The Rolling Stones (12 page)

Their father shrugged. “Thirty hours a week—any reasonable variations in the routine will be okay, provided you enter in the log the exact times.”

“Now that that’s settled,” Hazel commenced, “I regret to inform you, Captain, that there is one other little item on that Procrustean program that will have to be canceled, for the time being at least. Much as I would enjoy inducting our little blossom into the mysteries of astrogation I don’t have the time right now. You’ll have to teach her yourself.”

“Why?”

“‘Why’ the man asks? You should know better than anyone.
The Scourge of the Spaceways,
that’s why. I’ve got to hole up and write like mad for the next three or four weeks; I’ve got to get several months of episodes ahead before we get out of radio range.”

Roger Stone looked at his mother sadly. “I knew it was bound to come, Hazel, but I didn’t expect it to hit you so young. The mental processes dull, the mind tends to wander, the—”

“Whose mind does what? Why you young—”

“Take it easy. If you’ll look over your left shoulder out the starboard port and squint your eyes, you might imagine that you see a glint on the
War God.
It can’t be much over ten thousand miles away.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” she demanded suspiciously.

“Poor Hazel! We’ll take good care of you. Mother, we’re riding in orbit with several large commercial vessels; every one of them has burners powerful enough to punch through to Earth. We won’t
ever
be out of radio contact with Earth.”

Hazel stared out the port as if she could actually spot the
War God.
“Well, I’ll be dogged,” she breathed. “Roger, lead me to my room—that’s a good boy. It’s senile decay, all right. You’d better take back your show; I doubt if I can write it.”

“Huh uh! You let them pick up that option; you’ve
got
to write it. Speaking of
The Scum of the Waste Spaces,
I’ve been meaning to ask you a couple of questions about it and this is the first spare moment we’ve had. In the first place, why did you let them sign us up again?”

“Because they waved too much money under my nose, as you know full well. It’s an aroma we Stones have hardly ever been able to resist.”

“I just wanted to make you admit it. You were going to get me off the hook—remember? So you swallowed it yourself.”

“More bait.”

“Surely. Now the other point: I don’t see how you dared to go ahead with it, no matter how much money they offered. The last episode you showed me, while you had killed off the Galactic Overlord you had also left Our Hero in a decidedly untenable position. Sealed in a radioactive sphere, if I remember correctly, at the bottom of an ammonia ocean on Jupiter. The ocean was swarming with methane monsters, whatever they are, each hypnotized by the Overlord’s mind ray to go after John Sterling at the first whiff—and him armed only with his Scout knife. How did you get him out of it?”

“We found a way,” put in Pol. “If you assume—”

“Quiet, infants. Nothing to it, Roger. By dint of superhuman effort Our Hero extricated himself from his predicament and—”

“That’s no answer.”

“You don’t understand. I open the next episode on Ganymede. John Sterling is telling Special Agent Dolores O’Shanahan about his adventure. He’s making light of it, see? He’s noble so he really wouldn’t want to boast to a girl. Just as he is jokingly disparaging his masterly escape the next action starts and it’s so fast and so violent and so bloody that our unseen audience doesn’t have time to think about it until the commercial. And by then they’ve got too much else to think about.”

Roger shook his head. “That’s literary cheating.”

“Who said this was literature? It’s a way to help corporations take tax deductions. I’ve got three new sponsors.”

“Hazel,” asked Pollux, “where have you got them now? What’s the situation?”

Hazel glanced at the chronometer. “Roger, does that schedule take effect today? Or can we start fresh tomorrow?”

He smiled feebly. “Tomorrow, I guess.”

“If this is going to degenerate into a story conference, I’d better get Lowell. I get my best ideas from Lowell; he’s just the mental age of my average audience.”

“If I were Buster, I would resent that.”

“Quiet!” She slithered to the hatch and called out, “Edith! May I borrow your wild animal for a while?”

Meade said, “I’ll get him, Grandmother. But wait for me.”

She returned quickly with the child. Lowell said, “What do you want, Grandma Hazel? Bounce tag?”

She gathered him in an arm. “No, son—blood. Blood and gore. We’re going to kill off some villains.”

“Swell!”

“Now as I recall it—and mind you, I was only there once—I left them lost in the Dark Nebula. Their food is gone and so is the Q-fuel. They’ve made a temporary truce with their Arcturian prisoners and set them free to help—which is safe enough because they are silicon-chemistry people and can’t eat humans. Which is about what they are down to; the real question is—who gets barbecued for lunch? They need the help of the Arcturian prisoners because the Space Entity they captured in the last episode and imprisoned in an empty fuel tank has eaten its way through all but the last bulkhead and
it
doesn’t have any silly prejudices about body chemistry. Carbon or silicon; it’s all one to it.”

“I don’t believe that’s logical,” commented Roger Stone. “If its own chemistry was based—”

“Out of order,” ruled Hazel. “Helpful suggestions only, please. Pol? You seem to have a gleam in your eye.”

“This Space Entity jigger—can he stand up against radar wave lengths?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. But we’ve got to complicate it a bit. Well, Meade?”

The twins started moving their bicycles outside the following day. The suits they wore were the same ones they had worn outdoors on the Moon, with the addition of magnetic boots and small rocket motors. These latter were strapped to their backs with the nozzles sticking straight out from their waists. An added pressure bottle to supply the personal rocket motor was mounted on the shoulders of each boy but, being weightless, the additional mass was little handicap.

“Now remember,” their father warned them, “those boost units are strictly for dire emergency. Lifelines at all times. And don’t depend on your boots when you shift lines, snap on the second line before you loose the first.”

“Shucks, Dad, we’ll be careful.”

“No doubt. But you can expect me to make a surprise inspection at any time. One slip on a safety precaution and it’s the rack and thumb screws, plus fifty strokes of bastinado.”

“No boiling oil?”

“Can’t afford it. See here, you think I’m joking. If one of you should happen to get loose and drift away from the ship, don’t expect me to come after you. One of you is a spare anyway.”

“Which one?” asked Pollux. “Cas, maybe?”

“Sometimes I think it’s one, sometimes the other. Strict compliance with ship’s orders will keep me from having to decide at this time.”

The cargo hatch had no air lock; the twins decompressed the entire hold, then opened the door, remembering just in time to snap on their lines as the door opened. They looked out and both hesitated. Despite their lifelong experience with vacuum suits on the face of the Moon this was the first time either one had ever been outside a ship in orbit.

The hatch framed endless cosmic night, blackness made colder and darker by the unwinking diamond stars many light-years away. They were on the night side of the
Stone;
there was nothing but stars and the swallowing depths. It was one thing to see it from the safety of Luna or through the strong quartz of a port; it was quite another to see it with nothing at all between one’s frail body and the giddy, cold depths of eternity.

Pollux said, “Cas, I don’t like this.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Then why are my teeth chattering?”

“Go ahead; I’ll keep a tension on your line.”

“You are too good to me, dear brother—a darn sight too good!
You
go and I’ll keep a tension on
your
line.”

“Don’t be silly! Get on out there.”

“After you, Grandpa.”

“Oh, well!” Castor grasped the frame of the hatch and swung himself out. He scrambled to click his magnetic boots to the side of the ship but the position was most awkward, the suit was cumbersome, and he had no gravity to help him. Instead, he swung around and his momentum pulled his fingers loose from the smooth frame. His floundering motions bumped the side of the ship and pushed him gently away. He floated out, still floundering, until his line checked him three or four feet from the side. “Pull me in!”

“Put your feet down, clumsy!”

“I can’t. Pull me in, you red-headed moron!”

“Don’t call me ‘red-headed’.” Pollux let out a couple of feet more line.

“Pol, quit fooling. I don’t like this.”

“I thought you were brave, Grandpa?”

Castor’s reply was incoherent. Pollux decided that it had gone far enough; he pulled Castor in and, while holding firmly to a hatch dog himself, he grabbed one of Castor’s boots and set it firmly against the side; it clicked into place. “Snap on your other line,” he ordered.

Castor, still breathing heavily, looked for a padeye in the side of the ship. He found one nearby and walked over to it, picking up his feet as if he walked in sticky mud. He snapped his second line to the ring of the padeye and straightened up. “Catch,” Pollux called out and sent his own second line snaking out to his twin.

Castor caught it and fastened it beside his own. “All set?” asked Pollux. “I’m going to unsnap us in here.”

“All secure.” Castor moved closer to the hatch.

“Here I come.”

“So you do.” Castor gave Pollux’s line a tug; Pollux came sailing out of the hatch—and Castor let him keep on sailing. Castor checked the line gently through his fingers, soaking up the momentum, so that Pollux reached the end of the fifty-foot line and stayed there without bouncing back.

Pollux had been quite busy on the way out but to no effect—sawing vacuum is futile. When he felt himself snubbed to a stop he quit struggling. “Pull me back!”

“Say ‘uncle.’”

Pollux said several other things, some of which he had picked up dockside on Luna, plus some more colorful expressions derived from his grandmother. “You had better get off this ship,” he concluded, “because I’m coming down this line and take your helmet off.” He made a swipe for the line with one hand; Castor flipped it away.

“Say ‘even-Steven’ then.”

Pollux had the line now, having remembered to reach for his belt where it was hooked instead of grabbing for the bight. Suddenly he grinned. “Okay—‘even-Steven’.”

“Even-Steven it is. Hold still; I’ll bring you in.” He towed him in gently, grabbing Pol’s feet and clicking them down as he approached. “You looked mighty silly out there,” he commented when Pollux was firm to the ship’s side.

His twin invoked their ritual. “Even-Steven!”

“My apologies, Junior. Let’s get to work.”

Padeyes were spaced about twenty feet apart all over the skin of the ship. They had been intended for convenience in rigging during overhauls and to facilitate outside inspections while underway; the twins now used them to park bicycles. They removed the bicycles from the hold half a dozen at a time, strung on a wire loop like a catch of fish. They fastened each clutch of bikes to a padeye; the machines floated loosely out from the side like boats tied up to an ocean ship.

Stringing the clusters of bicycles shortly took them over the “horizon” to the day side of the ship. Pollux was in front, carrying six bicycles in his left hand. He stopped suddenly. “Hey, Grandpa! Get a load of this!”

“Don’t look at the Sun,” Castor said sharply.

“Don’t be silly. But come see this.”

Earth and Moon swam in the middle distance in slender crescent phase. The
Stone
was slowly dropping behind Earth in her orbit, even more slowly drifting outward away from the Sun. For many weeks yet Earth would appear as a ball, a disc, before distance cut her down to a brilliant star. Now she appeared about as large as she had from Luna but she was attended by Luna herself. Her day side was green and dun and lavished with cottony clouds; her night side showed the jewels of cities.

But the boys were paying no attention to Earth; they were looking at the Moon. Pollux sighed. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“What’s the matter, Junior? Homesick?”

“No. But she’s beautiful, just the same. Look, Cas, whatever ships we ever own, let’s always register them out of Luna City. Home base.”

“Suits. Can you make out the burg?”

“I think so.”

“Probably just a spot on your helmet. I can’t. Let’s get back to work.”

They had used all the padeyes conveniently close to the hatch and were working aft when Pollux said, “Wups! Take it easy. Dad said not to go aft of frame 65.”

“Shucks, it must be ‘cool’ back to 90, at least. We’ve used the jet less than five minutes.”

“Don’t be too sure; neutrons are slippery customers. And you know what a stickler Dad is, anyway.”

“He certainly is,” said a third voice.

They did not jump out of their boots because they were zipped tight. Instead they turned around and saw their father standing, hands on hips, near the passenger airlock. Pollux gulped and said, “Howdy, Dad.”