The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction MEGAPACK® (6 page)

“Be reasonable,” I said. “This Shaulan’s not dangerous. He just wanted to look around. Just curious.”

The wrench wiggled warningly. I wished I had a blaster with me, but I hadn’t thought of bringing a weapon. The alien faced Murchison quite complacently, as if confident the signalman would never strike anything so old and delicate.

“You’d better leave,” I said to the alien.

“No!” Murchison roared. He shoved me to one side and went after the Shaulan.

The alien stood there, waiting, as Murchison came on. I tried to drag the big man away, but there was no stopping him.

At least he didn’t use the wrench. He let the big crescent slip clangingly to the floor and slapped the alien open-handed across its face. The Shaulan backed up a few feet. A trickle of bluish fluid worked its way along its mouth. Murchison raised his hand again. “Damned snooper! I’ll teach you to poke in my cabin!” He hit the alien again.

This time the Shaulan folded up accordionwise and huddled on the floor. It focused those three deep solid-black eyes on Murchison reproachfully.

Murchison looked back. They stared at each other for a long, moment, until it seemed that their eyes were linked by an invisible cord. Then Murchison looked away.

“Get out of here,” he muttered to the alien, and the Shaulan rose and departed, limping a little but still intact. Those aliens were more solid than they seemed.

“I guess you’re going to put me in the brig,” Murchison said to me. “Okay. I’ll go quietly.”

* * * *

We didn’t brig him, because there was nothing to be gained by that. I had seen the explosion coming right from the start. When you drop a lighted match into a tub of hydrazine, you don’t punish the hydrazine for blowing up. And Murchison couldn’t be blamed for what he did, either.

He got the silent treatment instead. The men at the base would have nothing to do with him whatsoever, because in their year on Shaula they had developed a respect for the aliens not far from worship, and any man who would actually use physical violence—well, he just wasn’t worth wasting breath on.

The men of our crew gave him a wide berth too. He wandered among us, a tall, powerful figure with anger and loneliness stamped on his face, and he said nothing to any of us and no one said anything to him. Whenever he saw one of the aliens, he went far out of his way to avoid a meeting.

Murchison got another X on his psych report, and that second X meant he’d never be allowed to visit any world inhabited by intelligent life again. It was a BuSpace regulation, one of the many they have for the purpose of locking the barn door too late.

Three days went by this way on Shaula. On the fourth, we took aboard the twenty-eight departing men, said goodbye to Gloster and his staff and the twenty-eight we had ferried out to him, and—somewhat guiltily—goodbye to the Shaulans too.

The six of them showed up for our blastoff, including the somewhat battered one who had had the run-in with Murchison. They wished us well, gravely, without any sign of bitterness. For the hundredth time I was astonished by their patience, their wisdom, their understanding.

I held Azga’s rough hand in mine and said goodbye. I told him for the first time what I had been wanting to say since our first meeting, how much I hoped we’d eventually reach the mental equilibrium and inner calm of the Shaulans. He smiled warmly at me, and I said goodbye again and entered the ship.

We ran the usual pre-blast checkups, and got ready for departure. Everything was working well; Murchison had none of his usual grumbles and complaints, and we were off the ground in record time.

A couple of days of ion-drive, three weeks of warp, two more of ion-drive deceleration, and we would be back on Earth.

* * * *

The three weeks passed slowly, of course; when Earth lies ahead of you, time drags. But after the interminable greyness of warp came the sudden wrenching twist and the bright slippery
sliding
feeling as our Bohling generator threw us back into ordinary space.

I pushed down the communicator stud near my arm and heard the voice of Navigator Henrichs saying, “Murchison, give me the coordinates, will you?”

“Hold on,” came Murchison’s growl. “Patience, Sam. You’ll get your coordinates as soon as I got ’em.”

There was a pause; then Captain Knight said, “Murchison, what’s holding up those coordinates? Where are we, anyway? Turn on the visiplates?”

“
Please
, Captain.” Murchison’s heavy voice was surprisingly polite. Then he ruined it. “Please, be good enough to shut up and let a man think.”

“Murchison—” Knight sputtered, and stopped. We all knew one solid fact about our signalman: he did as he pleased. No one but no one coerced him into anything.

So we waited, spinning end-over-end somewhere in the vicinity of Earth, completely blind behind our wall of metal. Until Murchison chose to feed us some data, we had no way of bringing the ship down.

Three more minutes went by; then the private circuit Knight uses when he wants to talk to me alone lit up, and he said, “Loeb, go down to Communications and see what’s holding Murchison up. We can’t stay here forever.”

“Yessir.”

I pocketed a blaster—I hate making mistakes more than once—and left my cabin. I walked numbly to the companionway, turned to the left, hit the drophatch and found myself outside Murchison’s door.

I knocked.

“Get away from here, Loeb!” Murchison bellowed from within.

I had forgotten that he had rigged a one-way vision circuit outside his door. I said, “Let me in, Murchison. Let me in or I’ll come in blasting.”

I heard a heavy sigh. “Come on in, then.”

Nervously I pushed the door open and poked my head and the blaster snout in, half expecting Murchison to leap on me from above. But he was sitting at an equipment-jammed desk scribbling notes, which surprised me. I stood waiting for him to look up.

And finally he did. I gasped when I saw his face: drawn, harried, pale, tense. I had never seen an expression like that on Murchison’s face before.

“What’s going on?” I asked softly. “We’re all waiting to get moving, and—”

He turned to face me squarely. “You want to know what’s going on, Loeb? Well, listen: the ship’s blind. None of the equipment is reading anything. No telemeter pickup, no visual, no nothing.
You
scrape up some coordinates, if you can.”

We held a little meeting half an hour later, in the ship’s Common Room. Murchison was there, and Knight, and myself, and Navigator Henrichs, and three representatives of the cargo.

“How did this happen?” Knight demanded.

Murchison shrugged. “It happened while we were in warp. We passed through something—magnetic field, maybe—and bollixed every instrument we have.”

Knight glanced at Henrichs. “You ever hear of such a thing happening before?” He seemed to suspect Murchison of funny business.

But Henrichs shook his head. “No, Chief. And there’s a good reason why, too. If this happens to a ship, the ship doesn’t get back to tell about it.”

He was right. With no contact at all with the outside, no information on location or orbits, there was no way to land the ship. And the radio, of course, was dead too; we couldn’t even call for help.

Captain Knight looked grey-faced and very old. He asked worriedly, “What could have caused this thing?”

“No one knows what subspace conditions are like,” Henrichs said. “It may have been a fluke magnetic field, as Murchison suggests. Or anything at all—an alien entity that swallowed our antennae, for all we know. The question’s not what did it, Captain—it’s how do we get back.”

“Good point. Murchison, is there any chance you can repair the instruments?”

“No.”

“Just like that—flat
no?
Hell, man, we’ve seen you do wonders with instruments on the blink before.”

“No,”
Murchison repeated stolidly. “I tried. I can’t do a damned thing.”

“That means we’re finished, doesn’t it?” asked Ramirez, one of our returnees. His voice was a little wild. “We might just as well have stayed on Shaula! At least we’d still be alive!”

“It looks pretty lousy,” Henrichs admitted. The thin-faced navigator was frowning blackly. “We don’t dare try a blind landing. There’s nothing we can do. Nothing at all.”

“There’s
one
thing,” Murchison said.

All eyes turned to him. “What?” Knight asked.

“Put a man in a spacesuit and anchor him to the skin of the ship. Have him guide us in by verbal instructions. It’s a way, anyway.”

“Pretty farfetched,” Henrichs commented.

“Yes, dammit, but it’s our only hope!” Murchison snapped. “Stick a man up there and let him talk us in.”

“He’d incinerate once we hit Earth’s atmosphere,” I said. “We’d lose a man and still have to land blind.”

Murchison puckered his thick lower lip. “You’ll be able to judge the ship’s height by hull temperature once you’re that close. Besides, once the ship’s inside the ionosphere you can use ordinary radio for the rest of the way down. The trick is to get
that
far.”

“I think it’s worth a try,” Captain Knight said. “I guess we’ll have to draw lots. Loeb, get some straws from the galley.” His voice was grim.

“Never mind,” Murchison said.

“Huh?”

“I said, never mind. Skip it. Forget about drawing straws.
I’ll
go.”

“Murchison—”

“Skip it!”
he barked. “It’s a failure in my department, so I’m going to go out there. I volunteer, get it? If anyone else wants to volunteer, I’ll match him for it.” He looked around at us. No one moved. “I don’t hear any takers. I’ll assume the job’s mine.” Sweat streamed down his face.

There was a startled silence, broken when Ramirez made the lousiest remark I’ve ever heard mortal man utter. “You’re trying to make it up for hitting that defenseless Shaulan, eh, Murchison? Now you want to be a hero to even things up!”

If Murchison had killed him on the spot, I think we’d all have applauded. But the big man only turned to Ramirez and said quietly, “You’re just as blind as the others. You don’t know how rotten those defenseless Shaulans are, any of you. Or what they did to me.” He spat. “You all make me sick. I’m going out there.”

He turned and walked away…out, to get into his spacesuit and climb into the ship’s skin.

* * * *

Murchison’s explicit instructions, relayed from the outside of the ship, allowed Henrichs to bring us in. It was quite a feat of teamwork.

At 50,000 feet above Earth, Murchison’s voice suddenly cut out. We were able to pick up ground-to-ship radio by then and we taxied down. Later, they told us it seemed like a blazing candle was riding the ship’s back. A bright, clear flame flared for a moment as we cleaved the atmosphere.

And I remember the look on Murchison’s face as he left us to go out there. It was tense, bitter, strained—as if he were being
compelled
to go outside. As if he had no choice about volunteering for martyrdom.

I often wonder about that now. No one had ever made Murchison do anything he didn’t want to do—until then.

We think of the Shaulans as gentle, meek, defenseless. Murchison crossed one of them, and he died. Gentle, meek, yes—but defenseless? Murchison didn’t think so.

Maybe they whammied the ship and cursed Murchison with the urge to self-martyrdom, to punish him. Maybe. He never did trust them much.

It sort of tarnishes his glorious halo. But you know, sometimes I think Murchison was right about the Shaulans after all.

DELIVERY GUARANTEED

Originally published in
Science Fiction Stories
, February 1959, under the pseudonym “Calvin Knox.”

There aren’t many free-lance space-ferry operators who can claim that they carried a log cabin half way from Mars to Ganymede, and then had the log cabin carry them the rest of the way. I can, though you can bet your last tarnished megabuck that I didn’t do it willingly. It was quite a trip. I left Mars not only with a log cabin on board, but a genuine muzzle-loading antique cannon, a goodly supply of cannonballs therefrom, and various other miscellaneous antiques—as well as the Curator of Historical Collections from the Ganymede Museum. There was also a stowaway on board, much to his surprise and mine—he wasn’t listed in the cargo vouchers.

Let me make one thing clear: I wasn’t keen on carrying any such cargo. But my free-lance ferry operator’s charter is quite explicit that way, unfortunately. A ferry operator is required to hire his ship to any person of law-abiding character who will meet the (government-fixed) rates, and whose cargo to be transported neither exceeds the ship’s weight allowance nor is considered contraband by any System law.

In short, I’m available to just about all comers. By the terms of my charter I’ve been compelled to ferry five hundred marmosets to Pluto, forced to haul ten tons of Venusian guano to Callisto, constrained to deliver fifty crates of fertilized frogs’ eggs from Earth to a research station orbiting Neptune. In the latter case I made the trip twice for the same fee, thanks to the delivery guaranteed clause in the contract; the first time out my radiation shields slipped up for a few seconds, not causing me any particular genetic hardships but playing merry hell with those frog’s eggs. When a bunch of four-headed tadpoles began to hatch, they served notice on me that they were not accepting delivery and would pay no fee—and, what’s more, would sue if I didn’t bring another load of potential frogs up from Earth, and be damned well careful about the shielding this time.

So I hauled another fifty crates of frogs’ eggs, this time without mishap, and collected my fee. But I’ve never been happy about carrying livestock again.

This new offer wasn’t livestock. I got the call while I was laying over on Mars after a trip up from Luna with a few colonists and their gear. I had submitted my name to the Transport Registry, informing them that I was on call and waiting for employment—but I was in no hurry. I still had a couple of hundred megabucks left from the last job, and I didn’t mind a vacation.

The call came on the third day of my Martian layover. “Collect call for Mr. Sam Diamond, from the Transport Registry. Do you accept?”

“Yes,” I muttered, and $30,000 more was chalked to my phone bill. A dollar doesn’t last hardly any time at all in these days of system-wide hyperinflation.

“Sam?” a deep voice said. It was Mike Cooper of the Transport people.

“Who else would it be at this end of your collect call?” I growled. “And why can’t you people pay for a phone call once in a while?”

“You know the law, Sam,” Cooper said cheerfully. “I’ve got a job for you.”

“That’s nice. Another load of marmosets?”

“Nothing live this time, Sam, except your passenger. She’s Miss Vanderweghe of the Ganymede Museum. Curator of Historical Collections. She wants someone to ferry her back to Ganymede with some historical relics she’s picked up along the way.”

“The Washington Monument?” I asked. “The Great Pyramid of Khufu? We could tow it alongside the ship, lashed down with twine—”

“Knock it off,” Cooper said, unamused. “What she’s got are souvenirs of the Venusian Insurrection. The log cabin that served as Macintyre’s headquarters, the cannon used to drive back the Bluecoats, and a few smaller knickknacks along those lines.”

“Hold it,” I said. “You can’t fit a log cabin into my ship. And if it’s going to be a tow job, I want the Delivery Guaranteed clause stricken out of the contract. And how much does the damn cannon weigh? I’ve got a weight ceiling, you know.”

“I know. Her entire cargo is less than eight tons, cannon and all. It’s well within your tonnage restrictions. And as for the log cabin, it doesn’t need to be towed. She’s agreed to take it apart for shipping, and reassemble it when it gets to Ganymede.”

The layover had been nice while it lasted. I said, “I was looking for some rest, Mike. Isn’t there some angle I can use to wiggle out of this cargo?”

“None.”

“But—”

“There isn’t another free ferry in town tonight. She wants to leave tonight. So you’re the boy, Sam. The job is yours.”

I opened my mouth. I closed it again. Ferries are considered public services, under the law. The only way I could get a vacation that was sure to last was to apply for one in advance, and I hadn’t done that.

“Okay,” I said wearily. “When do I sign the contract?”

“Miss Vanderweghe is at my office now,” Cooper said. “How soon can you get here?”

* * * *

I was in a surly mood as I rode downtown to Cooper’s place. For the thousandth time I resented the casual way he could pluck me out of some relaxation and make me take a job. I wasn’t looking forward to catering to the whims of some dried-up old museum curator all the way out to Ganymede. And I wasn’t too pleased with the notion of carrying relics of the Venusian Insurrection.

The Insurrection had caused quite a fuss, a hundred years back. Bunch of Venusian colonists decided they didn’t like Earth’s rule—the taxation-without-representation bit, though their squawk was unjustified—and set up a wildcat independent government, improvising their equipment out of whatever they could grab. A chap name of Macintyre was in charge; the insurrectionists holed up in the jungle and held off the attacking loyalists for a couple of weeks. Then the Venusian local government appealed to Earth, a regiment of Bluecoats was shipped to Venus, and inside of a week Macintyre was a prisoner and the Insurrection ended. But some diehard Venusians still venerated the insurrectionists, and there had been a few murders and ambushes every year since the overthrow of Macintyre. I could have done without carrying Venusian cargo.

I was going to say as much to Cooper, too, in hopes that some clause of my charter would get me out of the assignment and back on vacation. But I didn’t get a chance. I went storming into Cooper’s office.

There was a girl sitting in the chair to the left of his desk. She was about twenty-five, well built in most every way possible, with glossy, short-cropped hair and an attractive face.

Cooper stood up and said, “Sam, I’d like you to meet Miss Erna Vanderweghe of Ganymede. Miss Vanderweghe, this is Sam Diamond, one of the best ferry men there is. He’ll get you to Ganymede in style.”

“I’m sure of that,” she said, smiling.

“Hello,” I said, gulping.

I didn’t bother raising a fuss about the political implications of my cargo. I didn’t grouse about weight limits, space problems aboard ship, accommodation difficulties, or anything else. I reached for the contract—it was the standard printed form, with the variables typed in by Cooper—and signed it.

“I’d like to leave tonight,” she said.

“Sure. My ship’s at the spaceport. Can you have your cargo delivered there by—oh, say, 1700 hours? That way we can blast off by 2100.”

“I’ll try. Will you be able to help me get my goods out of storage and down to the spaceport?”

I started to say that I’d be delighted to, but Cooper cut in sharply, as I knew he would. “I’m sorry, Miss Vanderweghe, but Sam’s contract and charter prohibit him from any landside cargo-handling except within the actual bounds of the spaceport. You’ll have to use a local carrier for getting your stuff to the ship, I’m afraid. If you want me to, I’ll arrange for transportation—”

My mood was considerably different as I returned to the Deimos to check out. My tub would need five days for the journey between Mars and Ganymede. Now, conditions aboard my ship allow for a certain amount of passenger privacy, but not a devil of a lot. Log cabin or no log cabin, I was going to enjoy the proximity of Miss Erna Vanderweghe. I could think of worse troubles than having to spend five days in the same small ferry with her, and only a log cabin and a cannon for chaperones.

I was grinning as I walked over to the desk to let them know I was pulling out. Nat, the desk clerk, interpreted the grin logically enough, but wrongly.

“You talked them out of giving you the job, eh, Sam? How’d you work it?”

“Huh? Oh—no, I took the job. I’m checking out of here at 1800 hours.”

“You
took
it? But you look
happy
!”

“I am,” I said with a mysterious expression. I started to saunter away, but Nat called me back.

“You had a visitor a little while ago, Mr. Cooper. He wanted me to let him into your room to wait for you, but naturally I wouldn’t do it.”

“Visitor? Did he leave his name?”

“He’s still here. Sitting right over there, next to the potted palm tree.”

Frowning, I walked toward him. He was a thin, hunched-up little man with the sallow look of a Venusian colonist. He was busily reading some cheap dime-novel sort of magazine as I approached.

“Hello,” I said affably. “I’m Sam Diamond. You wanted to see me?”

“You’re ferrying Erna Vanderweghe to Ganymede tonight, aren’t you?” His voice was thinly whining, nasty sounding, mean.

“I make a practice of keeping my business to myself,” I told him. “If you’re interested in hiring a ferry, you’d better go to the Transport Registry. I’m booked.”

“I know you are. And I know who you’re carrying. And I know
what
you’re carrying.”

“Look here, friend, I—”

“You’re carrying General Macintyre’s cabin, and other priceless relics of the Venusian Republic—and all stolen goods!” His eyes had a fanatic gleam about them. I realized who he was as soon as he used the expression “Venusian Republic.” Only an insurrectionist-sympathizer would refer to the rebel group that way.

“I’m not going to discuss business affairs with you,” I said. “My cargo has been officially cleared.”

“It was stolen by that woman! Purchased with filthy dollars and taken from Venus by stealth!”

I started to walk away. I hate having some loudmouthed fanatic rant at me. But he followed, clutching at my elbows, and said in his best conspiratorial tone, “I warn you, Diamond—cancel that contract or you’ll suffer! Those relics must return to Venus!”

Whirling around, I disengaged his hands from my arm and snapped, “I couldn’t cancel a contract if I wanted to—and I don’t want to. Get out of here or I’ll have you jugged, whoever you are.”

“Remember the warning—”

“Go on! Shoo! Scat!”

He slinked out of the lobby. Shaking my head, I went upstairs to pack. Damned idiotic cloak-and-dagger morons, I thought. Creeping around hissing warnings and leaving threatening notes, and in general trying to keep alive an underground movement that never had any real reason for existing from the start. It wasn’t as if Earth had oppressed the Venusian colonists. The benefits flowed all in one direction, from Earth to Venus, and everyone on Venus knew it except for Macintyre’s little bunch of ultranationalistic glory-hounds. Nobody on Venus wanted independence less than the colonists themselves, who had dandy tax exemptions and benefits from the mother world.

I forgot all about the threats by the time I was through packing my meager belongings and had grabbed a meal at the hotel restaurant. Around 1800 hours I went down to the spaceport to see what was happening there. The mechanics had already wheeled my ferry out of the storage hangars; she was out on the field getting checked over for blastoff. Erna Vanderweghe and her cargo had arrived, too. She was standing at the edge of the field, supervising the unloading of her stuff from the van of a local carrier.

The log cabin had been taken apart. It consisted of a stack of stout logs, the longest of them some sixteen feet long and the rest tapering down.

“You think you’re going to be able to put that cabin back the way it was?” I asked.

“Oh, certainly. I’ve got each log numbered to correspond with a diagram I’ve made. The reassembling shouldn’t be any trouble at all,” she said, smiling sweetly.

I eyed the other stuff—several crates, a few smaller packages, and a cannon, not very big. “Where’d you get all these things?” I asked.

She shrugged prettily. “I bought them on Venus. Most of them were the property of descendants of the insurrectionists; they were quite happy to sell. There weren’t any ferries available on Venus, so I took a commercial liner on the shuttle from Venus to Mars. They said I’d be able to get a ferry here.”

“And you did,” I said. “In five days we’ll be landing on Ganymede.”

“I can’t wait to get there—to set up my exhibit!”

I frowned. “Tell me something, Miss Vanderweghe. Just how did you manage to—ah—make such an early start in the museum business?”

She grinned. “My father and grandfather were museum curators. I just come by it naturally, I suppose. And I was just about the only colonist on Ganymede who was halfway interested in having the job!”

I chuckled softly and said, “When Cooper told me I was ferrying a museum curator, I pictured a dried-up old spinster who’d nag me all the way to Ganymede. I couldn’t have been wronger.”

“Disappointed?”

“Not very much,” I said.

* * * *

We had the ship loaded inside of an hour, everything stowed neatly away in the hold and Miss Vanderweghe’s personal luggage strapped down in the passenger compartment. Since there wasn’t any reason for hanging around longer, I recomputed my takeoff orbit and called the control center for authorization to blast off at 2000 hours, an hour ahead of schedule.

They were agreeable, and at 1955 hours the field sirens started to scream, warning people of an impending blast. Miss Vanderweghe—Erna—was aft, in her acceleration cradle, as I jabbed the keys that would activate the autopilot and take us up.

I started to punch the keys. The computer board started to click. There was nothing left for me to do but strap myself in and wait for brennschluss. A blastoff from Mars is no great problem in astronautics.

As the automatic took over, I flipped my seat back, converting it into an acceleration cradle, and relaxed. It seemed to me that the takeoff was a little on the bumpy side, as if I’d figured the ship’s mass wrong by one or two hundred pounds. But I didn’t worry about the discrepancy. I just shut my eyes and waited while the extra gees bore down on me. The sanest thing for a man to do during blastoff is to go to sleep, and that’s what I did.

I woke up half an hour or so later to discover that the engines had cut out, the ship was safely in flight, and that a bloody and battered figure was bent over my controls, energetically ruining them with crowbar and shears.

I blinked. Then the fog in my head cleared and I got out of my cradle. The stowaway turned around. He was quite a mess. The capillaries of his face had popped during the brief moments of top acceleration, and fine purplish lines now wriggled over his cheeks and nose, giving him a grade-A rum blossom, and bloodshot eyes to go with it. He had some choice bruises that he must have acquired while rattling around during blastoff, and his nose had been bleeding all over his shirt. It was the little Venusian fanatic who had threatened me at the hotel.