Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 15

  “A little more than ten years ago, this is how it was . . .”

  He opened the notebook.

  “I DON’T think it’s a runner, sir. Not unless they’ve found a new place in Deep Space to bootleg their water. But we’re hearing English all right.”

  The communications lieutenant tried for a new track on the corn-beam and gambled that there were a few minutes of overload time left in the amp tubes. The stacatto whisper faded altogether for a moment, then came back a trifle stronger.

  “Blow ’em out if you have to! Mister Grimes, stand by with auxiliary communications.” The Stellar Patrol captain readjusted his own headset and waited. It was all there was to do. The drive had been cut; the ship was vibrationless, soundless, and the crew’s breath was shallow. Grimes hunched over the auxiliary unit as though waiting for the main amplifier to blow up in the lieutenant’s face.

  Then it came; weak, but distinct.

  Griffin calling . . . this is Griffin calling—SFBB-3. Lost . . . Fouler Griffin dead. This is SFBB-3 can you hear me . . .

  “Good Lord, sir—”

  “Mister Cragin! Can you estimate her position? Grimes, contact the nearest base in this sector. Get a relay from Earth on the flight plan of Special Flight Beyond Barrier Three. Mister Kramer, I want a running plot of the track every three minutes. Cragin!

  The Captain punched the red FSA drive-room button and the Patrol ship slid from her drift into a white-hot mushroom of speed. The tower deck vibrated beneath Cragin’s feet.

  “She’s further out than I’ve ever been, sir. I can give you an approximate trajectory, but where she is it’s suicide—”

  “For how far out beyond the Barrier do you have exact knowledge of critical warp speeds, Cragin?”

  “A light-year maybe, sir. No more. Beyond that nothing makes sense; beyond that the variables will shoot any comptometer on tills type ship to hell. Beyond the Barrier it’s like tight-rope walking between the dimensions and after you get just so far—”

  “I know all that. How far out is she?”

  “Fifty light-years anyway. Maybe two hundred. I can’t tell. I think she’s holding for dear life to a critical. If she loses it, we lose her for good.”

  “You think she’ll make it to this side?”

  “If she’s lost, no, sir. She’ll just keep on out there until—”

  “Until?”

  “Until her comptometers break down, until her drive is exhausted, until she makes a mistake. Until eternity.”

  “Sir,” Kramer broke in. “Three minutes since pick-up. Her trajectory’s whacky. She’s sort of side-slipping in, but at the speed she’s making, she’s going to miss Barrier just by the width of her skin. She’ll tangent off sure.” Kramer thrust a hastily prepared three dimensional plot-check forward.

  “To bring her in we’ve got to go out and pick her up, sir,” Cragin said. “Grimes!”

  “Here, sir.” Grimes came up with a similar plot-check, described on a regulation ship’s form. The senior Patrol officer compared the two, the flight plan and the running trajectory laid out by Kramer, and Cragin’s teeth glinted through his lips as they went slack in amazement.

  “God, sir, that’s impossible. It ends at the square of light-speed!”

  “Fowler Griffin is—was—one of Earth’s topmost scientists. His work is beyond question, Mister Cragin. More so, perhaps, than that of any other. Your irreverance is out of order.”

  “Unintentional of course, sir.”

  “Plot the difference between Griffin’s planned return and the trajectory Kramer just tracked. Drive room!”

  The sleek Patrol ship quivered with the added thrust of her auxiliaries; her needle-tip nose swung a half-minute to her own three-quarter starboard axis.

  “Can we pick her up, Cragin?”

  “We’ll have to go the limit.”

  “Then take over the panel, Mister Cragin. Kramer! Attempt return communication!”

  “As she sails, sir.”

  Cragin’s thin, sensitive fingers flicked over the flight control panel with a dexterity and familiarity that is born only of a million light years of intimate, sometimes desperate familiarity, and the Patrol ship’s complex, high-strung nervous system responded as though it were a part of the man who held its throbbing life in harness.

  TO RANDOLPH CRAGIN, born under a dying sun and of a mother dead from desert-parch even as her labor ceased, there had never been life worth the living anywhere but in the cold, clean loneliness of Deep Space.

  He had bought odd second-hand parts from a junk dealer to build the first craft he had ever flown; he had made the moon with it before its jets blew and left him with the gray scar that ran from his left temple to the point of his square chin. He had been sixteen then, and too old to scare, too young to deter. From then on, there had been work in a lunar mine to pay for his next ship; then prospecting the asteroids to pay for a better, faster one. There were five years of hauling black muck from Venus and water crystal from the low ridges of Mars before he had the money he needed to build the ship that would take him into Deep Space for the first time, and a couple of years after that doing routine commission jobs of surveying outlying planetoid belts for the government to earn enough to keep his drive alive, and when he thought of it, his body.

  In between jobs, when he flew until he was broken again, Cragin found out more about Deep Space and about the Barrier, beyond which only one other beside himself had ventured, than any other man who lived. His predecessor had not. To Cragin it was sort of a challenge—sometimes more than a daring wanderlust, sometimes a little less, when he picked new directions from sheer boredom. But beneath it all, there was something that rebelled; that bordered on resentment, and at the same time on awe. He had never known which was the cause of which, only that the men of Earth (and they were the only men in this lonely system of planets) were dying, and had long since ceased to be awed by anything, or to be stirred beyond the narrow limits of their own complacency. They had achieved all there was to achieve; death was to be their reward. Hope had become folly; work a means to avoid insanity; science the only comfort and pleasure, because it had been thoroughly mastered.

  Except, perhaps, for the Barrier itself. Beyond it, Earth science had little hold, its concepts little validity. It was therefore a worthless waste, for it did not adhere to the facts that men said were true. And Cragin had found it difficult to decide why it was that he had chosen to let himself get swallowed up in it. Maybe for the sheer pleasure of laughing because it was so easy (the comptometers did all the work of plotting the warp paths and keeping the ship at the right critical speeds so it wouldn’t leave them and go plunging off into dimensions from which there would be no return) maybe because he hadn’t been as positive as he was supposed to be that what was beyond the Barrier was such a waste after all.

  To keep himself occupied he remembered what there had been to learn; to recam the comptometers in anticipation of the ever increasing speed of warp shifts; how to change direction and yet keep a bearing on home; how to fly some of it by himself, juggling equations in his head while the comptometers cooled off.

  Then two years ago he had joined the Patrol. Chasing water bootleggers who stole from government reserves and sold at fantastic prices was something he hadn’t as yet had a hand in. That he had become an officer in a year and a half instead of the usual six hadn’t surprised him much; if he weren’t a captain in another year and a half he’d resign. And dig the asteroids again maybe. It didn’t matter.

  “At Barrier in four minutes, sir. Grimes, stand by comptometer One with her coordinates . . .”

  Comptometer One rose from a deep hum below the range of hearing into audibility. “Now, Mister Grimes!” Comptometer Two checked in and the hum rose steadily to a high pitched whine. Three came in.

  “I’ve got her on the radar track, sir! There she is—good Lord!”

  “Signal her to cut her drive before we lose her altogether. Grimes—” But Grimes was too slow at r
esetting comptometer cams. Cragin plotted a trajectory in his head and kept alert for the least change in volume of the comps. Deliberately he brought the nose of the hurtling Patrol craft swinging about under the grazing touch of his fingertips and sought to keep the big ship on her warp while he estimated an intersection point.

  “Sir,” Kramer was howling, I can’t raise—yes, there! She’s cut her drive. But she’s not bow jetting a squirt!”

  “Just get the M-fields ready. I’ll tell you when,” Cragin said. If there had been any excitement in his voice before, it had disappeared. He knew they’d catch her now. He was on the Patrol ship’s back and he knew he could ride it down.

  “You’ve got maybe a dozen seconds, Cragin,” the captain told him. “At a drift her critical will be shot to blazes—”

  “M-fields!”

  The Patrol ship jolted, and Comptometer Five checked in and rose to a scream as the struggle to maintain critical speed with the suddenly increased load was fought. And won.

  Cragin manually checked in Six just to make sure, and kicked both ships into the trajectory that would fall them through the Barrier.

  Then it was all over, and a tiny, bulletshaped, explorer-type craft of less than a fifth the Patrol ship’s length was secured alongside, her aft tubes still smoking.

  Cragin relinquished his command and waited, while two space suited crew members picked their way along the M-field on their portable mag units. It took them less than ten minutes to get back. They carried another form between them; a form smaller than a man’s, and limp.

  “It’s his daughter all right,” Cragin said as the Patrol captain waited at his side while the two crewmen undogged the girl’s fully-transparent helmet. “Name is Lin, I think. Lin Griffin, student of her father’s, and up with the best of ’em, they say. What in hell they were doing out there only she’ll be able to tell us. If she’ll tell us.”

  If she lives to,” the captain said.

  The oval shaped, sharp featured face was pasty with space fatigue, and the large, wide set eyes were closed in unconsciousness. The short-bobbed, copper-hued hair that clung close to her slender neck and set off the wide forehead was still well groomed, but the high cheekbones on either side of her small nose showed sharply through the taut, smooth skin that covered them, and bespoke perhaps days of near exhaustion. Cragin fastened his eyes on the girl’s wide, generous mouth, waiting for some sign of returning consciousness. But there was none.

  Hardly out of her teens,” the captain muttered. Two damn young to die. Get her to my quarters; notify the ship’s space surgeon and have him put a corpsman on full duty. Want to know soon as she comes around.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Cragin turned to his superior. “Special orders?”

  “Have Kramer make a signal for a hospital ship and sign it with a priority one. That’s all.”

  “Yes, sir. You know she isn’t beautiful but she’s not bad.”

  “Too damn young to die. Tell the crew we’re back on SOP.”

  “As she sails, sir,” Cragin said, and wondered if the girl would die, at that.

  II

  IN OLD fashioned black letters, the legend on the thick metalo glass door said OFFICE OF THE ADMIRALTY, SPACE ARM. Cragin swung past it as though it had said Control Room and an officer of the day clad in an Earth Headquarters uniform told him that an Admiral Kirkholland would see him immediately.

  Kirkholland’s name was on the next door, and under it in smaller letters the single word, “Intelligence.” What the hell, Cragin mused, why argue.

  “At ease lieutenant. Sit down, Cigarette?” Big, thought Cragin. Tough old bird, red faced, cropped white hair, chief pilot’s rockets pinned to the plain front of his tunic. Cragin wondered how long he’d been flying the eight-foot plastaloy desk.

  He accepted the cigarette and sat.

  “More time we save the better, Cragin. Here it is. You were recalled because your records how you know your way around in Deep Space better than anybody in the whole Arm. HQ figured it’d be a better bet for this job to rely on what Intelligence training a regular Patrol officer gets than to try teaching a specialized Intelligence officer how to handle himself out where only yourself and Lin Griffin have ever flown and gotten back to tell about it. Except that so far, you’re the. only one who’s told anything.”

  “Not sure I follow that all, sir. I take it Miss Griffin—”

  “She’s getting along all right. Ready to leave the station hospital in a day or two. Only she won’t talk. Just mumbled something about an Ecliptic X when she finally started coming around, cried a little, and then shut up tight. Doctor says it’s extreme shock. I don’t think so. You can’t do reams of mathematics that nobody else can make head or tail of when you’re suffering shock. She not only won’t talk, but after she finishes each sheet of calculations, she tosses it in the bedside incinerator tube. So I’m making guesses.”

  Cragin let a little smoke dribble from his nostrils and tried reading Kirkholland’s penetrating look.

  “The market, sir? There wasn’t a gram of water crystal in her ship when—”

  “The report’s been read phonic by phonic, Cragin. We’ve had the market pretty well under our thumbs up to now, and we can’t go taking any chances. Setting up clay pigeons to lull us into a false sense of security is as old as the Martian ridges but it’s worth thinking about if they’ve found a way to operate outside the Barrier.”

  “What about the flight plan she and her father had to file, sir?”

  “In order, of course. Maybe just a clever part of the scheme. And who would suspect a man of Griffin’s caliber and position?”

  “I see. She’s a definite suspect, then, and—”

  “Can’t say that. Officially. But because of the circumstances surrounding her return, she’s certainly subject to observation.”

  “My job.”

  “You’ve been cleared by HQ, and put on carte blanche answerable to myself only and to the President. As soon as you go out that door, you’re on the job. And remember we’re not interested in her any further than to whom she leads us. This,” Kirkholland handed him a small, smooth, slate-colored rectangle of enamelite with the insigne of Space Intelligence atomically engraved through its molecular structure, “will take care of anything you need at any time from any department of the government and of course from any private citizen.”

  Cragin recognized and accepted it. He knew that it had been activated to his own unique neurophysical vibration specie, taken of course from his personal record. Within moments it would turn glittering white, and only as long as it was white would it be valid. Taken from him or lost, it would revert to the gray color and belie its bearer as either a chance finder or an imposter.

  “Good luck. And I repeat, if we’re right, it’s to whom she leads us that I want brought in. Now blast off, lieutenant.”

  “A-blast she sails, sir.”

  Something new, anyway. Not exactly new, but it could mean tight-roping beyond the Barrier again. Cragin’s pulse picked up a beat. Routine as hell of course. Take a week, maybe ten days. But it was something he hadn’t tried before. Until he had it all under wraps, it could be interesting.

  HE HAD almost lost her in the sudden sand flurry, but it wouldn’t have mattered because he knew now where she was headed. He hoisted the aircar a thousand feet and slacked throttle.

  “Security channel 12 open. Central Port please ack.”

  “CP go ahead 12.”

  “This is Cragin on CB-42-SMBB. Check please and know me by this.”

  “Clear CB we know you.”

  “Is that custom job registered under Griffin still in your park?”

  “Registered all right and primed to the forejets for a big ride if you ask me. Orders?”

  “Whack up her radar, but not with an axe. And warm me up an SP-15 if you’ve got one, with a ten comp bank. Soup the drive and gun circuits. Want a duplicate of her flight plan. That’s all and beam me when she blasts.”
<
br />   “When she blasts.”

  Then it was just a matter of sweating her out. Once Lin Griffin took her trim craft into Space it would be routine, if her bosses, if she were actually heading for any, didn’t risk a track beam on her. If they did and picked him up at the same time, they’d need faster guns than he had.

  The SP-15 looked brand new, and Cragin had little more than buttoned her up when flight control beamed him. He kept the Griffin ship tracked for a full minute, let it cut the edge of the Mars ecliptic before he cut in his own drive. She was giving Pluto her starboard when he decided on a comfortable watch dog position, and she was headed for the nearest Barrier co-ordinate within an hour afterward. Just as though, Cragin thought, somebody had written the whole script out for both of them, and all they had to do was say their lines and pretty soon the whole thing would be over. He checked the gun circuits, tried the detectors for a track, jacked in the comptometer bank. One began to hum a little and it took him off guard; he hadn’t expected it this soon. She had picked up speed and was going like hell even for a Barrier bust. But he was certain she hadn’t spotted him, and he was flying in her blind spot to keep out of her electroscopes. Sooner or later she’d check in her radar proximity beams and when they didn’t work—If she were as smart as she looked she’d be swinging her electroscope lenses all over the sky.

  Her Starwasp took the Barrier bust as though it were just so much Space between Earth and Moon, and Cragin straightened a little in his cushioned acceleration seat. He threw a track of his own on her, got an echo measure oh it and entered it as a constant into the comp bank, knocking out the variable that had represented his own control-error margin. It was the only way he’d be sure to keep her. But if she made a mistake or her own comps broke down, they’d both fall off the tight rope.

  Three cut in and began whining. Cragin tried a speed check; they’d passed light-speed, and there was no more danger of her catching him in her electroscopes. The velocity needle began wider oscillations, and the hum from Four verified it . . . the critical speed changes were getting trickier. Twenty minutes ticked off, and Cragin knew they were further out than when he’d picked her up two weeks ago. Light-speed trebled.