Collected Short Fiction, page 446
The alien nodded thoughtfully, studying the Astrocomp. Then he said, “I will do it. Yes. I will bring you what you desire.”
He skated over to the Astrocomp, peering down at it as if to get a closer look. He knelt, examining the row of control dials, the oscilloscope panel, the charge indicators. An Astrocomp is a fascinating sight; I couldn’t blame the little alien for being so entranced by it.
I was visualizing a long line of furry aliens skating gravely across the icefield, each bearing slung over one shoulder a little sack chock-full of pitchblende. We had figured on a rugged session of prospecting; instead, we were having our fuel handed us on a platter.
It was a pleasant daydream. While I was busy dreaming it, the little alien stooped for a closer look yet at the Astrocomp. And then, before I knew it, he had gathered the irreplacable device into his wiry little arms, had grinned cheerfully at me, turned, and was streaking rapidly away on his skates!
IT TOOK me perhaps a microsecond to realize what had happened; that was long enough to let the little thief get a head start. He was ten or fifteen feet along before I even got my feet into action.
It’s no cinch running over ice, even in spaceboots—and especially when you’re chasing a creature who is both native to the area and equipped for travelling fast and safely. I broke into a lumbering unsteady trot, bawling after the alien, “Hey, come back here with that! Come back here!”
I might just as well have been shouting Ancient Armenian recipes, because the alien couldn’t understand what I was yelling, and probably didn’t care anyway. He just kept on going. I could picture the devilish glint in his eyes as he gloated over the way he had swiped a no-doubt valuable bit of equipment from a couple of damfool Earthmen.
Still, for all its miniaturization, an Astrocomp is a pretty heavy piece of merchandise for a being only three feet and some inches high to run away with. The alien was finding it slow going—relatively slow, anyway. He moved with uncanny grace, taking good care to keep ahead of me. My legs were twice as long as his, but I was four times as clumsy. Maybe I would have caught up, maybe not.
BUT ABRUPTLY I was taken out of the contention. I lost my footing and went skidding along on my belly over about ten feet of ice, stopping only when I managed to snag a rock outcrop with my boot. When I looked up, I saw the little devil fifty feet away, and vanishing rapidly with his arms wrapped safely round what had been our computer, navigating device, control center, and translator.
I sat up and a moment later heard a crash behind me. Turning, I saw Carpenter flat on his face on the ice. He had given chase, too—and had no more success than I had.
Elbowing myself up from the sitting position, I gingerly made my way over to Carpenter and dragged him to his feet. For a moment, there was nothing either of us could say.
“He—he just grabbed it and skated away,” Carpenter muttered. “Lifted up the Astrocomp and beat it.”
“Yeah,” I said.
That was our entire conversation as we carefully crossed the ice and returned to our ship.
WE BROKE out some food and ate a morose meal; then I sat down with pencil and paper and started figuring out a blastoff orbit. Every spaceman is supposed to know how to calculate for takeoff and landing; in practice, the Astrocomp does all that sort of routine stuff, but we didn’t happen to have an Astrocomp on board. It’s not considered normal procedure to carry a spare. The way they package them, it’s pretty close to impossible to damage an Astrocomp unless you set your mind to it; and the Survey Corps just doesn’t figure on having its men let aliens steal the devices.
So Carpenter searched through the ephemeris for the nearest Terran base, which turned out to be a four-parsec hop, while I sweated over the complicated and annoying job of computing our nullspace entry. The job takes more sweat than brains; you simply have to balance out a few dozen simultaneous factors, checking each one to five or six places. It’s a hellish job, but the Astrocomp does it in seconds. Only our Astrocomp was probably getting cackled over triumphantly in some alien tarsier-warren by this time. We felt like saps. But how were we supposed to know the alien was hunting for Earthman souvenirs, and was going to grab anything detachable?
AFTER THREE or four hours of dreary arithmetic, I decided I had just about had it. I shoved myself away from the desk and glared at Carpenter.
“I’m knocking off for the night. You want to finish the job?”
Carpenter was never very much good at computations. He shook his head and said, “No, thanks; I’m going to sack out.”
It was as good an idea as any. I took a couple of tranquilizing tablets just before climbing into the hay—I didn’t want to have nightmares about little thieving furry aliens—and I slept soundly right through until the moment the next morning when another snowball splatted against the viewport.
I was up and at the window so fast I surprised myself. And there was our ice-skating friend, looking up from down there and grinning, and pointing, to a sack sitting on The ice a few feet from the right stabilizing fin of the ship. He grinned broadly, pointed at the ship and then at the sack, turned, and hightailed it across the ice-field. Maybe he figured we were going to come after him with blasters and force him to give back the Astrocomp. He would have been right, too.
But he was gone by the time we were in our spacesuits and out the airlock—opening it manually this time, because the Astrocomp was AWOL. All we saw was a dwindling brown dot on the horizon. But the sack still lay near the ship. Carpenter examined it, fumbled out his gamma detector, took a reading.
“It’s radioactive,” he said.
It was pitchblende.
THE CONVERTER gobbled the stuff up greedily, spitting out the impurities and keeping only the pure fissionable U-235 it hungered for. The alien had come through, all right; he’d delivered the goods.
We blasted off out of there an hour later with Carpenter at the controls, using my calculations; it wasn’t a bad blastoff at all, considering the fact that we were doing it by the book for the first time since training school. We subradioed ahead to the Terran base that we were coming, and would need a replacement Astrocomp. We didn’t say why; we didn’t dare.
Carpenter said, “It doesn’t make sense—first stealing the Astrocomp and then bringing us the pitchblende anyway! We couldn’t have gone after them—he didn’t have to bring the ore.”
“Packrat,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Packrat. It’s a Terran animal. Steals bright and shiny things and brings replacements. It’ll take a piece of silverware and bring a twig, stuff like that. But it always trades. I guess it’s the same with these people. Grab the Astrocomp, bring us some ore. The ore’s useless to them.”
“So is the Astrocomp.”
I looked at Carpenter in sudden puzzlement. “Yeah—but it’s bright and shiny. Maybe they like to play with gadgets.”
WE MADE our landing at the Markab base a day later, and they had a replacement Astrocomp waiting for us. We managed to ignore the questions they asked about how we had contrived to lose the computer, and we completed our flight to Beta Ceti III without further mishap.
But I’ve been wondering. Was that little furry beast a packrat, a mere acquirer-for-the-sake-thereof—or did he have some special reason for wanting the Astrocomp? Suppose the first scout survey was wrong; suppose those people are Level Nine instead of Level Six. In that case an Astrocomp would be quite a thing for them to have. It might cause a wholesale technological revolution.
I sort of think the Corps should send scouts back to World 7 for another look. But Carpenter and I filled out a Loss-of-Materiel form that said we had accidentally dropped the Astrocomp down an ice crevasse, and I’d hate to have to admit now that we had lied, that the computer had really been snatched by a crafty little ice-skating alien.
So we’re keeping quiet about it. I intend to wait and see—and to hope for the best.
Castaways of Space
It was McDermott’s job to rescue the Robinson Crusoes of the star lanes—whether they wanted to be rescued or not. Sometimes these castaways wanted to stay lost
LIEUTENANT McDermott was having a couple of drinks in the Nine Planets Bar on Albireo XII when his wristband bleeped, telling him to report to Patrol headquarters for assignment. McDermott scowled. This was his time off and he didn’t give a damn what Headquarters said. He cupped his hand tightly around the drinkflask and took a long slug. The wristband bleeped again, impatiently.
McDermott waited a minute or two and finished his drink. Then he switched the band to audio and said in a sour tone, “McDermott reporting. What is it?”
The thin, edgy voice of the Officer of the Day said, “Job for you, Mac. There’s been a kidnapping and we want you to do the chasing.”
“I’m off duty. Get Squires.”
“Squires is in sick-bay having his head sewed back on,” was the acid reply. “Get out of that bar and get yourself down here in five minutes or—”
The threat was unvoiced, but McDermott didn’t need much persuasion. He knew his status as a Galaxy Patrol Corpsman was shaky enough, and a couple more black marks would finish him completely. He didn’t like that idea. Getting booted out of the crime-prevention unit would mean he would have to go back to working for a living, and at his age that wasn’t nice to think about.
“Okay,” he rumbled. “Be right there.”
He pulled a platinoid five-credit coin from his pocket, fingered its embossed surface lovingly for a moment, and spun it down on the counter. The bartender slid two small coppers back at him in change. Pocketing them, McDermott grinned apologetically at the gray-skinned Denebian floozie he had been making plans about until the call to HQ, and shouldered his way out of the bar. He walked pretty well, considering there was nearly five credits’ worth of straight Sirian rum under his belt.
McDermott held his liquor pretty well. He was a big man, six-three and two hundred sixty pounds, and there was plenty of alcohol-absorbing bulk there to gobble up the stuff as he poured it down his throat.
His car, with the official nova-emblem of the Galaxy Patrol Corps, was sitting outside the bar. He tumbled into it, jabbed the start-button fiercely, and shot away from the curb. The trip to Headquarters took him twenty minutes, which was pretty good time considering that the building was halfway across town.
Sergeant Thom was at the night desk, a wizened little Aldebaranian who looked up as McDermott came through the door and said, “Better leg it upstairs, Mac. Davis is on tonight and he wants you fast.”
“He’s waited this long,” McDermott said. “He can wait a little longer. No sense rushing around.”
McDERMOTT took the gravtube upstairs and entered the Officer of the Day’s cubbyhole without knocking. The O.D. was Captain Davis, a forty-year veteran of the Corps who lived a model life himself and who had several times expressed himself rather harshly on the subject of McDermott’s drinking.
Now he looked at McDermott with an expression of repugnance on his face and said in his tight little voice, “I’m sorry to have found it necessary to pull you off your free time, Lieutenant.”
McDermott said nothing. Davis went on, “A matter has come up and at the moment you’re the only man at this base who can handle it. A girl named Nancy Hollis has been kidnapped—an Earthgirl, visiting this world on a tour with her parents. The father is a big-wheel diplomat making a galactic junket. She was plucked out of her hotel room and carted away in a Model XV-108 ship by a man identified only as Blaine Hassolt of this city. Know him?”
McDermott shook his head.
Davis shrugged. “Well, no matter. The girl left a scribbled note and we got on the trail pretty fast after the snatch. Hassolt was heading outsystem with her and we slapped a spy-vector on the ship. We followed it as far as we could. It disappeared pretty fast and as far as we can compute it crashlanded on Breckmyer IV. We saw the ship in orbit around that world and we saw a small lifeship detach from the main and skedaddle down to the planetary surface. Lifeships land but they don’t take off. That means Hassolt and the girl are somewhere on Breckmyer IV. Get out there and find them, Mac.”
Moistening his lips, McDermott said, “You’re sure it’s Breckmyer IV?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
McDermott knew that planet. It was a stinking hot one, whose moderate zones were intolerable and whose tropical zones were sheer hell. It was inhabited by primitive humanoids and there were no Terran settlements anywhere on the planet. He was being handed a lousy job, maybe even a suicide job. But the kidnapped girl’s father was a big-wheel diplomat, and policy dictated making at least a token effort to get her off Breckmyer IV, if she had survived the landing. The Corps had to send someone down there to look around—and the least valuable member of the local base was a rumsoaked Corpsman named McDermott.
“You’ll leave at once,” Davis told him. “You won’t stop at your bar for booze. You won’t stop to take a shave. You won’t stop to do any old damn thing.”
“Yes, sir,” McDermott said stonily.
“We’re fueling up a ship for you at the Corps port. It’ll be ready for blasting in fifteen minutes. Heaven help you if you’re late.”
“I’ll be there on time, sir.”
“You’d better be.”
MCDERMOTT got to the spaceport in time for the blasting. He had made one tiny stop, at an all-night package store just outside the spaceport area, but Davis didn’t have to know that. And the mass margin of the ship was a thousand pounds; nobody would mind if he brought a small brown bag containing a couple of bottles on board.
The ship was all ready for him. Under the floodlights the service flunkies bustled around, piping in fuel and checking the instruments. McDermott wondered why they were going to so much trouble. This was a sacrifice flight anyway; he wasn’t going to find that girl in the jungle, and he’d be damned lucky if he ever got back alive after making a landing on Breckmyer IV.
But he didn’t say anything. The groundside flunkies looked at him with the worship and wonder in their eyes, the way they looked at any full-fledged Corpsman no matter how seedy he was, how disreputable. As far as they were concerned, McDermott was a Corpsman, and the glamor of that rank eclipsed completely any incidental. deficiencies of personality he might possibly have.
He climbed into the control cabin of the ship. It was an XV-110, a four-man ship with auxiliary boost. That would make landing and taking off on rough terrain easier, and there would be room for him to bring back both Hassolt and the girl if he could find them.
McDermott stowed his three bottles of rum in the gravholder near the pilot’s chair, headed to the galley, and found a nipple-top in the galley stores. He opened one of the bottles, fastened the nipple to it, and took a quick slug. Then he strapped himself in for blastoff position while the count-down went on outside.
“Ready for blast, Lieutenant McDermott.”
“Ready,” he snapped back.
The automatic pilot was ready to function too. A glittering metallic tape dangled loosely from the mouth of the computer. McDermott knew that the tape would guide him faithfully through the hyperwarp across the eighteen light-years that separated him at the moment from Breckmyer IV. The trip would take a day and a half, ship time. If he budgeted himself properly, those three rum bottles would see him through the round trip.
If there was a round trip.
“Blasting in eight seconds, Lieutenant.”
“Check.”
He touched his fingers to the control board and switched on the activator for the autopilot. From here on he was just so much baggage. The ship would fly itself without any help from him.
Reaching out, he made sure his precious rum was secure against blastoff. He leaned back, waiting. He knew no one gave much of a damn whether he reached Breckmyer IV safely or not, whether he found the girl safe and sound, whether he got back to the Albireo base. He was being sent out just for the sake of appearances. The Corps was making a gesture. Look here, Mr. Hollis, we’re trying to rescue your daughter.
McDermott scowled bitterly. The last number of the count-down sounded. The ship rocked back and forth a moment and shot away into space. Eleven seconds after the moment of blastoff, the autopilot activated the spacewarp generator, and so far as observers on Albireo XII were concerned McDermott and his ship had ceased to exist.
A day and a half later, the autopilot yanked the ship out of warp, and in full color on the ship’s screen was the system of Breckmyer—the big golden-yellow sun surrounded by its thirteen planets. McDermott had finished one full bottle of his rum, and the benippled second bottle was drained almost to its Plimsoll line, but he had had time to look up the Breckmyer system in the ship’s ephemeris anyhow.
Of the thirteen planets, only one was suitable for intelligent life, and that was the fourth. The first three were far too hot; the fifth through eighth were too big, and the outer planets were too cold.
The fourth, though, was inhabited—by tribal-organized humanoids of a Class III-a civilization. There were no cities and no industries. It was a primitive hunting-and-agricultural world with a mean temperature of 85 in the temperate zones and 120 in the tropics. McDermott meant to avoid the tropics. If Hassolt and the girl had landed there, McDermott didn’t intend to search very intensely for them. Not when the temperature was quite capable of climbing to 150 or 160 in the shade—and a hot, muggy, humid 160 at that.
He guided the ship on manual into an orbit round the fourth planet at a distance of three hundred thousand feet. That far up, the mass-detector would function. He could vector in on the crashed ship and find its whereabouts.
Snapping on the detector, he threw the ship into a steady orbit and waited. An hour later came the beep-beeping of a find; and, tuning the fine control on his detector plate, he discovered that he had indeed located the kidnap ship.
