Collected Short Fiction, page 337
He crossed the street and found a parked car. It was locked, of course, but a quick hammerlike blow with the side of his hand caved in one window; he paused a moment, letting the stinging pain recede, then unhooked the window-catch and let himself in.
It wasn’t difficult to short the ignition of the crudely-built vehicle. The car started jerkily, spurting ahead ten feet before Ridgeley got it under full control. He looked back, saw no pursuers, and started off toward the main road out of Chago, engine thundering, clouds of smoke billowing from the exhaust.
He had little trouble guiding the vehicle, though driving it gave him a curious sensation of anachronism; on Earth, internal-combustion vehicles were museum pieces. But this one served well enough; he pushed the velocity up to fifty miles an hour, after some confusion over the gearshift, and kept the speed there as he rode on out of the city.
The highway was virtually deserted; at rare intervals a car would come hurtling toward him from the opposite direction, but for long stretches he saw no one.
Once a huge swaybacked beast ambled across the roadway, pausing deliberately in Ridgeley’s path to stare at him out of dull red-pupilled eyes.
Cursing, Ridgeley swerved the car around the unmoving creature, running five feet up on the road shoulder before returning to the highway.
It was forty miles from Chago to Yawk. Ridgeley drove carefully, never letting the speed exceed fifty on the tricky, poorly-paved road.
After nearly an hour, the first outlying districts of Yawk lay before him.
THE Boss of Yawk was a tall, powerfully-built man in his late fifties, balding, fleshy-faced, but with a deep well of strength evident that belied the pink pudginess of his jowels. He dressed ornately, in satin robes of green and violet hue, topped with a tiara of semi-precious stones. His office had none of the simplicity of Ben’s; rather, it was majestically furnished, with clinging draperies and shining mirror-surfaces.
Without his blaster—the wrist-band, this time, had been unnoticed or ignored by the Boss’ guards—Ridgeley stood before Dyke VII, Boss of Yawk.
“Ben’s Hale Ridgeley of Chago, eh?” Dyke repeated. His voice was deep and dry, unresonant but still commanding. He toyed with the row of studded jewels embedded in the stiff violet cuff of his left sleeve, glancing up at Ridgeley now and then. “You told me you took on oath to Ben. Why’d you break it?”
“I told you that too. I want to get back home to Earth as quick as I can. I know how to build spaceships. But I saw Chago was going about it the wrong way.”
“And how did you know that Yawk was going about it the right way?”
“I didn’t,” Ridgeley said. “But you couldn’t possibly be wronger than Chago. The thing they’re building won’t be off the ground in less than a century. I don’t have that much time.”
“So you came to us. Well, well, well.” It was impossible to tell whether Dyke was being friendly or threatening. Ridgeley waited patiently. At length Dyke said, “It eases my mind to know that Chago’s doing so poorly, in the eyes of an expert. Well, I suppose we can use you here, Ridgeley. I can’t swear you to fealty, though.”
“Why not?”
“You took an oath. You’re Ben’s man, and you stay Ben’s man forever.”
Honor among thieves, Ridgeley thought. No matter whose side he was on, the formalities had to be respected.
“All right,” he said. “I’m still Ben’s Hale Ridgeley. But I’ll build a ship for you, because I want to get off this world in a hurry. I don’t give a damn which city I build it for. I just want to get home.”
Dyke sighed heavily. “Well enough. I don’t see any reason why I should distrust you. But you’ll die fast enough if I find reasons. I’ll show you what we’ve done; finish the job for us, if you can.”
HE met the Yawk engineers.
There were two of them in charge, and a greater pair of opposites Ridgeley would have been hard put to imagine.
Bruun seemed to be the head man. He was about six feet nine, at a conservative estimate, a mountain of a man with a vast brooding head set atop craggy shoulders too wide to fit through normal doors. Ridgeley was impressed by him: he was the first man who had ever succeeded in getting the best of him in a handshake.
The other man was Weller, who barely topped five feet in height—a tiny insect of a man, all pointed teeth and bright gleaming eyes, set in a minute triangular face. Bruun’s ancestors might have been hired mercenaries; Weller’s, undoubtedly, pickpockets.
The pair of them conducted him to an elaborately-furnished experimental lab near the outskirts of Yawk. There were no crude wobbly model spaceships enclosed in domes here, no wild melange of improbable constructions. They did have charts, though.
“We’ve been toying with a plastic-extrusion hull,” Bruun said. The big man’s voice was an incredibly low rumbling thing. “We ran some flame-tube tests on metal shells. They just don’t stand up to the atmospheric passage.”
Weller nodded. “Send a metal ship up and it’ll be a cinder in an instant. What do your ships use?”
“Ceramic overlays,” Ridgeley said thoughtfully. “But plastic might do it. I doubt that you have the technology for ceramics now anyway.”
There was no harm in telling them things like that, he thought.
“How about the Chago people?” Weller asked.
“They were using an aluminum hull. I guess they haven’t tested it yet,” Ridgeley said.
He thumbed through the rest of the plans. The Yawkans had designed their ship—a slim, attractive-looking job, with retractable vanes and landing fins for atmosphere operation. According to their specifications, the ship would carry twenty men and could stack fuel enough for a billion-mile journey.
“It’s an ion-conversion drive,” Weller pointed out. “It ought to yield pretty close to 3/4C velocity at maximum thrust.”
“We figure that should get us to the next system in about two years. Not bad, except that we can’t store enough fuel on on board to last the whole trip.” Bruun’s massive face looked terribly sad—if it could be said that so vast a face could have any expression.
Ridgeley moistened his lips.
So far as he could tell from rough scrutiny of these plans, the Yawkans were infinitely closer to space travel than the Chagans. Obviously, these had been the ones who had sent the message.
The specifications before him were those of an ultimately workable ship. They had solved the theory; their drive-principle was sound, and whichever of these two had engineered that blast chamber, he had done a shrewd job of it. All that remained was to solve the problem of a sufficiently heat-resistant hull—a few months’ experimentation, no more and then to build the actual ship.
As it stood now, they could send a ship to their moon and back immediately, or almost so. The neighboring solar system was out of reach temporarily, but six words from Ridgeley could give them the clue that they would need to remedy that. Or, even without his help, it would be no more than a year or a year and a half before they solved the problem in the classic manner, by developing a reciprocating-cycle fuel converter that would assure them of an infinite supply of reaction mass.
A year, a year and a half and they’d have interstellar travel. Slow travel—three-quarters of light velocity, no more—but they’d have it.
Bardin’s Fall would once again have access to the galaxy. These men of unstoppable drive and ambition would come pouring forth after five hundred years of isolation, ready to take vengeance on the galaxy that imprisoned their ancestors.
How long would it be, Ridgeley wondered, before these men discovered the faster-than-light warp drive? Or stole it?
Whoever these two geniuses were, this Bruun and this Weller, they had given Yawk and Bardin’s Fall the key to space. The week Ridgeley had spent at Chago had been a waste of effort; while Herschel and his fellow bunglers toyed with aluminum hulls and fantastically complex fuel-injection processes, these two at Yawk had brought space travel virtually to tomorrow’s doorstep.
And Ridgeley could stop it. Right now.
Not much time remained.
He looked up at Bruun and Weller. “This is fine stuff. You’re on the right track, definitely. Of course, there are a few fundamental bloopers—”
“Could you point them out?” Weller asked. Eagerly.
“I’ll need a day or so to study these specs.” Ridgeley grinned warmly. “There won’t be much work for me to do, though. You’ve done a fine job.”
And I’m going to do my best to ruin it, he tacked on in silent parentheses.
MDNIGHT. And the end of the mission approaching for Ridgeley.
The lab area was silent, deserted; the normally dim moon was waning, and gave just the tiniest beam of light.
A watchman paced boredly back and forth before the lab entrance. Crouching in a shadowed corner, Ridgeley watched his mechanical motions, biding his time, waiting. His muscles tensed, ready for action.
A car was parked nearby—the watchman’s, probably, and so not locked. Good, Ridgeley thought. He would need to move quickly. He had a tight schedule to follow.
First, break into the lab. Destroy everything—the models, the notes, the blueprints. Set a fire that would take care of everything else, and incidentally keep the local authorities busy a while.
Next, grab that parked car and get moving. He had the addresses of Weller and Bruun. Two quick blaster shots and Yawk’s chances of reaching space in the decade to come would fade like dying firework bursts. It was too bad, of course, that brilliant men of the order of those two would have to die—but it was two deaths against the potential deaths of billions, and a pair of murders more or less were unnoticeable on such a scale.
After that, thought Ridgeley, back to the car again. Follow the wrist-indicator to the hidden location of the spaceship. Climb in. Blast off. Return to Galactic Control, let them know that Bardin’s Fall had been temporarily kept from reaching space, and inform them that they’d better shore up the galaxy’s soggy war-making machine if they wanted to prevent future trouble with Bardin’s Fall.
End of mission, he thought.
He emerged from his crouch slowly. He had it timed properly: a hundred thirty-two minutes should suffice for the whole thing. Two hours and twelve minutes from now, if all went well, he’d be on his way back to Earth, heading for Galactic Control to file his report.
He broke into a run.
THE watchman never saw him coming. He was a big man, with a rifle slung over one shoulder, but he obviously had been on the job a long time without ever encountering trouble. He had grown complacent.
Ridgeley caught up with him about ten feet before the point where he would turn and head back. He reached up, grabbed the muzzle of the rifle, and yanked down, hearing a satisfying clunk as the rifle’s stock crashed against the man’s clavicle.
The astonished guard spun and, rifleless, moved toward his smaller foe. But Ridgeley was ready. He swung the rifle up in a wide arc. It connected with the side of the man’s skull, felling him instantly. Blood began to trickle from the guard’s ear.
Ridgeley knelt, saw that the guard still breathed, and briefly debated killing him. He decided against it; the fellow wasn’t going to wake up too soon, and even though his carelessness merited him death, Ridgeley was willing to let him live.
He dragged the man into the deepest shadows, bound him quickly, and stood up. The first part of the night’s work had gone swiftly enough. The lab lay ready for him.
He vaulted the restraining barrier, clambered frantically up through the network of outer fences, and swung himself lightly in through a second-story window. The man who thinks like an ape, Ridgeley thought, remembering the label they had branded him with in his Academy days. And who climbs like one, he added now.
He dropped easily to the floor.
Ridgeley had always had a good directional memory; now, he found his way through the darkened laboratory to the room he had been in with Weller and Bruun earlier that day; there, the most vital of the plans were, and those he would destroy first.
En route, he passed a large workshop. He peered in. A scale model of a spaceship drive generator sat on a workbench, incomplete but carefully constructed and recognizable. Drawing his blaster, Ridgeley destroyed it with a quick spurt of energy.
Onward. He reached the engineers’ office. Charts and blueprints were within, behind the drafting-desk, in the gray metal cabinet. He blasted the lock apart and shoved the door open.
A siren screamed.
At first, he thought it might be some kind of burglar-alarm that he had sprung by breaking into the office. But he realized that was unlikely; if the lab were wired, he would have sprung the alarm the moment he entered.
No. The siren was outside.
He sprang to the window and looked down into the courtyard. An official-looking car had pulled up; men were rushing into the lab. Ridgeley began to sweat. Somewhere along the way, he had committed a fatal blunder; he had been detected. Scowling, he realized his entire mission hung by the end of a steadily weakening thread now. He would have to complete his job here, elude those below, and still reach Weller and Bruun this evening. else he would have failed.
He blasted open the blueprint cabinet and ashed its contents. A bound volume of approved schematics went next. He watched flame starting to spread; the lab was probably well fireproofed, but a determined arsonist could always overcome that.
Ranging up and down the office, he tossed whatever he could into the growing blaze. Even if he failed to reach the engineering pair, he would still have done enough damage to set Yawk back six months to a year in the spaceflight program.
The flame mounted higher now; he saw he had accomplished most of his task, and ducked out of the office. The coast seemed clear, for the moment.
I can only find some way out of here that isn’t being guarded.
He heard footsteps.
Whirling, he saw two figures mounting a catwalk some fifty feet away; by the flickering light of the flame he could see they held blasters, and were obviously searching for him. Their backs were turned.
Hostages, he thought.
“All right, you two over there,” he called. “Let your guns drop. Turn around slowly.”
Two blasters dropped to the floor. The men turned to face him. Ridgeley’s eyes widened when he saw who his hostages were.
The taller of the two was Dyke VII, Boss of Yawk. His companion was Ben V, ruler of Chago.
“WE came too late,” Ben said. There was little anger in his voice, only a strange sadness. “He ruined everything. If only I had called earlier—”
“Or if I hadn’t trusted him,” added Dyke ruefully. “But I suspected. I traced him. But too late, too late—”
“And so Bardin’s Fall remains in solitude,” Ben said.
Ridgeley nodded. “Your conquest of the galaxy will have to be postponed, I’m afraid.”
“Conquest—what—?”
Dyke shook his head. “What did you say?”
Ridgeley repeated it.
“Is that what Earth believes? That we want to conquer the galaxy? Really?”
Ridgeley suddenly began to sweat, not altogether because of the fire crackling in the lab behind him. What were they saying, he wondered?
“All we wanted was a chance to return to the community of worlds,” Ben said quietly. “To atone for the things our ancestors did. To take our place in society. And you, you destructive idiot, with your lies and trickery—!” He was unable to go on.
Ridgeley chewed his lip; the hand that held the blaster on the two bosses shook. To cross half of space and carry out a secret mission for this—
“Let’s get out of here,” he said hoarsely. “Start walking toward the stairs. I’m perfectly willing to kill the two of you if I don’t get out of here alive.
If you see any of your men ahead of you, tell them what the score is.”
They began to walk. Behind them, the fire flared, growing ever brighter. A blaze of heat lit their way as they wound down the spiral staircase. Five guardsmen stood in the courtyard, hands in the air, Ridgeley emerged with his gun trained on their ruler.
Fire danced through the lab.
It would be entirely destroyed. But—
He felt dizzy. “Why were you so anxious to build spaceships?” he asked.
Ben said, “To see what other people were like. To show them we had learned to live in peace. But of course you don’t believe that. You live by trickery, and you expect everyone else to try to trick you in turn.”
“He’s telling the truth,” Dyke said. “Your talk of a conquest is fantastic. What could one world do against an entire galaxy?”
You don’t know, Ridgeley thought. You don’t know how soft the galaxy’s become, how effete, how spineless. Without crime, with the toughest, most ruthless of its population sent to rot on a forgotten planet someplace—
A gulf seemed to be opening in front of him. All his life he had followed orders, carried out one mission or another unquestioningly. But—
Suppose these men were sincere. Suppose they wanted contact with the galaxy, nothing more? Should the sins of the fathers be visited upon the tenth and twentieth generation? Should these people be quarantined forever?
“Who are you?” Dyke asked finally.
“Hale Ridgeley . . . of Earth . . . of Space Service.” And he thought suddenly, What do I care about Earth?
He had never been comfortable there, with his physical strength and his shrewdness and toughness; they were qualities the galaxy had little of, and they had not loved him for it. The ruthless spirit of mankind had been cast off, the free spirits hurled into exile on Bardin’s Fall. And mankind was paying the price.
But if he let Bardin’s Fall go ahead with his project—if these tough, hard men came sprawling out over the galaxy, interbreeding once again, mixing their five-hundred-year-isolated strain with the effete blood of the civilized galaxy—
He glanced up at the waiting Bosses. “If I were to let you go—if I showed you how to build spaceships—dammit, if I showed you where my own spaceship is hidden!—would you let me stay on Bardin’s Fall?”
