Collected Short Fiction, page 237
“Okay, you know then. Sympathy isn’t enough.”
“I’m aware of that,” Das Shamra said. “But is eight thousand dollars enough?”
Kendall stiffened. “Eight thousand dollars is exactly the passage-fee back to Earth,” he said. “It happens to be exactly the sum I need.” His voice was cold and flat.
Das Shamra grinned affably. “Indeed? Then we can talk business—for eight thousand dollars happens to be exactly the sum I’m prepared to offer you if you do a certain job for me.”
“What kind of a job?”
“Piloting a spaceship.”
“But that’s impossible—” Kendall started to say, and stopped.
By law, all space commerce was to be handled through Space Service and its authorized pilots. There was a reason for that; a spaceship out of control could destroy half a continent in a crash landing, and so only authorized personnel could be permitted to handle spacecraft. No private piloting was allowed.
But it might be worthwhile to hear him out. “Go on,” Kendall said. “Give some details.”
“First I must know if your interested.”
“I might be. Talk away.”
The Martian’s chubby face was darkened momentarily by a frown. “Very well,” he said. “Here’s the job: a cargo of dionate extract is going to be unloaded at Phobos Depot tomorrow night. Some—friends of mine—are actively interested in securing this cargo. They’ve gone to the extent of securing a small spacecraft for the purpose of intercepting the incoming ship. Unfortunately, we Martians are completely unable to operate the ship, inasmuch as Earth’s Space Service has reserved interplantery commerce as a monopoly for itself. However, you are both a skilled pilot and a free agent without loyalty to the organization that so rudely ejected you. Therefore—”
Dionate extract was the newest of the wonder drugs. A cargo of it was probably worth millions. “You want me to pilot a hijack ship, is that it?”
“Not so loud, please. Yes, that’s it, crudely.”
“It won’t work, Das Shamra. I’m not a qualified spaceman any more. The computer said I don’t have the reflexes—and computers don’t lie. There’s no telling what might happen if I got behind the control panel of a spaceship.”
Das Shamra squinted one eye contemplatively. “And what if your lack of reflexes were a temporary condition—one that perhaps could by remedied by some Martian medical genius? Would you take the job, then—eight thousand dollars, and a chance to re-enter the Space Service.”
“You mean you think you can cure me?”
“I’m sure of it.”
Kendall stood up. His nostrils quivered; he hung on the brink of decision. It was tempting—but part of him argued that it was a filthy crime, that he’d never be able to live with himself afterward. So what if he got the eight g’s and was able to return to Earth? Could he ever face Kathy and the kid, knowing that he had returned home because of—of—
“No,” he said. “I like the price, but I won’t do it.”
He turned and headed for the door. Das Shamra uttered a quick, curt syllable and the Martian who had found him suddenly stepped out of the shadows.
“You know too much to leave now,” he said.
Kendall didn’t bother to reply. He kicked out viciously with his heavy booted foot, then leaped into the air to drive a fist into the Martian’s mouth. Teeth crunched. The blueskin yelled in pain, and Kendall heard the thunder of Das Shamra pounding across the floor toward him.
He threw open the door and dashed out into the filthy corridor. He found the stairs, and raced down them without looking back, out into the cold, chill late-afternoon air.
HE RAN. He didn’t know how far he ran, nor how long. All he knew was that he paced through the narrow streets of Mars City for block after squalid block, feeling his heart pounding as if trying to break through the cage of his ribs. Finally, exhausted, he paused on a street-corner, gasping for breath, and looked around.
He wasn’t being followed. Not now. But he knew his life wasn’t going to be worth much unless he got off Mars in a hurry. And he had no way of doing that. He couldn’t even radio Earth for money. There was no such thing as a collect call between planets—the cost of transmission was too great to risk a refusal—and in his present battered condition he knew he would never find anyone who’d lend him enough to call Kathy.
His shoulders slumped despondently. A neon sign said, “BAR” and he decided to go in. For six years in the Space Service he had kept away from liquor. He had plenty of lost time to make up for now.
He took a seat at a table in the rear. When the bartender approached, he said “Double valdoz. Straight.”
Kendall slouched and nursed the drink, then ordered another. And another. Drinks were cheap, on Mars.
After a while another Earthman came over and hovered by Kendall’s ear. “Mind if I sit with you a while, friend?”
“Go right ahead. The seat’s free.”
The newcomer was a man in his late thirties, seedy and weary looking. A week’s growth of beard sprouted on his face. He was, Kendall knew, an ex-spacer living from day to day on Mars, probably looking for a handout. Kendall shuddered. He saw his own future staring him in the face.
“I’m almost out of cash,” he said. “I can’t buy you a drink.”
“Didn’t ask for one. I’ll pay for my own. Just want company. Someone to talk to.”
It developed, after a while, that the newcomer was—as Kendall had guessed—a former spaceman. He, like Kendall, had flunked his six-month test between legs of an Earth-Mars run. That had been four years ago. He was still here, doing menial jobs to stay alive.
“That’s okay,” Kendall said, slurring his words. He had already had much too many valdoz doubles. “I won’t live long. Some bigwig here is out for my neck.”
“What for?”
Kendall explained what Das Shamra had wanted, and what the outcome had been. The old spacer grinned.
“Funny. Same thing happened to me. I said no, and they let me go. It’s an old trick, planting a distorter in a man.”
“What?” Kendall was suddenly sober. “Distorter? What do you mean?”
He reached across the table and shook the older man.
“Lemme alone. I’ll tell you. It’s a dodge they use to get men to flunk out. Least they tried it on me; I didn’t find out what they did till later. They’re damned clever surgeons. They slip up on a spacer when he’s asleep and bury a neural distorter on his body. It louses up his reflexes so he flunks the six-monther. They spring the job offer on him. If he takes it, they remove the distorter and he’s as good as new. If he turns it down—well, then he finishes like me.”
“How come you haven’t reported this?”
“What’s the use? Who’d believe me? Hey, wait a minute! You didn’t finish your drink!”
BUT KENDALL HAD DASHed the full length of the bar, dropped a crumpled bill on the counter, and raced outside. He snagged a taxi.
“Hotel Cosmos, in a hurry.”
The driver, a sneering blueskin, said, “Five bucks. Earthmen pay in advance.”
Kendall cursed and dug into his pocket. He had five dollars and change. He handed the blueskin the bill, pocketed the few coins again, and got in.
Minutes later he was outside the Hotel Cosmos. He threaded his way to Das Shamra’s suite, listened outside the door for an instant. Voices were talking, murmuring low in Martian.
He knocked.
“Who’s there?” a harsh voice said.
“Kendall. The Earthman. I came back.”
“Put your hands up,” came the voice. “When the door opens, enter slowly.”
“Okay.” He raised his hands.
Slowly the door opened. Kendall peered in and found himself facing enough artillery to blow a hole in Jupiter. There were five Martians in the room, none he had seen before, and each had a blaster trained on him. Das Shamra was sitting in his web-chair. There was no sign of the Martian Kendall had clobbered.
“The prodigal returns,” Das Shamra remarked. “To what do we owe this visit, Mr. Kendall?”
Hesitantly, Kendall said, “I’ve—changed my mind. I’ll do your damned job for you.”
“Oh? A strange reversal of philosophy.”
“I can’t help it. I just spent some time with some other guy who turned you down. I don’t want to end up like him. I want to get home to my wife, and I don’t care how I get there. What do you want me to do?”
Das Shamra seemed to purr. “The terms are as we mentioned before.”
“And what about fixing up my reflexes?”
“A simple matter—inasmuch as we happen to be the ones who saw to it that they deteriorated.”
Kendall felt a jaw-muscle throb.
The Martian’s cool words confirmed what the old drunk had told him; they had deliberately cooked up this frame.
Das Shamra said, “This is Murro Lignus. He’s our surgeon. He’s the man who—ah—surreptitiously placed the distorter in your body while you slept at the spaceport last night. He comes and goes with great stealth.”
“You cold-blooded swine,” Kendall said. “Okay. We’ll be honest with each other. I hate you, and you hate me—but I need you to ungimmick me so I can go home, and you need me to help you hijack that dionate. Okay.”
“We understand each other, then,” Das Shamra said.
“Take your gadget out of me and let me see the ship. I want to check it over before I go up in it.”
“Very well. Murro Lignus, apply the anesthetic and remove the distorter.”
Kendall shook his head. “No anesthetic. I want to watch this. I can’t trust you not to plant some other kind of gadget in me while I’m out.”
The fat Martian shrugged. “As you wish. It will be a painful operation, though.”
“I’ll take my chances on that,” Kendall said.
THE OPERATION WAS HELL.
The Martian surgeon had slipped a submicroscopic pellet near the base of Kendall’s spine, making use of one of the Martian super-anesthetics. Now there was no anesthetic in use, as Murro Lignus probed for the distorter.
It was fifteen minutes of sheer agony. Finally the Martian murmured, “It’s over. You can get up.”
Kendall felt bolts of pain shoot through him. Looking around at the watching Martians, he thought, You’ll pay for this. All of you.
His brain felt clear. He knew the computer would now accept him and restore his certificate. He toyed briefly with the idea of somehow ducking out and getting back to the Space Service office, but he turned that notion down. He wanted to do this up in style.
“We’ll take you to the ship,” Das Shamra said. “The plan is to lie in wait off Phobos until the dionate ship shows up. Then you can follow our instructions.”
“You’re the boss,” Kendall said. “Until this caper is over, anyway. Then I’m heading back to Earth and you can all rot so far as I care.”
They took him far out of town, circled around the outlying districts until he was pretty thoroughly confused, then brought him back.
By now it was night, and the twin moons were in the sky—tiny Phobos, only ten miles in diameter, and Deimos, half her size.
The ship was a small, sleek job, some twenty years old. Where they got it didn’t seem evident; possibly they had blackmailed some other pilot into surrendering it, possibly they had hijacked it in some fashion or other.
He climbed aboard, followed by Das Shamra and his five henchmen.
“You’ll have to weigh yourselves,” he announced. “With all six of you on board I’ll have some tricky mass-calculations to do.”
It took him a few hours to calculate the orbit, another hour to run a routine check on the ship. It was in beautiful shape, ready to go.
“Strap down for blastoff,” he said, when he was satisfied.
The Martians frowned in bewilderment. “We’ve never been in space,” one of them said. “We don’t know how to get into the acceleration cradles.”
Kendall showed them. Das Shamra lay closest to him, a blaster cradled in his arms. “You’re the only one who can move around now, Kendall. One move out of place and I’ll drill you.”
“Sure you will,” Kendall said. “And which one of you is going to pilot the ship back down again? If you want to live, Das Shamra, keep that blaster from going off.” He nestled down in the control webbing, and readied the ship for blasting. A sharp thrill ran through him, as it always did as he readied a ship for a leap into the great blackness. But there was a special thrill this time. Only hours ago he had resigned himself to a short, dreary few years of life remaining to him on barren Mars; now he was behind the controls of a powerful ship again.
He touched the power stud. A reassuring throbbing shuddered through the ship.
“We’re about to blast off,” he said. “Just relax, and it won’t bother you much. I’m going to put the ship in orbit around Phobos and then we can wait for the dionate ship at leisure. Okay?”
“Good enough,” Das Shamra grunted. The fat blueskin’s face was beaded with sweat. Obviously the Martians weren’t looking forward to their trip through space—but they were willing to put up with it for the sake of the millions in dionate to be grabbed off Phobos.
Kendall grinned and jammed down the blastoff key. The ship sprang skyward.
HE HAD HIS BACK to a man with a gun. That didn’t make him feel happier. But the little ship bit a chunk out of the sky, climbed higher and higher.
He heard a groan from behind him, but didn’t turn around. He kept himself bent over the controls, forced himself to remain conscious as the acceleration mounted.
Three g’s. Four. He yelled over his shoulder, “How you doin’ back there? Comfortable?”
There was no reply. He grinned and stepped up the acceleration. Seven g’s. Eight. The gravity was tearing at him like a demon’s claws, but he clung to consciousness.
A figure ran through his mind:
Mars—gravity, 0.38. He could stand two-and-a-half times as much acceleration as the blueskins behind him. His Earth-trained muscles, used to responding to a much heavier grav, could handle eight g’s without too much strain. The Martians must be having fits.
Nine g’s. Ten, He turned, looked back for the first time.
Reddish-brown blood trickled from Das Shamra’s fleshy lips. The blaster had long since fallen from his limp hand and lay on the spaceship’s deck. They were all unconscious—all of them, battered and beaten by the sort of acceleration an Earthman was able to take with relative ease.
Grinning savagely, Kendall boosted the thrust until he nearly blacked out himself. Then he seized the controls and started to reverse the ship.
Some time later, he landed it neatly outside the Space Service headquarters. Taking a loving look at the Martians, with their wrenched, distorted faces, he scooped up Das Shamra’s blaster and opened the hatch.
The computer technician he had fought with before came running out on the landing field.
“What is the meaning of this? An unauthorized flight? Who are you? Oh—Kendall!”
“Yes, Kendall,” he “said, leaning dizzily against the side of the ship.
Jerking his thumb over his shoulder, he said, “Get the Port Police out here on the double. There are six very sick would-be smugglers inside this ship. When you’ve got our green-faced blueskins packed away, I want another date with that computer. I think I can get an okay now—and I can’t get back to Earth soon enough!”
The End
This World Must Die!
The computer said Gardner was the man to blast Lurion to dust—but the computer had been wrong once . . .
IVAR JORGENSON was born in the little fishing village of Haugesund, Norway and grew up with an inherent love of the sea. He was brought to the UNited States when he was eight years old, but has done considerable travelling since then, and wrote his first published story while on shipboard. He writes in the classic tradition of adventure science fiction, and This World Must Die! is one of his best.
CHAPTER I
KARNES didn’t look much like the sort of man who could order the death of a planet, Loy Gardner thought. He didn’t seem to have the necessary hardness, despite the precise angularity of his face. But you could never tell about people, it seemed.
Karnes didn’t have to do the job himself. Gardner would take care of that. But it was Karnes’ decision, and that was the most awful part of the job.
“In sixty-seven years, plus or minus eight months,” Karnes said, tapping the sheet of computations, “Lurion will launch an all-out war against the Solar System. During this war, Earth will be totally destroyed.”
Gardner held himself in check. “Nice. If the machine’s telling the truth about this, that is.”
“Truth? Truth’s a concept that exists only for past time. This hasn’t happened yet. The computer says it will happen—if we allow it. Care to take the chance?”
“Oh,” Gardner said softly. He leaned back in the firm webchair, watching Karnes very carefully. Around him, the computer system of Earth Central clicked and murmured. A bright bank of cryotronic tubes glared at him from the wall. Gardner crossed one uniformed leg over the other, and waited. It didn’t take a million-cryotron calculator to guess what Karnes was aiming at, but Gardner had long since learned to let Earth’s Chief of Security do things in his own way.
Karnes rubbed his cheekbones, a gesture that accented his angularity. He said, “There are three billion people living on Lurion.”
“There are six billion on Earth,” Gardner countered.
Karnes smiled coldly, “Ah—yes. Among Lurion’s three billion are some who will be the parents of those who will aid in Earth’s destruction, sixty-seven years from now. Unless, of course, we prevent that.”
Sweat started to roll down Gardner’s face. “Prevent? How?”
“By destroying Lurion, of course.”
Gardner had seen it coming for more than a minute, but still it rocked him. He said, “And suppose the computer is wrong?”
Karnes shrugged. “Worlds have died unjustly before. A minor readjustment in a solar furnace’s metabolism, a flare of energy, and a totally innocent world dies.”
