Stadium beyond the Stars
by Milton Lesser
©
1960 by Milton
Lesser First Edition
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-5840
Made in the United States
of America
For
Steven—
and for Laurie and Julie, later
Contents
chapter page
1. The Dark Nebulae..................................................... ................. 1
2.
Derelict!....................................................................... 11
3.
Olympus in the Sky.................................................. 27
4.
Trouble on Olympus................................................. .............. 48
5.
The Coalsack Again.................................................. 62
6.
Chandlur Strikes........................................................ 79
7.
Hunk Strikes Back..................................................... 87
8.
Parade of the Planets............................................... 104
9.
Antares Wont Talk.................................................... Ill
10.
Rescue!......................................................................... ............ 120
11.Deneb Wont Listen................................................... 133
12.
The Space Captains.................................................. ........... 150
13.
Beyond Sagittarius................................................... ........... 163
14.
The Unknown............................................................. 179
15.
The Teleporter............................................................ ........... 191
16.
The Games................................................................... ........... 203
vii
Stadium beyond the Stars
Chapter 1 The Dark Nebulae
E |
VEN before they reached the viewplates, Steve
Frazer felt his heart pound with excitement. He knew they were still too early
though—for several moments more the starship Hellas, outbound from Earth for three months now, would hang in the gray murk
of subspace.
Several
moments more, then—the center of the galaxyl
They
went up the final steeply slanting companion-way, their magnet boots clanging
echoes from the walls and ceiling.
"Maybe
we ought to go back," Hunk Little said
uncertainly. He was a squat and powerfully built boy in a one-piece black
jumper. "We're not supposed to be here during change-over."
Steve
Frazer shook his head. "I
wouldn't miss it for
anything, Hunk. Come on."
Then
they stood on the upper observation deck of the Hellas. The familiar gray murk swam and coiled
on the other side of the viewplates, making it
seem as if the entire universe were contained in the thin metal hull of the Hellas. And until the change-over from subspace to
normal space, that was true enough. Time and matter were negative in subspace;
it was sub-space that made interstellar travel possible, and in three months of
Earth time the Hellas
had soared at translight
speed across eight thousand parsecs of the Milky Way Galaxy.
"What time is
it?" Steve asked.
Hunk Little
looked at his chrono. "0815," he said.
Steve's
blue eyes gleamed. "If were on time, change-over ought to be any second
now."
"You
re a funny guy," Hunk Little said. "What's
so special about it?"
"Youll see—"
Steve began.
Just
then they heard magnet boots clomping up the companionway behind them. Hunk Little gave Steve a despairing look, but Steve just shrugged
and smiled. The companionway they'd come up was the only way off the
observation deck.
"You
think Roy Ambler told on us?" Hunk demanded in his deep voice.
"What
do you think? He's the only one who saw us leave quarters."
Hunk made an unpleasant face. "I just
love that guy."
Then
a crewman wearing a yellow jumper came out on the observation deck and shouted,
"What's the matter with you two? You know you're supposed to be strapped
down in quarters during change-over. Come on."
Hunk
gave him a sheepish look, but Steve said, "It's too late, mister. Look at
your chrono. We don't have time to get back."
The
crewman looked, and nodded. "Grab something, boys. And hold on tight.
You're going to wish you were back in quarters."
Hunk
didn't say anything. Steve said, "No, I'm not," and smiled.
The
crewman's scowl melted into a reluctant smile. "Never saw change-over
before, huh?"
"First trip in
subspace," Steve said.
"First time out of Sol
System," Hunk added.
"Okay,
hold on and watch," the crewman told them. He smiled again. "I guess
it really is something, at that."
There
were swim-rails near the viewplates, and Steve and Hunk grasped them firmly. So
did the crewman. Just then a shrill whistle sounded in the canned air of the Hellas, the crewman shouted, "Brace
yourselves!" and Steve felt a shuddering, wrenching pressure grab and
squeeze every atom of his lean body. It shook and squeezed him like a giant
unseen hand. He heard Hunk's bellow of surprise and pain. He was staring at the
nearest viewplate. The gray murk misted. He blinked.
The
gray murk drifted away like a wraith of fog before die wind.
And Steve Frazer, his
knuckles white as he held the swim-rails, his body wracked by change-over, his
forehead beaded with sweat, was staring out at the deep, velvety black of
normal space—eight thousand parsecs from journey's start.
His
first look disappointed him, but then he realized the Hellas had made change-over on the fringe of the
dark nebulae in Ophiuchus. The blackness he saw was the blackness of the
nebulae—inert gasses and dust-motes.
Steve
relaxed. The change-over pressure was gone. He felt his limbs shaking. And, as
the gray murk of subspace had done, the black of the dark nebulae parted. More
suddenly, though. It parted almost like a curtain as the Hellas sped at barely sublight speed through normal
space.
And
in the viewplate Steve saw the myriad stars of the center of the galaxy.
With
no atmosphere to diffuse their light, they gleamed like jewels. They did not
blink. Their colors were all the colors of the rainbow. They were beautiful.
Even prosaic, plodding Hunk Little was moved to
exclaim, "Wow!"
"You
can say that for me too, boy," the crewman told him.
Steve just stared at the
viewplate, mute.
The
Hellas, with a crew of fifty under Captain Syrtis
Williams, had brought two hundred young Sol System athletes to the center of
the galaxy where, ahead among the eternal stars, the Interstellar Olympic
Games would be held on one of the planets of the Ophiuchus System.
"Hey, what was
that?" Hunk cried.
A
shadow had flashed across the viewplate. Steve had seen it, too. The crewman at
his side had become suddenly tense.
Even
aboard the spacetubs that plow the interplanetary orbits of the Sol System
there is a standing joke about ships that pass in space. It takes three men on
one to see the other at all—one to announce its approach, one to glimpse it
vaguely as it streaks by, one to see it depart. And the Hellas, having just come through change-over from
subspace, was still moving at almost the speed of light.
Had
the Hellas, parting the curtain of the dark nebulae that
hid the center of the galaxy, passed another ship? On the Hellas's prearranged orbit of approach, where no other
ship should have been?
"Did
you guys see what I saw?" Hunk wanted to know. But Steve squeezed his
shoulder, and Hunk was silent.
The
crewman was talking into the strap-radio on his wrist. "This is Hatcher on
upper ob-deck," he said. "I think we just passed a ship. Right. No more than thirty seconds ago."
Hatcher
looked up at Steve and Hunk, smiling grimly. "If that was a ship, it has
no business here. Which means it's in trouble. Which means, instead of being a
couple of delinquents doing what you weren't supposed to do, you're liable to
be the heroes of the day. Come on, let's go."
They
turned their backs on the viewplates and headed down the companionway.
"Roy Ambler should see us now,"
Hunk said. "A couple of heroes."
Captain Syrtis Williams, a half hour later,
paced back and forth on the Hellas s
bridge. He was a big, slightly stooped blond man with tanned, leathery skin. He
wore a yellow jumper with a Captains black stripes on
its sleeves.
"We
have a fix on the ship," he said. "Tried to raise it by radio, but
don't get an answer."
"What ship is it,
sir?" Steve asked.
"Antares markings, son. But Antares is so far from the center of the
galaxy, which means—"
"Which
means," Joe Ito, the Olympic team coach from Earth finished for him,
"that that's the Antares Olympic ship."
"Looks that way,"
Captain Williams agreed.
Joe Ito frowned. "In trouble?"
"No
distress call, Coach. But they don't answer the radio. According to the
astrogator, they're not moving under their own power. But they're on the
gravitational fringe of the Ophiuchus System, about four billion miles out.
They're orbiting—very slow. About three and a half miles a
second. Without lights, Coach. Without power." Captain Syrtis Williams took a deep
breath. "We've been slowing and circling back for the past twenty minutes.
It will take us another couple of hours to decelerate and parallel their orbit.
Then I'm going aboard."
"In
a spacesuit?" Steve asked.
Captain
Williams nodded. "There isn't any other way, is there?"
Steve knew there wasn't. And of course the
unwritten law of space, like the unwritten law of the sea before it, demanded
that any available ship go to the aid of a stricken vessel.
"But
what could have gone wrong?" Joe Ito wanted to know.
Shrugging,
Captain Williams said, "That's what I'm going to find out. It's also why I
sent for you, Coach."
"Me?" Joe Ito
looked at him blankly.
"Well, you and Frazer, actually. I have two hundred athletes aboard, Coach,
and a fifty-man crew. The crew is absolute minimum, with each man an expert in
his own field. Though they've all gone through the motions in Space Academy,
not one of them knows much about deep-space boarding. It's a tricky
business."
Joe Ito was frowning.
"What are you getting at?"
"Well,
ordinarily, a Captain doesn't leave his ship. But this time I've got to, Coach.
I know my way around in a spacesuit. I spent a couple of years mining in the
asteroid belt, which—as you know—is where I met Steve Frazer's father."
Steve felt a lump in his throat. His eyes
stung suddenly. Three months before shipping out for the Interstellar Olympics,
his father had died in a mining accident on Eros.
"Deep-space
boarding is a tricky business, as I said," Syrtis Williams went on.
"Hazardous enough for a team of two, it's prohibitively dangerous for one
man. I'm going aboard that ship because I have to. There isn't a member of the
crew I'd ask to go with me, though several, I'm sure, would volunteer. It would
be suicide, though, because they aren't trained for deep-space boarding. It
just isn't necessary these days."
"Now it is," Joe
Ito said simply.
Syrtis
Williams nodded. "Now it is, Coach." His deep-set eyes stared
unblinkingly at Joe Ito. "Tell me, do you know of anyone aboard the Hellas who can do the job with me?"
Joe Ito looked quickly at
Steve.
Steve
Frazer was on the Earth Olympic team as a spacesuit racer. He had grown up in
the asteroid belt, prospecting with his father. For the past two years— since
he was sixteen—with time out for school, he had helped his father make a living
that way. And asteroid prospecting was done in spacesuits.
"I can do it,
sir," Steve said.
Joe
Ito nodded slowly. "So can Roy Ambler. He's our other racer."
"I
know both boys," Captain Williams said. "If I had my choice, I'd
rather have Frazer at my side out there. But naturally I can't make him go.
He'd have to volunteer. It's very dangerous."
Steve
replied promptly, "There's a shipload of Antarean people out there, sir.
Apparently they're in trouble. If the situation were reversed, I'd like to
think they'd help us."
Captain
Williams smiled for the first time. "I was hoping you'd say that, son. You
remind me of your father. Don Frazer was a real pioneer—one of the greatest men
I ever knew."
Steve felt that lump in his throat again.
"He always
wished he could go into deep space with you, Captain. One more mining job and
he would have—if they'd have taken him despite his age."
"They'd
have taken him," Syrtis Williams said simply. He stopped pacing and stood
directly in front of Steve. "Well, are you ready?"
"I'm ready, sir,"
Steve said.
Hunk
Little helped Steve into his gear in the aft air lock
of the Hellas.
"Me," he was
saying, "I'm just a muscle-stiff. I wish I could do what you can do, Steve.
I wish I was going out there."
"You're
the best wrestler on the Earth team," Steve told his friend.
"Wrestler!" Hunk Little
snorted. "A—a cave man could
wrestle."
"So
could the ancient Greeks, who started the Olympic games,
Hunk. And in some ways they've produced the highest civilization we've ever
had."
Syrtis
Williams was already waiting at the outer air lock door, his spacesuit ready
for inflation and his bubble-helmet in his hands. A crewman poked his head into
the air lock. "Still no radio contact, sir. It's
definite now. They don't answer."
"We match their orbit
yet?"
"Locked in place ten miles apart, sir. It would be dangerous to get any
closer."
Syrtis
Williams grinned. "You're telling me! Somebody's being
too enthusiastic, mister. Better pull back to twenty miles and hold it
there."
"Yes,
sir," the crewman replied, and spoke into his strap-radio.
Steve turned to gaze out the air lock
viewplate. Against the velvet-black, star-studded immensity of space, the
Antares ship was a tiny teardrop mote. Since the Hellas now matched its speed and orbit, it hung
there as if motionless. It was dark, silent.
Why?
Syrtis Williams and Steve
were going to find out.
Not
talking, Hunk Little dropped the bubble-helmet over
Steve's head and screwed the lugs home. Hunk tapped the glassite of the helmet
and winked. Syrtis Williams's voice was loud and metallic over the intercom.
"Hear me, son?"
"Yes,
sir."
"All set?"
"Yes,
sir."
"Clear
the air lock," Syrtis Williams said. His
space-suit was bright red. Steve's was icy blue, with red and white bands on
the arms—the same suit he would use in the Olympic games.
Suddenly they were alone in
the air lock.
The
outer door swung toward them. Steve went weightlessly to it with Captain
Williams.
Together, they rocketed
into the depths of space.
Chapter 2 n^mi
tor every action, an equal and opposite reaction. Steve used his shoulder rockets to soar in a
swift arc between the Hellas
and the Antares ship. He
could hear the faint hiss of his air supply inside the inflated spacesuit;
could see Captain Williams, a few hundred yards off in space, a roly-poly
figure in air-inflated red. And whichever way he turned his head inside the
bubble-helmet he had a magnificent view of star-crowded space here at the
center of the galaxy.
Except dead ahead. For, dead ahead, the
Antares ship loomed ever larger. Steve hadn't realized how big it was
until he'd rocketed to within a few miles. Its hull was polished, silvery,
reflecting stars like a mirror. Its hundreds of portholes were dark. Why, it's
five times the size of the Hellas, Steve
thought. It must be almost a mile long.
"Steve?"
Captain Williams's voice called over the intercom. "She's heeled over
ninety degrees. The air lock will be on top."
In space there was no absolute up and down,
of course. A spaceship was a self-contained world with its own self-contained
orientation. But relative to the Hellas, the
big Antares ship was heeled over.
Steve
and Syrtis Williams rocketed to the top side of the Antares ship, where Steve
felt—and heard in the air of his spacesuit—the thump of touchdown as his magnet
boots landed on the silvery hull of the big ship.
Then he felt himself
slipping.
Moments
later he floated a hundred yards off in space, spinning, slowly orbiting the
Antares ship.
"They
don't use magnets," commented Syrtis Williams, who had managed to grasp an
air lock lug. "Rocket back slowly, Steve. Grab onto something."
Steve
followed the advice, but since the Antares ship's gravitational field was all
but negligible, his arms were almost pulled from their sockets when he grasped
a second lug across the air lock from Syrtis Williams. Like Newton's equal and
opposite reaction for every action, that was another natural law at work—a body
in motion tends to stay in motion. Steve had almost gone right by the Antares
ship and swung into another slow orbit again.
"You
all right?"
Syrtis Williams asked.
"Yes, sir." Then Steve saw Syrtis Williams's face inside
the bubble-helmet. The Captain's features were twisted with pain. "What's
the matter, sir?"
"Made
the same mistake you did," Syrtis Williams growled. "Expected
magnetization and didn't get any.
But you re a racer, Steve. You're better at this sort of thing than I
am. I think I dislocated my shoulder."
"Want me to take you
back, sir?"
Syrtis
Williams scowled darkly. "Not on your life. We're here to do a job. Let's
do it."
"But you—"
"It'll be all right.
Open the air lock and help me
inside."
"But you—" Steve
began again.
"I'll
stay in the air lock. You poke around some, son. We'll keep in touch on the
intercom."
Steve nodded, and set to
work on the air lock lugs.
In
space, an air lock door is fastened but never locked. Locks, of course, are
unnecessary, and the fact that they aren't used is an additional safety factor
in space travel. Loosening and spinning the outside lugs, Steve knew, would
loosen the inside lugs. In five minutes Steve had the air lock door unfastened.
Syrtis Williams pushed against it.
Again, for every action an equal and opposite
reaction.
The air lock door, fifteen feet across, weighed far more than Syrtis Williams
did. He was thrust off a dozen yards into space. The door remained sealed.
"What do we do
now?" he asked ruefully.
Prospecting
in the asteroids in far Sol System had made Steve an old hand at boarding.
"We use rockets, sir. Low power. Watch."
Pressing
the control button inside his slightly inflated left glove, Steve activated his
shoulder rockets. He soared feetfirst at the air lock
door, using his own body as a battering ram. The door swung slowly in, to
reveal darkness more intense than star-studded space.
Syrtis
Williams shook his head and smiled. "I'm glad I had you along."
They
entered the air lock together. Steve whirled as the door swung shut behind
them.
"Electric eye,"
Syrtis Williams commented.
"I feel heavy,"
Steve said.
Syrtis Williams nodded. "Artificial gravity."
"Inside,
but not on the hull?"
"Looks
that way."
It
was absolutely, utterly, Stygianly dark. Steve paced
three steps forward. Gravity aboard the Antares ship felt close to, if not
exactly, Earth-norm. But artificial gravity meant the ship was still functioning.
If it were still functioning, why hadn't it answered their radio call? And why
was it orbiting the Ophi-uchus System slowly, a couple of billion miles from
nowhere?
"... trouble with having weight again," Syrtis
Williams was saying, "is this dislocated shoulder is starting to really
hurt." Steve heard a clomp, decided that Captain
Williams had sat down on the air lock floor.
Just
then soft light glowed all around them. It radiated from the juncture of walls
and ceiling in the square, thirty-by-thirty air lock. It was reddish in color.
"Antares is a red star," Syrtis
Williams said. "Red would be the normal daylight color for the whole
system."
"But
if gravity, light—if the ship functions—" stammered Steve.
"Exactly
what I was thinking," Syrtis Williams said. "Maybe something happened
to their air supply."
Steve
looked at the environment gauge on his right wrist. He read off the figures sotto voce, "Temperature, sixty-eight degrees
Farenheit, air pressure, eighteen pounds to the square inch. Atmosphere,
twenty-one per cent oxygen, two per cent carbon dioxide, the rest inert gasses.
More neon than on Earth, sir. A
little less nitrogen. Everything's . . . fine ..." Steve's voice trailed off.
Syrtis
Williams frowned. His face was pale and beaded with sweat from the pain of his
shoulder. "Everything normal," he said. "But they don't answer a
radio signal, they haven't given a distress call, and they're in orbit without
power. And no lights till we came aboard."
"That's
right, sir," Steve said. It was an eerie situation. He felt curious and
uneasy, a combination which didn't quite add up to fear. "Can I remove my
space-suit?"
"What
for?"
"Well, if I'm going to have a look
around, and if they have air and gravity I'll make better time without
it."
"Yes, but what about
keeping in contact?"
"I hadn't thought of
that. I'll deflate the suit and leave my helmet here, sir. 1*11 hurry. You ought to have that shoulder attended to."
"Time
enough for that later. And be careful. Keep in constant contact."
Steve
was about to remove his helmet when Syrtis Williams shouted, "Hold
it!"
"Sir?"
"Radioactivity. You check for it?"
"No, sir," Steve
admitted sheepishly.
He
checked the gauge on his left wrist. The reading was negative.
A
moment later, suit deflated, helmetless, he stepped through the inner air lock
door and along the main companionway of the Airfares ship.
It
was a derelict ship, thousands of parsecs from home and apparently deserted. For no reason that Steve could see.
Half an hour later, he still hadn't been able
to discover a reason. Reporting back to Syrtis Williams every step of the way,
he had covered a lot of ground.
Engine
room; no damage, but the master switch had been cut, the atomics were cool and
safe.
Bridge;
like the rest of the ship it was lit by the soft red radiance. The control
lever had been thrust beyond full-stop to the orbit position. The last entry in
the logbook, written in the interstellar patois that was derived from English, was routine. "Leaving subspace 0914. Dark nebulae passed. Ophiuchus
System dead ahead. . . ."
It ended—just like that.
Dining deck; here Steve found the biggest
surprise of all. There were table-settings for more than five hundred people.
Food—cold now—was in all the plates, half consumed. Which meant, as far as
Steve could see, that the crew and Olympic-bound athletes aboard the Antares
ship had sat down to a routine meal, had begun to eat it—and had vanished.
Boat deck; all the
lifeboats were in their tubes.
"That's
about it, sir," Steve told Syrtis Williams on the intercom. "They
ought to be here. They're not. Somehow they just—left the ship."
"You're sure about the
lifeboats?"
Steve said he was sure.
"Where are you
now?"
"Boat
deck."
"Try quarters
yet?"
"No,
sir."
"Give
it a try, son. Then call it a day. You have no ideas at all?"
"None,
sir.
How's the shoulder?"
"Feels
like a brontosaurus is sitting on me, but I'll manage
for awhile longer."
Steve
went down from boat deck to the lower prom deck, then down another ramp to
quarters. What he found there was the same as dining deck all over again.
Personal effects hadn't been removed. Most of die bunks were made. Playing
cards of an unfamilar design were spread on a small table in one room.
The
Antareans, like Earthmen and the inhabitants of the hundred and twenty other
civilized star systems, were human. In their disappearance, this humanness was
all too apparent to Steve. It was exactly as if the crew and passengers of an
Earth ship had disappeared in the depths of space, eight thousand parsecs from
home.
Like
their brethren in the far-flung star systems, the Antareans were descendants of
Earthmen. Twenty generations ago, Steve knew, when the first translight ships
had been perfected and when, coincidentally, Earth was dangerously
overpopulated and using its natural resources at a reckless rate, the Great
Migration had taken place. It had consumed the major efforts of five
generations of Earthmen, and when it was over, human civilization had spread to
a hundred and twenty star systems.
And,
in an amazingly short time, Earth had become a backwater of the galaxy. Overpopulation
had stripped it of its mineral wealth. Many of its best young people had
shipped out in the waves of migration which had leapfrogged inward from the arm
of the galaxy in which Sol System orbited, toward the center. New frontiers on
new worlds brought out the best in people. In a very short time the centers of
civilization shifted from Earth's cities to the cities of Antares IV and Deneb
II and the Fomalhaut planets and Gregor's Star and the Carelli System and here
in Ophiuchus,
Then,
too, the early starships employed overdrive, not subspace, to attain translight
velocities. On overdrive it took a ship months to
span the gap between Earth and Antares and Deneb, and scores of years to reach
Ophiuchus. But twenty years ago subspace drive had been developed, so now it
was possible to reach Deneb in a matter of days from Earth, and even Ophiuchus
in just three months. Subspace drive had held great promise for the far-flung
human civilizations; it meant an ingathering of human achievement; it meant a
pooling of discoveries made by human beings on a hundred and twenty inhabited
worlds.
But, perversely, it also meant trouble.
Antares System, for example, was proud of its own achievements and suspicious
of Deneb System. Deneb was convinced it had earned the right to be called
leader of the galaxy. Since these two outworld systems had far outstripped
native Earth in power and wealth, allies gravitated to one or the other.
The
Olympic games here in Ophiuchus, Steve knew, were an attempt on the part of the
more levelheaded among the scattered outworlds, an attempt which might or
might not succeed, to restore a feeling of oneness and mutual cooperation among
the centers of civilization. Deneb had wanted the games, the first since the
Great Migration, on Denebian territory; Antares had wanted them; even
now-pastoral Earth, birthplace of humanity, had put in its claim.
In
the end, the Ophiuchus System had been accepted by all contending parties as a
compromise. For Ophiuchus, at the center of the galaxy, was symbolic of the
limits human migration had reached, and Ophiuchus could be regarded as a
doorway past the nebulae-obscured center to the unknown far side of the galaxy.
"Same down here, sir," Steve made
his report from quarters. "They left. In a hurry.
That's all I can tell you."
"Okay.
You've done what you could. Come on back, son."
Steve
said suddenly, "Hold it! I hear something." "You hear
what?"
Faintly, Steve heard the sound of music. He
told Syrtis Williams so on the intercom. "Music? Nearby?"
"Back of quarters. Sick bay's there, I think." "What
kind of music?"
"Just music. Simple but nice. A folk melody, I think."
Steve
didn't have to be told to investigate. Did the music merely mean someone had
left a player on— before disappearing? Or was someone still aboard the Antares
ship?
As
Steve approached the sick bay, the music grew louder. Bat-wing doors across the
width of the corridor separated quarters from the ship's hospital. The music
came from an open doorway this side of the division. Steve walked to it
cautiously.
Beyond
the open doorway a man was singing in a high and quavering, but not unpleasant
voice, to the accompaniment of a twanging instrument. Steve didn't recognize
the words, but he knew they were in one of the ancient national languages of
Earth. French? He thought it was French.
A recording instrument? Or a single Antarean left aboard the ship
from which all his companions had mysteriously disappeared; a single Antarean
singing incredibly in an archaic Earth language? Steve took a deep breath. He
was going to find out. When he reached the doorway, the music stopped. He
looked into a small room like all the others he had explored here in quarters.
His eyes widened and he felt his pulses racing.
A
little old man sat on the bunk in there. He had a stringed instrument on his
lap, and he was staring at Steve as Steve was staring at him. He was small and
slender with a frizzled shock of white hair and twinkling blue eyes.
"Knew
you came aboard," he said. "Was wondering when you'd get down here.
Like the song?" He plucked the stringed instrument. "It's French.
That's an ancient language of the Mother Planet. Earth."
"I'm from Earth,"
Steve heard himself saying.
"Earth? That so? I never
met an Earthman before."
"Are you an—Antarean?"
"What
do you think? This is an Antares ship, isn't it?"
Steve
had no answer to that. After the mystery of the abandoned ship, the old man's
matter-of-factness came as a surprise. All Steve could say, a little lamely,
was, "Where is everybody?"
The old man winked at him. "Out."
"I know, but—"
"My name's Billgarr. Yours?"
"Steve Frazer. Mr.
Billgarr, where—"
"No
mister. Just Billgarr. We don't use titles in the
Antares System."
"Where is everybody?" Steve
repeated. Billgarr plucked another note on his stringed instrument. "Getting measured." "Measured?"
Billgarr
stood up and came close to Steve. "A ship needs a caretaker. That's me. Nothing much to do, though. I wish I was getting measured,
too."
"Getting
measured?" Steve said blankly. "Did you say—"
"That's
what I said. Physically, emotionally, psychologically, all that stuff. Me, I'm
a music teacher. We Antareans are a pretty musical people."
"I know, I read that in school."
"You
read about us in school?" The Antarean's continued matter-of-factness was
exasperating. "That's good. I know something about Earth too. I can speak
French. France was a country in Europe, a peninsula jutting off western Asia
into the Atlantic Ocean."
"What
did you mean by getting measured?" Steve asked.
"They
used to speak French there. In France. A long time ago. You're from Earth? Ever been to
France?"
"Actually,
I spent most of my life in the asteroid belt. But this getting measured—"
"They
drank an extract of grape in France, called beer, I think."
"Wine!" Steve almost shouted the word.
Billgarr's
twinkling blue eyes stared at him. Then he smiled. Humor in
inflicted exasperation? Steve thought a little desperately. It could be;
humor would develop differently on all the outworlds.
Finally
Billgarr declared, still matter-of-factly, "They're being measured by
extra-humans, Stefrazer." He pronounced Steve's name rapidly, almost the
way he pronounced his own, as one continuous, liquid syllable.
"Extra-humans? You mean nonhuman beings? Intelligent
beings?" Steve said. "There aren't any."
Spreading
out among the stars, mankind had found flora and fauna on all the inhabitable
worlds—but no intelligent life except his own kind.
"On
this side of the center of the galaxy there aren't any," Billgarr said.
"There are on the other side. I ought to know. I've seen them. Do you
speak French?"
Steve
ignored the question. He wasn't being impolite, if the smile in Billgarr's
eyes meant anything. "Extra-humans?" he said. "You—you've seen
them?"
"Of course I've seen
them," Billgarr said.
Steve
didn't say anything. Billgarr went on, "They were just like you. Didn't
think any extra-roller sentient life was possible. Till they
found us."
"Roller?"
"They don't walk. No legs. They roll.
They don't talk. No vocal cords. They think."
"Out loud?" Steve gasped, and realized the foolishness
of his question.
"They—telepathize."
Billgarr sat down again. "One's aboard—keeping me company."
As if to prove the point, a
rumbling sound was heard in the companionway, Steve looked at Billgarr, looked
at the doorway, dashed outside. He felt a cold chill
on the back of his neck and down his spine.
Something so big that it almost filled the
companionway from bulkhead to bulkhead and floor to ceiling rolled toward him. Rolled! It was the only word that fitted.
It
had eyes—three of them, like large white saucers, that floated on the smooth
pink rolling surface so that they always remained in front.
Who are you? Steve thought.
Then
he realized he hadn't thought it at all. The thought had come, unbidden, into
his mind. It was the roller—telepathizing.
"I—I'm an
Earthman," Steve said out loud.
Another
thought, confused, came into Steve's mind. Just Antareans. No one else—yet.
Didn't I tell you, Billgarr?
"You didn't tell me anything,"
Billgarr said out loud.
The roller reached Steve. The three huge
lidless eyes surveyed him, unblinking.
Then the roller faded. It
didn't move. It just faded.
Steve
could see the opposite bulkhead right through it. Then all he saw was the
bulkhead.
The roller was gone.
"They teleport,"
Billgarr said.
"They
what?"
"Teleport. Move matter by thought waves. Instantly —anywhere. Its called
teleportation." Steve just looked at him.
Billgarr
said, "He's calling me. He's angry." "Who?"
"The roller. He wants me to . . . I'm going, Ste-frazer .
. ." Billgarr was becoming transparent.
Steve
tried to touch him. Billgarr was fading. He was as insubstantial as air. Then
Steve was alone in the room.
"Billgarr!"
he called.
No
answer.
"Billgarr!"
Hallucination?
But
he had seen Billgarr, had talked to him. Had seen the roller,
had "heard" its thoughts. He was sweating. His hands shook.
"Captain
Williams," he said into the intercom. "You—you're not going to
believe this."
"The
intercom was open. I heard you. I heard Billgarr. What was the—roller
like?"
Steve
told him. His voice was unsteady. "I'm going to look for them," he
said.
He
looked. He spent another hour on the ship, searching. He didn't find Billgarr. Didn't find the roller. They had vanished—like the Antarean
crew and Olympic contingent had vanished.
Billgarr
had called it teleportation.
Steve
returned to Captain Williams in the air lock.
"I
believe you, son," Syrtis Williams said. "I heard what went on. But
if I hadn't—"
"I
know," Steve said.
But
Syrtis Williams finished the sentence anyway. "If I hadn't, I wouldn't
have believed you for a
minute. You know something? I don't think anyone
else is going to believe you."
"They've got to,"
Steve said. "They've got to."
"It won't be
easy."
"But don't you understand? Extra-human
life, sir! Our first contact with it! We never dreamed. . . ." "Any proof?"
"No-o."
But
wouldn't the rollers come again—to Ophiu-chus maybe? And why had they removed
the Anta-reans from their ship? To measure
them? To measure them for what?
Steve climbed into his spacesuit. Still
thinking about it, he helped the injured Syrtis Williams rocket back to the Hellas.
Chapter $ Olympus in the Sky
ntil the Hellas
made planetfall on
Ophiuchus, Steve was convinced that the most important thing in the world was
to make someone believe what had happened aboard the derelict Anta-rean ship.
But
when the Hellas
came down sternfirst, when
the dense clouds of gas cleared from the landing pit, when Steve and Hunk
Little and all the other Olympic athletes crowded ob-deck for their first good
look at Ophiuchus, when the jet-bus that would take them to Earthtown arrived,
its jets roaring, when Steve had his first glimpse of the three suns that
dazzled the cloudless Ophiuchan sky—he forgot, at least for awhile, his
disappointing return to the Hellas.
Syrtis
Williams's dislocated shoulder had been put in speed-time traction; in
twenty-four hours it would heal. A warning beacon had been placed on the
An-tarean ship; it would be salvaged by the Ophiuchan authorities.
But no one, not even Hunk Little,
believed Steve's
incredible story. He wondered if Syrtis Williams was
having the same trouble convincing his fellow officers.
"You
mean they just disappeared?" Hunk Little asked
when Steve finished telling his story. He snapped his fingers. "Like
that?"
"Like
that," Steve said, a little lamely. "Billgarr said they used
teleportation."
Hunk
Little's big face scowled and his massive shoulders lifted in a shrug.
"Stevie-boy, you know me. I'm your pal. I'd like to believe you. But it
sounds—sounds all cockeyed. Maybe you just—"
"Maybe
I just what?"
"I don't know,"
Hunk admitted.
But
Roy Ambler, Earth's second spacesuit racer, had more definite ideas on the
subject. He was a tall, red-haired boy of eighteen with deceptively guileless
eyes and a freckle-splotched face. His family owned extensive mining property
on Ganymede, one of the Jovian moons in Sol System, and his father had led the
fight for asteroid-leasing by the big mining combines, as Steve's father had
led the fight for the small, private homesteading asteroid miners. He had never
liked Steve, as his father had never liked Steve's father. And, quick-tempered
and egotistic, he resented Steve's position as Earth's first spacesuit racer.
"Why
don't you say it?" he asked Hunk Little. "Steve's the biggest teller
of tall tales since—" But he didn't finish the sentence.
"Since
who?"
Steve challenged him.
"Forget it, Frazer.
Hunk knows what I mean."
Steve felt his face getting hot. "No.
Say what you mean."
"Just
forget it. There's no sense going into ancient history."
"What
ancient history?" Steve demanded. His voice was unsteady, for he knew what
Roy Ambler had in mind.
"Well,
you asked for it," Roy said finally. "Your father.
Everybody knows how the great Don Frazer used to make up stories to get people
interested in his prospecting ventures. Everybody knows—"
That
was as far as Roy went, because Steve's fist splatted meatily against his
cheek. Roy took three staggering steps back and sat down hard. It was suddenly
very quiet on ob-deck.
"Take that back!" Steve cried. "My father never went
around conning people into anything."
Roy
scrambled to his feet. Steve was waiting, his fists balled and ready.
"I'll forget you swung on me," Roy said condescendingly.
"You'll take it
back."
"Why
should I take back the truth? All Sol System knows how Don Frazer conned
people—poor miners —into backing his Eros expedition with a wild story
about—"
"Are
you crazy?" Hunk Little whispered furiously.
"Five hundred homesteading families are living on Eros, thanks to Don
Frazer. And he must have thought plenty of that expedition. He died trying to
make it a success."
Steve said grimly, "Get out of the way,
Hunk."
Reluctantly, Hunk stepped aside. Steve swung
wildly, missing, and Roy Ambler, coolly and with precision, landed a left hook
in his breadbasket.
The
trouble, at the beginning, was that Steve saw red. He was mad and he was wild.
He missed three more times while Roy Ambler, in a boxer's crouch, jabbed half a
dozen times at his nose until his eyes watered. Steve raised his fists to ward
off the rain of blows. Promptly Roy crossed a right into his exposed belly,
and Steve stumbled back. Following him, Roy caught a wild right cross on his
left palm and countered the miss crisply with a right upper-cut that caught the
point of Steve's jaw.
Steve
went down as if he had been pole-axed. He heard a roaring sound in his ears,
and his eyes were blurry.
"Enough?" Roy
Ambler demanded.
Steve
got slowly to his knees. One part of his mind was still cool, almost icily
calm. That's your father he's talking about, he thought. That's Don Frazer he
called the biggest liar in Sol System. And if you let him whip you, he'd make
his point.
Steve
stood up slowly. The calm part of his mind was in control now. He saw a cocky
grin on Roy's freckled face. He jabbed tentatively at it with his left fist.
Instinctively, Roy raised his guard. Steve rammed his right fist home under it.
Roy doubled over, a look of surprise and pain on his face now. Steve hit him
twice, left and right, on the jaw. Roy's knees buckled, but instead of going
down he clinched quickly and desperately with Steve. But Steve pushed him away,
then followed him, then landed with the right again high on Roy's left cheek.
Roy's knees thudded on the floor.
"Take it back,"
Steve said through clenched teeth.
Before
Roy could answer, if Roy was going to answer, another voice cried out.
"Boys!"
Steve
swung around. Striding through the circle of Olympic athletes watching the
fight was Joe Ito, the coach.
"He—" Roy Ambler
began.
"They—" Hunk Little started to say.
Coach
Ito raised a hand and cut them off. "I don't care why it started. I don't
care who started it. You boys represent Earth here at the games. When you leave
the ship you'll have the people of half the worlds of the galaxy watching you,
deciding what Earth and Earthmen are like from your behavior. If there's
another outburst like this, the boys responsible will be confined to shipboard
for the duration of the games." His level gaze met Steve's. "I don't
care who they are. Is that clear?"
"It's clear,"
Steve said.
Roy
wiped blood from his lips with the back of one hand. "You're the coach,
Mr. Ito." But he glared at Steve.
Joe
Ito was a trim little Japanese-American with brush-cut hair and eyes so dark
they were almost jet-black. "I want you boys to shake hands," he
said. "Right now."
Neither Steve nor Roy made
a move.
Joe Ito shrugged. "Look, you don't have
to like each other. There's no law says you do. But if you shake hands I'll
take that as a pledge that you won't make a spectacle of yourselves either here
aboard ship again or—even worse—outside on Ophiuchus. Come on—shake
hands."
"I'll
shake with you on that, Coach," Steve said. "But I don't have to
shake with him."
"I say you do."
Roy
Ambler surprised Steve then by smiling a little and saying, "Come on,
Steve. If you're willing, I'm willing." Steve looked for a moment at that
smile. Superficially it was bland like Roy's eyes, but the smile was pasted
there, like a mask. And though Roy's eyes were still guileless, the smile
didn't quite reach them.
"Stevie-boy,"
Hunk Little prompted. "He's meeting you
halfway."
In
the end Steve had to give in. He stuck his hand out and felt Roy Ambler take
it. They shook and parted quickly. Roy's eyes remained bland. Too bland. He isn't finished, Steve thought. He looked at
Roy's face. In an hour or so, the red-haired boy was going to develop the
granddaddy of all shiners, if the red puffiness under his left eye meant anything.
He isn't finished, Steve thought again. I know the guy. He's got something up
his sleeve.
Steve
didn't know what it was. But he would find out.
The single large planet of the Ophiuchus
System had never known one single day's absolute darkness.
It
swung in a complex orbit around the three suns of a triple-star system, and at
least one of them was always in the eternal daytime sky.
The
largest of the three suns was a dazzling, brilliant blue. The smallest was a
somber eye of dull orange. The third was white, like Earth's own sun, but
smaller, more distant.
As
if to welcome the two hundred Earth athletes to a really alien world, all three
suns were in the sky when the jet-bus took them from the spaceport to
Earthtown, a small section of Olympic City—which the Ophiuchans had built to
house the athletes of several dozen interstellar worlds.
The
trip from the spaceport to Earthtown took half an hour. Eyes glued to the bus
window, Steve temporarily forgot about Billgarr and the roller,
forgot his fight with Roy Ambler and the accusation Roy had made. A sense of
indescribable wonder filled him. He was here—here at the very center of the
galaxy, eight thousand parsecs from home on a strange, lushly tropical world, a
world superheated by its three suns.
Earthtown turned out to be a single large
building built like a round plastic bubble. Its lower floor housed a cafeteria
and a rec hall; the upper floors contained double rooms with Earth-style
furniture. On arrival, Steve and Hunk Little were
assigned to one of the rooms. Each unpacked his single canvas bag, then they showered and dressed in their lightest jumpers
because it was tropically hot on Ophiuchus. They'd hardly spoken since Steve's
fight with Roy.
Now
Steve stood at the round window, gazing down at the blue and white Earth flag
two stories below.
Hunk
cleared his throat. "Listen," he said, and cleared his throat again.
"I—you know I'm not much of a talker, Steve. I just want you to know, if
I— I mean, well, if a guy like Roy Ambler said a thing like that about my old
man, I—well, ahh, put her there, Stevie-boy."
They
shook hands. Hunk's eyes were smiling warmly in his pleasantly homely face.
"But next time, for crying out loud, Stevie-boy, don't go in on him wild
like that. He can fight. You almost got yourself clobbered."
"I know," Steve
said. "And thanks, Hunk."
"Forget
it. But don't go blaming Coach for breaking it up like that. He had to."
"I know he had
to," Steve said.
The
eternal afternoon of Ophiuchus wore on. An hour after lunch, Coach Ito had his
athletes limber up in the underground gymnasium below Earthtown. Then he gave
them a pep-talk about being on their best behavior here on Ophiuchus. After he
and Roy Ambler had been read the riot act aboard the Hellas it seemed almost anticlimactic to Steve.
"Well,
boys," Coach Ito finished, "that's about it. No more workouts till
tomorrow. You're free to see the sights if you want." He smiled. "Including Earthtown II. But don't let the eternal
daylight throw you. Lights out at eleven o'clock, ship
time."
"You
mean twenty-three hundred hours, Coach," someone called out, and Coach Ito
smiled again. Eleven o'clock was Earth's designation of time. "You trying to make us homesick, Coach?"
"Me
for Earthtown II," someone else said, and soon after that Earth's male
athletes broke up into small groups and left the building.
Earthtown
II, adjacent to Earthtown, was quarters for Earth's female athletes. There had
been several social functions aboard the Hellas, all carefully supervised. Friendships had
grown, and now perhaps half of Coach Ito's charges headed for Earthtown II to
visit the girls they'd known in high school or in athletic meets all over Sol
System or had met for the first time aboard ship.
Hunk
Little told Steve dolefully, "There's a girl
named Jane who's a free-styler on the swimming team who—"
"I
saw the two of you at the dance last week," Steve said, smiling slightly.
"All
right, all right," Hunk growled. "Don't rub it in. With my ugly mug I
couldn't get to first base with her." He shook his head. "As a matter
of fact, I think she has a crush on Roy Ambler."
"Bad
taste," Steve said, still smiling. "Obviously a
case of bad taste." But suddenly he felt a little foolish about his
own fight with Roy.
Until Hunk said,
"Speaking of Ambler, where is he?"
Steve shook his head. "Search me. I
haven't seen him since we got to Earthtown."
"That's
funny," Hunk said. "I wonder what he's up to."
"What
makes you think he's up to anything?" "Well, you know Roy."
After dinner, Coach Ito
sent for Steve.
"Tired?"
he asked. "A lot of the boys have already hit the sack."
"No,
I'm raring to go. I was planning to take the bus into Ophiuchus City tonight. Hunk Little and I."
"Hunk'll
have to take a rain check on that excursion. But you've got an appointment in
Ophiuchus City. If you grab the next bus you can just make it."
"Me?"
Steve said, surprised. "An appointment with whom?"
Coach Ito took a deep breath. "The Interstellar Olympic Commissioner." "The Commissioner?"
"That's
right, Steve. That—well, fantastic story of yours got around. The Commissioner
wants to see you."
"Didn't
Captain Williams make a report, sir?" "Radio report as I understood
it. He'll be in sick bay till tomorrow. The Commissioner wants to see you." "Are you coming with me, Coach?" A
pause, then, "I'll go along for the ride, Steve." "What's the
matter?"
Coach Ito was frowning. "That story of
yours. You sure you don't want to retract it?"
"Retract
it? Why should I? I told exactly what happened. Captain Williams—"
"Wasn't
actually there with you," Joe Ito finished for him. "All he heard, as
I understand it, was what came over your intercom. Steve, sometimes in space,
sometimes when you—"
"I
saw what I saw, Coach. What do you expect me to do, lie now and say I didn't see it?"
"An
extra-human sentient being?"
"Yes."
"Who disappeared into thin air?"
"Yes."
Coach Ito shrugged. "I don't think the
Commissioner's going to like your story." "Why not?
It's the truth."
"The
truth as you saw it or think you saw it. Be reasonable, Steve."
"I'm
being as reasonable as I can. I'm reporting what I saw."
"All right,"
Coach Ito said.
"All
right" Steve said right back at him. Then they both
smiled.
Coach
Ito said, "You're a funny guy. The trouble is, I
like you." His smile faded. "Well, let's go see the
Commissioner."
Steve rarely made snap judgments,
rarely took much stock in the first impressions people made on him. But he
disliked Chandlur the Denebian intensely.
The
man was almost as imposing as his official title —High Commissioner of the
First Interstellar Olympic Games. His office was elaborately furnished in the
Denebian style, all aglitter with the semiprecious stones that were so common
in, and accounted in part for the wealth of, the Denebian System. Chandlur
himself wore several large jeweled rings and a tiara on his absolutely bald
head.
He
was a huge man who dwarfed the Japanese-American, Joe Ito. His enormous hand
toyed with a string of opals and star sapphires as he listened to Steve's
story. His body, sleekly covered by a multicolored jumper, leaned forward. His
head, canted to one side, was most notable for the surprisingly small eyes that
seemed to stare beyond Steve to a point in air between him and the far wall of
the office. He had the ash-white skin characteristic of the Denebians.
When
Steve finished his story, telling it quickly and simply, exactly as it had
happened, the High Commissioner of the First Interstellar Olympic Games leaned
back in his chair, crossed his hands over his huge belly and said in his deep,
resonant voice, "This man Billgarr spoke French, did he?"
Steve
clenched his teeth before answering. Chandlur had selected, as a starter, what
was perhaps the least important element of the story to carp at. "Not
exactly, sir," Steve replied, managing to keep his voice level. "He
spoke the Interstellar patois,
just like you do, sir. But
he was singing in French."
"Singing in French," Chandlur
repeated the words and gave Joe Ito a deprecating smile. "Doesn't it
strike you as odd, Coach, that an alleged denizen of
the Antarean System would sing in an archaic Earth language?"
"Odd,"
Joe Ito admitted. But he added, "Not impossible, though. The archaic
Earth languages are part of our interstellar culture. Experts know them."
"Experts,
yes," said Chandlur. He leaned forward, playing with the string of
expensive beads. "Doesn't it also strike you as odd that the principals in
Steve Frazer's story conveniently disappeared when his little episode with them
came to an end?"
Joe
Ito, who had not really believed Steve till now, bristled. "Are you
calling the boy a liar?"
"My
dear Coach," Chandlur said unctuously, "certainly not. But whatever
he saw there on the Antarean ship made his imagination run away with him.
There are stories of hallucinations in space, of—"
"It wasn't an hallucination!" Steve cried out.
"But
of course you don't think
it was. No one is blaming
you, young man." The High Commissioner turned ponderously to Joe Ito.
"You realize that he had just come across eight thousand parsecs of space.
He was excited, overwrought. It is natural enough that, sent unexpectedly to an
alien ship, he would be victimized by his own fertile imagination."
Joe
Ito changed the subject. "Has anything been done about the Antarean
ship?"
"As
a matter of fact, it has. Which is why I'm so sure our young
friend here has been imagining things.
You
see, as soon as Captain Williams's radio report was received, we sent a tow
ship out to the Anta-rean s orbit."
"Then the derelict was
brought in?" Joe Ito asked.
"Indeed
it was. There was no—uh, roller' aboard. There was no old man singing—uh,
French folk songs. There was no one at all, Coach Ito."
"They
just disappeared, sir," Steve said. "We know that."
Chandlur
lunged to his feet. "And what else do you know, young man?"
"Well,
that there was food in the dining area, that no personal belongings had been
packed, that the lifeboats were all in their tubes.
Don't you see, sir," he added earnestly, "everyone else aboard the
An-tares ship had already disappeared before I got there —just as Billgarr and
the rollers disappeared afterwards."
"But
I don't see that at all," Chandlur said promptly. Dropping the jewels, he
picked up a sheet of paper and scanned it. "Since the Liberté was an Olympic-bound ship, it was one of the tugs of the Olympic Patrol
and not the Ophiuchus space-navy that brought her in, and I have the captain's
report right here."
"Did you say Liberté?" Joe Ito asked.
Steve
blurted triumphantly, "That's a French name. Which proves that Billgarr
wasn't the only Antarcan with a knowledge of or an
interest in archaic French I"
"Perhaps it proves that," Chandlur
the Denebian admitted. "But this report I have here disproves everything
else you claim."
Steve and Joe Ito exchanged
blank glances.
Chandlur
went on, "Something—we don't know what—made the Antareans leave their
ship. But they didn't leave suddenly or mysteriously, as you claim. There was
no food on the tables on dining deck. Most personal belongings had been
packed." He ticked the points off slowly on his big fingers. "And
every lifeboat was gone from its tube."
"That's not
true!" Steve shouted.
Chandlur
looked at him blandly. "Are you calling
me a liar?"
"Ask Captain Williams.
He—"
"Was
injured, remaining in the Liberies air
lock while you explored the ship and made your report back to him. The only
thing he knows about the interior of the Liberte, young man, is what you told him."
"I
wasn't wearing my helmet. My intercom picked up Billgarr's voice. Captain
Williams heard it."
"We
already went over that, the Captain and I. He didn't hear it very distinctly.
He's not sure what he heard. Are you, young man? Are you?"
Steve
took a deep breath, let it out and said softly but grimly, "I told you
everything that happened—just as it happened. Every word of it is the
truth."
The
High Commissioner showed them the palms of his hands. "Not according to my
report."
"Then the report's
mistaken."
"Easy, Steve,"
Joe Ito cautioned.
"How
can I take it easy? Don't you see—contact with an extra-human race could be the
greatest thing that happened to mankind since the advent of star travel."
"If
there were an extra-human race," the High Commissioner pointed out.
"Why
are you trying to cover it up?" Steve blurted. "Why?"
Chandlur
shrugged massively, then told Steve, "Will you wait in the anteroom a
moment? I'd like a word with your coach."
When
the door had shut behind Steve, Chandlur asked Joe Ito, "Have you thought
of having him psycho-tested? The journey through subspace sometimes—"
"Steve's
a very stable boy," Joe Ito said. "And very
intelligent. True, he has a tremendous curiosity and—well, sense of
wonder, but—"
"Sense of wonder? Or overworked imagination? Well, I leave
that to you, Coach. But I don't want young Frazer to contaminate the other
Olympic athletes with his story. I expect that will be your responsibility."
Joe
Ito nodded slowly. The High Commissioner's parting shot about his
responsibility also signified Joe Ito's dismissal. A moment later he went
outside and joined Steve.
"We'd better get back
to Earthtown," he said.
"And just ignore what
happened?"
Joe Ito scowled. "Can you think of
anything else to do?"
Outside,
the orange and white suns had set. The blue sun hung poised ten degrees off the
horizon. The air was hazy. In the blue twilight, the plastic buildings of
Ophiuchus City looked like bright blue bubbles. Ordinarily, the wonder of being
here, so far from home, on a strange world would have thrilled Steve. But now
he felt as if an intangible yet crushing weight were on his shoulders. He'd
seen Billgarr and the roller. No one else had seen them. No one believed or wanted
to believe him.
Drop the whole thing?
As
they waited for the jet-bus that would take them back to Earthtown, Steve knew
he never could do that.
He slept fitfully, and in the morning was at
the round window of the room he shared with Hunk, watching die orange and white
suns come up.
"They
give you a hard time?" Hunk wanted to know.
"The
High Commissioner thinks I imagined the whole thing."
"Well, did you?" "Hunk!
Not you, too?"
Hunk
changed the subject quickly. "I—saw Jane last night," he said. He was
blushing, Steve realized. "They held this dance and I danced with her a
couple of times. Gosh, she's a nice girl."
"Operator," Steve said, and they
smiled at each other, the tension between them suddenly and completely gone.
Hunk
said, "I don't care what you saw or what you think you saw, Stevie-boy. No
matter what," he added, shuffling his feet, the words not coming easily,
"I'm on your side. I want—you to know that, Steve. We're buddies. We're
going to stay buddies. Okay?"
Steve
couldn't talk right away. Hunk was the best friend he'd ever had, a real pal.
He
didn't know, until later that day, how important Hunk's loyalty was going to
be.
Coach Ito sent for Steve while he was going
over his space-gear after breakfast. He waved to Hunk who, wearing a sweatsuit,
was wrestling with the number two wrestler on the Earth team. Hunk waved back,
and went down on his rear with a thump. "Don't distract me,
Stevie-boy," he said, laughing. The last Steve saw of him before going to
find Joe Ito was a big Hunk Little, shoulder muscles
bulging, lifting the other Earth wrestler over his head like a sack of grain.
When
Steve reached Joe Ito's office at Earthtown, the coach's first words stunned
him.
"Steve, did you ever
race professionally?"
"Of
course not."
"You
sure?"
"Coach,"
Steve said, "you know my background as well as I know
it myself."
Coach Ito's eyes didn't leave Steve's.
"We've got trouble, Steve."
"What—what's the
matter?"
"A report from Olympic Headquarters in
Ophiu-chus City.
They accuse you of being a professional racer. They say unless we can disprove
the charge, you won't be eligible to compete in the games."
"But it's not true! I
never raced professionally."
Joe Ito shrugged
eloquently.
"Chandlur?" Steve asked him suddenly.
"No,
the report came from the chairman of the Eligibility Committee, a Fomalhautian
named Lin-kian. I've been in touch with him, but he won't tell me much, won't
reveal the source of the charges brought against you. That's standard
procedure, Steve. The last thing they'd want is an interstellar incident."
"Is there anything I
can do?"
"I've
already put a subspace radio call through to Earth, asking for your complete
file. All we can do meanwhile is wait. Are you sure
there's nothing in your past that—"
"I worked with my father on salvage and
mining," Steve said.
"In
a spacesuit?"
"Sure. In a spacesuit."
Joe
Ito threw up his hands. "Technically, that's the same thing. If you were
paid for any work done in a spacesuit, your eligibility's shot."
"But I wasn't paid!" Steve
protested. "Dad needed all the help he could get. I was going to junior
college at night on Ceres and helping Dad days and week ends."
"Can you prove he
never paid you?"
"Dad's dead," Steve
pointed out, his face grim.
"And he never paid
you?"
"Not
a single solar credit. He paid my tuition at Ceres Junior College,
though."
"That's
different. That's not pay for professional services rendered." Joe Ito
stood up. "We'll have to wait for a return of my radio message, Steve.
Meanwhile, they don't want you to work out."
Steve
felt as if the whole world were dropping out from under him. "I guess I
don't have to work out for a few days," he heard himself saying.
Joe
Ito wasn't finished. "Here's the tough part, Steve. If we can't get
contrary proof, and soon, the Eligibility Committee insists that you ship out
to Earth on the next outbound vessel."
"You mean leave
Ophiuchus?"
Joe Ito nodded slowly.
"But
I . . . don't you see? It's Chandlur. It has to be Chandlur. For some reason
he's putting a lid on this Antares ship business. The salvage tow's report
contradicted mine completely. It was a false report. And since I'm the only one
on Ophiuchus who knows the truth about the Antares ship, this is Chandlur's way
of getting rid of me."
"That's
a pretty rugged accusation. You have any idea why?"
"No," Steve
admitted after a while. He went to
the door. "But I'm going to find out. I've
got to find out."
"Let's
hope you do, for your sake as well as Earth's. Roy Ambler can't hold your
rockets, Steve. We'll lose a first place in racing if you can't compete."
When
Steve opened the door, Joe Ito added, "But don't get yourself into any
more trouble, Steve. You're in enough already."
That, Steve thought, was
putting it mildly.
Chapter 4- Trouble on Olympus
I |
he rest
of that day passed like a nightmare to Steve. Hunk Little
tried to reassure him. The report from Earth, Hunk said, was bound to clear
him. But Steve didn't see it that way at all, for no one could establish
whether or not his father had paid him, and on just such a technicality his
eligibility for the Olympics might go down the drain.
After
lunch Steve went out to the spaceport and watched two big interstellar ships,
bringing Olympic athletes from the Sirius and Procyon Systems, come roaring
down to the pits. Then he watched the athletes file out with their gay
planetary standards fluttering in the wind. The Sirians, boys and girls
marching together in double-file in their vivid purple jumpers were singing,
their voices swelling richly and carried to Steve on the wind so that he caught
the last part of the refrain:
"Oh,
Sirius is far away, far away, far away! We've journeyed to the Milky Way, the Milky
Way, the Milky Way , .
The melody was a stirring one. Steve felt
suddenly envious of the young Sirian athletes who would compete in the games.
As they filed by, some of them smiled at Steve. A pretty girl waved.
"... far away, far away, far away!"
they sang, and as quickly as it had come, Steve's
envy was gone. Even if his own part in it were jeopardized, even if he might
not be permitted to remain on Ophiuchus long enough to see the games, let alone
compete in them, the thought of athletes from all the outworlds gathered here
to symbolize the unity of mankind across the vast, unthinkable distances of the
galaxy was a glorious one.
"... journeyed to the
Milky Way, the Milky Way, the Milky Way . .
Steve felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned
and saw Syrtis Williams standing there, a look of concern on his space-tanned,
gaunt face, his lean body erect and tall, his eyes
deep-set and smouldering with the wanderlust that grips all Space Captains
sooner or later.
"Heard
you've had some trouble, boy," Syrtis Williams said.
"I'm glad to see you
up and around, sir."
"Speed-time healing. I spent a night in the sick bay. For my
injured shoulder it was the equivalent of three weeks in traction. Amazing,
isn't it?"
"I—I wish you'd been able to explore the
Antares ship with me, sir. Then all this wouldn't have—"
"I
know. Joe Ito briefed me. I've been meaning to talk to you, but a group of us
have been busy all day fitting out a salvage vessel to bring the Antares ship
in,"
Steve didn't answer at first. Then he gasped,
"What did you say?"
"We're
fitting out a salvage ship to bring in the derelict."
"But
Chandlur—he's the High Commissioner—told me that a tug already brought it
in."
Syrtis
Williams shook his head. "That's not true. You ought to know yourself a
salvage operation's a tricky business. Just getting ready for it takes
time."
"Then Chandlur lied, Captain. But why?"
"The
story I get is that a tug did go
out to the Antares ship. Spent a few hours there, then
came back."
"A Denebian tug?"
"So
they tell me. And one thing I wanted to tell you, son. Maybe the Space Captains are a crazy breed of men, and maybe I'm
the craziest of the lot, but I believe you. I believe what happened on the
Antares ship happened just as you told me."
"Thank
you, Captain," Steve said softly. "I appreciate that. And sir, we've
caught Chandlur in a lie, because he told Coach Ito and me they'd brought the
ship in."
Captain
Williams shook his head. "So what? He'll deny it,
that's all. I guess he didn't know I was one of the Captains fitting out the
salvage ship, or he never would have said it. But what difference does it make?
A Denebian tug went out there, stayed long enough to see to it that the
Antarean ship jibes with Chandlur's story."
"But why, Captain Williams? Can you at least tell me why?"
Captain
Williams scowled. "I wish
I could. I wish
I could tell you the whole of it. I can tell you this much, though. With Earth
now a depleted backwater planet, Deneb and Antares are vying for galactic
leadership. Not just in the games, though they're the two favorites. In everything from interstellar trade on down, son. And I
don't have to point out that the derelict ship is Antarean, while that High
Commissioner of yours is a Denebian."
"But that doesn't
explain—"
"It
hardly explains anything. I know that. But it does give us the general picture.
And whatever his reasons, Chandlur is worried enough to have invented that
cock-and-bull story about your lack of eligibility. He wants you out of here—in
a hurry."
Steve
asked, getting the words out quickly, "Captain, if you were in my place,
if you'd seen what I know I saw, and if they told you to leave Ophiuchus, would
you leave—just like that?"
Syrtis
Williams chuckled softly. His eyes were warm when they looked at Steve.
"I'm a Space Captain. We're a cocky- breed, son. The answer to your
question is no, I wouldn't leave. They'd have to drag me off Ophiuchus."
"That's
all I wanted to know," Steve said. For the first time since his meeting
with the High Commissioner, he began to feel just a little bit better.
"But
it isn't all you'll have
to know. I'll keep my ear
to the ground, boy. Anything funny going on, chances are the Space Captains
will be the first to know. And if you need any help, any kind of help at all,
the only thing you have to do is holler. Now I'd better be getting back to that
salvage ship."
Steve
thanked him and watched Syrtis Williams walk toward the blasting pits, a tall
and lonely figure on the wide, seared concrete apron of the spaceport.
"You
see Hunk around?" Joe Ito asked Steve when he returned to Earthtown.
"No I haven't, Coach."
"Funny. He's been gone
most of the day."
"Any reply from Earth
on my eligibility, Coach?"
"Not
yet. It ought to come by night." Joe Ito looked up into the sky, where
Ophiuchus's three suns shone dazzlingly. "If there was
night around here."
Joe
Ito went to work with the gymnasts, and Steve went to
the rec hall to look for Hunk. The big, homely wrestler wasn't there.
"Tough
break, Frazer," a sprinter said when he saw Steve come in. "Weren't
really a pro, were you?"
"No."
"Keep your chin up.
It'll come out okay."
Steve wished he could feel
as optimistic, himself.
Hunk Little came in
late that night. Unable to sleep, Steve had drawn the curtain back to watch the
strange blue twilight of the Ophiuchus night. The stars were never visible from
this planet of eternal day.
The door opened suddenly,
and Hunk was there.
"Stevie-boy? You up?"
"Uh-huh."
Hunk was excited. "Listen, I did some
spying for you and—" "Spying?"
"Roy
Ambler. You know, he was acting like cock-of-the-walk, big-talking how he was
going to be Earths number one spacesuit racer."
"He
was? I don't get it. It isn't official yet. Some of the guys know the hot water
I'm in, but Coach hasn't said anything definite."
"I
know," Hunk said
triumphantly. "But there was another dance tonight over at Earthtown
II—this afternoon, really, and we could eat dinner over there and everything.
Anyway, Jane told me how Roy Ambler was boasting he'd be Earth's first racer,
so I decided to make like an agent provoker or whatever you call it."
"Agent provocateur?" Steve supplied. He couldn't help smiling, and Hunk smiled with him.
"That's
it. Anyhow, what I did was corner Roy Ambler at the dance and tell him you were cleared. His face fell so far he almost
had to pick it up off the floor. A few minutes later, he got out of there.
Still making like a whatchacallit, I followed him."
"And?" Steve asked tensely.
"And
he made a beeline to a viz-phone. Three guesses who he called—and the first two
don't count."
"I don't know,"
Steve said, puzzled.
Hunk
Little gave him an exasperated stare. "The
trouble with you, Stevie-boy, is you don't have a larcenous atom in your body.
He called Chandlur, naturally."
"Chandlur!" Steve gasped.
"I
didn't hear all of it, but I heard enough to know who's been telling stories to
the High Commissioner. I heard Roy say, T thought you told me he'd be disqualified
on the information I'd given you.' Those were the exact words. Anyhow, Chandlur
must have reassured him, because Roy left the phone all smiles. But the
important thing is, we know now it's been Roy trying
to foul you up all along."
"I guess I never
should have fought with him."
"What?
You should have pushed his smug face in for him."
Roy
Ambler supplying the false information out of spite, Steve thought, and the
High Commissioner acting on it—for exactly what reason? He didn't know, but he
knew he had to find out. He also knew he had to learn the truth about Billgarr
and the roller, for everyone but Syrtis Williams discounted his story, and the
last few hours he'd almost begun to doubt it himself. Besides, Chandlur's
reason for wanting to deport him had to tie in with the mystery of the Antares
ship. Except for that, Chandlur couldn't possibly have anything against him.
". . . so," Hunk was saying, "I've got my spies
out."
"What? I'm sorry,
Hunk. What did you say?"
"Jane and some of her girl friends. A few of them had dates with some Ophiuchan
guys tonight, and one of them was even dating a Denebian." Hunk grinned.
"We'll have a whole platoon of spies working for us."
Tm
not sure I like that," Steve replied. "Chandlur isn't playing games.
They could get in trouble."
Just
then there was a knock at the door. Hunk and Steve looked at each other. A
girl's voice called softly, "Hunk?"
Hunk's
jaw dropped. "Hey, that's Jane!" he whispered excitedly to Steve.
"She knows she can't come here."
"Hunk? Are you going to let me in? Hunk? It's important."
Hunk's
face looked darker in the blue light that streamed in through the window, and
Steve realized his friend was blushing. "If they find out she's here at
Earthtown," Hunk muttered, "they'd ship her out faster than—"
"Faster than they'd
ship me out?" Steve supplied.
Hunk
was wringing his big, strong hands together, gaping at the door in indecision.
"Go on back, Jane!" he called. "Go on back before they catch you
and you have to answer to May Birch." May Birch was the Earthgirl coach.
"I'm
only doing what you said," Jane answered at once. "I learned
something about your roommate. It's important and it can't wait."
While they were talking, Steve had climbed
into
his jumper. He didn't want the girl to get into
trouble on his account, but she was probably safer inside then-room than
outside in the hall. Steve went to the door and opened it.
He
saw a small, blond girl with a pert face and big eyes that were now angry.
"What's the matter with that Hunk Little?"
she demanded caustically. "Does he want May
Birch to find out I was here?"
"I—" Hunk began, searching for words.
"Wrestlers,"
the girl said. "What can you expect from wrestlers?"
"Aw, listen—"
Hunk complained.
The girl said, "I'm
Jane. You must be Steve Frazer."
Steve nodded.
"Well,
at least shut the door behind me," she told him, smiling up into his eyes.
When he did, she added, smiling no longer, "Steve, you're in
trouble."
"I know I am."
"You don't know how serious it is—now.
At the dance I told Hunk one of the girls had a date with a Denebian boy."
She smiled again, almost archly. "What I didn't tell him was that the girl
was me."
"Hey!" Hunk
cried.
Jane
ignored him. "Anyway, here's what happened. He showed me around
Denebtown's rec hall, all chaperoned by May Birch's opposite number and
everything. Then I used the female's prerogative—I went to powder my nose. You
see, they said the High Commissioner had come from his office and was spending
the night in Denebtown."
"He's not supposed to do that,"
Steve pointed out.
"People
would think he wasn't impartial as High Commissioner."
"That's
just what I figured. But after what Hunk had told me, I thought it had to mean
Mr. Chandlur was conducting some business he couldn't conduct from Olympic Headquarters."
"Pretty sharp,"
Hunk said grudgingly.
"I—ah—managed to get lost," Jane went on.
"Lost in just the right direction—which was straight to where Mr. Chandlur
was staying."
"No!" Hunk said,
aghast.
"Oh,
yes. When I got there he was issuing orders to a bunch of stiffs and—"
"You mean
wrestlers?" Hunk asked, insulted.
"Will you
let me finish, Hunk Little? No, I don't mean
wrestlers. They were too old, for one thing. They looked like—well,
thugs." She glanced at Steve, quickly, anxiously. "I don't remember
his exact words, but he was telling them something like: 'The Earth coach won't
cooperate, but we have word that they won't be able to clear Frazer in Sol
System, at least not right away. I want Frazer off this planet, and I want him
off right away.' Tonight, he said. Tonight, Hunk!"
"Why didn't you tell
us sooner?" Hunk demanded.
"Because
you wouldn't let me," Jane said, arms akimbo. "You didn't even want to let me in
here."
"Those stiffs are
coming here?" Steve asked her.
"I
think so. Once you've been deported, Coach Ito won't be able to do much about
it. But what's so important about getting rid of you, Steve?"
"It's a long story,
and I don't know the half of it."
Hunk asked, "What're
you going to do?"
"Syrtis
Williams," Steve said promptly. "He's at the spaceport. I'll go to
him."
"And hide?" Hunk
wanted to know.
"If I have to. Until Coach Ito has a chance to clear me in Sol
System."
"Okay,"
Hunk said. "The spaceport it is. What are we waiting for?"
Steve shook his head. "You two have done
enough for me already. I can make it there on my own."
"Against
a bunch of Denebian stiffs?" Hunk said.
"I don't see any
Denebian stiffs."
"Yet"
Jane told Steve ominously.
"Believe me, they're coming. They have orders to shanghai you aboard an
outbound ship, Steve."
"I said you've done
enough—"
"Stow
it," Hunk told his friend, and went to the door. He opened it, peered
outside and said, "Coast's clear. Let's go."
The
three of them went along the hall to the stairs and down them. It was very
quiet. Steve wished it were dark, too, because darkness, now, would be his
ally. But beyond the uncurtained glassite expanse of Earthtown's main hall, the
blue twilight glowed eerily.
Steve
jumped when a voice called his name, "Steve! Over here."
It
was Joe Ito. His eyes widened a little when he saw Jane, but he didn't make any
comment. "Steve, listen. I just got a call from Linkian. He's the
Fomal-hautian in charge of eligibility, remember?" Steve nodded.
"He's
a pretty square guy. Not on our side necessarily, but he doesn't like
Chandlur. And the High Commissioner, he said, took off for Denebtown tonight. I
don't like that, Steve. I—"
"I know, Coach. Jane here told me."
"Mata
Hari in a swimming pool," Hunk Little said
proudly.
"Earth
can't substantiate my eligibility?" Steve asked the coach.
"Not right away, they can't. Chandlur's taking that as a negative. He
shouldn't."
"He's
doing more than that. He's sent some thugs here to shanghai me aboard an
outbound ship and—"
"He can't do
that!" Joe Ito cried. He was shocked.
"He's doing it, Mr.
Ito," Jane said.
"Then
get out of here, Steve," Joe Ito said at once. "Don't even tell me
where you're going. I don't want to know. Get out of here, get lost and stay
lost. I'll take this up with Linkian in the morning."
Steve
knew that wouldn't do any good. If the Denebian thugs failed in their efforts
to shanghai him, Chandlur would simply disavow them. And if they succeeded,
Chandlur would say they were acting in the best interests of the Interstellar
Olympics, would probably manufacture a story to prove that Steve was a
troublemaker the same way he'd altered the situation aboard the Antares ship.
But at least Steve knew
Joe
Ito was on his side, and in favor of his going into hiding.
"What
are you waiting for?" Joe Ito asked anxiously. "Get going."
With
Hunk and Jane, Steve left through the front door of Earthtown. It was
surprisingly cool. A brisk wind brought the scent of Ophiuchus's lush tropical
vegetation to them, and Steve could see the great trees which lined the road
leading to Ophiuchus City. Beards of a vivid orange variant of Spanish moss
hung from their branches.
"It's a long
walk," Steve said.
"We need the
exercise," Jane told him.
"We'd
better keep in the woods," Hunk suggested. "They'll be coming along
the road."
Steve
shook his head. "You two don't have to come with me. You know where I'm
going, Hunk. I'll keep in touch."
But
Hunk Little did some head shaking of his own.
"We're going to take you there, Stevie-boy—signed, sealed and
delivered."
They
started walking briskly along the path that led to the Ophiuchus City road and
the dense woods on either side of it. They were less than a hundred yards from
the woods when a jet-car roared up the road toward them.
This
hour of the night, Steve knew, it had to be Chandlur's stiffs.
"Run for it!"
Hunk shouted.
They started to run. Jane
took half a dozen strides, then stumbled and tripped.
She cried out, and Steve and Hunk went back for her.
The jet-car lurched to a
stop.
"There he is!" a
voice cried.
In
despair, Steve realized that Chandlur must have shown them his Olympic
registration photo.
Three
big men got out of the jet-car and sprinted toward them. Jane was on her feet.
"Run
for it!" Hunk shouted. "They're in for a surprise—Earth-style."
But
Steve couldn't just run and leave his friends there. Grimly, he waited with
Jane and Hunk.
CHaptCt 5 The Coalsack Again
I |
he first
man wore a black jumper. He was very big and, like the others, he had the bald
head of a Denebian. Hunk didn't wait. He ran to meet him, and they collided all
but head on. Steve saw a flurry of arms and legs. The Denebian roared in
surprise and possibly in pain. The next thing Steve knew, Hunk had lifted the
big Denebian bodily and hurled him at his companions.
Arms
flailing air, the thrown Denebian struck and all three went sprawling. But they
were up again soon and, sensing that Hunk Little was
the tougher of their adversaries, two of them circled him warily. The third
made for Steve, who stood with his fists balled, waiting. From the corner of
his eye he could see Jane sprinting back toward Earthtown.
Then
the Denebian closed with him. Steve felt the air rush from his lungs. The
Denebian just grunted. He was a big, powerfully built man who must have
outweighed Steve by fifty pounds. His heavy arms circled Steves
ribs, and they fell that way, Steve on the bottom.
Jane almost collided with Coach Ito in the
main hall of Earthtown. He caught her in his arms and the half-smile on his
lips faded when he saw her face.
"What's the
matter?"
"Denebiansl"
she panted. "They . . . outside . . . Steve . . ."
"Stay
here!" Joe Ito warned, and ran for the door. But Jane rushed outside with
him.
Steve and the muscular Denebian rolled over
and over on the ground. Vaguely, Steve was aware of Hunk Little
holding his own with the other two assailants. Then his senses blurred as his
head struck something hard, and the Denebian's weight pinned him to the ground.
Powerful hands closed on his throat.
"Hunk!' he managed to
call once.
After
what seemed a long time he felt the pressure leave his throat. The Denebian
seemed to sail through air all but weightlessly—to land in a clump of bushes
near the side of the path.
Steve
got up slowly, expecting to see Hunk standing there. But he saw Joe Ito and
Jane.
"Judo/'
Jane said, staring wonderingly at the coach. "I
never saw anything like it."
Neither, apparently, had the Denebians. With the odds now even at three against
three, the fight had gone out of them. When the man he had thrown climbed
groggily to his feet, Joe Ito greeted him with a repeat performance. But Steve
didn't wait to see it. He went to help Hunk, and sent one of his friend's
assailants sprawling with a right cross.
The
Denebian got up and ran for the jet-car. Hunk's single remaining attacker had
already fled to it, and as Hunk began to chase him Joe Ito shouted,
"Save
it for the games!''
But
Hunk didn't break his stride. The third Denebian reached the car a moment
before he did, and the door slammed. The engine whined and roared. Hunk ate
dust as the car sped away.
"At
least we gave them something they'll remember," Hunk said as the car
disappeared around a curve in the road.
Joe
Ito dusted his hands off. "What I said still stands, Steve. Get out of
here. Go where you'll be safe. I don't want to know where, because in my
official capacity I may be ordered to produce you— and I don't want to be able
to. Hunk can keep you informed of what's going on here.'
Steve
nodded grimly. Although Chandlur's attempt to shanghai him aboard an outbound
ship had failed, he knew the Denebian would not give up. His next attempt might
be made under the sanction of the High Commissioner's office itself, and
Steve's only protection, then, would be in temporary flight.
He
shook hands with Joe Ito, who said, "Don't think we're going to forget you
here. I'll do everything I can, Steve, to clear you."
Hunk
and Steve walked Jane back to Earthtown II. "Where are you going?"
she asked them.
"Can't tell you,"
Hunk said. "You heard the coach."
She
gave him an exasperated stare. "Oh, I wish I were a boy!"
Hunk grinned at Steve. The fight had
temporarily dispelled his usual shyness with girls. "I don't," he said.
Waving, Jane went inside.
"Now
what?"
Hunk asked.
"I'm going to find
Captain Williams if I can."
"It's
a pretty long walk to Ophiuchus City and the spaceport."
"You
don't have to come," Steve said. "You've all done enough to help me
already."
"You
bet your bottom credit I'm coming. I didn't mean it that way. I meant if
Chandlur's stiffs decide to wait for us down the road—"
"We'll
take the jet-bus then. Come on. And—thanks, Hunk."
Twenty
minutes later they boarded the bus which stopped near Earthtown. The bus had
two tramlike cars, and Steve and Hunk climbed on the first one.
Just
before the bus started, a figure detached itself from the deep blue shadows in
front of Earthtown. It ran for the second car and got on as the bus began to
move.
A tall, thin boy with red
hair and freckles. Neither Steve nor Hunk saw him. He was Roy Ambler.
The
narrow streets of the spacemen's quarter of Ophiuchus City ended at the edge of
the spaceport. The all-night joints that lined them were garishly lighted.
Spacemen moved in small packs from one source of light to another. Steve heard
shouts, singing, laughter.
"Don't they ever
sleep?" Hunk wanted to know.
"Not
between journeys. Even though we've come a long way and space travel's about as
safe as we can make it, every blastoff is a calculated risk," Steve
explained, much as his father had explained it to him in answer to the same
question years ago in Ceres City, Sol System. "Between journeys they live
to the hilt."
They
were heading from the spaceport to a rooming house on Tarmac Street. At the
spaceport a Sirian had given them Syrtis Williams's address, and for the last
half hour they'd been making their slow way there through the throngs that
crowded spacemen's quarter at all hours of the day and the arbitrary night in
Ophiuchus City.
"Want
to ship out for the Rodan Planets, mates?" a seedy-looking character asked
them. "Pay's good."
Steve
shook his head and the man went away. Another man, very fat, waddled up to
them, "Just in time for the Show of the Worlds, men. Very
entertaining. If you'll just come this way.
One credit admission and—"
This
time Hunk shook his head, and the fat man waddled on to find other customers,
without even breaking stride. At the next corner a crowd had gathered to watch
two men fighting. Further along Tarmac Street, a group of Centaurian Olympic
athletes was taking in the sights. They greeted Hunk and Steve and asked them
to join the party. Steve declined politely, but he suddenly realized
then-Olympic jumpers—in the blue, white and red of the
Earth
team—made them stand out. They'd be a cinch to follow.
Hunk,
understandably, wanted to gawk at the sights. But Steve hurried him along.
Half
a minute after they had passed the Cen-taurians, another figure in blue, white
and red came up. He politely refused an offer to join the Centaurian party and
hurried on.
"Did
you see his hair?" one of the Centaurians asked another.
"Amazing," was
the reply.
In the Centauri System, red
hair was a rarity.
"Here we are,"
Steve told Hunk a few minutes later.
The
place was a large bubble of plastic like all the buildings on Ophiuchus. It
stood on Tarmac Street at the far end of the spacemen's quarter, almost two miles
from the spaceport itself and half that far from the amusement center.
Steve
thumbed the door buzzer, and they waited. A moon-faced
Ophiuchan came to the door.
"Yes?"
"We're
looking for Captain Williams," Steve said. "The
Earthman?" "That's right." "Not in."
"Well,
may we wait?" Steve asked. The moon-faced man took in the color of their
jumpers.
"Earth
team, are you?" "Yes. We-" "Stay right here."
Moonface went away. Steve looked at Hunk,
shrugging. The door remained open. In a little while the two friends heard
footsteps approaching from inside.
Moonface
didn't come back. A short, utterly bald man in a gray jumper appeared in the
round doorway. If his skin weren't bronzed and leathery, Steve would have taken
him for a Denebian.
"Name's
Mackald," he announced in a crisp, raspy voice. "You
Frazer by any chance?"
"Yes," Steve
said. "How did you know?"
"Cap'n
had a hunch you might show up here. If you were in trouble.
You in trouble?"
"We'd like to see
Captain Williams," Steve said.
"But are you in
trouble?" Mackald persisted.
Steve
countered the question with one of his own. "Who are you?"
"Served under Captain Williams once in
Sagittarius.
Right smack in the heart of the swarm, it was. We had us a time, you bet."
Mackald scowled darkly. "Got myself grounded after
that." He thumped his right leg. "Bad break in three places.
Couldn't get to speed-time soon enough. She hurts in high-G." He added, as
if as an afterthought, "Captain Williams saved my life."
Steve didn't say anything.
"Know
what the Cap'n told me tonight? He says if an Earthman named Frazer shows up,
you do whatever he wants, Mackald. Whatever he needs—if he's
in need of help. Which means I'm your man, Frazer.
When a Denebian's life is saved, he doesn't forget. You bet he doesn't."
"You're a
Denebian?" Steve asked.
Mackald
scowled at him. "What's the matter, did I say the
wrong thing?" Mackald chuckled. "The way you're looking at me, a
Denebian's a bug-eyed monster. Well, I'm from Deneb and proud of it."
"Maybe we better come
back later," Hunk offered.
But
Steve shook his head. One bad Denebian like Chandlur didn't make the whole
population of the Deneb System suspect. And besides, Mackald couldn't have
known Steve was in trouble and might come looking for Syrtis Williams—unless
the Space Captain had told him.
"No,"
Steve said, making up his mind. "We'll stick around."
"Then
come on in," Mackald invited, stepping back with a limp. "Had my own
ship once," he said. "Interstellar it was. Till I
hooked up with Syrtis Williams." He lowered his voice to a
confidential whisper and went on, "Still got a ship. Interplanetary,
though. Beat-up old tub, but I like her. Say, you fellows wouldn't be in need
of a ship, would you?" he said hopefully. "I can space out to just
about anywhere, five-billion-mile radius though. Wouldn't
cost you a credit since you're friends of Syrtis Williams's."
The
offer surprised Steve. It also intrigued him. He knew that Chandlur had already
sent a tug out to the derelict Antares ship, knew that the tug's crew had cut
the lifeboats loose and changed things in general to make it appear as if the
Antareans had abandoned ship the usual way. And Steve also knew that space
salvage was a complicated operation which would not get underway until a
minutia of requirements had been met on the ground. In fact, if Chandlur had
any influence with the Ophiuchan port officials, he might delay the salvage
attempt indefinitely.
"Did
you mean that?" Steve asked Mackald. "About the
ship?"
Mackald
slapped a hand against his injured leg. "Did I mean it? Boy, I never meant something so much in my life. You need a ship? Now? Tonight?"
"Steve,
we better wait for Captain Williams," Hunk warned.
But
Steve shook his head stubbornly. "Chandlur already changed things on the
derelict," he said. "If we can get out there and find some proof that
the roller really exists, if we can present our proof when we got back—it would
be too late for Chandlur to try to stop us. Don't you see? Don't you see,
Hunk?"
"By the Dog Star!" Mackald cried tremulously. "You really do want a ship. Want to know something? I'm kind of a joke here around the
spaceport. License is revoked, on account of this leg. I'm planetbound, boys. For life. First tiling I ever ask a guy is,
does he need a ship. They all just look at me and shake their fool heads."
He licked his lips. "You really mean to say you need a ship? You need
Mackald's ship?"
"If
you'll take me," Steve said quickly, before Hunk could argue with him.
"There's a derelict out near the dark nebulae—"
Mackald
nodded eagerly. "Cap'n told me about her. Antares ship, smack on the edge
of the coalsack nebulae. I can take you there, you
bet."
Hunk was tugging at Steve's arm, but Steve
asked, "Tonight?"
"Any time you
say!" Mackald said triumphantiy.
"Where's your ship?"
Steve asked.
"At the port. Friend keeps her for me. She can hit 150,000
rn.p.s., boy. A tight little ship,
if old. She'd get you out to the coalsack
inside of six hours, that's a promise. You really mean you want to go?"
"I really mean it,
yes," Steve said slowly.
"Listen—" Hunk
began.
"I
don't expect you to go with me," Steve told his friend.
"Oh, yeah?" Hunk bristled. "If you're crazy enough
to go out there tonight, you think I'm crazy enough to let you go alone? If you go,
I'm going."
"But you—"
"But nothing," Hunk said firmly.
Mackald's rasping voice, a little choked with emotion, said, "Then
what are we waiting for?"
It was a spaceship. Only
just a spaceship. It had stout, stubby lines, some of its plates were
buckled and rusted, the nose was crushed in as if it
had hit an asteroid head on. If it ran at all, Steve told himself with dismay, it would be because Mackald had managed to hold it
together with spit and string.
"Beauty, isn't
she?" Mackald rasped.
"Beauty,"
said the Ophiuchan who had led them to the bubble-hangar,
"is in the eyes of the beholder."
Mackald
ignored the remark. "How soon can you get her on gantry?" he asked.
"Give me forty-five minutes," the
Ophiuchan replied, "and she'll be as ready for space as shell ever be."
Mackald
nodded happily. The hangar door slid noiselessly back as the Ophiuchan went to
work. In five minutes he returned on the saddle of a jet-tractor, and with
reverent care Mackald made the battered spacetub fast to its cables.
Moments
later, Mackald's ancient ship was wheeled out into the twilight. Across the
concrete apron of the spaceport a launching gantry waited in dark silhouette
over the blasting pit.
"I
know it's the middle of the night," Roy Ambler said stubbornly, "but
I've got to see the High Commissioner. It's very important."
Chandlur's
Denebian servant looked at him. "It had better be. Wait here."
Ten
minutes later, Roy had told his story to Chandlur. "So," he finished,
"they're out at the spaceport right now." He glanced at his chrono.
"If they maintain schedule, they'll be blasting off in less than fifteen
minutes. We've got to stop them, sir."
Chandlur
seated his big bulk at a desk, dialed a radiophone.
"Hello," he said. "This is the Olympic Commissioner. There's a
ship under the ownership of a Denebian named Mackald. . . .
Yes, I'll wait. ... Is that a fact?
You're sure?" A smile tugged at the corners of Chandlur's lips. "Very well. No, nothing. Of course
not. Just a matter of curiosity. Thank
you."
"You didn't tell them
to stop the ship," Roy said.
Chandlur's
smile had grown. "It really means a great deal to you to be Earth's first
spacesuit racer, doesn't it?"
"Never mind about that, sir. I'm doing my duty." "Yes, your
duty. Of course."
"Aren't
you going to stop that ship?" Roy asked. Chandlur shook his head.
"No. No, I'm not." "But-"
"Be quiet, will
you?"
"I don't get it,"
Roy Ambler said.
"Mackald's
ship is unlicensed. Mackald doesn't have a licence either. If they blast off,
they'll be guilty of a crime against the Ophiuchan authorities."
Roy Ambler was beginning to
smile now too.
"We're
going to let them blast off," Chandlur said. "And we're going to tell
the Ophiuchan authorities where they can be found in space." Chandlur
picked up the radiophone again. "Ambler, from now on you don't have to
worry. You can consider yourself Earth's number one racer." Looking at his
chrono, he put the phone down. "Let's give them all the time they'll
need,' he said.
"To hang themselves," Roy Ambler added quietly.
With a roar, and a lurch, and a sustained
rattle, Mackald's ancient ship lifted from the gantry.
It
reminded Steve of the first spaceships he remembered—the obsolescent tubs his
father had used in Sol System's asteroid belt when Steve was four or five years
old. If anything, Mackald's little ship groaned and creaked even more.
After
acceleration, Hunk Little gave Steve a worried look.
Steve shrugged, and then Hunk was smiling as he broke the tension all of them
felt with the age-old words, "I'll tell you one thing, she'll never
fly."
Awhile
later, Steve asked Mackald where the radar screen was located.
"Well
now, Sonny," the old Denebian replied, "that's something I never did
get to tell you. Radar's all shot. We don't have any."
"Don't have any?"
Hunk demanded.
"Seat-of-the-pants
reckoning," Mackald told them. "Don't you worry none.
I've got a fix on that position in space you gave me. We'll find the derelict,
or my name isn't Mackald."
"Mackald,"
Steve said, looking at the instrument panel. "Mackald, does the fuel gauge
work?"
"Sure does."
Steve
made some rapid computations. They had enough fuel to reach the orbit of the
Antarean ship and to return—with perhaps two hundred million miles in reserve.
We'd better find it, Steve
thought, on the first try.
The Ophiuchus police cruiser was a sleek teardrop
of a ship. It left Ophiuchus spaceport a half hour after Mackald's old tub, and
within moments after blastoff it had a radar-fix established.
"Where
are they heading, sir?" a lieutenant of the Ophiuchus police asked his
captain.
"Outbound. Straight
for the coalsack, it looks like."
"The
coalsack?
Why?"
"We'll find out,"
the captain said.
For Steve, rocketing across deep space here
at the fringe of the dark nebulae in a spacesuit, it was like living his first
encounter with the Antares ship all over again.
Maekald's
dead reckoning had been perfect; they'd found the Antares ship and had matched
its orbit just under six hours from blastoff. Now Steve, as he was approaching
the air lock, was wondering, Chand-lur says I'm lying, Coach Ito and the others
and even Hunk think Tm mistaken. What if they're right
and I'm wrong?
He
dispelled those thoughts from his mind, but it was with uneasiness that he
unfastened the lugs of the Antares ship's air lock.
Inside
the lock, he stood absolutely still for a moment. He heard the air hiss in the
patched space-suit Mackald had given him. He took a deep breath —and then the
familiar red glow lighted up the air lock.
Removing
his helmet, Steve opened the inner door. Billgarr was waiting for him on the
other side. "Wondering when you'd get back," he said. "The
roller told me—"
"Gosh,
is it good to see you!" Steve blurted. "I was beginning to think Id imagined it all."
Steve
hadn't realized how old Billgarr was. His wizened face broke into a puckered
grin as he said,
"Imagined
me? Would take some imagining,
I suspect."
"Is the roller
here?"
"Nope,"
Billgarr said almost cheerfully. "But he told me the next time anyone
showed up I could go down to Ophiuchus and tell my story. Rollers are almost
finished measuring."
"Measuring?"
Steve said.
Billgarr
winked at him. "Let's not start that again. Ready to
take me down?"
Steve
nodded earnestly, then frowned. "The only trouble
is, Mr. Billgarr—"
"No mister. It's just
Billgarr."
"The
only trouble is, I already told as much of it as I knew, and they wouldn't
believe me."
Billgarr
snorted. "They'll believe me. Let's
go low decks and fix me up with a spacesuit. You'll have to show me how to use
one of those contraptions, though. Never have."
Steve
assured him it was easy—as long as he didn't try anything fancy.
"All
right if I take my gee-tar?"
Steve
assumed he was referring to the twanging instrument and said he could take
anything he pleased. Ten minutes later, while Steve held his guitar, Billgarr
was climbing awkwardly into a spacesuit.
"You
ought to try tcleportation sometime," he said. "It beats this all
hollow."
Billgarr
reminded Steve of someone. At first he didn't know who, then it came to him.
Put a frizzled wreath of white hair on the Denebian Mackald's head, add some
color to his skin and some lines to his face, and he'd look amazingly like
Billgarr. Even their voices and way of talking were somewhat similar.
Impatiently, Steve thrust the pointless thought aside, for they had work to do.
What
he didn't know was that the thought—and the resemblance—would become important
later.
Steve
helped Billgarr fasten his helmet. Making a motion with his own glove, he showed
the old An-tarean how to switch on his intercom.
"Am I coming
through?" Steve asked.
"Loud
and clear," Billgarr said. "I still say tele-portation—"
His
voice trailed off, for they both heard a thumping sound on the hull of the
Antares ship.
"Don't
tell me we're being boarded again?" Billgarr asked. "Friend
of yours?"
Steve
shook his head. His had been the only space-suit aboard Mackald's nameless old
spacetub. Slowly the lugs on the outer air lock door began to turn.
"Roller?" Steve asked Billgarr tensely.
"Impossible. I told
you they teleport."
The
door swung in. Steve saw three figures in the silver spacesuits of the
Ophiuchus police.
"You
from that unregistered ship?" a voice asked over Steve's suit intercom.
Steve
had forgotten that Mackald's ship was unregistered. "I'm from Mackald's
ship," he said. "This man is an Antarean."
"Name of
Billgarr," the old man said.
"Well, we have orders
to bring all of you in."
"Police?" Billgarr demanded. "What
for?"
"We
have orders," the voice repeated. Steve couldn't see any of the
policemen's faces. Their helmets were one-way glassite, opaquely silver on the
outside.
"But what have we
done?" Steve asked.
The
answer came promptly. "Took off in an unregistered
ship. Came almost five billion miles with an
unlicensed pilot. Attempted to salvage a derelict
without authority."
It
would have been pointless to argue, Steve knew. What he didn't know was how
they'd been discovered. Then, all of a sudden, he thought he knew.
Mackald. Mackald was a Denebian, wasn't he? Mackald
had agreed to take them out—unlicensed, in an unlicensed ship—at Chandlur's
orders. What else could Steve think?
With
Billgarr and the three Ophiuchan policemen, Steve rocketed across to the sleek
cruiser. Mackald's ship hung in space a few miles off, deceptively bright
against the backdrop of the coalsack.
Steve
and Billgarr unsuited inside the small cruiser, heard
an Ophiuchan speaking over the ship-to-ship radio. "Two of them aboard the
tub, you say? Everything under control? Good. Give us
a million miles, then rocket back after us."
The
cruiser's powerful rocket engines started. Steve looked at Billgarr.
"Don't
you worry none," the old man said. "They
can't do this to me."
The only trouble was, they had done
it.
Chapter O Chandlur Strikes
'm no
great brain," Hunk said as he finished telling Coach Ito what had
happened, "but it doesn't take much to figure out what Chandlur's trying
to do."
"Let
me get this straight," Joe Ito said. "The police are holding Steve
and this man Billgarr in custody, but they've released you and Mackald. Is that
right?"
Hunk
nodded. Mackald, who had gone to see Joe Ito with him, also nodded.
"Released us on pledge of our own good behavior," he said. "Me,
I'm in a mess of trouble, but I've been in a mess of trouble all my life. Don't
bother me none. But—"
"But
the point is," Joe Ito finished for him, "they haven't released Steve
and they haven't released the Antarean Billgarr. Incidentally, did either one
of you see him?"
"Just
for a minute at the spaceport," Hunk Little said.
Joe Ito scowled. "All right, assume
there's something to Steve's story. Assume he knows what he's talking about.
They could have released all four of
79
you on pledge of good behavior, as they released
you two. They didn't. Steve and Billgarr are still in custody. So whatever
Chandlur is trying to hide is going to remain hidden."
"Can't you do
anything, Coach?" Hunk asked.
"If it were the police holding Steve and
Billgarr, maybe.
But you told me the police are holding them— for Chandlur as High
Commissioner."
"You
got the picture," Mackald said. "Steve is an Olympic athlete in trouble.
Billgarr belongs to an Olympic contingent that disappeared. That gives this
commissioner fellow jurisdiction."
"Hunk,"
Joe Ito asked suddenly. "Do you think you can find Captain Williams?"
"He's
at the spaceport," Mackald said, "We can find him."
Joe
Ito sighed. "I'm an athletic coach. The closest I ever came to
intrigue—till now—was the solido-dramas. You'd
better find Syrtis Williams and tell him what you told me."
"We'll find him,"
Hunk said.
The
interview was calculated, clever and cruel. Chandlur had a razor-sharp
cross-questioning technique. Also, with a few carefully chosen words, he could
be infuriating. After just a few minutes, Steve knew he wanted to infuriate
Billgarr. He succeeded admirably.
"So
you had other visitors between the first and the second time Steve Frazer
visited the Liberté,
is that what you want me to
believe?"
"It doesn't matter what I want you to
believe," Billgarr said. "You'll believe what you want to believe. It's the truth, though."
"And these other
visitors cleaned up the Liberté?"
"They
sure did. Put food and personal belongings in the disposal chutes, straightened
out quarters, even sent the lifeboats blasting out of their tubes."
Chandlur
gave him an oh-come-now-my-dear-fel-low look. "Really?
And why would they do all that?"
"Don't know why,"
Billgarr muttered.
"Mister Billgarr, how
old are you?"
"Not mister. Just plain Billgarr."
"How old are you,
Billgarr?"
"We
Antareans are long-lived. Statistics show we live longer on the average than
any other galactic people."
"That's hedging, isn't
it? How old are you?"
Billgarr
glared at him. "A hundred and four," he said, "on my next
birthday."
"A
hundred and four," Chandlur said, almost sweetly. "Does your memory
sometimes play tricks on you? It's understandable."
"Of course not!" Billgarr roared. "I'm fit. Give me any
kind of test you want to. There's nothing wrong with me. Why, I know Antareans
who live good, fruitful lives into their thirteenth decade."
"Indeed?"
Chandlur asked mildly. "That is truly commendable. And what, exactly, was
your task aboard the Liberté?"
"Music
teacher," Billgarr said. "We're a musical people."
"Yes, music teacher," Chandlur aped
the words. "I had forgotten. No kind of a trained observer?"
"No, but-"
"How is your
eyesight?"
"I
wear contacts!" Billgarr shouted. "I can see fine."
"Were you wearing them when the—uh,
rollers came aboard the Liberté?"
"I always wear
them."
"We'll
let that pass. And if the rest of you An-tareans didn't use the lifeboats, can
you tell me again how they left the Liberté?"
"The rollers took
them," Billgarr insisted.
"To
be sure, the rollers. But how?"
"They
teleported."
Chandlur
gave him an amused smile. "Teleporta-tion. I take
it this alleged magic is the—uh, instantaneous transportation of matter over
vast distances via the energy of thought?"
"You
take it right," Billgarr insisted. "I don't know how vast the
distance was, though."
"And the—uh, rollers teleported you
Antareans to do what?"
"To
measure us. I
told you."
"Measure
you? You mean widi rulers and scales and things?"
"We're
a strange race of intelligent creatures come from the other side of the
galaxy," Billgarr said slowly. "The rollers meet us in space and
don't know what to do about it. They figure if they can measure us, test us, study us—"
"A different race of intelligent
creatures," Chandlur said, amusement in his
voice. He leaned forward, his gross belly drooping over the edge of his desk.
"You know perfectly well we are alone among sentient beings in the
galaxy. There is only us."
"You
haven't met the rollers," Billgarr said. He looked at Chandlur defiantly. "Yet."
"And you're
ninety-four?" Chandlur asked blandly.
"A
hundred and four."
"Yes,
of course. A hundred and four. Physically, I must
admit you don't look a day over eighty, but mentally. . . ."
Billgarr
stood up, his face livid with rage. Actually, Steve knew, he could have passed
for a reasonably hale and hardy seventy-five. "Now look here!" he
cried. "I've taken just about all I'm going to take!"
Chandlur
didn't meet his eyes. "Have you? Have you now? Did you ever consider this?
A shipload of Antareans is missing. You're the only man who knows why, and all
you give us is a series of ridiculous lies."
"Maybe
you can tell me how come they're missing," Billgarr said sarcastically.
"Not at the moment.
But I'm going to find out."
The
interview was at an end, and Billgarr and Steve were ushered back to their
quarters. They'd been given a room on the fifth floor of the skyscraper-bubble
in which Chandlur had his office. There were no bars on the round window and no
lock on the door, but every time Steve went to the door it just so happened
that a few Denebians were loitering right outside in the hall.
"Now what?" Billgarr wanted to know. "Calling me a
doddering old fool!" he fumed.
"Take
it easy," Steve suggested. "They can't keep us here
indefinitely."
"They
can keep you here long enough to miss the games. They can keep me here long
enough—and give me enough trouble—to make the rollers decide they'd better
break off contact with us. Figure they're from the other side of the galaxy,
Stefrazer—from beyond Ophiuchus somewhere. They've admitted that much. If they
don't want contact, can you imagine how long it might take us to find them?
Figure they have half of the galaxy and we have half. We've settled on a
hundred and twenty worlds—out of how many million? But
meeting them as equals, sharing our culture and achievements with them as they
share their culture and achievements with us— that could be a great thing for
humanity."
"I know," Steve
said. "I know it can."
"But
look at it from the rollers' point of view. They're being careful about it.
First they test a bunch of us Antareans, then maybe
they plan on seeing the games here on Ophiuchus."
"Did they say
that?"
"After
your first visit they kind of hinted at it. What they figure is, this is an ideal situation to see how we humans get along.
That is, if we can't get along with ourselves, here at the games, when human
beings from so many outworlds are together, then we sure as can be won't be
able to get along with the rollers. And at a time like this a guy like Chandlur
has to be running the show."
"But
what's his motive?" Steve asked. "Why should he try his best to give
us such a hard time?"
Billgarr
shrugged. "Search me." He added quickly, "But I can take a few
guesses."
"Like what?"
"Well—no
offense to Earth now, son—you probably know Antares and Deneb are the two power
centers of the galaxy. First thing Chandlur learns is that the Antares contingent
is missing. Right away he's suspicious and—"
"Suspicious?
But why? If you don't show up for the games you don't
get a chance to win them— leaving Deneb as the odds-favorite all by
itself."
"Sure,
but maybe he figures we will show
up later —after some kind of special training like on a heavy planet or
something—that will give us an edge in the games."
"I hadn't thought of
that," Steve admitted.
"And
that isn't all. You come down here to Ophiu-chus claiming you met an
intelligent nonhuman life form. And Chandlur gets to thinking. First off, if
the rollers really exist—if your story is true and my story is true—they made
their first contact with us Antareans. Not with the Dcncbians, you see the picture,
boy? It's a slap in the face to the Denebians and is liable to consolidate
Antarcs's position of galactic leadership, and so on."
"But contact with the rollers is more
important than who's top dog in the galaxy," Steve protested.
"I
know it is and you know it is. But does Chand-lur? It doesn't look that way.
Then, too, there's another thing he's probably fretting about."
"What's that?"
"Ophiuchus. She's a strong young world, son, a world that's going places. Antares, Deneb, maybe
Fo-malhaut—those are the centers of power now. But Ophiuchus is coming up fast,
and if the rollers have made contact here, Chandlur has got to come to the
obvious conclusion—their homeworld or at least their colonies lie nearer
Ophiuchus than any other human-inhabited system. So, if contact is followed by
social intercourse, Ophiuchus and not Deneb or Antares is liable to be the new
center of human civilization.
"Not
if Chandlur can help it," Steve said grimly. As far as he could see,
everything that Billgarr had said made sense. "We've got to stop
him—before he stops us. Why, just the secret of teleportation alone —if the
rollers gave us that we'd have a whole galaxy as our backyard, as they
do."
Billgarr
didn't say anything for awhile. Then, shrugging, he said, "How can we?
Everything's going his way. Your eligibility is in question. You've
technically committed a crime, though the intent wasn't criminal. It's within
his authority to ship you out on the next outbound ship. As for me, I'm an old
man. He can discredit me without even half trying. I'm just an old music
teacher, that's all."
"We've got to stop
him," Steve said again.
Billgarr's answer was one
word, "How?"
And to that one word Steve
had no answer at all.
Chapter 7 Hunk Strikes Back
11 hat Hunk Little lacked in subtlety and cunning, il he more than made up for in strength and loyalty.
■ After
he and Mackald left Joe Ito, the little De-
i nebian
advanced several proposals as to how they could win the Space Captains, through
Syrtis Williams, to their side.
In
general, the idea was a good one. On any out-world the stand taken by several
dozen Space Captains would be highly respected; on Ophiuchus, almost on the
eve of the Interstellar Olympics, it could be decisive. But Mackald's specific
plans called for skullduggery and trickery. One by one, Hunk rejected them
with a stolid shake of his head.
"Mackald,
Mackald listen," he said finally, "that's a brainstorm of yours,
getting all the Captains on our side. Steve and Billgarr will need all the help
we can get. But there ought to be a—well, a more direct way."
Mackald
licked his lips and proposed one of his favorite schemes again. "If we can
convince them Chandlur is out to strip them of their seniority—"
87
"No," Hunk said decisively.
"Steve and Billgarr are telling the truth. Let's keep it that way."
"But
the Parade of the Planets takes place tomorrow," Mackald protested. "After that, the games. You think you have time for the truth?"
Hunk
nodded slowly. "Got me an idea," he said. "Steve won't be wild
about it, but he'll like it better than your ideas.
I hope."
Quickly
he told Mackald what he had in mind. The bald little Denebian's face lit up in
a grin. There wasn't any larceny in the idea, but it appealed to him anyway.
"Never!" Roy Ambler cried a half hour later. But his
voice, far from being defiant, was a quavering protest.
This
was in Roy's room at Earthtown. It's ceiling was low,
and Roy was almost scraping it. That was because Hunk, arms outstretched
overhead, held him there. Roy's arms and legs writhed in impotent fury, then in
fright. Hunk had held him that way for five minutes. Occasionally Hunk would
pivot, and when he did Roy Ambler's head would spin perilously close to the
door frame or the window.
"Come
on," Hunk insisted. "Who sent the police out there after us? Chandlur?"
He
spun again. Roy Ambler warded off the door frame with his outflung arms.
Mackald
was waiting in the hall, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. It didn't
seem like a very necessary precaution, and if the muffled sounds he heard
through the closed door meant what he thought they meant, Mackald wished he
were inside watching.
He
pressed one ear against the door—then jerked away quickly when he saw Coach Ito
coming along the hall. Inside the room, Roy Ambler cried out.
"What's going on in
there?"
"Nothing
you'd care to witness, Coach, I assure you, sure as I'm Mackald the
Denebian," Mackald answered quickly.
Joe Ito reached the door.
Mackald barred his way.
"I
think you ought to let me by," Coach Ito said, not very decisively.
"I'm thinking I better not," Mackald replied.
Joe Ito's face was grim. "Hunk inside?"
There was a brief thump.
Joe Ito winced.
'Ties inside," Mackald
admitted.
Joe
Ito hesitated, then said slowly, "I can't hear a sound. In fact, I wasn't
even up here at all. Good luck." Quickly the coach went off down the hall.
Mackald
got more comfortable against the outside of the door.
Inside—head
spinning near the ceiling—Roy Ambler cried, "All right, all right, I
followed you to the spaceport and then reported to Chandlur. All
right!"
"And Chandlur alerted
the police?"
"Ye-es!"
Hunk
put him down. "Lets go see Captain Williams."
But for a while they didn't go anywhere. It
was almost ten minutes before Roy Ambler could stand on his own feet.
Hunk's
mistake was keeping Roy Ambler as a trump card until all the Space Captains
were assembled. They met in an empty hangar at the port. While Hunk outlined
the story to them, Mackald waited outside with a subdued Roy Ambler.
At first Hunk had stage fright. He'd always idolized the Space Captains, but
he'd never seen them more than one or two at a time. Now though, he—Hunk Little—was addressing a whole hangar full of them, Space
Captains from the far-flung outworlds. His wide eyes took in their uniforms and
his voice cracked. He even began to stammer.
But
soon the tanned, lean faces and the alert, far-seeing eyes, eyes that,
collectively, had seen the length and breath of half a galaxy, gave Hunk
confidence. They were watching him, listening intently, without comment. Their
faces were impassive, but their eyes were curious and friendly. And taking
strength from them, Hunk began to speak more confidently. Soon, the words were
fairly flowing from his lips, and he saw the Space Captains—first one and then
another and then most of them—nodding, their eyes piercing his speculatively.
He
concluded, "At first I didn't believe it. But now I'm almost sure what
Steve Frazer told us was the complete truth. There's a race of nonhumans out
there in space waiting to see what we do. Chandlur the Denebian—for reasons I'm
not sure of—wants to break off contact. We can't let that happen. We
can't!"
For
a few moments there was a hubbub in the hangar as the Space Captains speculated
on the possibility, now the probability, if they believed Hunk as he finally
believed Steve, of extra-human sentience.
Some
of the Space Captains got quickly to the heart of the matter, suggesting that
Chandlur s opposition stemmed from the same reasons Billgarr had outlined to
Steve. Even the Denebian Captain, a tall hairless man named Westor, nodded his
reluctant agreement.
"The
one thing we don't have, Hunk," Syrtis Williams said finally, "is
proof."
Westor
suggested, "We're about ready to salvage the Antarean ship. We can find
all the proof we want then."
But
Hunk shook his head. "Chandlur tampered with it. He destroyed the proof. Just as he's going to exile Steve from Ophiuchus as soon as he can.
Just as he's keeping Billgarr the Antarean in protective
custody. If only he'd give them a chance to talk. Just to tell their
story, that's all. I've only been able to give it to you second-hand."
"If
we Captains petitioned this High Commissioner," one of them said,
"we'd get results. We carry some weight around here."
But
another one said, doubtfully, "I'd like some proof first. All we've heard
is an interesting story."
Hunk was smiling. Captain Williams asked him,
"Have something up your sleeve, Hunk?" "Yes,
sir." "Let's have it."
Hunk
strode past the gantry which took up most of the room inside the hanger and
opened the small personnel door at lire base of the great overhead rocket door.
"Mackald!" he
shouted.
In
a few moments Mackald came in leading Roy Ambler by the arm.
"Mackald,
you old reprobate!" Westor the Dene-bian boomed. "What are you doing
here?"
"Looking
for trouble, I guess, Cap'n. Like usual. This here is Roy Ambler, Earth team. Got him a story to tell."
But
Roy's guileless eyes belied that fact. For Hunk had waited too long, had given
him a chance to compose himself. And now, among the assembled Captains, Roy
knew nothing was going to happen to him.
"He's
going to tell you," Hunk said, "how he followed Steve and me to the
spaceport, and how he reported our movements to Chandlur, and how the High
Commissioner sent the police after us."
"Now
that's the kind of proof I had in mind," the doubting Space Captain said.
Roy
Ambler's voice was polite and friendly. "Then I'm sorry to disappoint you,
sir." His face wore an earnest expression. "But you see, I don't know
what Hunk Little is talking about."
"Why, you lying—"
Mackald began.
But Syrtis Williams cut him off with a wave
of his hand. "Roy, why cl you come here?"
"Hunk
asked me to. Then, while I was waiting outside, this man—" he gestured
toward Mackald, "gave me the details of an incredible story without a word
of truth in it. He even threatened me, said that Hunk would beat me up if I
didn't cooperate."
"And?" Syrtis Williams prompted.
"And
I'm sorry, sir, but I see no reason to lie to you. I haven't the faintest idea
what this Denebian and Hunk Little are talking about,
and I won't be threatened into telling lies."
"That's
not true!" Mackald cried. "I mean, what Hunk's been telling you, it's the truth."
"You
threatened him?" Syrtis Williams asked mildly.
"Well,
we had to," Mackald insisted. "When?"
"Before. Before we even got here.
Hunk kind of—" Mackald grinned, "scared him some."
Syrtis
Williams said, "Roy, I want you to wait outside. Or if you want, you're
free to go."
"I'll wait outside,
sir," Roy decided.
When
he was gone, Syrtis Williams said, "That was a mistake, Hunk. You did
manhandle him, didn't you?"
"Yes, sir. I couldn't think of any other way." "Me, I thought of loads
of ways," Mackald announced.
"And
each more devious, no doubt, than the one before," Westor said, laughing
good-naturedly.
After the general laughter subsided, the
doubting Space Captain, who was from Procyon System, said, "Then we're
wasting our time here." He headed for the door.
"Hold
it," Syrtis Williams snapped. "I know Steve Frazer. I've known him
for years and I knew his father. If Steve has a story to tell, I, for one,
want to listen. Besides," he went on, commanding their attention with his
well-chosen words, "if there were any possibility at all of contact with
an extra-human culture, shouldn't we, as Space Captains, explore it to the
hilt? Wouldn't we be a pack of unimaginative fools and unfit to wear our
uniforms, if we didn't?"
"What
do you have in mind?" the Procyon Captain demanded.
But
it was Westor the Denebian who answered him. "I propose we get up a
petition, signed by all of us here right now, asking Chandlur the Denebian to
release Steve Frazer of Earth and Billgarr of An-tares into our custody long
enough for us to ask them some questions."
The
roar of affirmation which greeted this suggestion brought a smile to Hunk's
homely face and made Mackald jump up and down with enthusiasm.
"We swung it,
boy!" he shouted. "We swung it!"
The
petition was drawn and signed by everyone present. It was decided that Westor
the Denebian should deliver it to his fellow planeteer, Chandlur.
". . . petition,"
Roy Ambler finished. "I heard them outside. Westor will probably be here
in a few minutes. But nothing says you have to honor their petition, sir."
Chandlur
snorted. "Afraid for your position on the Earth
team?"
Roy
Ambler frowned. "You—you don't like me, do you, Commissioner?"
Chandlur
waved the question aside with a fat hand. "There is an old expression,
from Earth, I believe. 'Politics,'
they say, 'makes the strangest bedfellow.'"
"But
you're not going to honor the petition?" Roy insisted.
Chandlur's
answer was prompt and bland. "But of course I am. Though
naturally I won't remain idle while the Space Captains are conducting their
interrogation."
The
High Commissioner's smile was smug and confident.
With the assembled Space Captains, Steve
listened to Billgarr's excited words as the old Antarean told his story. This
was the first time Steve, or anyone, had heard all of it, and somehow the bare
walls of die hangar, dominated by the bulk of the rocket-launching gantry, was
the perfect setting for it, just as the Space Captains who had come from
halfway across the galaxy were the perfect audience.
Steve
was still surprised and delighted by their unexpected release from what had
amounted to imprisonment, and for the first few minutes after they reached the
hangar in Westor's custody he had listened eagerly while Hunk filled him in on
the details. Now, though, the only sound was Billgarr's voice.
".
. . the first roller," he was saying. "But
pretty soon there were others, and inside of five minutes the Liberté was—if you'll pardon the expression-just rolling with them.
Teleportation, they said. And of course their language wouldn't be
comprehensible to us, and ditto the other way around. Not that it mattered.
They don't talk. They think,
projecting their thoughts
into your brain. Telepathy.
"Anyhow,
they said they had known of the existence of our human civilization here on
Ophiuchus for some time now—a generation, they said, though how long a
generation is for rollers, I couldn't tell you. They were cautious, though—as
cautious, I reckon, as we would have been if the circumstances had been
reversed. Would we welcome contact with them? Would we be friendly—or hostile?
That's what they had to find out.
"Even had factions pro and con on their
home-world beyond the center of the galaxy. Leave well enough alone, some of them said.
It might be another ten generations or more before those bipedal creatures discover
us, so why look for trouble. But others wanted contact right away, thought it
would be toi great an opportunity for both races to miss.
"Well,
sir, their observers reported the preparations here on Ophiuchus for the
Olympic games, and that was the chance they were
looking for. So, when the Liberté
approached, they teleported
every manjack aboard her—excepting me—they figured they'd need to leave
someone behind in case another ship showed up, I reckon—teleported the crew and
team of the Liberté
to their nearest world.
"Had all kinds of tests for my people,
mostly psychological and emotional. If we pass with flying colors, and the last
I heard there was a good chance we would, the rollers are going to send an
observer group to the games here on Ophiuchus. Because if we humans can get
along among ourselves, they figure we'd be a good bet to get along with them. . .."
"Waiting
for the last minute, aren't they?" Westor the Denebian asked.
"Tomorrow's the Parade of the Planets, and the day after that the games
begin."
"One
way or the other," Billgarr explained, "they promised to get the
Antarean team down here in time for the games."
"That,"
the Captain from Procyon said, "remains to be seen."
"Listen,"
Billgarr cautioned. "Let me tell you two things about the rollers. They're
honorable, so you don't have any worries on that score, Captain. And even more
important, they're shy. I mean, really shy. Just look how long it took them to
make any kind of contact at all."
"What
are you getting at?" Syrtis Williams wanted to know.
"Just this, Captain. Chandlur sent a tug out to the Liberté, and its crew shot off our lifeboats so it would look like we left the
normal way. The rollers found out. It scared them. The last thing they wanted
was to create the wrong kind of stir among us humans. Why, the way I was told
it, they were almost ready to call the whole thing off."
"In
short," Westor said, "you mean we have to make all our moves
carefully?"
"If
we want to establish contact, Captain, we do. I was able to placate them some.
Got them to admit all the rollers weren't sweetness and light, but if they
suspected—" Billgarr shook his head, "that the big cheese out here
himself, the High Commissioner, was dead set against contact, I figure they'd
just up and take off and that would be the end of it for maybe five hundred
years or more."
"Nice,"
Westor said grimly. Just then the personnel door opened, but the Denebian
Captain went on speaking. "But I can't believe that Chandlur—"
"What
can't you believe about me?" Chandlur asked, his enormous girth all but
filling the doorway. "What can't you believe about me, Captain
Westor?"
Westor
shuffled his feet uneasily. "Well, sir, that you—"
The
High Commissioner waved a sheaf of papers he held in his big hand. "In the
interests of interstellar harmony on the eve of the games," he declaimed,
"I felt it my duty to deliver this report to you Space Captains
personally. Perhaps, Captain Westor, it will dispell
your doubts."
"What
report would that be?" Syrtis Williams asked suspiciously.
"A report," Chandlur said, "on
the mental state of a hundred-and-four-year-old Antarean music teacher named
Billgarr."
In
the shocked silence which followed, Billgarr blurted, "Whatever he has
there, it's all lies! They never gave me any tests. They never—"
Chandlur
looked at him pityingly. "My dear man, will you allow me to proceed?"
"If
you had anything to tell us, sure," Billgarr fumed. Angry blood had
darkened his face. "But nobody tested me."
"I
can vouch for that," Steve said. "All the time we were prisoners—"
"You mean
guests," supplied Chandlur.
".
. . Billgarr was never out of my sight. They couldn't have given him any kind
of test at all," Steve said.
"The
lad ought to know, Commissioner," Westor said.
"Indeed?
Ought he to know that the room they shared was not only wired for sound but
also had a one-way viewscreen built into one of its walls? I must insist that,
since the old man had his moment before you Space Captains, I have mine. May I
continue?"
Assent
was granted grumblingly, and Chandlur began to read excerpts from the report.
It was couched in technical jargon, much of which was lost on Steve. But
halfway through it, two of the Space Captains had to restrain Billgarr
physically. Steve heard such phrases as, "paranoid tendencies . . . delusions
of grandeur . . . out of contact with reality. . . ."
When
he had finished reading, Chandlur folded the papers and pocketed them. In the
shocked silence that followed, Steve said, "Then what about me? Do I have
these delusions, too? Because I saw one of the rollers,
myself."
Chandlur
waved a fat hand deprecatingly. "You are apparently a very impressionable
boy. I'm not accusing you of lying. You think you saw what you say you did,
but—"
"I
know I saw the roller," Steve said. He expected to be angry. Instead, he
was icily calm. "I know I saw all the lifeboats in their tubes aboard the Liberté"
Chandlur gave him a mildly
pitying look.
"I
say," Steve went on, "that between my first and second visits to the Liberté, you had the lifeboats removed from their tubes. I say—"
"That's
absolutely ridiculous," scoffed Chandlur. He looked at the assembled Space
Captains. "I ask you men, what would have been my motive?"
Steve
countered, "When I first saw you, you told me the Liberté had been salvaged. It wasn't—and it isn't."
"That,"
Chandlur insisted, "is not true. I never told Frazer any such thing."
It
was, Steve knew, an impasse. Chandlur's documents were impressive, had been
signed by the psychologist on the staff of the High Commissioner. He passed
them around now, and some of the Space Captains nodded slowly, reluctantly.
Billgarr watched their faces as if his life depended on it. Those who nodded
wouldn't meet his eyes.
"Commissioner,"
Syrtis Williams asked finally, "what do you propose?"
"Two
things, Captain," Chandlur answered at once. "First, I must urge you
Space Captains to go ahead with your salvage plans. For if you have any
lingering doubts—"
"That
wouldn't help much," Syrtis Williams pointed out, "if Steve Frazer's
story is true."
Chandlur
looked shocked. "My word—against that of an
impressionable young man?"
Syrtis
Williams ignored that. "What's the second thing, Commissioner?"
"As
you know, these are the first Olympic games of the Galactic Era. The last thing
any of us wants, I'm sure, is the spread of any bad feeling. In order to
prevent that, I must insist that Steve Frazer be returned to my custody until
such time as an outbound ship can return him—not in disgrace, I assure you—to
Earth. And that Billgarr, since his own Antarean contingent is not here to help
him, also be returned to my care—for proper psychiatric treatment."
Syrtis
Williams's voice was as bland as Chandlur's. "Doesn't it strike any of you
as strange," he wanted to know, "that in the short time since our
arrival here on Ophiuchus, the Commissioner has made two attempts to have
Frazer expelled from Ophiuchus?"
Chandlur
countered, "I assure you, the matter of his eligibility was purely
coincidental,"
"Convenient coincidence," Mackald
said dryly. "I must insist—" Commissioner Chandlur began again.
But
Syrtis Williams cut him off. "With no Antareans present, you have
jurisdiction in Billgarr's case. But Earth is represented here in full force,
Commissioner. So while it's within your rights to keep Steve from competing in
the games until such time as his status is settled, it is not within your
rights to detain him against his will. / must insist on this.
Frazer, here and now, is to be released to my custody. I'll hold myself
responsible for him."
"But-"
"That's all, Commissioner."
Anger
sparked for an instant in Chandlur's eyes, then died.
He shrugged. "Very well, so long as I have your assurance he'll keep his
wild stories to himself."
"I'll
hold myself responsible for him," Syrtis Williams said again. "Personally."
Chandlur
called out, and two guards in Denebian jumpers entered
the hangar. With a jerk of his head that made his flabby jowls quiver, Chandlur
indicated Billgarr.
The
old music teacher looked with mute appeal at Steve, then at Syrtis Williams,
then at the other Space Captains.
"We can't let him—" Steve started
to say. "We've got to," Syrtis Williams told him. As the Denebian
guards reached the door with Billgarr between them, Steve ran past the gantry
and
placed his hand on die old man's shoulder. "We
won't let you down, Mr. Billgarr," he promised.
Then,
for the first time since Chandlur's accusations, Billgarr managed a smile.
"Not mister," he said. "Just plain
Billgarr."
The
guards took him outside. Steve watched them until they were silhouetted against
the gantries on the field with the blue light beyond them.
Chapter o Parade of the Planets
ere comes Earth!" Steve cried excitedly.
He
was seated in the grandstand of the great Olympic stadium three miles from
Ophiucbus City. It was a bright, hot morning, with Ophi-uchuss three suns high
in the cloudless sky. The enormous stadium had seats for a quarter of a million
people, most of them Ophiuchans. In honor of the place of origin of the Olympic
games, the stadium had been built on the sloping
hillsides around a little valley. Lush tropical vegetation had been stripped
from the land, which was now bare, with gaunt rocks protruding from the soil
skeletaliy beyond the final row of grandstand seats. The stadium had been built
to resemble an ancient Greek amphitheater but was ten times larger.
Steve,
Captain Williams and the entire crew of the Hellas had arrived early to claim their seats. Even
then the grandstand had been thronged, and when the last of the quarter of a
million seats was finally occupied, an expectant hush fell on the huge crowd.
Everywhere he looked, Steve saw a sea of
color— the lightweight jumpers worn by the Ophiuchans and the space-crews of
fifty worlds that had sent Olympic teams to the center of the galaxy. But the
stadium itself, its floor the deep, almost incredible blue-green of the native
Ophiuchan grass, was absolutely deserted. Not a flag,
not a solitary human figure, marred the great expanse of green. In the very
center of the field stood a marble altar, and on it was a niche for the Torch
of Freedom, which had been lighted at Olympus, Greece and, still burning, had
been carried from Earth aboard the Hellas to
the center of the galaxy.
The
hush lengthened. It was possible to hear the proverbial pin drop anywhere in
the enormous grandstand as 250,000 people waited for the Parade of the Planets
to begin.
Syrtis
Williams looked at his program. "They won t come in alphabetically,"
he told Steve. "Earth's first, then the rest of the star
systems—all fifty who've sent teams—in the order in which they were
colonized."
"Earth,"
Steve read from his program, "then Cen-tauri, Sirius, Rigel, Canopus,
Procyon, Altair, Fomal-haut, Deneb, Antares—"
"Antares?" Captain Williams said. "I doubt
it."
"Billgarr said—"
Captain
Williams shook his head. "Better make that forty-nine star systems, boy.
Antares won't show up."
Steve frowned. "Maybe."
"Any minute now," Captain Williams
said, looking at his chrono.
Any
minute now, Steve thought, and I ought to be down there, marching with Hunk Little and Jane and the other members of the team. His
throat felt suddenly constricted, and he blinked his eyes rapidly. But only for
a few seconds did he feel sorry for himself. He was here, here on Ophiuchus.
That wasn't all it could have been, but considering what had happened, it was
enough.
"I
want to thank you, sir," he told Captain Williams. "If you hadn't
intervened, I might be in custody right now, like poor Billgarr." Even
worse, he realized. They could have brought criminal charges against him.
"Listen,"
Syrtis Williams said. "This business isn't over, not by a long shot."
As if he'd somehow read Steve's thoughts he added, "You'll notice that
Chand-lur didn't bring the Ophiuchan police in on it."
"I know he didn't. I
don't know why."
"Try
this for an educated guess. He didn't want anyone else examining Billgarr.
He—"
That
was when Steve cried, "Here comes the Earth
team!"
It
was true. Far across the field, a door had opened at the base of the
grandstand. And through it, marching five abreast,
came the two hundred athletes from Earth.
"Parade
of the Planets!" an Ophiuchan near Steve shouted, and a roar of approval
from a quarter of a million throats greeted the Earth athletes, first team out
on the field.
The wore blue and white jumpers with red trim, and
they marched smartly. On their heads were white straw hats with blue bands,
worn at a jaunty angle. And leading the two hundred marchers in their
procession across the huge field were two figures a dozen paces ahead of the
vanguard.
The
one on the left, carrying a guidon with Earth's proud blue and white flag, was
Hunk Little. Hunk looked so proud he almost strutted. Partly this was for the
flag he carried and the team he led. But partly it was for his marching
companion.
The
one on the right, a smaller figure in a white blouse and trim blue skirt and
almost knee-high red boots, was Jane, holding the Torch of Freedom proudly
aloft as she marched beside Hunk.
Then
Steve completely forgot his own predicament. He felt so happy for Hunk and Jane
that a grin split his face from ear to ear. As of last night, no one knew who
would carry Earth's guidon and the Torch of Freedom. Now the representatives of
fifty worlds knew, Hunk for Earth's blue and white flag, Jane for the Torch of
Freedom.
Across
the arena they came, stepping smartly. As the Torch of Freedom, which until now
had never been seen on the outworlds, progressed from one section of the field
to the next, great shouts of enthusiasm greeted it. Jane held her head high.
Hunk Little looked proud enough to burst.
Presently the Earth team had taken its place
at the far end of the field. Not the biggest contingent that would march in the
Parade of the Planets, and certainly not favored to win the games against the
tough opposition of worlds like Deneb, Fomalhaut and the still-missing Antares,
Earth was still the Mother Planet from which all human civilization had sprung.
Every
person in the grandstand stood up and applauded lustily as Jane, at the climax
of Earth's role in the Parade of the Planets, marched alone—a solitary,
graceful figure—to the altar in the center of the arena. For a moment she
paused there, then thrust the torch into its niche on
the altar. The flame, carried eight thousand parsecs from Sol System and, symbolically,
half that many thousands of years from the first Olympic flame in Greece,
fluttered for a moment in the wind, then burned steadily.
The
shouts of approval that followed Jane back to the waiting Earth team were
almost deafening.
A
few moments after that, the second team marched out and across the arena. This
was the contingent from Centauri System. Centauri's one habitable planet was
small; if anything, the Centauri team, its members in gray jumpers, its silver
and black flag held proudly aloft in the alien skies of Ophiuchus, was smaller
than Earth's.
Then
quickly came the representatives of the other
outworlds nearest Earth, those which had been colonized in the first wave of
migration to sweep out from the Mother Planet.
Sirius ...
a large contingent in vivid purple, its members chanting:
"Oh
Sirius is far away, far away, far away . . . We've journeyed to the Milky Way,
the Milky Way, the Milky Way . .
And Sirius, less than three parsees from Earth itself, was indeed far away—almost
halfway across the galaxy.
Rigel ...
in solid orange; Canopus ... its
proud athletes in red, yellow and black; Procyon ... in brilliant saffron yellow; Altair . . . another large
contingent, in deep blue and gold; Fomalhaut . . . almost four hundred strong,
in sleek metallic brown under brown and green banners; Deneb . . . die largest
contingent so far, with absolutely hairless men, and women, as if in
compensation, with hair flowing down their backs almost to their waists.
There
was a pause. By now everyone on Ophiuchus knew the Antares team was missing. On
the program, Antares followed Deneb. Strongly, the suns beat down on the teams
already assembled on the field; and even stronger burned the Torch of Freedom.
The spectators were dead silent, waiting. No one had said, officially, that
Antares would not show up, but it seemed a foregone conclusion. Everyone now
waited for the white uniforms of the Polaris team, which was scheduled to
follow the missing Antares.
"Look!" someone
cried.
"Over there!
Look!"
"Crimson! Their jumpers are crimson . . ."
Steve
found himself on his feet, like everyone else, staring incredulously.
Stepping
out smartly, as all the others had done, a team was marching onto the field.
A very large contingent, as large as Deneb's—almost five-hundred strong.
In
brilliant crimson jumpers—the missing team-miraculously, at the last moment,
here in the great stadium on Ophiuchus—marching as if nothing strange, nothing
incredible had befallen them.
An tares!
Chaptet 9 Antares Wont Talk
teve found himself running down the sloping aisle of the grandstand almost
before he realized what he was doing. The Antares team, here! Here on Ophiuchus
while their derelict ship orbited slowly five billion miles out in space.
Didn't that confirm his story—and Billgarr's? "Steve!" he heard
Syrtis Williams call. "Wait—" But Steve was already running across
the field. He wasn't the only one. Reporters from fifty worlds had broken from
the press benches and were sprinting across the blue grass toward the Antares
team. As Steve approached, he heard a flurry of questions, ". . . gone
till now?" "Any statement for Interstellar News?" ". . . derelict."
"Can you tell us why you left your
ship?"
"How did you get here—without
transportation?"
"Where, by space, were you?"
"Why?"
A man too old to be one of the Antarean
athletes held up his hand for silence, but silence was a long
in
time coming. The reporters' questions came,
trigger fast, and from the grandstand there rose a
great cheer, repeated over and over again: "Antares! Antares! Antares!"
Finally,
by shouting at the top of his voice, the gray-haired Antarean was able to
announce, "There will be no comments now, gentlemen. Later, Antares
intends to issue a statement. Later, not now. Later, gentlemen."
"Coach
Harvshaw!" one of the reporters said. "There ve been rumors here on Ophiuchus that if the Antares team showed up at
all it would have been after strenuous training for the games on a heavy
planet."
"That,"
Coach Harvshaw said with dignity, "would have been against the rules set
forth by the Interstellar Olympic Committee."
"Naturally,"
retorted the reporter. "Have you any statement?"
"None now, I already
told you that."
"But a heavy
planet—"
"Then
no statement except this; Antares did not in any way violate the rules of the
Interstellar Olympic Committee."
Before
the reporters could ask any further questions, a voice boomed over the
grandstand loudspeakers:
"By
order of the High Commissioner, the Parade of the Planets is postponed until
tomorrow. The Parade of the Planets, repeat, is postponed until tomorrow! By order of High Commissioner Chandlur."
The teams already on the field milled about
in confusion, their guidons and banners drooping.
Coach
Harvshaw of Antares told his team, "All right, you all heard that. We're
going back to the locker room. You are—none of you—to answer any questions or
offer any information. Is that understood?"
As
the members of the team nodded, the guidon bearer pivoted smartly and marched
back through the ranks of his fellow Antareans. "About face!" he
bawled, and the team turned to follow him.
The
reporters went after them like pilot fish surrounding a shark.
But
an hour later no one, the reporters included, knew anything more about the
mysterious arrival of the Antareans. They had marched to their locker room,
entered it, and locked the doors—and that was that.
"They
can't just stay in there indefinitely," one reporter said.
"They'll
have to come out sooner or later." "We'll be waiting."
Steve
was in the crowd that had followed the reporters to the locker room. One of
them turned to him suddenly. "Say, aren't you Frazer?"
Steve admitted that he was.
"Nebcott,"
the reporter introduced himself. "Fomal-haut
Interstellar Press. You're the Earthman who
went aboard the Liberte,
aren't you?"
"That's right."
Steve found himself the center of
attention.
Questions
were hurled at him from all sides. He had no reason not to answer them. If
anything, his cooperating with the press might help Billgarr, he decided. It
certainly couldn't do the old man any harm. But he knew he was treading on
dangerous ground too, for Syrtis Williams had declared himself responsible for
Steve, and though the Space Captain was not under Chandlur's jurisdiction as
Steve was, his answers might still make trouble for Syrtis Williams.
"Then
you think the High Commissioner is trying to clamp a lid on all this?" one
of the reporters asked after Steve had related his own experiences aboard the Liberté.
"I
didn't say that. I'm in no position to judge the Commissioner's actions."
"He wants to prevent
contact with these rollers?"
"I can't answer that.
I'd just be guessing."
"What are you going to do, Frazer?"
"You still have any hope of competing in
the games?"
"I'd
like to think there's a chance." "And you never raced
professionally?" "That's right, I never did."
One
of the reporters on the edge of the crowd shouted, "Bus coming!"
With
Steve following, they all rushed down the ramp that went under the grandstand
and outside. Three large jet-buses were just pulling up.
"For
the Antareans?" one of the panting reporters asked the driver of the first
bus.
"Just got a
call," the Ophiuchan replied laconically.
Soon the crimson-clad Antareans began to file
from their locker room. This time a cordon of Ophiuchan police formed an aisle
through the crowd for them, and the reporters' questions went unanswered.
Steve
had managed to find a position near the lead bus, and as Coach Harvshaw,
leading his team, reached it, Steve cried, "What about Billgarr? What are
you going to do about Billgarr?"
The
Antarean coach looked at him. "You a reporter?"
"No. I'm Steve Frazer, Earth team. I
went aboard the Liberie"
"Where's
Billgarr?"
Steve had to shout to make himself
heard. "Chand-lur has him in custody, says he's senile." "He's
what?"
"Senile.
Imagined the whole thing." Coach Harvshaw's face
darkened. "We'll see about that."
"Can
I go with you, sir?" Harvshaw shook his head at once. "But I-"
"The answer is
no."
"All
right, but listen," Steve said. "I was in hot water, just like
Billgarr. They released me in the custody of the Earth Space Captain, Syrtis
Williams. Maybe you can get them to release Billgarr in your custody."
"Good
idea," said Harvshaw. Then the hard lines of his face softened and he
added, "We'll try. And thanks for the advice, son."
The Antareans climbed aboard the buses, and
with a woosh and a roar they sped away. Steve stood in the brilliant light,
watching them until they were dots on the road that would take them to
Antarestown in the Olympic compound.
Scattering,
the reporters went looking for transportation. Steve walked slowly along the
road to Ophiuchus City. An Ophiuchan in a ground-jet stopped for him and drove
him the rest of the way in. At Ophiuchus City Steve caught the jet-bus that
would take him back to Earthtown.
Two
hours later Syrtis Williams was telling him, "I put a call through to
Ralpday, the Antarean Space Captain." Williams shook his head. "They
tried to get Billgarr away from the High Commissioner."
"And?"
"They
couldn't. Ralpday says they won't budge out of Antarestown until the old man
goes free. It looks like a stalemate."
"What about the
rollers?"
"Ralpday
refused to answer any questions about the rollers. If I had to take a guess I'd
say the Antareans are afraid the rollers will break off all contact if they
learn the way Billgarr's being treated."
"But where are they
now?"
"The rollers? I don't know. Wherever they go when they
teleport."
Just
then Hunk Little came in with Mackald. The big
wrestler whistled. "Popping up like that, those
Antareans
sure stole the show. Maybe now Chandlur will have to listen to reason."
"He's doing his best
not to," Steve said.
"Might
have known," Mackald grumbled. "The thing that bothers me is, he's a Denebian just like me. He's making me wish I was
born somewhere else and—" Mackald winked, "I haven't exactly led, how
they say, a life of rectitude."
Hunk
Little said, "A few minutes ago, we almost got
mobbed. I thought we'd never get here."
"You and Mackald?" Syrtis Williams asked, giving the wrestler a
blank look. "How did that happen?"
"Well,
we were coming along the short way from the compound entrance, right past
Antarestown and—"
"It
was me," Mackald picked up the story for him. "A couple of Antareans
rushed out shouting something, then more of them, then a whole mob."
"Billgarr," Hunk Little said.
"He's
here in the Olympic compound?" Syrtis Williams asked, amazed.
Mackald
shook his head. "Of course not. Me. Don't you get it? Of course, I'm a far better looking type
of guy, but the Antareans—at first they thought I was Billgarr. They were so
happy to see me, we almost got mobbed. Then they realized the mistake. Never
saw so many disappointed people in my life." He repeated, "Of course,
I'm a much better looking type of guy, but-"
"Captain," Steve said suddenly, a
strange look on
his face, "didn't you tell me the Antareans won't do anything until
Billgarr is free?"
"That's
right. They're afraid the rollers will break contact if they learn what
happened to Billgarr. So what?"
Steve
turned to Mackald slowly. Once before he'd noticed the resemblance between the
Denebian and Billgarr, and what had happened today proved it.
"Mackald," he said, "Mackald, how would you like to show
Chandlur just what you think of his behavior?"
All Mackald said was,
"Come again?"
"Billgarr. You look like him. With a little make-up,
you could probably pass for his double. You'd need a fringe of white hair and
some lines on your face, because Billgarr is older than you, and some pink
pigmentation on your skin, but that would be easy."
Syrtis
Williams shook his head. "You mean you want Mackald to pass himself off as
Billgarr to the Antareans? It would never work."
"No
sir. That isn't what I mean. I'm asking Mackald to pass himself off as
Billgarr—to
the Denebians."
There
was a silence, then Mackald blurted, "Hey now, wait a minute. Wait a minute!"
"All
we can do is ask you, Mackald," Steve said. "But look at it this way:
sooner or later the rollers are going to learn what Chandlur did and—"
"And,"
Syrtis Williams finished for him, excitement in his voice, "it would be
nice to be able to point to Mackald and say, 'Here's one Denebian who was on
your side from the very beginning.' "
Mackald's eyes got big. "But what
happens to me in the meantime? I like
it here on Ophiuchus. Been living here for years. You
want me to change places with Billgarr, huh? What do you think will happen when
Chandlur finds out? He's liable to have me deported from Ophiuchus."
Again
Syrtis Williams shook his head. "I guarantee
you that won't happen. I can see to it. There won't be a Space Captain
who'll agree to take you off."
"And,"
Steve pointed out earnestly, "if things go right with the rollers, you'll
be a hero."
"The hero of the
day," Hunk Little said.
"Your
name in all the solido-casts," Syrtis Williams urged.
"Me?" Mackald
gulped. "A hero? A real
hero?"
"Just say the
word," Syrtis Williams told him.
Mackald
paced back and forth. He sat down again, got up, paced some more, went to the
round window and looked out. When he turned, he was smiling.
"You
know something?" he said. "You just got yourself a hero."
Chapter 10 Rescue!
e had been Mackald the Denebian. Now he was Billgarr.
Steve blinked. He still
couldn't believe his eyes.
It
was Mackald himself, Mackald who knew his way around Ophiuchus City, who had
sent for the make-up specialist. And, exactly as Steve had foreseen, a fringe
of white hair, age-lines on Mackald's face and slight pink pigmentation had
been enough to create the metamorphosis. Mackald now looked almost as much like
Billgarr as Billgarr did. He even wore an Antarean jumper.
While
the make-up had been applied, Syrtis Williams hadn't been idle. He'd contacted
WTestor, the Denebian Space Captain, and they'd outlined the plan to
him.
"Sure,
I have friends in Denebtown," Westor said doubtfully. "I can get you
inside, but what then?"
Hunk
told him, "That's where I come in. If you need muscle, I'll be
along."
"I
don't like sending one of you boys—" Syrtis Williams began.
"One of us, nothing," Steve said.
"You're sending two
of us. Billgarr's a funny
guy. He trusts me. He's liable not to trust anyone else. I've got to be the one
to deliver him to Antarestown."
"That
makes sense," Syrtis Williams admitted. "But if Chandlur catches you,
I won't be able to intervene. You'd be saying good-by to Ophiuchus for
good."
"I'll
take that chance, sir. We ought to be able to pull it off, Hunk and Westor and
Mackald and me. We'll wait for night. It won't be dark, but at least most of
the Denebians will be sleeping. And if there's any doubt about who Billgarr is on the way out, the twilight ought to
help."
"He
can wear my jumper," Mackald suggested. "And if you want to take a
pair of clippers along, we can shave his hair off. Not that he has much more
than I do."
For
awhile all of them were silent. Then Syrtis Williams asked Westor, "Mind
telling me why you agreed to this? I almost didn't call you, but we needed
someone who could get us into Denebtown."
Westor
shuffled his feet awkwardly. He looked uncomfortable. Finally he said,
"Well, I tell you, Captain. One bad apple like Chandlur can give a planet
a bad name. I guess I want to do what I can to show Deneb in its true light.
There are good Denebians and bad Denebians and indifferent Denebians, just
like any other world." He cleared his throat. "Well, you boys
ready?"
"We're ready," Steve said. His
palms were moist. He heard the blood rushing in his ears. For the first time
since he thought of the plan he admitted to himself he was a little—make that
more than a little-afraid.
"You,
Mackald?" Westor
asked.
Mackald's
smile was fleeting. "I ought to have my head examined. This is the first
time I ever walked into prison of my own free will."
"You
will have your head examined," Syrtis Williams
told him, "if they think you're Billgarr."
Mackald
groaned. They all went downstairs and outside, where Syrtis Williams had a
jet-car waiting.
It
was too early—two suns still in the sky. But they were too tense and anxious to
sit around waiting. They drove to Ophiuchus City and beyond it, and then, with
the blue sun alone in the sky and close to the horizon, back to the Olympic
compound and Denebtown.
Hunkered down in the blue shadows near the
facade of Denebtown's single enormous building, Mackald whispered, "What's
keeping him?"
"Got
to make contact with his friends inside," Syrtis Williams said, then raised a finger to his lips for silence.
Steve
could feel the muscles of his legs growing stiff as he crouched with the others
a few yards off the stone walkway that led to Denebtown's main entrance.
Leathery-leaved shrubs grew there, helping along with the blue twilight shadows
to conceal them. Once a jet-car pulled up, and three Denebians walked up the
path and entered the building. Steve flinched. They passed so close he almost
could have stood up and touched them.
After
awhile Steve asked Syrtis Williams, "You sure they've got him in
Denebtown?"
"That's what Westor
says. He ought to know."
"But
wouldn't Chandlur feel safer keeping Billgarr in Ophiuchus City, itself?"
"Might be too many questions. Linkian or some of the others on the
committee might start asking questions. Besides, Chandlur'd have the press to
worry about there. And—"
"Here comes
Westor!" Hunk whispered excitedly.
It
was true. The door at the end of the path had opened, and the Denebian Space
Captain came through it. He walked right past the crouching Earth-men and
Mackald without stopping. "Around in back," he said out of the side
of his mouth, and kept going.
Hunk
rose at once, impulsively. But Steve clutched his shoulder, and they waited
until Wester, walking rapidly, had reached the foot of the path. Except for the
noise Westor's boots made crunching on the stone, there wasn't a sound.
"Let's
go," Syrtis Williams said finally, and he, the two boys and Mackald got up
to follow Westor.
A Denebian whose face Steve never saw was
waiting for them inside the back entrance of Denebtown. With his back to them,
he merely nodded his head when he saw Westor walk past him, then fell into step
a single long stride behind the Space Captain and several strides in front of
the others.
They
went up three flights of stairs. Once Steve heard voices along one of the
hallways resounding from the circular stairwell, and once, over his head
somewhere, he heard the pound of feet. They kept going. Westor's nameless
friend seemed to know not only where he was leading them, but that they
wouldn't meet any trouble along the way.
At least, Steve hoped he
knew that.
Three
more flights of stairs, until finally they walked down a hallway and stopped
before a door. Mackald was panting like an archaic steam engine. He raised a
hand, half in doubt, half in question, as the Denebian who had led the way kept
walking, turned down a branching corridor, and disappeared. But Westor shook
his head, took a deep breath, and motioned Steve to the door.
"Billgarr
knows you best," the Denebian said. "You ought to be the first one he
sees."
Tensely,
Steve went to the door. Would this be the right place? Would Billgarr be
inside, waiting hopelessly, never expecting rescue? Or had they been led into a
trap? After all, Westor's unknown friend was a Denebian, wasn't he? Like
Mackald who Steve once thought had betrayed them, Mackald—who had now agreed to
change places with Billgarr so that the old Antarean could rejoin his people.
Westor
had spelled it out. There were good Dene-bians and there were bad ones, as
there were among any other people. And while Deneb had its Chand-lurs, it also
had its Westors and its Mackalds.
Steve
put an ear to the door. First—nothing. Then he smiled.
He heard a twanging sound. Billgarr's "gee-tar."
Steve rapped on the door once with his knuckles, called, "Billgarr!"
At
once the twanging stopped. Steve could hear footsteps inside.
The
door opened.
Billgarr,
guitar in one hand, blinked. He started to say something, then
his jaw hung as he saw Mackald in the dim light of the hallway.
"I'm
in here" the old man said. "What am I doing out there?"
"He'll take your place," Syrtis
Williams said tersely. "We're delivering you to Antarestown." "Now?" "Now."
"Have
to hurry, then, because a couple of guards are going to take me to Chandlur for
questioning-right about now," Billgarr told them. "At least, that's
what they said at supper."
As
if to prove the old man's point, the sound of footsteps was heard far down the
corridor.
"Inside!" Syrtis Williams whispered.
"Quick!"
They all crowded into
Billgarr's room, and waited.
Could
Billgarr have been mistaken? Steve felt his heart pounding. If he weren't,
they'd have a fight on their hands.
The
footsteps came closer, paused outside the door. Mackald was sitting on the bed
with Billgarr's guitar on his lap. He twanged it once. The rest of them were
flattened against the wall on either side of the door, Hunk closest to it on
the left side, Syrtis Williams on the right.
A fist banged against the
door peremptorily.
"Billgarr?"
"Right
with you," said Mackald from the bed. If they didn't come in, if they
waited outside for him and took him down the hall at once, the Earthmen could
get away with Billgarr. But if they entered the room. . . .
Which
was exactly what they did.
When
the door opened, Hunk rose on the balls of his feet, raising one arm overhead.
Two guards, one tall, the other thickset and with the widest shoulders Steve
had ever seen, entered the room. The thickset one was closest to Hunk. The
taller one had a hand weapon, probably a Denebian blaster, belted around his
waist.
Hunk
brought the edge of his right palm down in a judo-chop at the back of the
thickset Denebian's neck. The guard took a step forward and fell to his knees.
As he did so, the tall one cried out and retreated.
Syrtis
Williams grabbed his arm, hauling him into the room. He
staggered forward, broke free as Williams swung on him, missing.
He reached for his blaster.
Steve
tried to stop him, but with one motion the guard ripped the blaster from his
belt and swept it up in a savage arc that ended against the side of
Steve's jaw. Steve felt himself falling. His vision
blurred, and then he was looking up at the tall guard's legs.
"Keep back, all of youl" the guard
warned. "You're overed."
For
an instant, time seemed to hang suspended. There was absolutely no motion in
the little room, and not a sound. Then the guard felled by Hunk climbed slowly
to his feet, and simultaneously little Mackald leaped up from the bed and
hurled himself at the guard with the blaster.
It
roared once and Mackald, a surprised look on his face, fell forward. Both
guards, standing side by side now, watched him.
"Two
of them," the tall one said incredulously. "Two
Billgarrs!"
It
was the last thing he said for a while. With an outraged cry, Hunk Little flung his great bulk at the guards. Muscular arms
spread wide, he hit them. One big hand closed on each head, and then Hunk
brought them together. The sound they made was like a mallet striking hardwood.
The thickset guard's eyes rolled. The other one dropped his blaster. Both of
them fell.
Steve
kneeled near the stricken Mackald, fingered his wrist.
The pulse beat was weak and fluttery. The chest of Mackald's jumper was
scorched where the ray from the blaster had struck him.
"Is he—" Syrtis
Williams began.
But
Mackald's eyelids fluttered, and the little De-nebian managed a faint smile.
"Don't finish that sentence, Cap'n. It'll take . . . more than one of
Chand-lur's hired . . . blasters to kill . . . me."
Syrtis
Williams scooped up the blaster. Hunk said, still outraged, "They shot
him. They went and shot him."
"Got
to hurry," Syrtis Williams said quickly. "They'll have heard that
blaster outside. Won't know where exactly it came from at first, but they'll
find out. We'll have to be on our way before they do."
Mackald
groaned, then grimaced and tried to smile again without success. "I . . .
guess you leave me . . . behind as planned."
"No
we don't," Steve said. "We're getting you out of here."
Hunk
stooped to pick up the fallen Mackald, but Syrtis Williams said, "Not you.
We may need your muscle on the way out."
So
it was Steve who lifted Mackald as gently as he could. The tough little
Denebian was surprisingly light. He didn't weigh much more than a child.
"Go
. . . easy," he told Steve. His face was white and bathed in sweat.
They
went into the hall, Syrtis Williams leading the way with the blaster, Hunk
bringing up the rear, Billgarr and Steve—carrying Mackald—between them.
As
they hit the top of the stairs, a voice hailed them from behind. They didn't
stop, didn't turn, but plunged on down. Feet pounded in the hallway above and
behind them. Steve turned. It was then that he realized Hunk Little
had remained behind. Steve heard shouts, a thud, another, more shouting.
"Come on, boyl" Syrtis Williams
urged over his shoulder.
Steve
went down with Mackald cradled in his arms. Hunk, he kept thinking. What's
happening to Hunk now?
If
he lived to be a hundred, Steve knew, he would never forget their retreat down
those six flights of stairs. At first Mackald had seemed light, but with every
step Steve took he seemed to grow heavier. Before they were halfway down Steve
felt as if the Denebian's weight would wrench his arms from their sockets. But
as hard as it was for him, he knew it was five times as hard for Mackald. And,
too, there was the uncertainty about Hunk, who had remained behind to give them
enough time to get downstairs and outside.
When
they reached the bottom of the last flight of stairs, Steve's arms had become
completely numb. Ahead of them, just a dozen steps now, was the back entrance
to Denebtown. Then—a quick run outside and around the building to where Syrtis
Williams's jet-car was waiting. . . .
But three guards, blasters on their hips,
stood with their backs to the door.
"Don't
go for those weapons," Syrtis Williams said grimly. "I'll blast you
before you touch them." Steve had never heard the Space Captain's voice
like that before. He knew Syrtis Williams wasn't bluffing.
The
guards must have realized that, too. They didn't make a move after their eyes
darted to Syrtis Williams's.
"Get their blasters," the Space
Captain told Bill-garr, and the old Antarean advanced spryly, almost cockily,
on the guards. In seconds he had disarmed them.
Syrtis
Williams jerked his thumb toward the door. "Outside, the
three of you."
At
first Steve didn't understand, but then he did. Syrtis Williams wanted to clear
the path for Hunk when—if—the wrestler came down in a hurry.
Steve
was hardly aware of rushing outside, of jogging along the path that went
around the side of Denebtown. His jaw throbbed dully and Mackald's weight
threatened at every step to nail his legs to the ground. Left leg . . . right
leg . . . left again . . . lungs heaving like an overworked bellows . . . and
Mackald, head lolling on Steve's shoulder, magnificently managed to encourage
him, "Come on, youngster. Not much further. I can see it, youngster. I
can see the car. . . ."
And
then they were tumbling inside, the three guards standing off a few steps,
watching them, Syrtis Williams standing between them and the jet-car with his
blaster.
"Billgarr?"
he said. "Can you drive? I'm waiting for Hunk."
It
was Mackald, though, Mackald stretched out now on the rear seat, who answered.
"Not . . . going anyplace . . . without that boy. . . ."
And so they waited.
Denebtown's
front door opened suddenly, and half a dozen guards
rushed outside. At the same instant,
Steve saw Hunk sprinting around the side of
the building, Hunk with bruises on his face and his juniper torn and hanging
from his shoulders, Hunk with a bloody nose but grinning. "Hunk, hurry!"
Steve cried.
Syrtis
Williams fired a warning shot over the guards' heads with his blaster. They
stopped short. Only one of them was armed, and he hadn't reached for his weapon
yet.
Then
he did just as Hunk Little leaped into the jet-car.
Syrtis Williams got in right behind him. The
blaster seared the blue twilight, missing them.
The jet-car lurched and
sped away.
"Hospital?" Syrtis Williams said over his shoulder.
"Not
for me," Mackald told him. "That's all those . . . rollers would have
to hear ... all this trouble because
they . . . they'd break off contact. . . ."
"My people will take
care of him," Billgarr offered.
"Mackald?" Syrtis Williams said.
"All
right with me, Cap'n."
Panting,
Hunk said, "Anyway, Chandlur's goose is cooked now. As soon as we
report—"
"We
can't," Steve pointed out. "Same reason. The
rollers are shy and uncertain, remember? If they get wind of the disturbance,
they'll go away and never come back."
"You
mean," Hunk demanded angrily, "Chandlur just
gets away with it?"
"For now," Syrtis Williams said,
"yes. But this isn't over yet, boy."
They weren't pursued. In the crowded confines
of the Olympic compound Chandlur's men would run too great a risk of being observed. They sped quickly past Fomalhauttown and
Siriustown and Centauri-town until Syrtis Williams called out,
"Here we are."
Williams
stopped the jet-car. Hunk got out first, and between
them he and Steve carried Mackald as gently as they could.
Up
the path at last to Antarestown and the mysteries it held for half a galaxy.
Chapter ii Deneb Won't listen
hielded by lead, little Mackald was stretched out on a speed-time table. The s-t radiation gun, its nozzle trained squarely on his chest, was suspended
from the ceiling of the Antarestown dispensary.
Syrtis
Williams took the Antarean physician aside. "Will he be all right?"
"I
believe so. s-t radiation
speeds up the metabolic functions of the injured area, you see, and—"
"I know," Syrtis Williams said.
The
physician shrugged. "Not all the outworlds use speed-time therapy."
Syrtis
Williams managed not to smile. The inhabitants of every planet in every star
system regarded all the others as outworlds as if, to its own denizens, each
planet was the center of the universe.
".
. . five or six days perhaps," the physician was
saying, "and he'll be as good as new. During that time, you see, the
patient's injury will have been treated, subjectively, for almost six months. So . . /'
The
physician rambled on, like all physicians everywhere, erecting a wall of
jargon between himself and his listeners.
Syrtis Williams caught Mackald's eye and
winked at him. Mackald winked back, and even managed a weak smile. Then Syrtis
Williams went into Coach Harvshaw's office where Steve, Hunk, and Billgarr were
waiting.
Two
hours had passed since they had arrived at Antarestown in Syrtis Williams's
jet-car. During that time Billgarr had told his story to his fellow
planet-eers.
Now Harvshaw said, "It's ironic in a
way. At first it seemed that the tests the rollers gave us would be crucial.
But now diat we've passed those tests with flying colors—"
"We have?"
Billgarr said.
"That's
right. Despite the enormous physical differences, the rollers find our
psychological and emotional make-up to be basically like their own. But as it
turns out, the tests aren't very important. Because if the rollers learn what's
been going on here on Ophiuchus, chances are they'll break off contact."
You
mean because of Deneb?" Syrtis Williams demanded.
"That's
what he means," the Antarean Space Captain, Ralpday, said grimly.
"But don't you see," Steve pointed
out, "Chand-lur isn't the only Denebian. He's not representative of his
people. There's Westor, who made it possible for us to rescue Billgarr; and
Mackald, who was willing to change places with him in Denebtown, and who almost
lost his life when we did escape with Billgarr. Can t we tell the rollers
that?"
Ralpday
was still pessimistic. "We can if we have to, but what good would it do?
Here's the situation, Steve. Now that we've passed our tests the rollers are
planning to send some emissaries to the games tomorrow."
"Tomorrow!" Hunk blurted.
"But every time Steve mentioned the rollers no one would believe him, not
even—" Hunk gulped, "me. And I'm his best friend."
"Well,"
Ralpday admitted, "we have this much leeway. In order for the rollers to
come down to Ophiuchus, we'll have to bring one of their telepor-tation
cylinders here for them. I guess if we had to we could delay. But if we did,
the rollers would know something's wrong, and if they thought something was
wrong they still might want to call everything off."
"Give
us a few days," Syrtis Williams suggested. "Maybe we can get things
ready for them here."
Harvshaw
gave the Space Captain a sharp look. "You mean, for example, wait until
Mackald is healed?"
"Right. I gather the rollers will shy away from us
unless they can be convinced all is sweetness and light for their
reception."
Steve
frowned. "I'm just a kid, so maybe I ought to keep my big trap shut and
listen, but you know what I think? I think it would be a
mistake to try-to deceive the rollers in any way. Sure, we humans aren't
a hundred per cent paragons—but how can the rollers expect that? If they want
to establish contact with us, they've got to accept the good with the bad and
hope, the way we hope, that the good cancels out the bad. After all, the
rollers didn't let you Antareans test them, did
they?"
"Besides,"
Hunk took up where his friend left off, "why don't they just look at our
history? We've got billions of people living on all the outworlds, each world
with its own aims and motives, but there hasn't been a war during the entire
Interstellar Age. Doesn't that show we humans can get
along with each other despite guys like Chandlur?"
"They
have a good point there, both of them," Harvshaw said promptly.
"Maybe
it's high time we told the rollers to take us as we are," Ralpday agreed.
"The thing that bothers me, though, is this, we won't
be able to predict what the High Commissioner will do. He wants to stop us, that's for sure. He'll fight tooth and nail to prevent any
kind of cultural exchange between humanity and the rollers."
"But why?" Steve asked. "How can you say that for sure? He wouldn't even
believe the rollers existed when I told him my story, and when Billgarr told his story to the Space Captains. He said I was a wild-eyed kid, and that
Billgarr was senile."
Ralpday
shook his head. "That was all sham. Maybe not right away, but after a
Denebian tug visited the
Liberté, it was. Which means Chandlur knew perfectly
well that Billgarr was telling the truth."
"Huh?
1 don't get it." That was Hunk, looking as
perplexed as he sounded.
Ralpday explained, "Way back when we
first started our journey to Ophiuchus, the Denebians had planted a spy, an
Anterean crewman, aboard the Liberté.
"A
spy?"
Steve asked. "What for?"
"Originally to keep tabs on our
athletes.
Later, and quite accidentally, he was able to report on our contact with the
rollers. He left the Liberté
on the De-nebian tug, so by
now Chandlur knows just about everything you know."
Steve
was puzzled. "Billgarr didn't tell me anything about him."
Ralpday's
smile was wry. "That's because Billgarr didn't know."
"You're
right, I didn't," Billgarr admitted. "How'd you find out?"
It
was Coach Harvshaw who answered, and he didn't look particularly happy about
his answer. "They
had a spy aboard the Liberté. We—well—we had one in Denebtown."
Hunk clapped a hand to his
head and said, "Ouch!"
"All
right, all right," Harvshaw went on defensively. "Deneb and Antares
are the vying centers of power in the galaxy, don't forget that. Maybe the
Olympic games aren't anything more than athletic contests to you, Hunk—"
"Athletic
contests!"
Steve cried. "They're the first chance humanity's had to get
together—people from all over the galaxy—since the Interstellar Age
began."
"That's
true, and I wish it were the whole story," Harvshaw said. "But it
isn't. Because neither Deneb nor Antares, for propaganda
reasons, can afford to come off second best in the games. So," he
finished lamely, "we used spies."
"And they found
out?" Steve wanted to know.
"Nothing,
except that Deneb's going to be a mighty tough opponent."
Syrtis
Williams grinned. "You knew that before you ever left Antares."
"Spies," Billgarr
said distastefully.
"Anyway,"
Ralpday brought the conversation back to where it had started, "Chandlur
has two very good reasons for trying to balk us. One, he'd like to disqualify
Antares in the games. Two, and even more important, he knows of the existence
of the rollers, despite any protestations to the contrary, and he's determined
to prevent our meeting with them."
"But why?" Steve asked. "Some time ago Billgarr
told me Chandlur was afraid, on Deneb's behalf, that Ophiuchus—lying close to
the center of the galaxy as it does—would become the most important human world
if contact were established. But that doesn't make sense."
"The
rollers live on the other side of the center, beyond the Ophiuchus nebulae and
the star swarms of Sagittarius, remember?" Ralpday said.
"So what? What difference does it make—since they have
this teleportation and can get any place they want instantaneously?"
"It
isn't as easy as you make it out," Ralpday explained. "Remember I
said we'd have to bring one of the teleportation cylinders down to Ophiuchus
for the rollers? That would be true in every case, so for some years at least
Ophiuchus would be bound to find itself in the galactic spotlight, as a sort of
transshipment point for the rollers' cylinders. And don't think Chandlur isn't
aware of that."
"Looks like he doesn't
miss a trick," Billgarr said.
"We
have some alternatives," Ralpday said. "Three, as I see it." He
ticked them off on his fingers, "One, we just let the rollers come after
bringing their cylinders here."
"From
where?"
Syrtis Williams asked.
"We
have a pair hooked up between the Liberté
and Denebtown. But it's a
low-power unit, fit for travel between here and the ship, and that's all. What
we'll have to do is teleport back to the Liberté, then take the Liberté
through subspace to the
roller station nearest us—it's beyond Sagittarius—then bring a really big
teleporter back here to Ophiuchus.
"Anyway,
the first alternative, as I've said, is to just let the rollers come ahead and
hope for the best. The second, we take the Liberté to their station beyond Sagittarius and explain the situation to them.
Even though Steve and Hunk seem to favor that, and even though what they say
makes a lot of sense, I'm not sure I go for it. The rollers are just plain too
cautious, that's all. At the first sign of trouble, they're liable to call the
whole thing off."
"And the third alternative?" Syrtis Williams demanded.
"The
third one is this, a group of us visit Chand-lur and lay
the situation on the line for him—playing down the shyness and caution of the
rollers and hoping for the best. Then, if that fails, we can still try
alternatives one or two."
"With
Chandlur brought up to date on our plans," Billgarr said.
Ralpday's
answer was a shrug. "Anyone have a better idea?"
There was a silence.
Apparently no one did.
"Then
it's settled," Ralpday said. "It's the middle of the night. I suggest
we all get some sleep and pay a visit to Chandlur in the morning."
"He'll
love us," Hunk said. "After what we did at
Denebtown tonight."
Ralpday
shook his head. "That was his fault, not ours. He had no right to keep
Billgarr a virtual prisoner—especially after the rest of us teleported here.
He must have known that we weren't pursued beyond Denebtown. But if he wants
to make anything out of that, we'll have an impartial Ophiuchan psychologist
run some tests on Billgarr. It won't come to that, though. On this point at
least I know Chand-lur'll back down. He'll have to."
Opening
the door for them, Ralpday added, "By the way, I'd like you two boys on
hand for the showdown with Chandlur in the morning. I like the way you put
things and, besides, the most important single element in the games is the
youth of the fifty worlds. So, you be their spokesmen. All
right?"
Steve
and Hunk looked at each other. Hunk shuffled his feet. Steve could sense his
friend was waiting for him to give the answer for both of them.
"We'll
do what we can," Steve said, and as he left with Syrtis Williams and Hunk,
after they'd checked again on Mackald's condition, he realized that what they
achieved tomorrow—and if not tomorrow, then a little later out in the
unchartered regions of space beyond Sagittarius—might determine the course of
human history for the next several generations.
An hour later Steve and Hunk were in their
bunks in Earthtown. Hands laced behind his head, Steve was staring at the heavy curtain
drawn across the window. He was too restless, too excited to sleep.
As
if reading his thoughts, Hunk called from across the room, "Asleep,
Stevie-boy?"
"Uh-uh."
"Thinking about
tomorrow?"
"I
guess so. I told Captain Ralpday we'd do what we can, but we're just a couple
of kids and—"
"And
even if we had beards down to our toenails, Chandlur's answer would still be
the same. That guy isn't going to cooperate a lick,
Stevie-boy."
"That," Steve
admitted, "is what I was thinking."
Awhile
later Steve heard Hunk's regular breathing. But for a long time Steve lay awake
wondering what the future held for them—and for mankind.
A rough hand on his shoulder shook Steve
awake. "Hey, Hunk, g'way!
G'wananlemmesleep!" he protested.
"Steve! Steve, wake up. It's me, Joe
Ito."
Coach
Ito's voice sounded strange. Steve blinked, stretched and sat up on his bunk.
Coach Ito was trying very hard not to smile, but suddenly he gave up the effort
and a truly huge grin all but bisected his face. Paper rustled in his hand and
he cried,
"Here
it is, Steve! What you've been waiting for. A copy of the
subspace radio message that just came from Earth. Read it, boy. Go on
and read it."
Steve
needed no further urging. With all that had been happening on Ophiuchus the
past day or so, he'd pushed to the back of his mind the problem of his own
status as an Olympic athlete.
Now
Joe Ito thrust the sheet of white paper into his hand, laughed, thumped Steve
on the shoulder, laughed again and almost sang, "Read it out loud, boy. Go
ahead, let Hunk hear it, too."
"Hear
what?" Hunk demanded sleepily. His voice was almost a growl.
"Just read it, Steve."
And Steve read:
"Coach
Joe Ito, Earthtown, Olympic Compound, Ophiuchus. Eligibility status of
spacesuit racer Steve Frazer investigated and confirmed by this office. Fra-zer
has complete amateur standing and our best wishes for success in the
games." Steve's voice caught. He couldn't go on for a minute.
"Hey, Stevie-boy, that's great!"
Hunk cried, and
jumped out of his bunk to pound Steve's back so
hard Steve saw stars.
"It—it's
signed," Steve finished, "Morelli, Earth Olympic Commissioner,
Athens, Greece, Earth, Sol System. It—you did it, Coach. You did it!"
"It
just confirms what we knew all along, Steve," Joe Ito said.
Hunk
asked, "Does Roy Ambler know yet? Boy, I can just see his face."
"Not yet," Coach
Ito said. "But—"
Hunk
and Steve weren't listening now, though. Grasping Steve's arm, Hunk had dragged
him off the bunk, and they were doing a wild, crazy dance around the little
room.
"You'll tear the place
apart!" Coach Ito warned.
For
answer, Hunk grabbed him, too, and made him join in. Hunk's weight made the
floor shake. Then he grabbed Joe Ito's hand again and shook it up and down like
a pump handle.
"Give
it back to me, it's the only right hand I have," Joe Ito protested. When
Hunk released it, the coach managed to say, "As you probably know, they're
holding the Parade of the Planets over again this morning. You'll be able to
take part, Steve. And tomorrow the games start. If you don't win a gold medal
for Earth and Sol System, I'll eat the medal of the man who does."
Some
of the enthusiasm drained out of Steve, replaced by a different sort of
excitement. "Coach," he said, "I—I won't be able to make the
parade."
"You're kidding."
"No," Steve said, "I'm
not." Then he explained what had been decided at Antarestown last night.
"It's
just a parade," he finished, "and if I can be of any help at all when
they visit Denebtown, I want to be there."
"Hunk?" Joe Ito said.
"So
who has to parade all the time? I was in the first one, anyway."
Soberly
Joe Ito said, "You boys are all right. But tell me this—you will be able to compete in the games, won't you?" He frowned.
"Earth, as I see it, can only look forward to two gold medals. Anything
else would be gravy. The two are yours, Hunk, and yours, Steve."
"Nothing'll
keep me away from those wrestling mats," Hunk vowed.
But
Steve didn't answer the question right away. Until he'd reached Ophiuchus, the
games were the most important thing in the world to him. Now, with the roller
situation coming to a head, he wasn't sure. He just didn't know at the moment.
"I'll race if I
possibly can," he told Joe Ito.
"If
you possibly can?"
Steve
felt awkward. "Believe me, Coach, I'm not ungrateful. You've done a lot
for me, more than anyone had a right to expect."
"What
does that have to do with it? Earth—" "Earth, like every other human
world in the galaxy, is faced with the possibility of contact—friendly
contact, Coach—with an alien culture. If I can do anything to help make that
happen, I—I'm going to doit."
Coach Ito nodded slowly. What he had no way
of knowing, and what Steve didn't know yet either, was that successful contact
with the rollers would rest squarely on the shoulders of an eighteen-year-old
Earth boy—an eighteen-year-old Earth boy named Steve Frazer.
Steve
headed for the shower stall. "We'd better get dressed and have some chow,
Hunk. They'll be waiting for us at Antarestown."
High Commissioner Chandlur said, "I could have all of you arrested for what
happened here. Two Denebian guards were injured."
He
also said, "Please don't tax my patience. I won't —I simply cannot—believe
any wild-eyed stories about extra-human life waiting to make contact with
us."
And
then he said, "So if you—uh—gentlemen will excuse me. . . ."
All
this was after Syrtis Williams, Ralpday, Harv-shaw, Hunk and Steve had outlined
the roller situation to him. He simply did not listen, had waited impatiently,
drumming fat fingers on his desk while they spoke. It was one of the most
frustrating experiences Steve had ever had. He knew Chandlur was aware of the
existence of the rollers; Chandlur's spy aboard the Liberté would have informed him. Yet Chandlur,
convinced that Deneb's role as one of the two centers of galactic culture was
more important than a meeting with the rollers, denied all of it.
No
one paid any attention to his curt suggestion to end the interview. Chandlur
stirred uncomfortably,
but stopped drumming his fingers. "Exactly what do you want of me?"
"Cooperation,
Commissioner," Syrtis Williams said. "The rollers will call the whole
thing off unless they're convinced everyone on Ophiuchus is for the meeting and
the establishment of diplomatic relations developing from it. If they believe
the High Commissioner himself opposed it—"
"But
how can I cooperate in something which simply is not true?" the
Commissioner asked blandly.
Ralpday
stood up angrily. "It's true and you know it's true, Chandlur. What we
came here to find out is what you're going to do about it."
Chandlur
rose ponderously to his feet, his bald head gleaming. "Gentlemen, we're
wasting each other's time. I have a very busy schedule today."
"But you can't—"
Ralpday began.
"Can
and will, Captain." Chandlur turned slowly, almost lazily, to face the
Antarean Coach, Harvshaw. "Oh yes, I almost forgot. I am glad you're here,
Coach. If you hadn't come, I would have sent for you. I'll want a full report
on where the Antarean team spent its time after the Liberté was deserted."
Harvshaw
gaped. "We already told you. With the rollers."
But
Chandlur ignored that. "A rumor is circulating here at Olympic
Headquarters to the effect that the Antarean team went into intensive training
on a heavy planet beyond the coalsack. If that is
true, then of course Antares will be barred from the games."
"It's not true!"
Harvshaw gasped.
"You'll have to prove
that."
"But it's lies! All
lies!"
"My informants
indicate that—"
Harvshaw's
face was red and his hands shook. "Who?" he cried.
"Who told you those lies?"
"They
wish," Chandlur almost purred, "to remain anonymous."
Harvshaw
advanced on him menacingly, but Ralp-day held his fellow planeteer back.
"Don't you see, he's trying to goad you?"
"But he said—"
"I
know what he said. He doesn't have any informants, not since the Denebian spy
hid from the rollers and later left the Liberté.
He can't prove those
accusations, and he knows he can't."
Chandlur
was still purring. "Can you prove that wild-eyed story about the rollers,
or whatever you call them?"
No
one answered him. "Tit for tat, gentlemen," he said. "If Antares
forgets about these alleged extra-human beings, I'm willing to drop this
business of the heavy planet that you—"
"He's
right," Syrtis Williams admitted, marching heavy-footed to the door,
"we're wasting each other's time, and we've got work to do."
The
others followed him, Harvshaw a little reluctantly. "Thanks for
nothing," Hunk Little said as they left.
A
few minutes later Chandlur was looking at Roy Ambler's unhappy face on his
viz-phone.
"I'm glad to see you followed my
suggestion about not parading after all," Chandlur said.
"That's
easy for you to say. I had to lie to the Coach, tell him I wasn't feeling well."
Chandlur
chuckled. "Are you? With Steve Frazer reinstated as Earth's first
spacesuit racer?"
"What do you
think?"
"And you want to do
something about it?"
Roy Ambler nodded.
"Good.
Good. Keep close to the wrestler called Hunk Little
and to Frazer. Then. . . ."
Roy
Ambler listened and nodded again. But his thoughts wandered. He had spent too
much time in Steve's shadow, he told himself. And even before that, his father
had seen too much frustration at the hands of Steve's father. There'd been a
time when Roy Ambler Senior could have picked up a lifetime lease on an
enormous quadrant of the asteroid belt, but Steve Frazer's father, proving that
a single determined homesteader could venture profitably in the asteroids, had
blasted a path for thousands of homesteaders who had followed after him. Sol
System disapproved of large lifetime leases. Then, for Roy himself, there had
been a series of humiliating defeats in local Sol System racing events. Each
time Steve had beaten Roy, Roy Ambler Senior had taken it personally, as if Don
Frazer were besting him all over again. And then there had been the final
defeat on the eve of departure from Soy System, when Coach Ito had posted team positions.
It had, of course, been a foregone conclusion, for Steve had outraced Roy
Ambler consistently in the asteroid belt and in the Jovian moons competition.
Not that Roy lacked racing ability. He was a more than competent spacesuit
racer. He was a very good one. But Steve Frazer, he thought bitterly, had
always managed to come up with that barely fractional increase in racing
efficiency which meant the difference between first and second place in the
meets they'd entered together.
This
time, Roy vowed grimly, it wouldn't happen. This time Frazer wouldn't win—even
if it meant that neither of them competed. This time Roy wouldn't have to
return home and tell his father that Frazer had beaten him again.
And
while Roy Ambler made his grim vow, the rollers waited beyond the coalsack nebulae and the star swarms of Sagittarius that hid
the center of the galaxy.
Chapter 12 The Space Captains
teve and
Hunk returned the long way to Earth-town, walking past the great Olympic
stadium. Their unsuccessful meeting with Chandlur had made them miss the second
Parade of the Planets. It had ended moments before they reached the stadium,
and throngs of Ophiuchans and outworlders were milling about the main entrance
as they approached.
A
holiday mood gripped the crowd. People collected in little knots which dashed
this way and that as the parading teams filed out of the stadium, their flags
and guidons still held proudly high, the banners whipping in the hot Ophiuchan
wind.
The
biggest crowd of all had gathered near the bulletin board in front of the main
entrance. At first Steve didn't know why, then he heard someone shout,
"Come
on, this way! They're posting the order of events!"
Steve and Hunk felt themselves pushed into
the press of bodies around the bulletin board. As they
waited their turn in front of it, Steve was
thinking of the races. In a general way, he knew how they'd be held. A series
of artificial satellites would be placed in orbit around Ophiuchus—six of them,
probably. A spacesuit racer, competing with two other racers from each
represented planet, would have to follow a prescribed course from satellite to
satellite and, finally, back to the stadium.
It
would be a grueling test of racing ability and stamina, for the racers would
probably be in their suits at least sixteen hours to complete the course. Four
of the satellites, Coach Ito had told Steve, would have readily predictable
orbits. But the remaining two would have obtained velocities just short of
orbital, and their positions would be uncertain. Yet each racer would have to
touch down on these, also, before he completed the course.
Just
thinking about it excited Steve. He had journeyed halfway across the galaxy to
compete in these races. He wouldn't know the exact satellite orbits until the
last moment. Then, using what was still called seat-of-the-pants reckoning,
he'd have to speed out to all of them and return to the stadium, using nothing
more than the shoulder rockets of his spacesuit.
If he entered the races.
"... wrestling on the afternoon of the third day!"
Hunk was shouting jubilantly. "So if we go out there to the rollers, we
ought to get back in time for me to compete. That's something, huh?"
Steve nodded, happy for his friend. Then his own eyes were scanning the program. This
afternoon . . . gymnastic events. Tomorrow morning . . . foot races,
marathon. . . . Steve's eyes narrowed, and all at once the sounds of the crowd
receded.
Tomorrow
morning the spacesuit racing would begin. There it was on the program. Tomorrow
morning!
Which meant that if Steve joined Syrtis
Williams and the others in their meeting with the rollers, he'd miss the races.
Do
they need me? he wondered. Do they really need me out
there?
"Where
are you going?" Hunk asked. Steve had begun to walk quickly away from the
bulletin board. "Back to Earthtown?"
Shaking
his head, Steve called over his shoulder, "The spaceport."
It was the first time Steve had seen the
salvage ship. It wasn't big and it had engines far too powerful for its size
and weight. The name stenciled near the prow was, Milky Way.
"In
a way it's symbolic," Syrtis Williams told him. "Milky Way. That's what we call the galaxy, and our half of the galaxy will be
getting together with the other half in it."
Westor
the Denebian nodded. "According to Bill-garr, we were supposed to teleport
out to the Liberté
and head for the roller
base in the Antarean ship. But you know us Space Captains."
Syrtis Williams grinned. "Once they got
wind of this business, there wasn't a Space Captain on all of Ophiuchus who
wouldn't have given his eyeteeth to go out there and meet the rollers. And
Billgarr told us the teleportation cylinder which brought the Antareans here to
Ophiuchus was just a small unit which—"
"It
was big enough to get all the Antareans here," Steve pointed out.
"Small
means small power component, son. Something about having to
recharge it, unless we want to send people through one at a time at several
hour intervals. So the quickest way out there is to take the Milky Way—which we're going to do first thing tomorrow morning."
"Tomorrow
morning," Steve said.
"What's the
matter?"
"The spacesuit races. They're being held tomorrow morning, too.''
Syrtis
Williams made a face. "I see what you mean. And you can't decide whether
to compete or to come with us, right?"
"That's about it,
sir."
"I
wish Billgarr were here," Syrtis Williams said slowly. "He could say
what I'm going to say much better than I could. He had a hunch about something,
son. The rollers. Sure, they'd put the entire Antarean
team through an exhaustive series of tests, but everything was so scientific
and objective, they hardly got to know the Antareans at all, except as squiggly
lines on graph paper and charts and tables and things like that."
"I don't think I
follow you, sir."
"Well,
there's going to be trouble. Chandlur has a good idea what we're up to, and he won't just stand by. That's where Billgarr's
hunch comes in. Assuming Chandlur makes trouble, assuming he tries to throw a
monkey wrench into any meeting with the rollers, we'll need a weapon of our
own."
"A
weapon?"
Steve said blankly.
"The
rollers, Billgarr said, were extremely interested in Earth."
"But
why Earth? We're just a backwater planet now. We—"
"We're
the birthplace of humanity," Syrtis Williams said, and Westor and the
other Space Captains nodded. "We've spent twenty generations in space,
and maybe that's a long time, Steve. But how many millennia were spent—before
that—on Earth?"
"I
get your point, sir. You mean the rollers are going to be particularly interested
in Earth and Earthmen, don't you?"
"Sure, and more than that. The rollers had a birthplace world too—and
it's always produced most of their top leaders. If they equate Earth with that
world, and if we have some representatives of it aboard the Milky Way to counter whatever bad impression
Chandlur's going to make—"
"But surely he isn't
coming!"
"On the Milky Way? Hardly. But believe me, he'll be there. To play on
the rollers' caution and shyness, to try and break things off before they get
started. Anyway, it was Billgarr's hunch that we were going to need you."
"Why
me?"
Steve wanted to know.
"A lot of reasons. You're from Sol System, Steve. So am I,
sure—but I'm a Space Captain and the rollers will know they'll get no trouble
from us. Then, too, you've been in on this business almost from the very
beginning. One of the rollers even met you, remember? And—how old are
you?"
"Just
turned eighteen, sir."
Syrtis
Williams smiled a slow smile. "All right. Eighteen. You think of yourself as a man, so don't get in a
stew over what I'm about to say. You're a boy, Steve. You're still a boy. And
the rollers will know, of course, that whatever happens out there won't be half
so important as what will happen next year, and the year after that, and the
decade after that, and so on. In short, it's going to be the youth of our half
of the galaxy and the youth of theirs that..."
Syrtis
Williams went on, but now Steve was hardly listening. Why me? he kept thinking. Why me? He'd finally been cleared for the
races, hadn't he? Wasn't that why he'd come here? Wasn't it more important than
any high-level meeting with the rollers, especially since, as Syrtis Williams
said, he was still a boy? But they'd be interested,
the rollers would, in the reactions of youth—wouldn't they?
"Why me?" Steve said out loud. "Why
not someone else?"
"The reasons I already
told you—and something else." Syrtis Williams was grinning. "I've
saved the clincher for last, son. You're a spacesuit racer, Steve. You've
practically grown up in a spacesuit. And the rollers have this teleportation.
How long they've had it, I don't know. But Billgarr says hundreds of our Earth
years. So, for a long time, they haven't had to face the rigors of space as
we've had to face them."
"They're
going to be mighty interested in you, Steve Frazer," Westor the Denebian
finished for his fellow Space Captain. "Mighty
interested in you and that spacesuit of yours. In a way you're our trump
card. An Earthman, young, a spacesuit racer—"
"Now
do you see?" Syrtis Williams asked gently. "Colonizing our half of
the galaxy as we've done, we humans have had a pretty rough, wild—yet
glorious-time of it. As we see it, Steve, in a way you're a symbol of all
that."
Stubbornly, Steve said,
"I came here to race."
For
a moment Syrtis Williams didn't reply. Then he snapped suddenly, "Going to
turn pro?"
"Why no, sir, I
just—"
"You
sure?"
"I'm sure. I don't
want to be a professional racer."
"What
do you want to be? An asteroid miner like your father?"
Steve
shook his head. "Dad always wanted to be a Space Captain, sir. Like you.
He never quite made it. I know he'd want me to—become one in his place."
"A Space Captain then. You want to be a Space Captain?"
"Yes,
sir," Steve answered. "And not a professional
racer?" "No, sir. I already told
you."
"Good."
In his earnestness, Syrtis Williams sounded a little angry. "I just wanted
you to spell it out. You want to be a Space Captain. And how do you think the
Space Captains will be spending most of their time—in your generation?"
"I—I
don't know."
"Yes,
you do. I want you
to tell me." Steve licked his lips. "Well, with the
rollers, I guess. Paving the way for our two cultures to get
together." "You guess?" "I—I'm pretty sure,
sir."
"All right. We start tomorrow. At
dawn. You can start tomorrow—with us. What do you say, Steve?"
"I
just don't know. I wish I had more time to make up my mind."
"The
toughest decisions in life," Syrtis Williams said, scowling, "have to
be made on short notice. Believe me, boy, that's the truth. Take it from a
Space Captain. Well? You be here tomorrow
morning?"
Steve
didn't answer. If he shut his eyes, he knew he'd see the spaccsuit racers in
their bright suits waiting for the starting gun in the personnel pit.
"Dawn,"
Syrtis Williams said again, "We'll be here. Ready to
blast off. We won't wait."
"Yes,
sir, I understand that," Steve told him.
But
Syrtis Williams had turned to Westor and was saying, "If the radar screens
still give you trouble . .."
Steve walked away. The decision was his, and his alone, to make.
As if it had all been planned, Joe Ito
presented the other side of the picture when Steve returned to Earthtown.
"Going
to be a six-satellite course," he told Steve. "A
million-and-a-half-mile course in all. Rough and pretty complex, but
you've had them rougher—and more complex—in the asteroid belt. Except for one thing."
"What's that?"
Steve asked.
"Well,
the tricky part of it is this: two of the satellites will be in unstable
orbits. At aphelion they'll be competely clear of Ophiuchus's atmosphere, but
at perihelion they won't. At perihelion they'll hit the fringes of the
atmosphere. For a man traveling in a spacesuit at a couple of hundred miles a
second, its liable to be pretty soupy."
"Couldn't they wait
for aphelion?"
"They?" Coach Ito looked at him strangely.
"Don't you mean we'?"
Steve
said nothing, and the coach frowned a little and went on, "Ordinarily you
could wait for aphelion, but as I told you those two orbits won't be stable.
You could lose too much time waiting unless you happened to be lucky. Each man
will have to make up his own mind, though, because the friction heat can be
intense, even on the fringes of the atmosphere, at the speeds you'll be
traveling." Coach Ito asked suddenly, "Sounds exciting, doesn't
it?"
"I
guess, Coach." Steve
faltered. "You guess?" "Well, I-"
"What's
the trouble, Steve? I don't have to tell you Earth's depending on you to win a
gold medal."
"I
know, but—" And Steve told Coach Ito of his talk with Syrtis Williams.
When
he finished, the coach asked, "You asking me for advice?"
"No,
Coach. I have to decide for myself."
"Good,
because this isn't something anyone can advise you on. But I wish, when it
comes to you kids, they'd keep their politics away—about five hundred
light-years away."
Politics?
But
wasn't it far more than politics?
If
Billgarr's hunch were right, wasn't what Steve had to do out there at the
unknown center of the galaxy more important than any gold medal he might or
might not win for Earth?
If Billgarr's hunch were right. But it didn't
have to be. Maybe Steve was just an eighteen-year-old kid with a race to run.
Maybe
. . .
That
night, Steve still hadn't made up his mind.
In
a way, it was like the beginning of his incredible adventures here on Ophiuchus
all over again. For then he and Hunk had slipped up to the Hellas's ob-deck to watch change-over when they were
supposed to have remained in quarters. And now, on the eve of the races—when
Steve should have been sleeping he donned his jumper, went out into the blue
twilight and took the long walk to the spaceport.
Not
because he'd made up his mind. He hadn't. But tonight they were putting the
racing satellites in orbit, and somehow, as if they could supply the answer
Steve couldn't give himself, he wanted to see the small, two-stage rockets
blast off.
He
reached the spaceport just before the first satellite-bearing rocket lifted off
its miniature gantry. Unlike the big spaceships, he knew, these would be
liquid-fuel rockets. There would be no instantaneous burst of power, no quick
disappearance into the velvet twilight. Instead, the rockets would rise
majestically on their exhausts, building power, climbing on a column of smoke
and fire, slowly at first, and then a little faster, and then—unexpectedly—very
fast, until only their fuel and vapor trails hung in the sky and their whining
roar backlashed the ground of Ophiuchus.
Waiting
alone beyond the metal mesh fence of the blastoff area, Steve heard the droning
radio countdown of the first rocket.
"X
minus thirty seconds!"
The
last technician, by then, had scurried clear of the gantry. The rocket was
waiting, poised, its nose cone, one of the satellite stations for the race,
looking patiently skyward.
"X
minus twenty!"
Steve's
mouth was dry all of a sudden. "X minus ten!" "X minus
five!"
"Four .. . three . . . two . . . one . . . off!"
The
rocket rose, stood poised on its pillar of fire, climbed, climbed slowly and
then not slowly and then Very fast—and then it was gone.
They
wheeled the second gantry into place. And soon after that the third, and the
fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth . . .
All
the rockets had been launched. All the way-stations for the race were speeding
on their way to orbit.
Six rockets pointed at the sky. Six rockets blasting off.
Six
way-stations in space for a race that, now, was part of an athletic event that,
on and off, had absorbed mankind for four thousand years and more.
Or
were those rockets symbolic of something else? Of mankind's eternal quest,
perhaps, the quest that had taken him down from his trees and out of his caves
and up the long ladder of civilization until now he was poised on the brink of
the unknown at the center of the galaxy?
Steve
walked slowly back to Earthtown. When he reached his room, Ophiuchus's second
and third suns were bright on the horizon. Hunk was sleeping soundly. Steve
took his spacesuit out of the closet, the ice-blue suit trimmed with red and
white.
When
he turned with it, deflated and draped over his arm, Hunk was awake.
"Is it time?"
Hunk asked sleepily.
"Time
for what?"
"You
know for what. Til be back before the wrestling starts, but you—"
"I know," Steve said. "I know.
That's the hard part of it." He went to the door.
"Hey,
wait for me!" Hunk cried. "Where you going?"
Hunk
climbed quickly into his jumper. "Where are you going?" he asked his
friend again.
Steve
took a deep breath. "To the port," he said. "The Space Captains
are waiting."
Chapter 15 Beyond Sagittarius
f anyone
had told Chandlur the Denebian he was essentially an evil man, he would have
been shocked and, in his own view at least, righteously indignant. No, he did
not regard himself as an evil man.
But
he was a Denebian. Fondling his jeweled tiara, he could picture what life would
be like on his homeworld right now. It was a very large planet revolving in an
immense orbit around a huge white sun. Its density was surprisingly low so
that, despite its size, gravity stood at just slightly more than Earth-norm.
Its cities were great, glittering hives of wealth and pleasure. There wasn't
much farmland—for low specific gravity accounted for a porous rock layer that
would float on water and did not produce good soil.
Chandlur
was proud of Deneb II and its place in the galaxy—so proud that he would do
anything to maintain it. Little Earth had once worn the mantle of power, little
Earth from which humanity had sprung. But Earth was a second-rate planet now,
Chandlur told himself. As for Ophiuchus, the site of
163
the Olympic games, it didn't even have Earth's
proud heritage. If Earth was the birthplace of humanity, now in cultural
eclipse;, then Ophiuchus was a brash, raw frontier
world. But too often in the long interstellar history of mankind, Chanelhir
knew, the brash, raw frontier planets made their bids for power.
Hadn't
Antares done it? And Fomalhaut? Why, they vied with
Dencb for center stage in interstellar relations, even though the Antares
System had for its luminary a dying old red star, and even though Fomalhaut
VII, the chief planet of that system, was a water world with no real natural
resources other than those of the sea, and no scenery to match Deneb's Sky
Mountains or the great Kaludni Desert which, Chandlur thought with pride, was
larger than Earth's Sahara and Gobi put together.
Yes,
frontier worlds sometimes became annoyingly aggressive. Even Deneb had once
been a frontier system, but that was a very long time ago. And
Ophiuchus?
Ophiuchus,
here near the center of the galaxy, had fallen into luck. For Ophiuchus,
revolving in a complex orbit around its three suns,
would soon—unless Chandlur could prevent it—be the gateway to the unknown.
The Ophiuchans as gatekeepers, Chandlur
thought, and the Antareans as humanity's emissaries. For hadn't the extra-human rollers made
their first contact with Antareans, here in Ophiuchan space? And if contact were consolidated and relations firmly established,
wouldn't Deneb be threatened with the same sort of eclipse that had beset
Earth, once its pioneers had opened the pathway to the stars? Wouldn't
Ophiuchus, due to an astrographical accident that placed it adjacent to roller
territory, become the new center of human civilization? And wouldn't Antares,
because its Olympic ship Liberie had
been contacted first by the rollers, find itself in the same lucky position?
Chandlur
went ponderously to the window of his skyscraper quarters in Ophiuchus City. It
was not yet dawn—not yet dawn of what might turn out to be the most decisive
day in Deneb's history. Chandlur stood looking out at the blue twilight.
Twilight
for whom? he thought. For Deneb?
Not if he could help it.
Earlier,
he'd received his report from Roy Ambler. He knew that the Space Captains, led
by Antares's Ralpday and Earth's Syrtis Williams, would be blasting off just
after dawn in the Milky
Way. Destination —the
roller base beyond Sagittarius. Reason—to consolidate
contact with the shy, cautious rollers. Result —glory for Ophiuchus and
Antares, eclipse for Deneb.
But
the rollers, Chandlur knew, were balanced precariously on the edge of a blade.
Push them one way and they would share all the far reaches of the galaxy with
humanity, with Ophiuchus and Antares leading the way for mankind. Push them the
other way, and they would break off all contact. Make them doubt mankind's
motives, make them think mankind was suspicious, neither trusting nor
trustworthy, and that would end it.
With a sigh, Chandlur headed for the door. He
had already made his arrangements. A ship was waiting for him at the spaceport.
He would follow the Milky Way into
space and beyond Sagittarius into the unknown. He would not return, even though
it meant not being on hand for the opening of the games, until the dream of
relations between mankind and the rollers went up in smoke.
A
huge, waddling figure in a multicolored jumper, he went downstairs and outside
to where his jet-car was waiting. He started driving, heading for the
spaceport.
For Deneb, he thought. I'm
doing it for Deneb.
The Milky Way was a small ship, but very powerful. It had
been equipped with translight overdrive, not with subspace engines—for here at
the center of the galaxy distances were more nearly interplanetary than
interstellar, and overdrive would be fast enough.
More than forty Space Captains crowded into
the little ship.
Ralpday and Syrtis Williams sat at the controls, ready to blast off.
"Frazer," Ralpday
said. "He isn't here yet."
"We still have a few
minutes."
"You think he'll
come?"
"I
don't know. Billgarr's outside waiting for him. Have you plotted our course,
Ralpday?"
The Antarean nodded. "We head stellar
north past die fringes of the coalsack and through the Sagittarian swarm. Then—"
and Ralpdav smiled "—no direction at all."
"No
direction at all?" Syrtis Williams was puzzled. "Exact
center of the galaxy. No directions there." "What's it
like?" Syrtis Williams asked after a while. "A
single star. White dwarf. You know the kind— where
a pocketful of its matter weighs several tons." "No planets?"
Ralpday
shook his head. "But planetoids by the millions, varying in size from dust
motes to a few pretty big worldlets. The one we're heading for—the roller base—is about forty miles in diameter."
"They're expecting us?"
"I
hope so. But we'll worry about that later, Captain Williams. Its
going to be tricky, dangerous even, astrogating through those planetoids. You
can't imagine what it's like."
"Maybe
I can, if it's anything like Sol System's asteroid belt." And, waiting
anxiously for Steve and wishing to delay departure as long as he could, Syrtis
Williams described the asteroid belt. "So," he finished, "our
scientists believe a planet once orbited in space between Mars and Jupiter,
blew up for some unknown reason and left all that debris behind it—countless
thousands of asteroids all wheeling around the sun about midway between Mars
and Jupiter. That's another reason I'd like to have Frazer along, come to think
of it. He knows his way around the asteroid belt."
"Roughly
the same situation at the center of the galaxy," Ralpday said. "Only more so. Because if your asteroid belt resulted
from the destruction of a single planet—"
"Either that," Syrtis Williams
broke in, "or pre-planetary particles which never formed a single whole.
Our scientists use both theories to account for it."
"Well,
anyway, I was going to say that the planetoid material beyond Sagitarius is so
extensive that you must think in terms of perhaps half a dozen planets having
exploded in the distant past."
"Is it spread
out?"
"Hardly. The planetoids orbit the white dwarf in a
comparatively small amount of space."
Syrtis
Williams scowled. "Is the roller base on the edge of the swarm?"
"Almost
exactly in its center, Captain."
"Then how in the universe arc we going
to get through?"
"Don't
worry," Ralpday said, smiling. "The rollers plotted a course for us.
It leads to their base, but that's all. A single deviation,
and we'd be in trouble, for the rest of the swarm is uncharted. But then, we
have no reason to deviate from course." Abruptly Ralpday changed the
subject. "How is Mackald?" he asked.
Grinning,
Syrtis Williams said, "He's a hard guy to keep down. He's still in
speed-time healing at Antarestown. Another few days, the doctor thinks. But he
actually wanted to come along this morning."
Ralpday
looked at his chrono. "I'm afraid, my friend, that we'd better prepare for
blastoff. You see, the roller orbit through the swarm is temporal as well as
spatial."
"Sure, I know. With all those hunks of rock spinning around one another as well
as revolving collectively around the white dwarf, we'll have to hit orbit at
exactly the right moment. But—"
"Frazer?
Apparently he won't come. You'd better send for Billgarr."
"All
right, he's just outside," Syrtis Williams said, and clomped on his magnet
boots down the com-panionway toward the air lock.
Billgarr knew Stefrazer was
late.
The
old man was pacing nervously back and forth in the shadow of the Milky Way's tail tubes, glancing anxiously around. It was
practically dawn. Ophiuchus's blue sun had climbed several degrees up from the
horizon where it had hovered all night, and the white
and orange suns were brightening the sky in other directions.
Billgarr
shook his head. Call it a hunch or call it intuition or call it an old man's
whim, he thought, but I know we're going to need Stefrazer out there.
What was keeping him? Where
was the boy?
The
blue sun, climbing higher, cast a long, skeletal shadow of the Milky Ways gantry. A metal-runged ladder climbed its
side to the ship's air lock. In a few minutes—in a very few minutes now,
Billgarr knew— he'd be climbing that ladder. Without
Stefrazer?
He
heard a voice suddenly, and looked up to see Captain Williams's face in the air
lock.
"Billgarr! I think we better get going."
"But can't we wait a
few more—"
"There isn't time!" Syrtis Williams
bellowed down at him. Billgarr grinned a little. The Earth Captain wasn't mad
at him. It was just that the Earth Captain had expected Frazer, too, and was
disappointed.
"All
right, here I come," Billgarr said, and dispiritedly approached the
gantry and the foot of the ladder.
"Billgarr . . ."
"I said I was coming," the old man
called. Then, one hand on the ladder, he came to a dead halt. The voice hadn't
come from above him. From behind.
He whirled. And felt sudden
tears stinging in his
eyes.
Running
across the spacefield were two figures—one short and solid with wide shoulders,
the other taller, slender, with a blue spacesuit with red and white trim draped
over his arm.
Steve
Frazer and his friend Hunk Little.
"That's
right, sir," Roy Ambler told Chandlur, aboard the converted spacetug Sky Mountain, "Frazer's going out there with
them."
"You're sure of this?"
Chandlur demanded.
"Positive."
Chandlur
didn't say anything for a moment. Then he mused, "So the rollers want a
look at Frazer, do they? I wonder why. Clean-cut Earth youth,
perhaps, a representative of the birthplace of humanity?"
"Maybe,"
said Roy Ambler. He wasn't very interested.
"And you, I take it, are all set to compete in the racer
"Yes, sir. With Frazer out of the way, I stand a good
chance to—"
Chandlur
shook his head. "You don't stand a good chance to do anything. You're not
competing."
".
. . cop a gold medal and . . ." Roy Ambler gasped. "What did you say?
What do you mean, I'm not competing?"
Chandlur
smiled a slow smile. "If Billgarr and the others think it's a good idea
for Steve Frazer to meet the rollers, I think it's a good idea for you to meet them."
"But
I—the whole idea of me helping you was so I could race, without having Frazer
in competition. What—what are you going to do?"
"Follow
them out there. Meet the rollers, too. Tell them that, as a Denebian, I don't
want the rollers meddling in human affairs. That ought to work, but if it
doesn't—there's always you."
"Me? But-"
"You, Roy Ambler. You, who tried your best to sell your fellow
planeteer out so you could win a medal. The rollers
will want to meet you, I think."
"I'm going to enter
that race!" Roy Ambler shouted.
He
turned, tried to run down the companionway toward the air lock.
Chandlur
caught his arm. "You're blasting off with .is."
His deceptively soft hand was very strong.
Chandlur held Roy Ambler's arm in a powerful grip. The red-haired boy
struggled briefly, then relaxed sullenly.
Chandlur
called Sky
Mountains control
room on his intercom. "Has the Milky Way blasted
oft?"
"She's lifting right
now, sir."
"Very well. Keep her in your radar. And don't lose her."
"Yes,
sir.'*
"Give
her five minutes—then follow." "Yes, sir."
A four-man crew, Chandlur thought, and Roy
Ambler and himself. Six of them in all to break oft contact between mankind and the
rollers. It sounded all but impossible, but it would be the simplest thing in
the world. Just show the rollers there was discord, just show them that one
faction of humanity, at least, didn't want contact, and . . .
"Sir,"
the radio voice said, "will they be easy to follow?"
"We're at least as
fast as the Milky
Way, aren't we?"
"Yes,
sir.
But—"
"Well?"
"Do
you know exactly where we're going, sir? They've probably charted a course, and
we haven't."
"All
we have to do is follow them," Chandlur assured his pilot. "It will
be simple. Nothing to it."
First, the coalsack . . .
All-obscuring
blackness and the odd, almost eerie feeling—like subspace all over again—that
nothing existed outside the thin shell of the Milky Way.
Weightless, not wearing magnet boots, Steve
floated to the viewplate and stared out at—nothing.
The
coalsack nebulae, along with the star swarms in
Sagittarius, he knew, hid the center of the galaxy from the probing,
inquisitive eyes of man. Even from distant Earth you could see them—the coalsack blotting out starlight, the Sagittarian stars as
the brightest region in the great sky-spanning band of stars called the Milky
Way. And beyond them, waiting—what?
Then, abruptly, they left
the coalsack behind them.
Second, Sagittarius . . .
Steve
saw stars, stars as he had never seen them before. Clusters of stars, whole
spinning systems of stars following their eternal courses around mutual centers
of gravity, stars not stripped to a uniform whiteness by an intervening
atmosphere, but great bold clusters of stars, red and green and blue and yellow
and even mauve, stars to make his head swim and his senses whirl.
The
final barrier hiding the exact center of the galaxy . . .
Hunk
was at his side as the Milky
Way plowed through
Sagittarius. Several times they passed stars close enough to see perceptible
discs instead of mere pinpoints of light. Once Steve thought he saw a system of
planets—tiny pinpoints of light reflecting their mauve parent star's unfamiliar
luminosity. Stars and planets never before seen by an
Earthman's eyes.
Once Billgarr came up to him. Steve was vaguely aware of the old man
saying it was time to eat. He shook his head. He wanted to watch. He didn't
want to miss a thing. Billgarr went away, and then returned with two squeeze
bottles of liquid nourishment. Weightless, mouthing the squeeze bottle and
eating, Steve didn't even remember what the food tasted like. He never took his
eyes off the viewplate.
"Hey, look!" Hunk
cried after a long time.
The Milky Way had suddenly entered clear space.
They
weren't looking out, now, at the blackness of the coalsack,
nor at the myriad points of radiance of Sagittarius. What they saw was simply
empty space —and, far beyond it, a very long way off—a hazy radiance like the
Sagittarian swarm seen from a great distance.
"What's that?"
Hunk wanted to know.
Steve
took a guess. "We're there, Hunk. We're approaching the center of the
galaxy. Apparently it isn't blocked just on our side by the star swarms of
Sagittarius. It looks as if it's surrounded by star swarms. Look, you can see
them all around."
Just
then Syrtis Williams, who had shed his magnet boots as Steve had done, floated
over.
"That's
right," he said. There was awe in his voice. "We're almost in dead
center now."
"But isn't there anything in here at all?" Hunk asked. "Just empty space?"
"Look,"
Syrtis Williams said, and pointed at the viewplate.
Steve
saw a single star—white, not very imposing. And, reflecting its pale light, at
this distance just
barely visible, a thousand thousand tiny points of
light. "Asteroids?" he guessed.
"Asteroids,"
Syrtis Williams said, smiling. "You ought to feel at home. There are
millions of them, and we've got to thread our way through to the roller base.
It's going to be tricky."
"Dangerous?" Hunk
wanted to know.
"A little, maybe. But we have an orbit. If we didn't-"
"So
this is the center of the galaxy," Hunk said, shaking his head. "Hot
dog! And I thought I was just going to do some wrestling!" He winked at
Steve. "Who wants to wrestle now?"
"The
center's an oblate spheroid of space," Syrtis Williams explained. "Diameter of about six billion miles. The star is a
white dwarf. The planetoids—well, that's where the rollers are waiting."
Syrtis
Williams made a swimming motion with his arms and legs, propelling himself away
from the view-plate. "They're going to need me in the control room,"
he said, and was gone.
The
myriad tiny motes of light came closer and closer—then danced on all sides of
the Milky Way,
They had reached the very
center of the galaxy.
An oblong of rock, ten times the size of the Milky Way, hurtled by. It spun end over end on its long axis as it
flashed across the viewplate.
"That
didn't miss us by more than a mile or so," Hunk gasped.
It was the third such narrow escape. On all
sides of the little spaceship, now, the pinpoints of light were flashing and
dancing. They were beautiful, and they didn't look very deadly. But many of
them, zooming through space, were large enough to crush the Milky Way if they struck.
Something
touched Steves shoulder. He hadn't realized how tense he'd become. lie whirled so suddenly, forgetting weightlessness, that he
drifted off to his right.
"Nervous?"
Billgarr asked. He had come out on ob-deck and was floating over Steve's head.
"Eager to get where
we're going."
Billgarr
made a face of mock horror. "If I'd known a space trip through these
planetoids was going to be like this, I'd have waited for teleportation. Those
rollers now, they've got themselves a cinch. All they have to do is deliver the
first teleportation cylinder anywhere—then they can just teleport. It's like sub-space,
only better."
"But how does it
work?" Steve asked.
Billgarr
shrugged. The motion made him rise slightly toward the ceiling. "There you
have me, boy. The way I see it, thought waves are something like the
electromagnetic wave lengths of the physical world. Like, well, whoever would
have thought, back in the prescientiflc days, that such things as heat, radio,
infrared, all the colors we see, ultraviolet on up to X-rays and gamma
radiation were really the same thing, just in different wave lengths?"
"Everybody knows
that," Hunk pointed out.
"Everybody knows it now. And thought has its own wave length, too. All the others are waves
of—well, energy, aren't they?"
Steve said that they were.
"Thought,
that's energy, too. We humans have channeled energy waves to our use, all the
way from long wave lengths like heat and radio to really short ones like gamma.
The rollers have gone one step further, that's all. They've mastered the
highest frequency wave lengths of all—thought. And they have teleportation.
But I guess you'll get to see it soon enough—if we get along with the
rollers."
A
few moments later, Ralpday's voice came over the intercom. "All hands to
acceleration hammocks," he said. "We're coming in."
Steve,
Hunk and Billgarr swam back to the hammock room, where all the Space Captains
except Syrtis Williams and Ralpday were already strapped into their hammocks.
Reclining, Steve fastened his straps. There was a viewplate on the ceiling
above his head, and in it he could see a single planetoid growing perceptibly
larger. It seemed quite sizable, but not so big that physical law would dictate
a spherical shape. It was shaped, in fact, like a dumbbell, with two swollen
ends and a relatively narrow bar of rock connecting them. And on the narrow bar
of rock Steve could see a tiny bubble—like a glassite dome on one of Sol
System's asteroids.
The
roller base?
It looked that way.
Steve waited, heard the
scream of the Milky
Way's
reversing engines, felt the sudden return of normal
weight, and then far more than normal weight. He could feel the flesh of his
face contort.
The
dumbbell-shaped planetoid loomed closer, the glassite
dome grew larger, larger. . . .
The
pressure of 8 G's forced Steve's eyes shut. Time hung in the screaming of the
rockets, waiting.
And then the Milky Way came down with a thump.
Chapter 14 The Unknown
aybe, Steve thought, things would have gone
better
Y |
l if the rollers had shown themselves, had agreed to a face-to-face
meeting with the Space Captains. But they hadn't—and it looked as if they
wouldn't.
Several
hours had passed since the Milky Way made
planetfall on the roller base. At the viewplates, its occupants had stared out
at the bleak, lifeless surface of the planetoid. It was a grim, desolate place
for a meeting of the two highest forms of life the galaxy had produced.
Less
than half a mile away, Steve could see the gleaming transparent convexity of
the glassite dome. It had an enormous air lock, and the outer door slid
noiselessly open.
"What
are we waiting for?" Syrtis Williams had asked.
But
Ralpday said, "Funny—where are the rollers? They're air-breathers, as we
are. They tested us inside that dome—last time."
The dome was empty now.
179
Shrugging,
Syrtis Williams suggested that they all
■ don spacesuits, leave the Milky Way and enter the air lock of the dome.
"I
wish at least they'd let us know they're here," Billgarr said uneasily.
And,
as if in answer to that, two words impinged on Steve's consciousness.
Welcome, humans.
"You hear that?" Hunk cried.
But
of course no one had heard anything. The thoughts were delivered
telepathically.
"I'll bet they're underground!"
Billgarr blurted. "They said, last time, they had this whole planetoid
honeycombed."
The thought came again.
Welcome, humans.
It
seemed friendly enough. It was the first—the only—sign of good will the humans
aboard the Milky
Way had received. Bulky
in their spacesuits, they filed from the Milky Way's air lock and across the rock of the planetoid
to the much bigger air lock of the dome. When they were all inside, its outer
door slid shut and its inner one opened.
You
will find the atmosphere
breathable, a
voice said in Steve's head. You will find the proper temperature.
Syrtis
Williams raised a hand for caution. Steve knew he wanted to test the
environment before chucking suit and helmet. But impulsively Steve unfastened
the lugs of his helmet and removed it. He didn't want their first gesture at
the roller base to be one of distrust.
The air was sweet and warm. Syrtis Williams
and the other Space Captains removed their helmets. Then, as the others
followed his move, Syrtis Williams deflated his suit.
"It's
me, Billgarr," the old man called. "Where are you?"
No answer.
Syrtis
Williams cleared his throat. "I'm Williams," he said. "Planet Earth. We've come as mankind's first
emissaries—"
The
words which came into Steve's head shocked him.
We want no emissaries. . .
.
A
bewildered look on his face, Syrtis Williams repeated the words, "No
emissaries? But you—"
No
emissaries. We are sorry. It has been decided that contact between mankind and
the rollers would be unwise, after all.
"But,"
Billgarr blurted, "we passed the tests! You said
we passed the tests!"
And
you did. You are a stable race, you have an intelligence level roughly
equivalent to our own, you have a well-developed
ethical sense.
"Then—" Billgarr
began.
But
it has been decided, the
telepathic words went on with neither pity nor anger, but merely
matter-of-factly, that
self-interest is too strong a motivating factor among your people. And
naturally we have more to offer than you have. We have teleportation.
Steve's
intense disappointment merged with anger. Who did the rollers think they were?
And, sure, teleportation was terrific, but mankind had a trick or two up its
sleeve, too. Steve heard himself saying, "Wait a minute! We'll admit
that—teleportation would be a great boon to mankind. But—" he went to the
inner door of the dome's air lock and pounded his fist on the tough glassite
"—is this the best you can do?" We do not understand.
"Glassite. That's what we call this material. In Sol
System, where I come from, we have hundreds of these domes in the asteroid
belt. Are they the best you can do? A pretty good-sized meteor can smash
one."
Can you do better? You
already said—
"Glassite,"
Steve broke in triumphantly, "is now obsolete. We're replacing it with
forcefields."
Forcefields?
"We
utilize the binding force of sub-atomic particles," Syrtis Williams
explained, eyeing Steve approvingly. "It's far stronger than any known
physical material. No physical material can crush or puncture it. In fact, it's
even impervious to cobalt bombs."
The voice was amused.
Then
you have a need for protection against bombardment?
"You're
twisting my words, I think," Syrtis Williams said coolly. "I merely
wanted to point out that defense is so far ahead of offense in human warfare
that warfare has been abandoned as an instrument of planetary policy."
For
that reason alone. Not for ethical reasons?
Syrtis
Williams snorted. "There you go twisting my words again."
It was not going to work,
Steve thought. The rollers, apparently, had made up their minds. He listened as
Syrtis Williams went on defending the human position, listened with an inner
ear as the rollers consistently misconstrued his words. Because
different cultures produced semantic problems? Or
because the rollers had already reached a decision—a negative one?
Time
passed under the dome on the lifeless world. It was eerie. Mankind's
representatives, assembled anxiously under the dome, were debating the future
of the human and roller races with unseen—and even unheard—roller
representatives. It was then that Steve thought, Maybe things would go better
if the rollers showed themselves.
But
they preferred to remain in hiding. Where? Underground? They had to be
underground, as Bill-garr had suggested, if they were
on the planetoid at all. And they didn't want to show themselves because they
had already reached a decision, had already given it—to break off all contact.
"Look,"
Syrtis Williams was saying patiently, "you've tested us and studied us and
passed decision on us—but we've been willing to take you at face value all
along. As far as we're concerned you're the Unknown—with big, fat capital
letters. But we think it's important enough to take the chance. We want to
establish contact with you—for our mutual good. Can't you at least meet us
halfway?"
At
first there were no answering thoughts. Steve paced anxiously back and forth.
He thumped the glass-ite again, and the thought came.
Yes,
your forcefield intrigues us, but. . .
And
"but" was followed by a long speech, if a mental one. Initially, the
rollers insisted, they had wanted contact. Hadn't they revealed themselves to
mankind, and not the other way around? But they were a cautious race. Yes, they
admitted it. If self-interest were the prime motivating factor in human
thought, caution was for the rollers.
Syrtis
Williams wanted to say something in reply. But the rollers weren't finished.
Once, long ago, they said, they, too, had been motivated by self-interest. Then
there had been wars and strife and destruction —and they never wanted to risk
that all over again.
Then,
gradually, caution had replaced self-interest, and the rollers hadn't known war
in a hundred generations. At all cost—even if it meant humanity stayed on its
side of the galaxy and the rollers on theirs—they never wanted to experience
such strife again.
"You
say self-interest is everything with us," Syrtis Williams persisted,
"just as you say caution is everything with you. But you weren't too
cautious, were you—when you contacted the Antareans?"
Did
Steve hear laughter inside his head? He did, and it probably meant the rollers
were pleased with or amused by Syrtis Williams's logic.
Very
well, we weren't cautious then.
"Just as self-interest doesn't dominate
us as much as you think it does. If I had to name the one thing/' Syrtis
Williams said slowly, pondering each word as he went along, "which most
motivates mankind, I'd say it was this—I'd say it was a sense of—well, a sense
of wonder. That, after all, is why we are here today. Wonder—and perhaps
humility in the face of a vast and shoreless universe which makes us realize
just how small, for all our achievements, we are. Or," he added with a
smile, "how small you are, too,"
That,
the rollers responded
immediately, is
a Space Captain talking. Of course a Space Captain would feel that way. But what about the rest of mankind?
"Same
thing," Syrtis Williams insisted, "if you'd give us a chance."
The
same thing—for Chandlur of Deneb?
There
was a shocked silence. They should have known diat if the rollers knew Syrtis
Williams was a Space Captain, they knew a great deal more, too. And now, while
the shock was still settling, the rollers continued. Even while testing the
Antareans, they hadn't neglected to collect information about other humans.
They had mastered telepathy—and apparently other forms of extra-sensory
perception as well, for they knew about Chandlur and his attempts to thwart
contact, knew even how Roy Ambler had tried to betray Steve for his own selfish
ends. They knew that Chandlur, the supposedly objective High Commissioner of
the Olympic games, was acting on behalf of Deneb and his own self-interest and
that Roy Ambler, a representative of the youth of mankind, betrayed his
companion in order to win a race.
Self-interest. . . .
Was
there any wonder the roller answer had been a decisive no?
Even now, the roller went on implacably, this
Chandlur
of Deneb and this Roy Ambler of Earth are approaching. Even
now. . . .
"Here?"
Steve said, astonished. "They're coming here?"
Yes,
in a spaceship. Chandlur thinks it necessary to tell us that Deneb is opposed
to contact. He has judged our caution correctly. Our answer already is no. It
will remain no.
There
was a pause. Then—for the first time—the roller sounded, at least mentally,
excited.
They're going to crash!
"Chandlur?" Syrtis Williams said.
Chandlur of Deneb, yes. They followed you. They had no orbit through
the swarm. They are even now . . .
Again, silence.
"Where
. . . what . . .?" Syrtis Williams cried. He was a Space Captain first and
foremost, and a Space Captain went to the aid of a stricken vessel—no matter
who was aboard.
But,
for a frustrating moment, the roller's thoughts were elsewhere.
It
is a shame, for we too would have wished for contact. The secrets of your half
of the galaxy, the secrets of ours—what might not our two races have accomplished
together—if only people like Chandlur of Deneb realized that what is in the
best interests of all mankind is also in the best interests of their own
worlds?
"where are they?" roared Syrtis Williams.
And the roller said, Their ship crash landed on a small asteroid a
hundred thousand of your miles from here. They had no chance at all without a
charted orbit. They will die. They have air only for three or four more of your
hours. . . .
Syrtis
Williams was already running for the dome air lock. "Where?
Just tell us where. We've got to rescue them. We can't just let them die."
You
cant. Not in a ship that size. Not without an orbit.
And by the time we could prepare an orbit for you, they will have died.
"Then we'll chance it
without an orbit."
No
chance. Suicide. We forbid you to throw your life
away.
Syrtis
Williams reached the air lock door and pounded on it. But it remained fast.
He
should have hated them, Steve knew—Chandlur and Roy Ambler. He had every reason
to hate them— not just because they had done their best to keep him from the
games, but because tiiey had managed to give the rollers a bad impression. Now,
mankind would be chained to its own half of the galaxy. And if they were waiting
for death, at this very moment, on an airless little world with only the canned
air in their suits granting them a few hours of reprieve before asphyxiation
took their lives—if they were waiting like that, why should he care?
But
Steve looked down at his own deflated space-suit. Earth's proud icy blue, it
was, with red and white trim on the sleeves. A racing
suit—for a racer who had come halfway across the galaxy to use it.
And all at once Steve knew, still looking
down at the colors of his spacesuit, that he did not feel hatred at all for
Chandlur of Deneb and for Roy Ambler. What he felt instead was pity—pity that
they should be the way they were, pity that they were narrow enough to put
their own interests before the interests of mankind. Pity. . . .
"They're
dying," Syrtis Williams was shouting. "They're dying out there, and
the rollers won't let us out. They won't let us out!"
"Captain,
listen. What good would it do? If they let you out?
You'd crash, too. You'd never make it on the Milky Way. You know you wouldn't."
"I've got to try. They
have no right to—"
"You
don't have to try. Not that way." Steve was already inflating his spacesuit, could feel it going rigid on his arms and legs.
"I'm going to try," he said. "I'm going to do it."
"You? What are you talking about?"
"Coach
Ito always told me there wasn't a better spacesuit racer in the galaxy. Maybe
he was wrong twenty ways from Sunday—but it looks like I'm going to get the
chance to prove it."
"What are you talking
about?"
"A
ship couldn't possibly thread its way there through the swarm—but one man, in a
spacesuit, could. One man, Captain. Me."
"In a spacesuit? What good would it do—supposing you reached
them?"
"Teleportation,"
Steve said promptly. "If the rollers let me take one of their cylinders
out there—where they crashed—we could all teleport back here."
"They won't let you.
They already said—"
"I
can do it, don't you see? I can get through. I know I can."
But
Syrtis Williams shook his head. "It would be suicide out there. I can't
let you do it."
"You would have
tried."
"Me? That's different.
A Space Captain—"
"But I have a chance
to get through. I—"
"Steve!" Hunk
shouted.
Steve
whirled. On the ground fifty yards off was a gleaming cylinder of silver metal
somewhat larger than a man. Steve did not know how it had been produced. The
ground was bare and featureless around it. Somehow, it was there. It was just
there.
In
Steve's mind a voice said, Teleportation unit. Yours to use. Good luck,
Steve Frazer of Earth.
Steve
adjusted his shoulder rockets. He was aware of all the Space Captains watching
him. Of Billgarr smiling.
"I
knew it," Billgarr said tremulously. "A hunch.
I had me a hunch about you, boy!"
"I
won't let you—" Syrtis Williams started to say. But Steve had already
reached the gleaming cylinder. It was surprisingly light. It didn't seem to
weigh more than thirty pounds, despite its size.
Syrtis
Williams came running toward Steve. "You're staying here. I can't let you
risk your life."
"Hunk!" Steve cried.
And
Hunk Little intercepted the Space Captain, got his big
arms around the older man's middle and held on. Syrtis Williams couldn't move.
"You fool!" he cried. "You
can't . . . you'll never make it . . . you'll . . ."
Steve
carried the cylinder toward the air lock. The other Space Captains parted to
let him by.
"You
. . . glorious . . . fool!" Syrtis Williams said, and then Hunk let him go
and he stood there with the others and watched the air lock's inner door slide.
Steve went through it with
the cylinder.
Chapter 15 The Teleporter
n Fomalhaut, Steve guessed, they might know
what it was like.
He was out in deep space
now, in the silent void.
And
on Fomalhaut's chief planet, a water world, they spent a great deal of time
underwater, weightless in an environment not really meant for man, but an
environment man's audacity and sense of wonder had conquered—just as it had
conquered space. And, weightless underwater, with no up or down or sideways,
floating effortlessly—that was the nearest you could come to spacesuiting
through deep space.
So
maybe on Fomalhaut they might know what it was like.
But
still there were differences. Underwater, the murky depths obscured your view.
Here you could see a billion billion miles in all directions. Underwater, you
moved slowly, a few lazy feet at a time. Here, with nothing but the thin skin
of an inflated spacesuit between you and the airless, frigid void, you streaked
along at hundreds of miles per second.
191
As Steve left the air lock, the rollers had
telepa-thized directions to him. Objectively, with neither
encouragement or disapproval of what he was attempting. They had simply
told him where to go— and given him instructions as to how to operate the
cylinder.
Now, racing through deep space, he was riding
it. Actually, his shoulder rockets supplied the power; as yet the cylinder was
just a burden—it was impossible to teleport without a cylinder to pick up and a
cylinder to receive. Steve was straddling it now, his legs clamped firmly
about it. Because of its size, it was a burden. But in space it weighed exactly
nothing— which was what Steve weighed. In space. . . .
He
cut his left shoulder rocket suddenly and applied full power to his right.
A
worldlet five times his size had come zooming up. He watched it sail away, a
few yards beyond his shoulder. That had been close—and he still had a long way
to go.
All
about him he could see the pinpoints of light that were the planetoids swarming
here at the exact center of the galaxy. Those further away seemed stationary.
But on all sides of him lights danced and moved and soared. At the speed he was
moving, contact with any one of them would be fatal. The larger ones would
crush him. Even the smallest, hardly bigger than motes of dust but shining
brightly by reflected starlight, could puncture his air tanks or his suit.. . .
Another large one. As big as a house.
There was
The Teleporter
193
very little warning, for their combined speeds of
approach were around five hundred miles per second. But Steve could see a very
long way off in deep space and his reflexes were those of a racer. His life depended
on those two factors.
He
skirted the house-sized worldlet—to be confronted by a cluster of pea-sized
pellets swarming toward his helmet!
Instinctively,
he ducked his head, finger-controlled his shoulder rockets upwards, and watched
the pellets streak harmlessly by.
Harmlessly—this
time.
Lights
swung and danced before his eyes. He had time to check his astro-compass, to
hope he was still heading in the right direction. Then one approaching light became
a jagged boulder as big as a spaceship. To avoid it, Steve applied power to his
left shoulder rocket, then waited to see the boulder
dart away.
It did not.
Steve's
shoulder rocket had failed to deliver full thrust—jammed temporarily. Sometimes
that happened, he knew. In seconds it would be functioning again.
But seconds would be too
long.
Steve
watched the boulder, tumbling end over end and revealing all its craggy
surface, speeding toward him.
Had
he come this far, he wondered, to perish in deep space?
With
a roughly spherical shape and a diameter slightly over six miles, the little
world had negligible gravitation. A spaceship needed only a very low speed of
escape, indeed; it would merely have to lift on its rockets.
The
Sky Mountain, Roy Ambler knew, wasn't even going to do
that. Its tubes were shattered and there was no way they could be repaired, not
here, not now.
How
much air did they have left? Roy Ambler didn't know. A few hours' supply in his
own spacesuit, he thought, perhaps less.
His
spacesuit bore the colors of the Earth team, and that was ironic, he thought; a
racing suit, but he wasn't going anywhere in it. He had tried, about half an
hour ago. Chandlur, who was now sitting on a bare outcropping of rock with the Sky Mountains four-man crew, had suggested it. And Roy,
using his shoulder rockets, had blasted a hundred miles or so off the surface
of the little world.
He'd
quickly returned. A man in a spacesuit wouldn't have a chance out there, he'd
discovered. A veritable rain of pellet-sized stones had swarmed all around him.
They were deadly. They could puncture a spacesuit in seconds. And if they
didn't, miraculously, then the larger ones would crush a man. So Roy had
returned to the little world where now he was waiting.
Frazer?
he wondered. It was an idle thought, for of course
Steve Frazer didn't know of their predicament. But if anyone could get through
the swarm here at the center of the galaxy, it would be Steve Frazer. Now, when
the end had come, Roy was ready to admit it. Steve Frazer was probably the best
space-suit racer in all the galaxy.
But
even if, incredibly, Frazer knew of their plight, what could he do to help
them? Besides, assuming there were something
he could do, he wouldn't lift a finger to do it, would he? Why in the universe
should he? He'd given Steve Frazer nothing but a rough time since their arrival
on Ophiuchus.
Roy
looked up. The little world's sky, with no intervening atmosphere, was a
brilliant blue-black, sprinkled with the tiny pinpoints of light that made up
the swarm. He could see the nearer ones moving, flashing, streaking
through space like star trails on a photographic time exposure.
I
was wrong, he thought, wrong to try to keep Frazer
from racing. But he'd been the odds-on favorite to win the gold medal in
racing, and disqualifying him would have given Roy his chance, wouldn't it?
Roy
Ambler shook his head slowly. The Olympic medal, won under those terms, what
good would it have been?
But
it seemed that all his life he had hated Steve Frazer, had been taught to hate
him because his father hated Steve's father. Now—now when it was too late—he
realized that was not reason enough. Whatever stood between Roy Ambler Senior
and Don Frazer had been between them. Roy had no real reason to hate Steve at
all. And if he hadn't hated him with a desperation born of his own father's
bitterness, he wouldn't be here now, waiting to die. If he hadn't hated him
that way, he would have entered the race and done the best he could, and
probably would have shaken Steve's hand, if Steve had won, in honor of victory.
Roy
Ambler stared up at the almost-black sky with its points and streaks of light.
Suddenly his vision blurred. Tears filled his eyes and rolled down his cheeks.
Wearing a helmet, he could not rub them away.
Steve felt an abrupt surge of power as his
left shoulder rocket cleared.
At
first he thought it was too late, for the surface of the worldlet tumbling
toward him was so close he thought he could almost touch it if he stretched out
his hand. That was an illusion of space, though, because suddenly the rocky
little worldlet was alongside him, and then it was behind him.
He
had no time to congratulate himself on his good luck. Other rocks, small and
large, sailed by. Again he checked his astro-compass. Still heading on course,
he thought. This wasn't just a race with a gold medal and a modest smile in the
winner's circle. This was a race on which human life depended. The lives of his
enemies. . . .
His enemies? Steve wondered. But was he enough of a
paragon, to consider any man his enemy, to hate anyone? He tried to search his
heart for hatred, hatred of Roy Ambler, of High Commissioner Chandlur. He
couldn't find any. He wanted to find them, to help them.
All at once his body stiffened within the
blue suit.
Sunk
in reverie, he'd been streaking through space toward a rough, rectangular prism
of a world. Twisting, he used his right rocket, and the sudden burst of power
dislodged the teleportation cylinder from between his legs.
It
sailed serenely through space at right angles to Steve's new course.
He
plunged after it recklessly. If he didn't recover it immediately, he knew, it
would crash on one of the planetoids.
Closer.
Closer. . . .
A
rain of pellets struck Steve's spacesuit. Almost at once he heard the tell-tale
hiss of escaping air.
The
spacesuit was self-sealing up to a point, but if the holes were too large, or if there were too many of them. . . .
The
hissing stopped. Steve took a deep breath. He still had enough air. Enough—for the moment. But how much had he lost?
Shrugging,
because there was nothing he could do about it, he went after the teleporter.
High Commissioner Chandlur, too, heard a hiss
of air. It meant that the main tank of his spacesuit was empty, meant it would
switch automatically to the emergency tank.
And
the emergency tank had exactly forty-five minutes of air in it.
Chandlur
glanced at Roy Ambler standing near the ruined tubes of the Sky Mountain, turned and studied the huddled figures of the
Sky Mountains four-man crew. One of them had been badly
shaken up in the crash landing. They'd had to put his spacesuit on for him and
carry him outside. But it really didn't matter, Chandlur thought. We could just
as well have left him in the wreck. We're going to die here. We're all going to
die here.
And
for the first time in his life Chandlur wondered what it would be like to five
his whole life over again.
He
loved Deneb. He was proud of being a Deneb-ian. That wouldn't change.
But
he had this nagging doubt—since I love Deneb so much, does that mean I love
mankind less? Deneb and mankind—and wasn't there one thing more, one thing he'd
forgotten? People, he told himself. People as individuals: like Roy Ambler,
whose weakness he had used with cold calculation; like the old Antarean,
Billgarr, who wasn't crazy, and Chandlur had known all along he wasn't crazy;
like Mackald, a fellow planeteer, a Denebian, who'd almost been killed because
of Chandlur; and like Steve Frazer, whose life Chandlur had done his best to
ruin.
If
I had it all to do over again, Chandlur mused. If I had it all to do over
again—why stop contact with the rollers? If such contact would help mankind,
then, helping mankind, wouldn't it help Deneb, too? And all
the Denebians, together and singly, and all the Antareans, Fomalhautians,
Earthmen, Centaurians, Ophiuchans?
But
it was finished now, it was done. He, Chandlur, had ruined everything. And now,
with less than three
quarters of an hour's air supply left, he was going
to
pay-------
"Commissioner!"
He
looked up. One of the crewmen had been calling him on intercom.
"Look! Look there,
Commissioner!"
His
eyes followed the pointing finger. He squinted. He blinked.
What
he saw was a bright moving light in the sky amid the swarm of flickering
lights. It was moving right toward them. It came closer. Not a rock. . . .
It was a tiny figure, then
larger, then—
A man in a spacesuit—the
blue, white and red of
Earth. He was straddling a gleaming silver
cylinder. "He's coming!" Roy Ambler cried. "He's coming
here!"
And
a moment later Steve landed fifty yards away across the barren, rocky world.
"Teleportation," he said, but they
just stared at him blankly. He'd forgotten to switch on his intercom. Now he
did so and said, "It's a teleporter. The rollers gave it to me, to save
you. Come on, let's go."
"But we . . . you. . .
." Chandlur couldn't speak.
And
Roy Ambler, who had been up there in his own spacesuit, who had come back down
because he knew he didn't have a chance, cried, "You're looking at the
best spacesuit racer in the galaxy, Mr. Commissioner. That's all—at the best
racer in the galaxy." The words, words which he'd always known were true,
came easily. He'd never been able to speak them before.
Steve
opened the side of the teleporter. It seemed to be just an empty cylinder. The
interior was big enough for one man at a time.
This
was a cruder form of teleportation than he'd witnessed on the Liberté, Steve realized. There, the very bulkheads of the ship must have
contained a teleporter. There, first Billgarr and then the roller had faded and
disappeared. Here, the man-sized cylinder was necessary. Here, a man had to
enter the cylinder to be whisked away at the speed of thought.
"What.
. . what does it do?" Chandlur asked.
"Teleports you. Back to the roller
base." Steve almost said, Or don't you
believe in teleportation yet, Commissioner? Almost, but not
quite.
They
placed the injured man inside first. Steve shut the side of the cylinder. He
waited awhile, then opened the cylinder.
The man had disappeared.
Chandlur stared, wide-eyed.
The Sky Mountains three
remaining crewmen entered the teleporter, one at a time, and disappeared.
"Okay, Roy," Steve said. "I just want to say—"
"You
don't have to say anything." Steve smiled a little. "I can see it in
your face."
They
shook hands, then Roy stepped into the teleporter.
"I—I let my father do my thinking for me long enough," he said.
"And my hating too. . . ." Steve shut the cylinder.
That left Chandlur and Steve. The big
Dcnebian
cleared his throat, and for a moment Steve thought
he was going to speak. He cleared his throat again. He had a pained look on his
face. "Skip it," Steve said.
"At
least do me one favor?" Chandlur said at last. "What's that?"
"You
go now. I'll wait till last. I—I'll feel better that way."
Steve
nodded slowly. A proud man from a proud planet. It was
as close to an apology as he would get. The rollers, Steve thought. If only the
rollers could see this, they might change their minds.
Chandlur
closed the cylinder on him. Steve waited. He felt nothing. But then the walls
of the cylinder became insubstantial. They faded, faded. Steve saw gray murk,
like subspace.
Then,
with almost no feeling of transition, he saw the dome of the roller base. From the inside. And Roy-Ambler, spacesuit removed, a smile
on his face, was rushing toward him. They shook hands.
Steve
realized he was still standing inside the tele-port receiver. Clasping Roy's
hand, he stepped out just in time to make way for Chandlur.
Then
Syrtis Williams and Hunk and Ralpday and the other Space Captains were
gathering around him, all shouting at once, all trying to pound Steve's rib's
and back.
Suddenly,
Steve saw the broad smiles fade. Everyone was staring past him.
He
turned slowly to see ten spherical shapes come rolling across the ground toward
them.
The rollers.
They had three lidless eyes each. Steve
couldn't tell what sort of emotion they felt. He couldn't see emotion in those
eyes at all. But perhaps, he thought, the rollers couldn't evaluate the surface
manifestations of emotion in us, either. Later, he was to learn that the
rollers' skin changed color according to how they felt.
One
of the rollers spoke to Steve and the others, mentally. Steve listened.
And
smiled so hard he thought he'd dislocate his jaw.
Chapter 16 The Games
n Ophiuchus, here at the Stadium Beyond the
Stars, the rollers stole the show. Because they had decided
to establish contact, after all.
What
they had said, on the roller base, was this: We always worried that you humans were
activated too much by self-interest, as—indeed—we
had been during the early stages of
our development. But what happened here today showed another facet of humanity. For Steve Frazer should have
hated these people. If we were right
about you humans, he should have been glad to see them die. But he wasn't. He
risked his own life to save them.
You
are a young race, and, we still think, too much motivated by self-interest. But
Frazer showed us what our tests and observations couldn't. There is hope for
you. And we are willing to take a chance on you. We are willing to take a
chance. All
space, Steve thought dreamily . . . from one end of the galaxy to the other ... all space for mankind and the rollers
to share . . . and travel across the vast gulf of parsecs at the speed of
thought . . . leaving
laggard light and even laggard subspace far behind ... a new era for mankind. . . . He felt
like singing.
They
were all teleported to the Antarean dressing room at the stadium on Ophiuchus.
The rollers appeared suddenly, in the midst of the games. It was Chandlur
himself who took a microphone in hand and explained, his voice subdued by awe,
what had transpired. It took the rest of that day and most of the next for the
first shock of the rollers' appearance to abate. There were conferences,
hurried subspace radio messages back and forth to all the outworlds. Vague
plans were made, vaguer decisions reached. Experts in all the sciences would
meet with their opposite numbers among the rollers. Later, the plans would be
made more specific. You could see it building,
building-mankind had not known such enthusiasm since the Great Migration so
long ago.
"We
need a frontier," Billgarr said simply. "Man always needed a frontier
to find the best in himself."
"We
have the whole galaxy now," Syrtis Williams told him.
The
games went on. Hunk Little won a gold medal for Earth
in heavyweight wrestling. Jane copped a silver medal, second place, in
free-style swimming, trailing a Fomalhautian girl by several yards.
Strangely
enough, none of the onlookers worried about whether Deneb or Antares or
Fomalhaut won the greater number of points. The games were conducted on an
individual basis.
The rollers watched, and
approved.
"Going back home?" Syrtis Williams
asked Steve after the final Parade of the Planets, after the Torch of Freedom,
still burning as it would always burn, had been carried back aboard the Hellas by Jane.
"Yes,
sir. For awhile. But f 11 be back."
"I'll
bet you'll be back," Syrtis Williams said. "Meanwhile, there's
something the Olympic Committee wants you to take back to Earth with
you."
Steve looked puzzled.
"What's that?"
Syrtis
Williams smiled. "Why don't we let Coach Ito tell you?"
They
drove in the Space Captain's jet-car to Earth-town, through the crowds that
thronged the road between the stadium and the Olympic compound. When they
reached Earthtown, they almost had to force their way into Joe Ito's office.
Steve was bewildered. As far as he could tell, all the Space Captains on
Ophiuehus were waiting there. They'd been talking, but when Steve and Syrtis
Williams entered, they fell silent.
Joe
Ito said, "Steve, I ... we all.
. . ." His voice choked up and he handed Steve a small black box. He
cleared his throat as Steve opened it. "I'm not very good at making
speeches, Steve. But you earned it."
The
assembled Space Captains shouted their approval. Inside the little box a gold
medal rested on black velvet.
"But I—I didn't
race," Steve protested.
"No?"
Syrtis Williams said. "The way the Olympic Committee sees it, you ran—and
won—the most important race of all. Look at the inscription."
Steve turned trie medal over. On its back was
inscribed:
STEVE FRAZER—EARTH
Outstanding Sportsman First Interstellar
Olympic Games
About
the Author
Milton Lesser is the author of many science
fiction novels, among them The
Stab Seekers and Earthbound in the Winston Science Fiction Series. His stories have appeared in leading
magazines. He has written for television, edited anthologies, and is an experienced
consultant on science fiction articles.
A
New Yorker by birth and residence, a graduate of the College of William and
Mary in Virginia, he has traveled in twenty-odd countries on three continents,
skiing in Canada, mountain climbing in Switzerland and exploring fjords in Norway—all because planet-hopping is
still a few years off.