Tales of the Flying Mountains (19 page)

Pearson's ruined features twisted into a grimace. “I do,” he snapped. “Want to resign?” He was small and hunched, five years younger than the captain, but looked ten years older—not entirely because a goodly fraction of him was prosthetic.

“Certainly not.” R X Q.

“I expected that, you know,” said Pearson. His bishop scuttled across the board and captured the black queen. “Check … and mate.”

Ben Judah studied the board for a moment before he sighed. “Right. Good game.”

“You could have had me a while back,” Pearson said, “when——”

“Never mind.” Ben Judah got up and moved across the deck, heavily under the ship's internal gyrogravitic field, to his dresser. He began to load an old pipe. “I'm afraid I can't concentrate on chess. I keep thinking about the pilots.”

Pearson observed him narrowly. “Don't,” he said.

“I must. I'm the captain.”

“Not in their case. I am.”

“
Nu?
” Ben Judah swung about, indignant. This was his first Jupiter-diving cruise, and he admitted there was much he didn't yet know. But—

“You are the captain of the mother ship,” Pearson said. “However, we're in orbit now. Only the scoopships are under weigh. And I direct their operations. Under the laws of the Republic, they're my responsibility. You'll find working for the Jupiter Company is a lot different from an inner-planet merchant run.”

Ben Judah relaxed. “You needn't tell me,” he said with a rather wan laugh. “Everything in the Belt is different. I don't envy you, trying to keep those wildcats of yours under control.” He sobered. “But what disturbs me—now that I'm here with the actuality, not a textbook abstraction; now that I
feel
what is involved—what makes me wonder if I should have come at all, is the business of sending men out time after time, ordering them to possible death, while we sit safely here.”

“They aren't ordered,” Pearson reminded him. “Any pilot may refuse any flit. Of course, if he does it repeatedly, he'll be fired. We can't afford to ship deadheads.”

“I know, I know. And yet, well, you asterites are obsessed with economics.” The captain lifted a hand to forestall the manager's retort. “I am quite aware of how closely you must figure costs. But there's a … a callousness in your attitude. You often seem to think a machine is worth more than a human life.”

“It is, if several other human lives depend on it.” Pearson gave him a quizzical look. Himself an introvert, he had not yet gotten to know the new skipper very well. “Why did you come to the Belt, anyhow?”

Ben Judah shrugged. “I was approaching compulsory retirement age. Earth's too crowded for my liking. Beside, spacing is my trade, the thing I want most to do. JupeCo offered me good pay for as long as I'm able to stay in harness. Also a downright luxurious homeship for my family. I've no personal complaints. But sometimes I can't help wondering, meaning no offense, if I want my children to grow up as asterites.”

He flipped a switch on his viewscreen. The panel darkened into a simulacrum of the outside, uncountably many frost-cold stars, the curdled ice of the galaxy, and Jupiter. The planet hung monstrous in its nearness, amber with multitudinous colored bands, blotted by storms that could have gulped all Earth, the Red Spot a glowing ember. One moon was coming into sight around that terrible horizon. Its face was tinted saffron by reflection.

“Live men, diving into yonder kettle of hell,” ben Judah said low. The susurrus of the ventilators made an undercurrent to his words, as if the ship tried to tell him something. “And it isn't necessary. You could automate the operation.”

“Doubling the capital investment in every scoopship,” Pearson said. “Also increasing the rate of loss by an estimated twenty-five percent. Too many unforeseeable things can go wrong down there. An autopilot can act only within the limits of its programming. A man can do more. Sometimes, when he runs into trouble, he can bring his ship back.”

“Sometimes.” Ben Judah's hands returned blindly to his pipe. He finished stuffing it, touched an igniter to the tobacco, and blew nervous puffs.

“We get more applications than we can find qualified men to accept,” Pearson said. “Pay, prestige. And most of the boys actually enjoy the work.”

“Maybe that's why I'm scared,” ben Judah said. A corner of his mind observed that his English, hitherto Oxford with an Israeli accent, was slipping into the Belt dialect. The citizens of the young Asteroid Republic had every national origin, but North Americans predominated and put their stamp on language and folkways. “When my sons are grown, they might put in for those berths … and get them.”

Master Pilot Thomas Hashimoto eased his craft away from the mother ship with a deftness born less of experience in this job—though he had plenty—than of several years of Earthside test piloting. His motions at the control board were nearly unconscious. Most of his attention was on the view before him.

His heart knocked.
I'm not afraid
, he assured himself.
I can't be. At least I'd better not be. This isn't any more dangerous than what I did back home
.

The thing is, though, I was doing those things
there.

“Clear track,” said the dispatcher's radio voice. Static buzzed around the words. No tricks of modulation could entirely screen out the interference of Jovian electrical storms. “Good gathering, Tom.”

“Roger,” said Hashimoto, mechanical response to a ritual farewell, “thanks, and out.” His eyes focused on instrument needles, his fingers jumped over switches. The computer clicked and muttered. Otherwise the cockpit was silent, making the beat of blood loud in his ears. He grew conscious of the spacesuit enclosing him, a thick rubbery grip. Its helmet was left off, like its gloves, until such time as an emergency arose. So his nostrils drank smells of machine oil and the ozone tinge that recycled air always has in close quarters. For the minute or two that he traveled in free fall he felt weightlessness: scoopships didn't waste mass on internal field generators. But there was no dreamlike ease to the sensation, such as he had known in other days. The seat harness held him too tightly.

The computer gave him his vectors and he applied power. The nuclear reactor aft was noiseless, but the Emetts of the gyrogravitic generators whirred loudly enough to be heard through the radiation bulkhead which sealed off the engine compartment. Field drive clutched at that fabric of relationships that men call space. Acceleration shoved Hashimoto back into his seat.
Mary Girl
leaped Jupiterward.

He had a while, then, to sit and think. This interval of approach under autopilot was the worst time. Later the battle with the atmosphere would occupy all of him, and still later there would be the camaraderie of shipboard. But now he could only watch Jupiter grow until it filled the sky. Until it became the sky.

The trouble is
, he realized,
I'm so near the end of my hitch. I didn't count the days and the separate missions at first, when I began this job. But now that there's only a few more months to go.…

Three years!

He hadn't needed to stay in the Belt that long, as far as his wife was concerned. She wanted desperately to have children, yes, and her frail body would miscarry again and again unless she spent each pregnancy under next-to-zero weight, and obstetrical facilities for that kind of condition existed nowhere but in the Asteroid Republic. (No country on Earth would spend money to establish a geegeeequipped maternity hospital, or an orbital one; anything that increased population, however minutely, was too unpopular these days.) Hashimoto had been more than glad to land a contract with JupeCo that enabled them to move out here. But two healthy children were plenty. Now they wanted to return home.

However, JupeCo insisted on a minimum of three years' service, and the bonus he would lose by quitting before the term was over amounted to half his total pay. He couldn't afford it. No contract that harsh would have been allowable in North America. But once they concluded their war of independence, the asterites had gone their own way.

It was not Hashimoto's. He remembered too well how sunset touched the mists of San Francisco Bay and made it a bowl of gold, how gardens lay vivid and trees stood rustling about his house in the Marin County hills, how men moved and spoke and exchanged friendship according to rules worn gentle with long usage. The asterites were as raw and stark as their own flying mountains.

He did not fear Jupiter because it could kill him. Any untried spaceflitter might do that at home. But it would be horrible to die without having slept once more in the house that had been his grandfather's, without having walked Earth's living soil and felt Earth's wind on his face again.

Or without seeing his and Mary's children grow into the heritage that was theirs.

Throttle down
, Hashimoto told his mind.
You've got work to do
.

The scoopship thrummed around him. Through the low, thick inertrans canopy he looked forward along the flaring nose. By twisting his neck he could have looked aft to the tapered stern. The metal shimmered blue in the light that poured from Jupiter. He could not see that open mouth which was the bow, gaping upon emptiness, but he could well visualize it. He had watched the service crew often enough, to make sure that their periodic inspections of every accessible part were thorough.
Mary Girl
was getting along in years, as divers went—which wasn't very far. (She had been
Star Pup
when passed on to him, but every pilot had the right to name his own craft.) Hashimoto didn't trust his life to someone else's estimate of her soundness. Most of his fellows did; but then, most scoopship pilots played a hell-for-leather role that he secretly considered rather childish.

They were good joes, though, he thought. He must admit he would miss that gang. Often on Earth he would remember escapades and shared laughter.

And by the Lord Harry, it was something to steal from Jupiter himself and come back to brag about it!

The ship drove onward.

Eventually the planet filled his entire vision. But then it was no more a planet, hanging in heaven; it had become the world. It was not ahead but below. Cloudfields stretched limitless underneath him, layered, seething, golden-hued but streaked with the reds and browns, greens and blues of free radicals. To port he saw a continent-sized blot of darkness that was a storm, and shifted course. Deceleration tugged angrily at him, and the planet's own pull, nearly three times Earth's. His muscles fought back. The first thin keening of cloven air penetrated to him. The ship quivered.

He switched off the autopilot and plunged downward on manual. The noise grew until it was thunder, booming and banging, rattling his teeth in the jaws and his brain in the skull. Winds did not buffet this craft traveling at many times supersonic speed, but gigantic air pockets did, back and forth, up and down, till metal groaned. Darkness overwhelmed him as he passed through a cloud bank. He emerged below it, looked up and saw the masses towering kilometer upon kilometer overhead, mountainous, lightning leaping across blue-black cavern mouths and down the faces of roiling slaty cliffs, against a distant sky that was hell-red. Briefly an ammonia storm pelted him, the hull drummed with the blows of gigantic poisonous hailstones. Then he was past, still screaming downward.

Presently he was too deep for sunlight to touch his eyes. He flew through a darkness that howled. He ceased to be Tom Hashimoto, husband, father, North American citizen, registered Conservative, tennis player, beer drinker, cigarette smoker, detective-story fan, any human identity. He and the ship were one, robbing a world that hit back.

The instruments, lanterns in utter murk, told him he was at sufficient depth. He leveled off and snapped the intake gate switch. The atmosphere ceased to whistle through the open tube of the hull—for now the tube was closed at the rear. A shock of impact strained him against his harness. The ship bucked and snarled. He reduced the drive to let the atmosphere brake him.

That air was mostly hydrogen and helium, but rich in methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, water vapor; less full of ethylene, benzene, formaldehyde, and a dozen other organics, but nonetheless offering them in abundance. This far down, none of them were frozen out. The greenhouse effect operated. Jupiter's surface was warm enough to have oceans like Earth's. No man had seen them. The weight of atmosphere would have crumpled any hull like tinfoil. Even at this altitude,
Mary Girl
sped through an air pressure several times that of sea-level Earth.

Rammed into her open bow by sheer speed, the gases poured through a narrower throat. The wind of their passage operated an ionizer and a magnetic separator. Most of the hydrogen and helium were channeled off into a release duct and thrown away aft. Some of the other gases were too, of course, but there was more where they came from. An enriched mixture flowed—hurtled—through rugged check valves into the after tanks.

The process did not take long. This was actually not the time of maximum hazard—though ships had been known to break up when the stress proved too much for some flaw in their metal. The dive downward from orbit had killed most of those who had perished, and the climb back was not always completed. Gales, lightning, hailstorms, supersonics, chemical corrosives, and less well understood traps could be sprung. If the pilot was simply knocked unconscious, or lost control for a couple of minutes, Jupiter ate him.

A needle crossed the Full mark. The intake gate opened again and the tank valves shut. Hashimoto swung the ship's nose toward the hidden sky and poured power into the field drive.

He was once more out in sunlight, a storm-yellow dusk that showed him nothing but a cloud wrack tattered by wind, when his engine began to fail.

Master Pilot Charles de Gaulle d'Andilly approached the mother ship with a song. What a dive that last one had been! He was still ashiver from it, tumbling end over end in a doomsday blackness until he found an updraft that he rode toward safety. Within the spacesuit, his zipskin sopped sweat. He wanted a drink in the worst way. There were only two kinds of occasion when every cell of a man's body was absolutely alive, and Jupiter expeditions didn't take women along.