Look Out For Space (Seven For Space) (11 page)

The grunting was intermittent; there would be silence for a moment or two, then it would start again. But at least it never got any louder. Then, abruptly, the grunting stopped altogether. To be replaced by a shuffling sound. Which was getting louder by the split second.

Something
was moving toward me.

Since I'm trained in seventeen forms of solar combat, I'm nobody's pushover, but I didn't know how to set my body for what was coming at me. After considering the situation, I opted for a low angle Hungo half-crouch, which meant that I would be able to utilize my upper deltoids for maximum strike power in case I was …

"Yikes!" I shouted. Something
clammy
had me by the shoulder.

"Easy, mate!
Easy
does it," a calming voice rasped next to my ear. "Cor blimey, yer about to jump plain outa yer scuppers, you are!"

"Did you say 'cor blimey'?"

"Sure did, mate."

"That means you are a British Earthling from the Greater Colonial United Kingdom —
or
it means you are a non-Earth creature who has learned to imitate, in word, tone, and inflection, the exact …"

"It's the first," he cut in. "Old New London's me 'ome, luv, an' that's a fact."

"When I heard you grunting in the darkness, I naturally assumed that you were some kind of wild animal."

"Me late wife, Lord bless 'er soul, told me I had a right terrible snore, an'
that's
the sound you heard, mate! I was dead asleep I was. Didn't even hear 'em bring you in."

"In?"

"In
here,
mate."

"And where's here?"

"Cor, you don't know where ya be?"

"You got it, fella. I'm in the dark,
literally
."

"Well, I be damned! Where was ya last — in your recollection?"

"On the Moon. Pendorf Wrenhurst, the worm slave trader, took an intense personal dislike to me. Said he'd put me out of circulation. I was clipped on the conk, and I woke up here."

"Ya mean ya weren't
officially
condemned?"

"I don't follow you, Mac."

"This be a Hundred Year Hellship, bound out for the Black Gulfs. All of us on 'er is stranglers an' ax men an' poisoners … or worse. I thought you was
one
of us!" His voice began to assume an unfriendly tone and I realized I had to maintain his confidence.

"Well, I've done my share of killings … nitro charge in the gut, that sort of thing."

Warmth returned to his voice.

"Fry me in oil, that's good to hear!" He slapped me on the back. "Welcome aboard the
Soul
."

"Odd name for a ship," I said.

"Her full name's
The Damned Soul,
an' it fits 'er well enough. Damned souls be we
all
on this ship, mate."

That didn't sound encouraging.

"Me name's Cutter," he chuckled. "That be 'cuz I'm quick with an ax. What's yours?"

"Just call me Sam," I told him.

Another hearty slap on the back. "Sam it is, then!"

My eyes had adjusted somewhat to the gloom and I was able to make out Cutter. He was a fright. Big, broken-nosed fellow with a jutting brow and a brutal squared jaw set with rotted tooth stumps. He was bare to the waist and matted with hair.

"Put 'er there, mate!" He grabbed my right hand and began exerting pressure.

I grunted in pain, then got sore. This hairy bozo was giving me the business, expecting me to crack.

I brought up my left elbow and drove it full into the round of his gut, then body-chopped his ribs. He howled like an Earthape, then got a chest hold on me. Both of his big muscle-knotted arms were locked around me, squeezing.

I groined him and he fell away, howling again, crashing back against the wall. He slid down, holding both hands over his crotch.

"You be …
hurtin
' a man!" he complained.

"I'm nobody's patsy," I told him. "You were into a fast shuffle so I dealt some aces."

The gloom was suddenly split by a thin bar of light from a doorway. Then loud, metallic banging.

"Grub," sighed Cutter, slowly pulling himself up. "That is, if you can call the swill they feed us anything at all."

I was starved and thirsty. "Food's food," I said. "I'm not particular."

Two heavy trays were shoved through the lighted slot under the door.

Cutter lurched for them. "Quick, mate! Before the rats beat us!"

I scooped up my tray. In the light from the doorslot I examined its contents: a cup of fetid water, a cracked bowl of vile-smelling mush, and a molded crust of stale bread.

"I didn't see any rats," I told Cutter.

"Yer right. They're leavin' it alone. Guess they gave up on this stuff. Made 'em right sick, it did. You could hear 'em groanin' all night."

"Groaning rats?"

"Right … an' I might say that it be a 'orrible sound."

I used the hard crust to scoop out some mush. Tasted it. Coughed and spat.

"Har, har!" laughed Cutter. "
Foul,
ain't it, mate?"

"The worst," I said.

"And there be no change. They feed us the same swill twice a day. Or what you may
call
a day 'ere in the Gulfs. There ain't no nights nor no days inside the
Soul.
"

"What's our destination?" I asked, forcing myself to swallow some of the bread and water.

"Hell is our destination! An' that be the truth of it. The Black Gulfs. Some lost an' gone planet that the Devil himself wouldn't claim. Every planet in the Gulfs is the same. And on every one of 'em, we do the same."

"And what's that?"

"You'll see soon enough. Each man has got 'is job. You'll work till you drop … an' then you'll get up again, 'cuz they'll lay a whip to your hide. You sweat salt, you do. And blood an' salt don't mix, mate. Pain's so bad, you want to rip yer guts out!"

"Sounds much worse than the involuntary job I got assigned to on Pluto," I told him. "They had me hunting Zubu eggs."

"You'll wish you were on Pluto 'afore yer done. You'll wish you was
anywhere
but where you'll find yerself."

And he finished the last of his food, rolled over, and was soon asleep. His awful grunting snores filled the cell.

But at least the rats weren't groaning.

The planet didn't have a name. And nobody cared enough to give it one.

It was a triple sun system. The planet's surface was semi-liquid, and it smoked and bubbled with noxious gases. Each worker was encased in an armored heatsuit which was supposed to resist the killing temperatures, but the suits were almost as hot as the planet. After a six-hour workday in one, you felt as if your skin had been boiled in oil. The oil was your own sweat.

Cutter had the right word for it: Hell.

My job, along with dozens of other convicts, was to scoop up the semi-liquid soil with an instrument that looked like a giant soupspoon. The gook was then deposited in a large bowl-like container. The containers were rolled into an ugly metalloid structure for processing. Workers refined the stuff and canned it. Periodically the cans were shipped out to Earth.

I was told that the stuff sold as fast as it could be delivered. The demand never slacked.

"What can anybody
do
with it?" I asked Cutter, who was toiling beside me in the furnace heat. "You can't
eat
it. Can't drink it. What good is it?"

"They use this stuff fer bod rubs in sexdens," Cutter told me. "Supposed to be bloody erotic, it is. Stimulates the bloody glands in the jennyteel area."

"All this so some fat bozo in New Oshkosh can get his pipes cleaned?"

"That's one way to put it, mate. They call it Erectile Miracle Heat. An' I hear tell the FSG boys make a tidy profit out of every shipment."

I was pissed. Shanghaied aboard a Hellship by a corrupt Moonking, then ripped off in the Black Gulfs by the Federated Space Government. No wonder the average solar citizen had lost faith in cosmic justice.

What good was one honest dick from Bubble City in the greater scheme of things … the universal warp and woof? I was an overage knight tilting at the windmills of galactic corruption. "But dammit, Space," I told myself,
"somebody's
got to play the game straight! Somebody's got to expose the sharks and the con men and the quick-buck boys who walk this mean universe." And I was elected. By a vote of one.
Me.

Sam Space, the last free lance for hire in a cosmic cesspool.

"Hop it, mate!" Cutter warned me. "Cuz 'ere comes trouble!"

I'd been standing idle while all these depressing thoughts were running through my brainpan and an overseer, electrowhip in hand, was zipping toward me in his hoverbug.

But how could you whip a man in an armored heatsuit?

I quickly found out. The whip was electrically charged to react against the metallic surface of the suit. A searing bolt of raw voltage stabbed into me with each blow.

I got ten lashes.

By the last of them, I was a mass of quivering nerves.

"Now, you lazy sod, maybe
that'll
teach you not to dream on the job. Move that juice!"

That's what they called this sex-muck. And that was my job.

I was a sex-juicer in Hell.

And if there's a worse job, I haven't heard of it.

Obviously, I had to escape.

* * *

"There's no escape," said Cutter, when we talked that night in our cell, which was located in one of the planet's hastily-constructed work-dens. "An' even if there
was,
where would ya escape
to
?"

"Out of here, first of all," I said. "Then, I'd …"

And I stopped. Cutter was right. Where would I go on a planet of liquid fire?

"When does the next Hellship arrive?" I asked.

"Don't matter," he said. "They come, drop off leeks like us, then go on, deeper into the Gulfs." He spat on the nearstone floor. "Hellship's no way out."

"Then what about the juice rockets — the ones they use to ship this muck back to Earth? I could stow away on one."

"It's been tried, mate, an' now they got scanners fer every inch a' the ships. A bloody Martian sandflea couldn't hide in one a' those tubs!" He nodded darkly. "I tell ya, mate, you'll never get off this planet. We'll die here, the both of us, scoopin' juice."

"I don't intend to do that," I said flatly.

Cutter gave me some "Har, hars!" — exposing his rotten stumps. "What you intend or
don't
intend ain't worth spit in a bucket! It's here ya sweat an' it's here ya rot. There be no two ways about it. Now, mate, I ask that you kindly shut yer gob an' let a man get his rest."

And he was soon snoring horribly.

I tried to sleep, but couldn't. Instead, I got up from my cot and prowled the narrow cell. Thinking … planning …

* * *

On the next work detail I told the shift guard I needed to see the psyc doctor.

"Why?" He glowered at me.

"I'm having awful dreams," I told the guard. "Seeing things in my cell."

"
What
things?"

"Singing lizardeggs. Dancing bats."

"Singles, or in couples?"

"Batcouples. Male and female. Dancing together all night."

"That's spooky, I'll grant."

"Can't sleep," I said. "If I can't sleep, I can't scoop. I have the
right
to request a session."

And I did. By government law, each prison planet had to provide a psyc doctor to maintain mental stability among the workers. And the law also specified that a worker was entitled to a psycvisit once each tenth sunperiod. Providing he was having severe mental problems.

"All right, then," said the guard. "On the shift break, I'll take you over to see the doc."

Which he did.

A prisoner was allowed to be alone in the room with the doctor. No guards to invade his mental privacy. But the office door was locked, and there were no windows or vents. Three walls were bare, painted a dull copper-orange.

The forth wall was the doctor.

A machine.

Floor-to-ceiling, filled with tiny blinking lights, spinning tapes, and relay-data switches.

"Please sit down, Mr. Space," said the walldoc. Its voice was pleasant, soothing. Deep masculine tone. Reassuring. Meant to convey wisdom.

I sat down in a small bodchair facing the wall.

"Now, what seems to trouble you?"

"I gave the guard a phony story to get in here to see you. All about singing eggs and dancing bats."

"Do you usually have problems with eggs and bats?"

"No. Like I said, it was a phony story. I just told the guard a lot of baloney."

"And why did you do that, Mr. Space?"

"Because I needed to talk to someone
rational
on this planet. And, the way I figure you're the only rational thing on it."

"I am not a
thing,
Mr. Space." The wall sounded a little miffed. "I am a psyc doctor, fully qualified and licensed for the Black Gulf area."

"Okay, fine. At least you're rational."

"Indeed I am."

"My situation isn't normal," I said. "I'm not your average ax murderer. I don't strangle kiddies. Or grind up old folks. Or rob nearbanks."

The wall chuckled. "You're telling me that you are innocent. They
all
say that. Every psychotic prisoner I talk to is innocent."

"I'm not psychotic, for starters," I said.

"Of
course
you're psychotic," the wall insisted. "If you were not, you would not be here facing me, telling me you are innocent."

The wall chuckled again. Which bugged me. But I tried to ignore it.

"Look, I'm a legit private investigator. I work on the
law's
side, not against it. I've committed no crimes."

"Then goodness gracious, why are you here?"

"I'm the victim of a corrupt Moonking named Pendorf Wrenhurst. I had criminal evidence against him. But he caught me. Said he'd put me out of circulation. And he did. He sent me here to the Gulfs. Now, if you'll just check my fax records you'll find that I …"