Asteroid Man

Jonga kicked over the chart table with a savage oath. Krull raised an eyebrow inquisitively.

"What's wrong, Jonga?"

"Everything!" retorted his colleague. "Every blasted thing in the galaxy! Every blasted thing in the universe! I'm sick and tired and fed up. Wish I'd never heard of astronomy. Wish I'd never gone to a university. Wish I'd never mastered astro-physics, and above all, I wish I'd never come here. God! What a job for a man with imagination and enthusiasm!" He sighed wearily and thrust his hands deep into the tunic pocket. "I thought space was a big job for a big man. I thought it needed men with enormous minds to run enormous ships. I thought all sorts of crazy things before I got into the service." He spat expressively onto the shining beryllium of the floor. "And when I got into the service"—his voice took on a desperate edge—"what did I find? What did I find? They stick me behind a charge table, and I count asteroids. I count 'em day in and day out! I orbit 'em! I plot 'em. I cross-check 'em! I've never been so bored in my life. I feel like a kid who left school wanting to be an engine driver, a couple of hundred years ago, and what happens? I imagine those poor little beggars of the past cleaning piston rods and other soul-destroying things! By the time you get a job that you really want to do, you've waited for it so long that you don't want it any more. If you can't have the thing that you want when you want it, it takes the edge off your appetite. Makes you sick… it does me, anyway. I'm teed off. I never want to see another asteroid. I never want to see another planetoid. I never want to look on this blasted chart again. I don't want to touch that computer any more. I'm fed up!"

"I know how you feel," said Krull. "I know exactly. But don't you realize that, in a sense, you've got the very job you wanted?"

"Have the job I wanted?" echoed Jonga incredulously. "You don't make sense, Krull."

"You said you wanted something tough," said his colleague. "Do you think there is anything tougher than this soul-destroying monotony? Any romantic kid straight out of school can get into one of those rocket ships and fly them to Lord-knows-where, imagining himself as a prehistoric 'cowboy' or something like that, with the reins of a fiery horse. You see it on television screens every day. Boys in rocket ships, boys riding atomic racing cars, sure they can do that! Crazy kids, plenty of dough, so what? It takes a man to stand here and count asteroids. Do you think any of those crazy kids has got enough depth inside his own mind to stand here day after day, week after week, year after year, doing the same job—checking, re-checking, and then checking again? You know as well as I do why we're here. You know why they have to be checked. You know that that's about the weakest point in the solar system defense!"

"You're right. I'm sorry I said anything," answered Jonga. "I realize it's got to be done."

"Then you realize why you've always got to have the same men on the job. There's no equipment designed that could do this job. We tried it, remember? The new Hickworth computer was tried, and what did it do? Every time one of those babies went erratic, it blew off a false alarm, and so what? Every ship in the inter-planetary force goes up to intercept. And what do they go and intercept? A chunk of rock! You need the human element here. You must have the human element. Even in this 21st century, there's no computer that can do this job as well as men. We've got a responsible job! And look at it the other way. Think of all the guys who'd be glad to sit back and earn as many interplanetary credits as you do, just by sitting, watching a screen!"

"Yes, I guess they would." Jonga laughed. "You know, Krull, you've got a sense of humor. Didn't one of those prehistoric writers say it was a saving grace?"

"It is! Kept me alive more than once. I remember the time I was lost on Lunar. Oh heck, it was my own silly fault! I was out there with a party. Talk about crazy kids, I was one! We weren't more than seventeen or eighteen. We'd a second-hand car, and we were trying to get across across the Sea of Rains, you know—establish some new kind of record. The car broke down, and we had to start foot-slogging it in space suits. We had no navigational gear with us. We were supposed to be steering by the landmarks. Then the night comes up and catches us, and there were no landmarks. None of us knew enough astronomy; we only kept kidding ourselves we did. We were looking at the wrong constellations, and we were trying to work out our position in relationship to earth, and how those constellations should have looked, and which was north from where we were heading, and —oh—it was fantastic. We finished up pretty well dead beat, just slugging across that vast plain of pumice dust. I wouldn't be here now, only somebody with a bit more sense than we had had been keeping a friendly watch without letting us know. When we were pretty well on our beam ends, they came and picked us up. It taught me something. It taught me a lot of things! Even while we were waiting there, slugging across that desert, slugging through that pumice dust with the water running low and the food even lower, we were making jokes over the short-wave all the time. They weren't funny jokes, they were very weak jokes, they were some of the oldest chesnuts you ever heard, but we laughed. We laughed out of a sense of duty to each other. We decided that if we were going to die, we'd try and die laughing. We were laughing when they found us, only by that time it had gotten pretty well on the verge of hysteria… They congratulated us on getting as far as we'd gotten. They said it was a greater achievement than getting there. They hadn't expected to find us laughing. I believe they stamped a gold star on the record sheets; it probably helped us to get the job later… Yes, I've had lots of reasons to be grateful to a sense of humor."

"I'll have to try to develop one," commented Jonga.

"Let's see: 'Little tiny asteroid—I'd like to give you the boid."

"Yes, that's about the standard of the jokes we were making. You must be getting pretty well to the end of your rope. I tell you what—nip down to the canteen and bring up a half-bottle of rye."

"Now that," said Jonga, "is about the best suggestion I've heard for a long time!"

"Make sure it's only a half-bottle! These things are bad enough to count when we're stone cold sober!"

"O.K." Jonga departed. He felt much better. He liked Krull. Krull was a good chap. Krull was tall and dark, with a face like the back end of a bus, one of those pleasantly ugly men with broad shoulders and grey, twinkling eyes. Krull had been around. The panel slid to behind Jonga's slim, athletic figure, and Krull returned his eyes to the chart. They danced there… thousands upon thousands of them, or so it seemed. He had another look in the computer book. Actually, there weren't thousands, as he well knew—at least, if there were, only just. Centuries ago—way back in 1942—they had been officially charted at one thousand, five hundred and thirty-nine. Now, in 2260, there were two thousand, eight hundred and twelve. Every asteroid in the belt. Dancing and twirling and swirling around, following their insane, erratic orbits. Every few hours the whole gamut had to be checked and double-checked. You couldn't keep track of their orbits. You could only keep their numbers under surveillance. The orbits were too erratic even for the computers. He recalled again what had happened when they tried to leave the Hickworth mechanism to do the job on their own. Brother! Had that caused some trouble!

All the solar system dwellers knew that far, far out beyond the galaxy were many, many other systems. Far, far beyond the known, lay the great unknown. Just what it contained was a perennial problem for the earth men and their allies on the other habitable planets of the system. Their screens worked incessantly. Any unidentified object that might have been any kind of spaceship was at once checked and intercepted. In the friendliest possible way… there was even betting that anything from out there was just as intelligent and friendly as their own colleagues in the system itself. They didn't shoot first and ask questions afterward. The stranger was always given the benefit of the doubt. But there was always the chance. It was the risk that they dare not take. The risk that somewhere out there, in the great unknown, was a lurking intelligence, with more brain power than man or his allies. Something that was evil and threatening and malevolent. Something that must not be allowed past the defenses. That was where the asteroid spotters came in. That was where the weak link had to be guarded. You could hide a space ship up there in the asteroid belt. It would just show up as one more blip among the two thousand, eight hundred and twelve other blips… That was—unless you counted the things. Krull flicked the computer onto its auto-counting mechanism and swung the directional beam on its mammoth task.

Two thousand, eight hundred and nine; two thousand, eight hundred and ten; two thousand, eight hundred and eleven; two thousand, eight hundred and twelve;—Oh, no! It had happened! It couldn't happen, but it had to happen. Krull felt his hands shaking with suppressed excitement. Two thousand, eight hundred and thirteen! No, there weren't. There couldn't be. It didn't make sense. The pointer on the computer recording dial jarred and flashed in front of his eyes like a probe of his eyes, like a probe of white-hot light. Two thousand, eight hundred and thirteen! He wished Jonga would hurry and get back. Two thousand, eight hundred and thirteen. He kept repeating it over and over to himself. It seemed to be like a figure from the Book of Doom… What had come in? Had one of them split? It could, of course, be a false alarm. The routine process would have to be put into action. The recognizables would have to be double-checked, and that would leave the uncertainty margin on the edge to be investigated…

He rang the alarm bell.

Better a false alarm than letting some invader slip through, he decided. Jonga came hurrying back, a plastic bottle in one hand.

"Did you get so thirsty you had to ring the alarm?" he cracked.

Krull shook his head. "Look here!"

Jonga flashed his eyes across to the computer with its auto-recorder. Two, eight, one, three. His voice was incredulous. "What happened? Did she blow a valve? Mechanical counting gone haywire?"

"Be your age," said Krull. "Counting mechanism doesn't go haywire. It wouldn't be here if it did!"

"Stone the crows! What are we gonna do now?"

"We'll try and sort out which one it is, now I've sounded the general alarm," said Krull. "Let's get the eccentricity charts down." They crossed their gleaming ultra-modern laboratory and began hauling at heaps of highly involved equipment. As soon as a number variation showed up, they threw every analytical scientific device they could get into trying to find the odd man out. At the moment, the only thing they knew was that there was one asteroid too many. There was one strange planetoid up there in that erratic swirling mass…

"This is crazy," said Jonga slowly. "Come off it; you know as well as I do this is what we're here for. It isn't crazy; it's just very, very unusual," retorted Krull.

"O.K. We'll skip the definitions," said Jonga. He was himself again now. Action was what he craved. Action was what he loved. It was this ceaseless counting of unvarying blips on a screen that got him. But give him the chance to do something, and he was all man…

"Right! Let's see which of these beggars we can isolate," said the scientist. "In the first place, we can cross off the first thousand known and computed's."

"Yes, and then we can add the odd five hundred and thirty-nine with calculable orbits," said Jonga. "That's all the old originals counted."

"Fair enough," replied Krull. "Which leaves us with what?"

"Why, only an odd eight hundred," said Jonga. "This thing is big, Krull, hadn't we better see the skipper about this?"

"I guess so."

They went from the observation room into the gleaming beryllium elevator, and whistled swiftly and silently down toward general control underneath.

An ash-blonde secretary with a supercilious and superior smile raised one carefully re-designed eyebrow as they approached her desk.

"General alarm?"

"Yes," snapped Krull. He didn't realize the unconscious pun he had made till afterwards. The icy wonder did. She raised the other eyebrow.

"Odd time to be supercilious."

"You should know," grinned Krull; "you've had plenty of practice. Tell the skipper we've got to see him quickly, will you?" She moved with a slow, superior kind of poise as though she were carrying a stack of books on her head.

"General Rotherson, an urgent report from the asteroid checking point. The officers wish to see you," she called over the intercom.

Rotherson's voice began somewhere below his stomach and rumbled up like a volcano.

"Come in."

Jonga and Krull made their way into the inner sanctum.

"What's the matter, chaps?" Rotherson was one of the "old school" and believed in military tradition. He sported a military moustache and a military beard, both of which were iron-grey. His hair was close-cropped to his enormous head. His eyes, strange green and amber eyes, seemed to flash lightning as he looked at the men. His chest was like a barrel. His shoulders were as broad as the desk behind which he sat. His great hands drummed a ceaseless tattoo on the blotting paper.