The IF Reader of Science Fiction Page 15

  “A hundred miles,” Gabrilov said, not looking away from the screen in which the buster had grown progressively from a mere spot of light to a sizeable globe. “The homer has picked it up. Shall I just let it go its own way now?”

  “How far above the surface will the magnets take charge?”

  “From about ten miles they ought to give a soft enough landing for the beacon to survive undamaged.”

  “Then try and match velocities with the lifeboat about ten miles off.”

  Gabrilov raised an eyebrow and looked worried, but he moved the main jet control slightly. The image of the lifeboat in the other half of the screen showed a spurt of reaction mass.

  More time limped by.

  At last Gabrilov gave a precisely timed touch to the braking jet control, and sat back. “Very nice,” Rusch said under his breath. “Yes, she’s going down.”

  Aylward wondered if his heartbeats were audible to those around him; he was almost deaf with the rush of blood in his ears, and he was breathing fast and urgently. On the screen, the buster grew to moon size, Earth size, and still larger; by now the lifeboat and the buster could no longer he seen separately from the ship without high magnification. The beeping grew to an intolerable unbroken buzz and stopped short.

  “Well, she’s down,” Gabrilov said unnecessarily. “And it looks as though—”

  He got no further. On both halves of the screen there was suddenly an eruption of incredible, sun-like-light, as though a miniature star had been born.

  “Crew’s getting restive, sir,” Gabrilov said, putting back the phone. “That was the MO with the casualty statement. One man was watching through binoculars. He’s going to need new eyes when we land, and a man in the nav section was looking down a ’scope, and he’ll need one new retina. The radar tech who first spotted it has gone hysterical and needed sedation, and we have at least half a dozen cases of radiation sickness incipient.”

  Rusch grunted. He had been more affected by their narrow escape that he wanted to reveal. He said, “It seems to me some of us joined the service for no better reason than the chance of sharing in a buster! The thing would have blown us to glory if we’d gone much closer. Tell ’em they’re lucky to be alive. Did the thing leave any debris, by the way?”

  “Not a scrap,” said Gabrilov gloomily. “Oh, there’s probably some dust hell-bent for the stars, but nothing big enough to pick up.”

  “It can’t have been a total-conversion reaction!” The idea seemed to hit Rusch like a physical blow.

  “No—or even at this distance, we wouldn’t have survived to talk about it.” Gabrilov drew himself down to a chair and formed his body into a posture as though resting on the seat. After a moment, he said, “Lieutenant Ahmed was talking about space-mines. Weapons of war. At first I thought he was just suffering from the after-effects of seeing his dreams of riches go bang. But the more I reflect, the more I’m inclined to wonder.”

  Rather unwillingly, Rusch looked across the room at Aylward. “What do you think?” he demanded.

  Aylward shook his head seriously. “I don’t think it’s war. I mean—well, we haven’t suffered much material damage. It’s cost us thirty or so ships, but we have three and a half thousand in regular service. The loss of experienced space personnel is probably more serious, but still it’s a fleabite. And besides, why should . . . someone who can afford to disguise a mine with thousands of tons of metal, and induce a reaction as efficient as the one we saw, waste effort on sowing a few mines randomly in space? They could so easily make a job of it by launching a few into orbits intersecting Earth’s. No, I don’t think we have to invoke an enemy. My guess is that the busters are inherently unstable, being composed of such heavy elements. Conceivably they don’t even belong in our order of space-time. Alteration of the vicinity of a large and massive object, such as a spaceship—might upset their not very good equilibrium and blow them back into the continuum from which they came.” He frowned deeply. “And yet this leaves so many questions unanswered. Why, for instance, were many of them safely brought into orbits around human-occupied worlds? I had it in the back of my mind that they might be contraterrene, but since some of them were—uh—hooked, this is out of the question. I think I’m going to give this matter some further investigation.”

  “Well, we can’t do much here,” Rusch said heavily. “We have sick men on board who need planetside medical care, but even if we hadn’t I’d order immediate planetfall. This news about busters is too urgent to keep to ourselves. Gabrilov!”

  “Sir?”

  “Get the nav section to program us an orbit that will take us in radio range of a government station as soon as possible, and then home. Have the men strap down for a turning maneuver. And you’d better have the MO issue decelerine, too. We’re in a hurry!”

  IV

  Martinu looked regretfully at his empty glass, and realized as he did so that the gentle voice of Professor Aylward had stopped. With an effort he brought himself back to the present, eyeing the other with curiosity. One would never have taken him for such a damned good story-teller.

  So that was how it all began,” he said after a pause.

  Aylward was tying knots now in his length of tubing. He nodded. “Mark you,” he said, “it wasn’t easy to convince the authorities. I say, I’m sorry to have to ask you, but would you do me a favor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I’d like another drink, and I don’t feel up to fetching one.”

  Oh, certainly!” Martinu pulled himself to his feet. His muscles complained a little, but he adjusted after a moment or two and walked off with their glasses to find a waiter again. He was feeling a little superior by the time he got back. After all, Aylward enjoyed at least some gravity most of his life, whereas a spaceman like himself had to cope with the change from no gravity at all to one full gee every time he landed on Earth.

  Handing Aylward his new drink, Martinu wondered whether it was genuine devotion to duty or some defect of personality which made the tubby man hide himself away on the far side of the moon. He suspected the latter, now he came to think about it. What a shame—to be so outstanding in one narrow field, and yet basically incompetent in the most important field of all, that of being an ordinary person.

  With disconcerting insight Aylward said, “There’s no need to be sorry for me, you know.”

  Martinu choked on a mouthful of his drink and began to make frantic denials. Aylward ignored him. Staring at the dancers inexhaustibly whirling around the floor, he went on, “I pity you as much as you pity me, and both of us ought to pity the people here. Like mice, when the cats away.”

  Was he going to become maudlin, for heaven’s sake? Martinu decided to change the subject as quickly as possible. He said, “You were saying something about convincing the authorities, professor.”

  “Was I?” Aylward blinked; the alcohol was taking effect on him. “Ah, so I was! Yes, I remember a blockheaded idiot named Machin—a bureaucrat if ever there was one—who tried to make out that we’d concocted a plot to filch all future busters away from their rightful owners. Like most people, he needed to have his nose rubbed in the truth before he’d accept it. But for him, we could have saved the Sirius.”

  “I remember the Sirius!” Martinu said. “I had friends on her. She found a buster within radio range of Lima Port—”

  “And because of Machin and his like,” Aylward interrupted, “it went right in to grab it, and was blown up with eight hundred people aboard. Too many people saw it happen with their own eyes, and went blind like the crewmen of the Algol, for that affair to be hushed up.

  “So they fell over backwards to make amends. I was given facilities for taking proper equipment to the spot when the next buster appeared. By the time the fifth or sixth one showed up, I’d worked out the theoretical pattern of the Field. They try and tell me it was difficult to do, but don’t you believe it. The math is simple enough. What did give trouble was getting the generating equipment down to p
ortable size. But we managed it in the end, made it a commercial proposition—and busters held no more terrors; we could stabilize them in our space-time long enough to cut them up and separate out the radioactives.” His s’s were getting the least bit slurred, and he was staring at his fingers as though unsure quite how many he could see.

  “Angus tells me,” he went on after a pause, “that it might have been a very bad thing. It was the direct cause of the vast inflation we underwent—when?—oh, thirteen or fourteen years ago, because the market for precious metals was saturated. It’s the cause of prices like five bucks for a cup of coffee and two hundred for a taxi ride. I remember I used to dream of having a million dollars. Now where would it get you? I bet Angus is spending a million on this party!” He waved to include the whole of the gaiety around them. Distantly in the background a theremin was playing a solo in imitation of a trumpet. Martinu nodded pontifically.

  “But of course it also cured us of the tendency to place arbitrary values on things,” Aylward finished. “Now we prize only work invested as a backing for currency, and the uranium from the busters made cheap fission-power possible, so maybe the trade was a good one. Ah!”

  A waiter in search of empty glasses entered the alcove, and Aylward signaled to him. “Get the captain another!” he instructed. “And one of the same for me.”

  Martinu hesitated, then shrugged. “Slivovitz,” he told the waiter, who nodded and hurried away. A man and a girl, holding hands, looked in to see if the alcove was unoccupied, and on finding it wasn’t moved away. The waiter returned with the fresh glasses.

  “Foof!” Aylward said, having gulped at his. “That’s rather good.” He lowered the glass cautiously beside him, then leaned back, sleepily half-closing his eyes.

  “Look at them,” he said. “Three thousand million blind mice. Who’ll bell the cat?”

  Martinu, whose own wits were apparently slipping a little, said foggily, “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, ‘Three thousand million blind mice. Who’ll bell the cat?’ ” repeated Aylward with dignity. “Though there isn’t a cat, that I know of. For ‘Who’ll bell the cat?’ read ‘The mouse ran up the clock’.”

  No, it was no good. Martinu didn’t try to follow that one.

  Aylward finished his drink with an appreciative belch, and said, “I suppose mice don’t do so badly, really. What were we talking about?”

  “Mice, apparently,” Martinu said.

  “I was talking about mice,” Aylward corrected. “We were talking about busters. This can’t last, you know.”

  “What can’t last?”

  “All this!” said Aylward largely. He gestured. “Not just this party—everything else too. All unconscious of their doom the little victims play. Tell me, do you think the human race is master o’f its fate, or do you believe, like some people, that we’re property?”

  Martinu was relieved to hear a fairly sensible remark for a change. He considered the question. “That’s one of Fort’s speculations, isn’t it? I—well, I don’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Aylward promised. “Do you think you’re of value to anyone but yourself?”

  “Well, no.”

  “You’re lucky. So am I. Just think of all the poor-people who think they do matter. How disappointed they’ll be when they find they don’t!”

  “When will that be?” Martinu said, feeling it was expected.

  “Oh, definitely some time. Do you know what a buster is? I mean, what it’s for?”

  Martinu was finding this a little tedious. He wished he had taken Angus’s advice. “Tell me,” he requested resignedly.

  “I warn you, you won’t believe me. Angus doesn’t, and he’s a typical hard-headed individual. None of the other people I’ve told has believed me either. Anyway, I’ll tell you. You said you didn’t know if we were property or not well, we aren’t property. Because we aren’t worth owning. We’re just one hell of a nuisance. Did you ever find yourself bothered with mice?”

  Sheer politeness, nothing else, drove Martinu to bring to bear what concentration he had left. “When I was a kid,” he said finally, “I recall my mother had a house full of them. But they never bothered me. I rather liked them—except for the stink.”

  “How did your mother get rid of them?”

  “Well, I guess we tried trapping them first. That didn’t work for long—the cunning so-and-so’s soon learned to avoid the traps. So in the end we poisoned them.”

  Another couple appeared at the entrance of the alcove with their aims round each other. They were too absorbed to notice that anyone else was present, and walked past the seat where Aylward and Martinu were towards the curtains hanging behind it. Clad of some distraction, Martinu glanced over his shoulder and saw that they had drawn one of the curtains back to reveal an open window; they were leaning on the sill and staring at the stars. He envied them.

  “All right,” Aylward said. “Now if you wanted to do something like that to men, what would you use for baiting your traps?”

  “I’m sorry?” Martinu came back with a start. Aylward repeated the question.

  “Well,” Martinu said, humoring him, “I’d use something either useful or precious.”

  “Exactly. And you’d lay some groundbait first, to lure the unsuspecting victims to the traps when they were put down.”

  Suddenly Martinu got it. He wondered why it had taken him so long, he said disgustedly. But after a moment he saw the amusing side of it—and after all, Angus had warned him!

  He chuckled. “So they’re mousetraps, and we’re the mice!” he said. “What an idea! But aren’t you overlooking one thing in your analogy? How about the poison?”

  “I was coming to that,” said Aylward with equanimity. “And so, I judge, are the ‘people’ who planned the busters. When the mice started dodging the traps, did your mother latch on at once?”

  “No, we kept right on setting them for a while. It was only when they became a real pest we turned to poison.”

  “Precisely!” Aylward looked pleased. “I imagine that they—whoever they are—will decide that their traps aren’t working any more. Then someone will find a super-large, stable buster and bring it to Earth, and—that will be that.” A cold chill moved down Martinu’s spine. Trying to ascribe it to the open window behind him, he said slowly, “Haven’t you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Mohammed Abdul in the Vega just brought in the first stable buster since the Capella’s! Parked it in orbit today! And—and it’s an outsize one, a giant!”

  Aylward’s face, all of a sudden, went pasty-pale. He looked at Martinu and tried to speak, but couldn’t.

  Behind them, the girl looking out the window said in a tone of puzzlement, “Honey, what’s the time?”

  “Three o’clock. Why?” said her companion.

  “I thought it wasn’t dawn yet. And that isn’t even the east over there. But look how red the sky is getting!”

  The wakey-wakey played Earth Is Where My Heart Is and Mark Hassall sat up with a pounding heart. Every simulated morning for the last simulated three weeks he had woken ‘to the gentle sound of Earth Is Where My Heart Is. But whatever you set the wakey-wakey to play, he reflected sadly, after a time it gave you a cold sweat to hear it. For any signal which brings you to life in the morning after the mental death of sleep becomes associated with that shock to the system. The fear of death is nothing, compared to the fear of life.

  He flicked on the sound transmission of his telephone and left the visual pickup off. “Yup,” he groaned into it.

  The telephone built up the unblushing image of Marylou, Transit Station J’s nubile communications expert.

  “Marco,” she cooed. “You’re sitting up in bed.”

  “You’re damn right I am,” he said. “But not any morel” And he curled himself modestly up in his electric blanket. “Anyway how in hell would you know? I’ve got the visual off.”

  “I’ve eyes in the back of my head.”
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  “You just might have at that,” he answered. For a communications expert on a Transit Station is considerably more than a mere switchboard girl.

  “Why don’t you get dressed?” said Marylou.

  “I’ll really try and remember to do that before I go on duty,” said Mark, rolling towards the shower. “But I don’t promise I’ll get the time.”

  “You just find the time,” she said. When she heard the shower start she leaned forward across the control panel and turned the knob that accentuated the yellow register. She was a connoisseur about the performance of her telephone and loved it best of all her instruments.

  “I saw that,” said Mark, just to keep her on her toes. “I was only turning up the yellow,” said Marylou. “It was a little low. That’s all.”

  “You’re a liar. You wanted to show off your pretty yellow hair.”

  Marylou pouted a little. “Just because you’re being so tiresome this morning I’ll tell you now why I called you.

  “Oh, God, no I You couldn’t do that,” he said from under the shower. “Not before breakfast.”

  “You’ve got no time for breakfast. It’s sim-0545 now. At sim-0615 you’ve got a case.”

  “Oh, boy. Oh, boy,” he moaned. “In the good old days bringers of bad news got killed. I’m surprised you dare. Why in space does this trial have to happen in the middle of the sim-night?”

  “Colonel’s orders, Marco. He says a summary trial will impress the natives.”

  The colonel of Transit Station J was Colonel Prince Banerji of Haipur, and his ideas of discipline were inherited from an ancestor who once personally beheaded 409 English people, including 14 women and 27 children, back in his home state of Haipur on his home planet Earth, because he thought the English residents were becoming insubordinate. When the British soldiers came to take vengeance he told them that he had been no more severe with their late compatriots than he would be with his own people, and this was doubtless true.

  His descendant carried on the tradition by such endearing maneuvers as holding the monthly Emergency Evacuation Drill at sim-1100, the morning hour that is consecrated throughout the civilized universe to a pull at the Venusian drug-weed and a cup of coffee. “Constant and Effortful Vigilance” was his motto for his Transit Station. It was rumored that he never slept. Nobody had ever called him on the telephone without finding him immaculately uniformed and sitting at his desk.