Kenneth Bulmer (16 page)

The clock showed twenty-one
four and a half .'. .

Stella's
voice rang lightly from the speakers, melliflously phrasing the words Randolph
had taught her.

"All right! Here it is! And wake up at
the back, there!"

Laughter.
Dazed laughter, a little; a running sigh of humor breaking shakily from those
people in the Grand Salon, all now looking at Stella and. wondering why, perhaps,
they felt a little stiff, why their drinks were a litde flat, why their
cigarettes were subtly different. But they'd been watching this unknown Mrs.
Ramsy, hadn't they? Hadn't taken their eyes off her. And there she was with her
silver whistle and the lucky yellow ticket—the lucky yellow ticket . . . That
was the mesmerizing ace . . .

Warner's
face, worried, anxious, conscious of that gun barrel so steadily bearing on his
back, was alive once again. Marko was chuckling deeply with his moment of
triumph. The guards shifted a little—perhaps to ease cramped muscles.

And
Howland felt his hand tremble as Helen's body moved, as she turned slightly to
look up at him
...

"And the lucky winner
is number 7871"

Catcalls,
whistles, screams of dismay—and one long screeching whoop, banging out from
the speakers and bouncing from metal walls.

"That's
787 letting us know who's won!" Willi Haffner tossed his crumpled ticket
onto the floor. "And to think it could have been one of us." He
looked hard at Professor Randolph.

Randolph laughed. "There are better
things in life, my dear Willi, than merely winning a gambling prize . . ."
"There are." Marko turned Uthely away from them. "And they're
all stacked up in that strong-room across there." He shouted at a guard
standing by the door. "How's it coming, AlwynP"

"Slowly,
chief. But they're cutting through hard now. Stoppage a moment ago—the torches
went out for some reason."

"Well, keep 'em at itl Our ship will be
here soon."

Randolph, Howland and
Haffner exchanged glances.

For them, the tension had drained. Howland
felt a great longing for Helen sweep over him. She stood close to him,
trembling slightly, worried, wondering what was going to happen. He wanted to
reassure her; but all he could say was, "Hold steady, Helen. It will soon
be all right. Nothing is going to happen to you. I promise."

Her only answer was to press her hand over
his.

After
that the sequence of events moved in a preordained pattern.

Howland
knew he would never forget the look on Marko's face when the brief, bitter but
bloodless battle was over.

Larssen
had managed to give the alarm without revealing the source and had been in the
forefront of the rescuing party. In the battle Howland, his fears for Helen
torturing him, had been forced to fight and had wounded two rebels. He had not
enjoyed doing this. When the captain and Warner, a very chastened man, had
thanked him, he hadn't been able to take his eyes off Marko. The rebel leader
stood against a bulkhead, his hands on his head and his whole damned soul in
his eyes.

Howland
couldn't face that look. He turned away. "We had to fight them," he
said to the captain. "For the sake of the women passengers. But you have to
feel sorry for them—at least, they believe in what they're doing."

As
an epitaph, it was poor; but Howland had buried a great many ideas he had once
cherished on this trip.

But, also, he had found
Helen Chase.

That would make up for
everything.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A
most
beautiful culture, my dear Peter."
Randolph beamed at his chief assistant. Around them the newly-created laboratory
gleamed with wealthy opulence, quite clearly the result of inspired detail
design, prolonged hard work—and much money. Old Gussman looked up from his
bench, his scare-crow face agleam with happiness.

"I
second that, Peter. This batch should take us a long way along the trail.
You're taking it out today?"

*Tes."
Howland nodded. The excitement they all felt bubbled in him no less strongly;
but they did not have a Helen Chase on their minds. "Area seven-three, I
thought, would be suitable. There is a tidal mud flat and a river churning up
minerals. We ought to have positive results inside ten days."

"Ten days." breathed Randolph.
"Ten days for the creation of life—it took millions of years on Earth.
But then, where was the midwife?"

"That
ancient life was created and died, over and over again," Gussman pointed
out, smiling at the reference to a midwife. "And so will ours. But each
time we process a fresh batch, we gain a little more on death."

"Conditions
here on Pochalin Nine are ideal." Randolph did not turn to look through
the windows. That compulsion had died with the death of the first batch, twelve
months ago, and now they all accepted without question the dark overcast, the
flickering, eerie lightning, the battering gusts of wind crashing against their
buildings. When the sun ripped apart those lowering clouds and revealed the
landscape the first and dominating thought—always—was 'this place is dead.' No
oxygen in the air, no humus in the soil, no virus or bacteria in the atmosphere
or ground—
a
dead world; but
a
world that had not yet lived and so contained a promise.

Colin
Ramsy walked into the laboratory. "All ready, Peter, when you are."
Ramsy was a changed man. He walked with
a
spring,
his face was ruddy with health, he glowed with the fulfilment of this second
chance in life. Truly, the plunder of
Poseidon
had
created life for Colin Ramsy.

"Thanks, Colin. What's
flying going to be like today?"

"Bad,
as usual; but not too bad. The decontam squad is cleaning the flier up now. I
shudder to think what the prof would say if we took just one little Earth virus
out there with us!"

Randolph
scowled ferociously at him. Td send you out to join it, Colin, my boy—without a
suit!"

They
were all here, here on
Pochalin Nine. All of them, except Terence Mallow, Bamy Cain, and Duffy Briggs,
and their friends. They had been paid off—Randolph had seen the wisdom of that.
Mallow had said what he'd had to say. "Can't understand what came over me,
uncle," and "frightfully sorry, uncle. You
do
forgive me?" and "of course I had nothing to do with the death
of Fingers Kirkup. He must have fallen foul of some of his shady friends."

It
sickened Howland but, rationally, he did nothing about it. The old professor
had been punished enough by merely having such
a
relative, the galaxy would not mourn the death of Kirkup—and any further
inquiries would lead men like-Warner straight to Pochalin Nine and the answer
to the riddle that had astonished everyone.

For
the rebels claimed not to have taken the cash. Their cutting equipment had not
bitten through the door to the strong-room before Larssen's warning had brought
the captain and the crew down to wrest back control of their ship. But the
money was gone. And—quite evidendy—the three men and a girl arrested by Warner
could have had nothing to do
with
its
disappearance.
That,
at least, the police could count on as solid
fact.

The tracks of heavily laden electric trolleys
had been found on the air lock floor. And the money had disappeared. But
how
it had vanished and
who
had
taken it remained a mystery.

Howland had disembarked with the rest of the
conspirators at Gagarin Three and had helped with the cover deception to
conceal the absence of Colin Ramsy from
Poseidon.
With
Stella's willing help that had not been difficult, and with Sammy Larssen doing
the doubling act at customs, they had brought it off nicely. Stella, too, had
changed. When they'd all re-united back on Earth and had begun the careful
ordering of equipment already designed and waiting at various
manufacturers—ordered by Randolph early on the strength of the Maxwell Fund—she
had greeted her husband unmistakably as a loving wife.

Having a scientific team bolstered by all
these ex-space Navy types made a wonderful difference; things got done. Howland
had privately wondered if any of them would object to living on a world like
Pochalin Nine; the opposite was true and pathetic. They'd all welcomed eagerly
the chance of doing an interesting job again—an honest job.

Colonel
Erwin Troisdorff was in his element as security chief, given the difficult task
of maintaining the planet completely free of life—any form of life—apart from
those carefully introduced cultures brewed by the scientists in their labs.

When
Charles Sergeivitch Kwang wasn't skippering the supply spaceship, he helped
Sammy Larssen with the myriad electronic devices that turned the
human-inhabited part of Pochalin Nine into a second Eden. All in all, the space
hijackers led a full and interesting life; and all felt themselves to be, at last,
doing a job worth doing.

Old
Gussman superintended the loading. Cheerful workmen slid the wide shallow
trays into the racks riveted to the cabin walls of the flier. Ramsy, zippering
up his flying suit, entered the hangar. Howland, despite his own calm
scientific manner and dislike of excess emotion on a job, zippered up feeling
tense and a little apprehensive. This batch was a good one. He felt that. Now
it was up to him to see that the artificially created living cells received a
flying start, grew and multiplied—even though, as they all knew, the cells
would—must—die in the end. But how long that end could be prolonged would add
another significant entry in Randolph's Life Chart.

"All loaded, Peter." Gussman smiled
his scare-crow smile. "Good luck."

"Thanks, Gus. Fit,
Colinr

Ramsy nodded. They entered the flier and the
hood clanged down. The decontam squad, masked and armed with the implements of
their cleansing profession, went over the flier again. This whole hangar area
was asceptic; but a man breathing out might start a train of life on this
world—it was a sobering and yet a vaulting thought.

Ramsy handled his controls with the delicacy
of perfect understanding. The flier rose, headed up and through the triple
airlocks, out and away.

"Overcast is down to three thousand,
Peter. But it's clear ahead. See the sun pouring through."

Howland
looked through the transparent hood. The scene was certainly impressive—wild
and inspiring and full of a savage beauty. Ahead the overcast tattered away
like smoke driven before a breeze and through the last coiling tendrils the sun
avalanched down, a golden floor spreading over the land.

Away
to port the horizon broke in jagged, blue-grey waves as the naked hills rose
into pinnacling mountains. Untouched by the breath of life, those mountain
ranges were new enough not to show appreciable signs of erosion. The wind
clawed at them and the rain lashed down on them; but still they stood, tall and
spiked, ridged and sharp edged, a primitive upheaval of a primitive world.

"There's the
sea."

Howland
followed Ramsy's pointing finger, saw the ashy waste, sullen and rolling,
flecked by white-caps, surging in tirelessly as Pochalin's single moon
directed, flowing to and fro over the tidal mud flats he had selected as his experimental
area.

Ill

"Looks mighty unpleasant, Colin. Better
call base and reassure 'em we're still airborne."

"Right." Ramsy called up the base,
talked to Larssen who usually stood communications duty when a big operation
started.

"No reply," Ramsy said. That's odd.
Hullo, Sammy. Can you hear me?"

No answer apart from static mush that
bedeveiled human communications the galaxy over.

"Come in Sammy. Sammy, can you hear
me?"

"I suppose the radio
checked out okay before we took off?"

Ramsy
nodded curtly. "Of course. Did it myself. Ah— here he is now. Sammy—you
being incontinent again?"

Larssen's
cheerful voice rode in. "Sony for the delay, Colin; but I had to talk to
Charley-"

"Charley! But he's not
due in with supplies for a week yet."

"So we believed. But he's up there in
orbit now, prelim-ming a landing pattern. And you know how tough the prof is on
anyone coming into Fochalin Nine."

"Yeah,"
Ramsy laughed. "Do I not. Charley's welcome to that chore."

To
Howland the thought that their supply ship was circling up there with Kwang
riding her into the landing pattern brought a comforting sense of union with
the galaxy, as though an umbilical cord had not yet been broken. He
concentrated again on the sea ahead, like a great grey carpSt spread out to the
horizon and felt the flier turn gendy onto a new course.

"We'll
just be back in time to greet Sammy," Ramsy said. Then they both put all
their rninds to making a perfect landing. A crackup would not be funny. When
the flier touched down on the black, greasy mud, and the engines stopped, both
men let out sighs of satisfaction.

Their
work went well. The trays were positioned in the airlock blower units, slid in
and the doors closed on them. The pumps were started and the plastic trays and
covers given a last sterilization. Then the outer valves opened, telescopic
arms raked out bearing the tray at their extremities, rather like those clever
semi-robot servers
in
classy restaurants. The tray was lowered onto the mud at the precise
point selected by Howland, the lid blown free and the cells deposited neatly in
their home.

The work was easy and could have been done
inside an hour; but Howland went methodically and precisely at it, so that
three hours elapsed before he packed up and turned to Ramsy.

"Right, Colin. She's all yours. Home,
James."

As the flier lifted, Howland looked back. On
that primeval mudflat microscopic cells lay, alive, but only just, waiting for
nutrient salts, for sunlight, for the alchemy of nature to take over the task
from mankind. The thought could never fail to thrill him.

Unexpectedly,
as the flier bore on for base, Ramsy said, "YTonow, Peter, I'm very
disappointed in you scientific blokes. I knew you wanted to create life. So I
expected a tank with pipes and controls and masses of impressive equipment and
then, out of it, for you to bring a—a—"

"A beautiful girl with long blonde hair,
a perfect figure and vacant eyes, with the brain of a new bom baby? Really,
Colin—this is a scientific venture!"

"I
know, old boy. And, I suppose in a queer way what you're doing is even more
impressive than your blonde. After all—she's there and the next step is
educating her. That's not a problem in creating life. But here—I know enough to
understand that you're the guiding hand that begins it all, and from now on
nature acts
in
her
own strange ways. More profound . . ."

"We're doing in a month or so what
nature took millions of years; but we're still doing it nature's way. This
blonde would be anti-natural, and science may go against nature at times for
the good of man's eternal soul; but basically we try to play along with the old
lady."

"Yup,"
said Ramsy. "And the base is coming up—and Charley is already down."

"I didn't hear him
land
..."

"Smart boy, our Charley Kwang. Oh, well,
there's the landing signal. I'm taking her in—nowl"

And the flier orbited once, dived, and came
to an impeccable landing in the hangar as the triple locks above slid shut.