Collected Short Fiction, page 205
Trouble was that the repairs had already been made. The tube was useful, but not absolutely necessary. I glanced at my watch. In eight hours the refrigerator would have the tube down to zero temperature and—
And then it hit me. I could see the whole plot now! In eight hours, the lead busbar would become a superconductor, and the current would be circuited around the copper. The resulting power input would blow every tube in the station!
FOUR OF THOSE HOURS were up before I could do anything. Asking—even pleading—with the Martian Guard did nothing. They weren’t going to let me out of their sight. I tried to explain, and they wouldn’t listen. The guy who was patrolling the corridor paid no attention to me, and neither did any of the others who walked by. I was a voice crying in the wilderness.
Finally, after four hours, a squad took me out of my cell and led me to an office. Behind the desk sat a powerfully-built man with gray at his temples and a colonel’s insignia on his collar. He was introduced as Colonel Parkhurst.
He waved me to a chair. There were no guns being pointed at me, but two Guardsmen were sitting quietly nearby, their hands never very far from their holsters.
When I sat down, Colonel Parkhurst said: “Caldwell, why don’t you come clean?”
“I’m not Caldwell,” I said flatly. “My name’s Van Martin.” I explained who I was all over again.
A sardonic smile appeared on the colonel’s face. “Come now; you don’t expect us to believe that sort of junk. That identity packet of yours is as counterfeit as the money you were pushing on Earth.”
“Look, Colonel,” I said, “That isn’t my packet. I never saw it until your man jerked it out of my pocket.”
The colonel’s smile grew even more sardonic. “No? Well, well, well. And how did that come about?”
I told him. I gave him every detail. And as I talked, I could see disbelief written in large letters all over his face. I wasn’t getting anywhere.
“You don’t believe a damned word I’ve said,” I told him.
“Oh, come off it, Caldwell,” he said sharply. “We’ve got a flyer on you. It’s your photo, your prints, your retinal patterns on that flyer. You’re listed in the official files as a criminal wanted on three planets. Do you expect us to believe some cock-and-bull story like that in face of the identification evidence?”
I didn’t say anything. He was right. I couldn’t expect him to believe a word I said.
Colonel Parkhurst sighed. “All right, Caldwell. You came to Syrtis City for something; we want to know what it is. Maybe a little zombie drug will do the trick.”
“That’s illegal,” I said.
“It is on Earth—not on Mars. Mars is a frontier planet, and we have to use methods that wouldn’t apply on Earth.”
One of the guards went over to a wall cabinet and took out a hypogun. The other got a hypnoprobe light and set it up in front of me. I knew then what I could do—if it worked.
The hypnoprobe light looked a great deal like an old-fashioned television screen, with a glare-light tube in place of the picture tube. As soon as it was set up, I stood up and pushed it away.
“Look here!” I said. “You haven’t any right—”
“Sit down, Caldwell!”
I was staring down the barrel of a gun in the colonel’s hand.
I sat down.
But I’d done what I intended to do. I’d turned the intensity knob as I pushed the machine—turned it so hard it had broken and twisted it on over to a low setting. It was actually set for highest power, but the knob no longer showed it.
I sat still, not moving.
One of the Guardsmen reset the hypnoprobe light, the other got the hypogun ready to use. Then the hypnoprobe light was switched on. I closed my eyes and threw my arm across my face. Even so, I could see an intolerable glare of light that seemed to sear through my eyelids and burn my retinas.
I threw myself out of the chair and kicked the blazing light. A gun spanged, and the hypnolight exploded in an even more intense glare.
I opened my eyes. Things were a little foggy, but I could see a hell of a lot better than anyone else in the room.
“Don’t anyone move,” I said. “I have a gun.”
They’d all been blinded by the light. They couldn’t see a thing, and they couldn’t know that I didn’t have a gun. They froze, staring blindly into space.
I walked over to the nearest Guardsman and took the hypogun out of his hand. Then I put it against his arm and fired. The charge of zombie drug went into his bloodstream without leaving a mark on the skin. The other Guardsman and the Colonel got the same treatment.
“Sit down, all of you.” They sat—the colonel sat back in his chair, the Guardsmen sat on the floor. “As soon as your vision comes back, say. so.”
Zombie drug is nasty stuff, and I hated to use it. When a man is full of it he has no mind of his own, no will power at all. He’ll do what you tell him and answer any questions you want to ask—truthfully, but sometimes misleadingly.
“I can see,” said the colonel.
I thought he’d be the first one; he’d been a little off to one side when the glare hit. Within a couple of minutes more, the other two spoke up. I was all set to go. I’d have to move fast; zombie drug didn’t take long to wear off. I figured I had half an hour at the most, and probably fifteen minutes at the least.
I took their guns, opened the butts, and took out the charges. Then I shoved them back in the holsters.
“All right,” I told them; “here’s the plan.” I outlined it to them very carefully.
A FEW MINUTES LATER, four men walked out of Martian Guard headquarters and climbed into a groundcar. The colonel led the group, and the two Guardsmen, looking keenly alert, flanked me on either side. The groundcar had a Guardsman driver. I didn’t like the fact that he was a fully-awake Guard, but there was nothing I could do about it. The whole operation had to come off like clockwork, just as though it were a regular part of the whole scheme.
I could have made the colonel order the driver out and replace him with one of the drugged Guardsmen, but that would have been dangerous. In the first place, the protocol of the Martian Guard didn’t allow for such substitution; the driver would have thought something was funny. In the second place, a man under zombie drug hasn’t got good driving judgment; he won’t even turn a corner unless he’s told to. And obviously I couldn’t drive the car myself.
“Take us to the spaceport,” said Colonel Parkhurst. “We’ll deliver this man to the Earth police.”
“Yes, sir,” said the driver. The turboelectric engine hummed, and the car started moving. We headed toward the airlock of the Syrtis City dome.
We got through the lock easily, and headed out across the reddish sands toward the spaceport. Outside the pressurized cabin of the car was the thin, oxygenless Martian air.
It took nearly ten minutes to get to the field, and I was getting fidgety. If one of the Guardsmen or the colonel himself started to come out of it, I’d be a dead duck.
Following the colonel’s orders, the driver pulled up beside my ship. “Here we are, sir,” he said.
And the colonel let out a strangled noise. He was coming out of the influence of the zombie drug!
I didn’t have any time to waste. I jerked one of the Guardsmen’s guns out of its holster and slammed the driver and the colonel across the side of their heads. They collapsed into the seat, and I climbed out of the car, heading for my ship.
A shot slammed against the airlock door as I opened it. I realized what had happened; the Guardsmen in the back seat had come out of it.
I jumped inside. I’d had to hold my breath as I ran; the air on Mars isn’t exactly breathable outside a dome, and I didn’t have time to put on a mask. As soon as the door of the airlock swung shut, I turned on the pumps.
I damned near blacked out before there was enough air in the lock to let me breathe. I flung open the inner door before the cycle had actually been completed and collapsed on the floor inside.
It took half a minute or so for me to get my senses back, and all I could think of was that refrigerator on Phobos—approaching zero.
As soon as I could get my breath, I scrambled into the control chamber and strapped myself in.
Then the radio blared: “Caldwell! If you take off—”
I didn’t bother to listen. I knew they couldn’t have done anything yet that would stop me. I jammed my finger down on the takeoff button and my ship roared towards the sky.
I HADN’T BOTHERED, with worrying about takeoff times; there hadn’t been time for that. I’d simply climbed spaceward and to hell with targets. That meant that I’d have to orient myself after I got into space.
Phobos makes a complete revolution of Mars in about ten hours. I didn’t know where Phobos was at this instant by memory, so I looked it up as soon as I was clear of the atmosphere. Phobos is nearly six thousand miles from Mars, but that’s measured from the planet itself. I was a couple of thousand miles up in a fairly short time, but a check showed me that the satellite was on the other side of the planet. That meant a long ride around Mars.
I only hoped I could make it in time.
I found out soon enough that I didn’t have the time. It didn’t take long for the Guard to follow me up. By that time, I was a long ways from where I’d taken off, but they spotted me pretty quickly with radar and headed for me.
There was a little trick I’d figured out years before. I knew it would work, but I never thought I’d have to use it. But now, if ever was the time to put it into operation. After all, I’m not an expert on electronics and low-temperature physics for nothing.
I checked my own radar screen and figured I had about twenty minutes before the Guard caught up with me. It wasn’t enough time, really, but it would have to be enough.
The first thing I had to do was take the automatic computor out of the autopilot. That meant that I’d have to fly the ship myself, but I hadn’t any other choice. Then I hooked the whole computor brain into the radar system and rigged the relay banks against the detector circuits so that the output could be individually phased against the input.
By the time the Guard ships—two of them—came close to me, I was ready. They were almost within firing range by the time I got back to the controls and was ready with my haywire rig. The only trouble was that I didn’t dare use it yet.
I’d been heading around the planet in a pretty slow orbit, moving toward Phobos—but that had to be changed. I spun the ship away from Mars, heading outwards. The Guard ships hadn’t expected that maneuver, and they were a little slow on the uptake. Shells burst silently in space around me as I changed course.
I gave the little speedster full power and headed for Deimos, the outer moon of Mars, nearly fifteen thousand miles away. I gunned that ship for all she was worth, fifteen gravities of acceleration squeezing me against the pads. My breath came in slow gasps, and my body felt as if it weighed a ton and a half—which it did. I blacked out.
My hand left the throttle when that happened, and the drive acceleration dropped to a single gravity. When I came out of the blackout, a glance at the radar screen showed that the Guard ships had lost plenty of space. They were a long way behind—but was it long enough? I eased the throttle forward again, building my acceleration up to an uncomfortable, but not unbearable, four gravities.
The Guardsmen weren’t fools, and they had damned good ships. Slowly, inexorably, they gained on me. I was in a jam, and I knew it. I eased the ship up to five gees of acceleration, but the Guardsmen came on. How much could they take?
How much could I take?
Deimos finally came into view as my skew curve of an orbit took me towards her. I checked my time against my velocity and flipped my ship, end-for-end, at just the right time. I slammed the throttle all the way forward.
The resulting acceleration was something like being hit on the head with a sledgehammer.
WHEN I COULD SEE again, I was close to Deimos—practically sliding past it, a hundred miles or so from the surface. The Guard ships, thinking I was trying to escape, hadn’t slowed down in time, and were way beyond the second moon. But my detectors showed that their radar was still spotting me.
I dropped toward the surface of Deimos—fast. And then, just as I was about to land, I pushed the switch on my gadget. Then I headed away from Deimos as fast as I could comfortably stand it.
At a few miles, a dead black spaceship is totally invisible. The only way it can be spotted is with radar.
But my little gimmick was the answer to that; it returned the radar waves exactly in phase with the outgoing pulse in such a way that the transmitter and the receiver of the Guard cruisers interfered with each other. In other words, their radar screens looked perfectly clear as far as I was concerned. I was invisible to radar.
As I headed away, I hoped that the Guardsmen would think what I wanted them to think—that I had landed on Deimos. Let them look—and enjoy themselves.
I made a geodesic bee-line for Phobos. I was running out of time.
Phobos isn’t a very big hunk of rock, as far as moons go. It’s only five miles in diameter. I didn’t want anyone at the relay station to see me, so I landed out of sight beyond the horizon—two hundred meters away.
I put on my spacesuit and headed toward the station. But when I came close, I didn’t go to the airlock; I crept around to one of the windows.
Sure enough, there was Sam Ledland, big as life and uglier.
He was all by himself, putting on a spacesuit. I turned my head inside the fishbowl helmet and looked around. As I expected, there was a ship nearby. I could see the oddly-slanted nose sticking up from the jagged horizon a little ways away.
Since it looked as though Sam Ledland was going to leave, I decided to wait for him at the airlock. At the same time, I wondered where Channing was. I hoped I hadn’t made any error in my deductions; I hoped he was still alive somewhere inside the station.
I glanced at my watch. And realized, with a shock, that I had less time left than I imagined. Fd said twelve hours when I started that refrigerator, but it’s impossible to judge that accurately. It could possibly reach the critical temperature within fifteen minutes! And then—blooey!
I prayed hard, hoping that Sam Ledland would open the airlock soon. And while I was praying, I was making my way around to the Jock. When I got there, I stood and waited.
When Ledland came out, I could see a big, happy grin on his porcine face. It was more than I wanted to take at the moment, and I didn’t want to hold myself back anyhow. He didn’t see me when the outer door opened, but it wasn’t long before he felt me. I let him have a stiff one right in the solar plexus.
And I got a surprise.
I’d supposed that Sam Ledland was all fat, and I was wrong. Underneath the blubber, he had a good, solid sheath of muscle.
When I hit him, he fell back in surprise, but he didn’t double up. When he saw who I was, he came at me like a bull.
He made a mistake right off the bat. He slammed a fist into my face, forgetting that I was wearing a helmet. There was plenty of power behind it, and I tumbled several yards under the low gravity of the little moon. But I wasn’t hurt, and Ledland was nursing a sore fist.
I leaped for him, launching myself across the intervening yards of space like a bullet. My head slammed into his stomach, and I could feel the breath go out of him. We fell to the ground together, and I gave him another punch in the paunch to make sure.
He was out cold.
I dragged him into the airlock and started the pumps. When the cycle was over, I pulled him inside, unscrewed his helmet, and gave him a slug on the jaw for good measure.
I took his gun from his holster, checked it, and shoved it back in. Then I went over to the communications console board for a few minutes. Suddenly, I heard footsteps behind me.
I turned. It was Channing, standing there with a blank look on his face. He looked from me to the inert form of Sam Ledland on the floor. Then he rubbed the back of his head.
“Somebody slugged me,” he said. “What the hell’s going on around here?”
I leaned back comfortably against the bulkhead. “Plenty,” I said. “Sam Ledland, here, had a little plan for throwing the whole relay station out of kilter.” I explained it to him, step by step. When I was through, he nodded.
“Yeah. I get it. Well, he didn’t actually succeed, so there’s nothing lost.”
“Not this time,” I said, “but what about next time?”
“Next time? What do you mean.”
“Come off it, Channing; you know damn good and well what I mean! Somebody had to send that phoney message from Earth to the Martian Guard—someone had to slip my photo and prints into the communications circuit. And you’re the one.”
He could move fast; I’ll give him credit for that. He jumped over to Ledland’s prone figure and jerked the gun from its holster. He stood up, levelling it at me.
“You’re pretty bright, Martin. What else?”
I didn’t move. “I don’t know the tie-up completely,” I said, “but I’d be willing to bet you’re in for a nice chunk of dough if this had worked.
“You wanted to wreck the station, but you had to have a scapegoat. You didn’t want the blame for yourself. So you break the refrigerator and then set a big busbar across it that will carry the current. Then you call Earth for help.
“You know enough about how these things are fixed to know just how I’d go about it. Meanwhile, you’ve got no Z9M9Z tubes. What did you do? Junk ’em all?”
He grinned wolfishly. “Go on, pal.”
“Naturally, I was the one who had to go to Mars to pick it up. And you’d already sent in that flyer on ‘Caldwell’, knowing I’d get picked up. If I wasn’t arrested as soon as I set down, I’d be turned in by your pal, Sam, here.
“You knew the Guard would hold me for long enough to let the station blow when the lead busbars reached critical. And you would have been as innocent as a baby—the blowout would have been my fault. Ledland would get the communications franchise, and I’d get fired. What would you have gotten, Channing?”
