on duty, just to watch the giant planet and its moons. The girl and I never said a word to each other.

We weren't to stop at Io, but were landing directly on Eu-ropa, our destination, the third moon outward from the vast molten globe of Jupiter. In some ways Europa is the queerest little sphere in the Solar System, and for many years it was be-lieved to be quite uninhabitable. It is, too, as far as seventy per cent of its surface goes, but the remaining area is a wild and weird region.

This is the mountainous hollow in the face toward Jupiter, for Europa, like the Moon, keeps one facealways toward its primary. Here in this vast depression, all of the tiny world's scanty atmosphere is collected, gathered like little lakes and puddles into the valleys between mountain ranges that often pierce through the low-lying air into the emptiness of s.p.a.ce.

Often enough a single valley forms a microcosm sundered by nothingness from the rest of the planet, generating its own little rainstorms under pygmy cloud banks, inhabited by its in-digenous life, untouched by, and unaware of, all else.

In the ephemeris, Europa is dismissed prosaically with a string of figures: diameter, 2099 M.-period, 3 days, 13 hours, 14 seconds-distance from primary, 425,160 M. For an astronomical ephemeris isn't concerned with the thin film of life that occasionally blurs a planet's surface; it has nothing to say of the slow libration of Europa that sends intermittent tides of air washing against the mountain slopes under the tidal drag of Jupiter, nor of the waves that sometimes spill air from valley to valley, and sometimes spill alien life as well.

Least of all is the ephemeris concerned with the queer forms that crawl now and then right up out of the air pools, to lie on the vacuum-bathed peaks exactly as strange fishes flopped their way out of the Earthly seas to bask on the sands at the close of the Devonian age.

Of the five of us, I was the only one who had ever visited Europa-or so I thought at the time.

Indeed, there were few men in the world who had actually set foot on the inhospita-ble little planet; Gunderson and his men were dead, save me and perhaps Kratska, and we had been the first organized ex-pedition.

Only a few stray adventurers from Io had preceded us. So it was to me that Captain Henshaw directed his orders when he said, "Take us as close as possible to Gunderson's landing."

It began to be evident that we'd make ground toward the end of Claire's long shift, so I crawled out of the coffinlike niche I called my cabin an hour early, and went up to the con-trol room to guide her down.

We were seventy or eighty miles up, but there were no clouds or air distortion here, and the valleys crisscrossed under us like a relief map.

It was infernally hard to pick Gunderson's valley; the burned spot from the blast was long since grown over, and I had only memory to rely on, for, of course, all charts were lost with the Hera. But I knew the general region, and it really made less difference than it might have, for practically all the valleys in that vicinity were connected by pa.s.ses; one could walk between them in breathable air.