With the rocket exhaust roaring like mad, Tom’s plane swung over on its back and nosed down again. Almost directly beneath him the Terrestrial saw three of the mutineers’ planes and jerked one of the copper wires. One of the rapid fire guns clattered viciously and one of the planes disappeared in a puff of white smoke. Tom’s hand jerked at a control and the plane protested with a groan of metal at a slight change in direction. Another plane, however, brought directly beneath the nose of the Terrestrial’s ship, also disappeared in a white cloud that slowly sifted downward.
As Tom leveled off, one of the Martian planes turned over on its back and from its underside a ray sliced upward, but missed the Terrestrial ship by a wide margin.
Off to the right and just over the edge of the ridge which separated the twilight belt from the hot side of the planet, Tom saw the transport hanging in all its silver bulkiness. There was not a single ship between it and him! With a catch in his breath he flung his ship down in a long dive. His heart sang exultantly as the machine screamed down on the transport.
Those on the great ship must have noticed his maneuver, for the huge transport stirred, swinging slowly around in an attempt to escape. It was not built, however, for quick getaway. It had not a single chance to elude the lightning flier.
Not more than a hundred feet above it, Tom drove his plane, and as he screamed over it, he swung back hard on the control lever and the little ship shrieked upward. Beneath him the transport, cleanly rayed, split in two, dropped toward the molten sea.
Tilting the machine, Tom stared down through a side observation port. He gasped in amazement and then held his breath.
Where the transport had fallen rose a great geyser of molten ore and rock. Slowly a part of the great ridge toppled and fell. Like a monstrous tongue of flame the molten geyser curled over and poured downward, while the mighty sea of sluggish liquid rushed for the hole blown in the ridge which separated the twilight belt from the hot side of the planet. Great clouds of heavy gases rolled upward, blotting out the scene below. The planes driven by the Martians, caught in the terrible blast, were tossed about like leaves in an autumn gale and out of control, were falling back to the surface. The only thing that had saved him from a similar fate, Tom knew, was his hasty break for altitude after raying the transport.
The transport had carried a consignment of explosives, he remembered, and had arrived only a few hours before the general mutiny. Evidently it had not been unloaded and had exploded when the disabled ship struck the bubbling sea.
At three miles he leveled off and stared down at the surface of the twilight belt. Like a great river the molten metal was pouring through the break in the wall and was rapidly spreading over the unprotected region. Not a single plane was in the air.
As he watched, the advancing flood struck Station Number Three and seemed to rear up to surge over it. Even from his great height he saw pitifully small figures running for their lives before the great wave. He knew that, hampered by space suits, they could not run far before being overtaken.
Part of the wave seemed to be congealing, but even as it did so, more of the molten stream poured over it and rushed on. One tongue gradually pushed its way across the belt and stopped only a few miles short of the cold side of the planet, frozen into a solid mass by the frigid conditions on that side of Mercury.
Tom noticed that the congealing of the metal stream was slowly backing up the outpouring of the liquid through the break in the wall. In a few hours a vast new barrier would be thrown up between the twilight belt and the bubbling ocean, but buried beneath that new barrier would be the failure of a rebellion on Mercury. The Terrestrial had proven himself master again.
A blue light flashed on the instrument board. He reached over and plugged in a connection. He spoke into a small microphone.
“Tom Clark, geologist of the Universal Ore Mining Company, stationed on Mercury, ready to receive,” he said.
“Commander James Smith, of the Earth vessel, Star Ogre, speaking,” replied a faint voice, “now running near orbit of Venus. Have five ships to put down uprising on Mercury. Hold on!”
“Send back four of your ships,” said Tom. “Only one is needed to take off survivors. The mutiny is suppressed.”
“How many survivors?” the voice asked laconically.
“Only one,” said Tom, “and that’s me.”
Jackpot
“Jackpot” is another of those stories in which Clifford D. Simak portrayed Earthlings out among the stars as rapacious explorers, roaming the galaxy in search of things that could be taken, grabbed, or exploited. Among others in the same vein are “Beachhead,” “Junkyard,” “Installment Plan,” and “Retrograde Evolution.” This story originally appeared in the October 1956 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction.
At least in this case, some of the Earthlings are better students.
—dww
I found Doc in the dispensary. He had on quite a load. I worked him over some to bring him half awake.
“Get sobered up,” I ordered curtly. “We made planetfall. We’ve got work to do.”
I took the bottle and corked it and set it high up on the shelf, where it wasn’t right at hand.
Doc managed to achieve some dignity. “You needn’t worry, Captain. As medic of this tub—”
“I want all hands up and moving. We may have something out there.”
“I know,” Doc said mournfully. “When you talk like that, it’s bound to be a tough one. An off-beat climate and atmosphere pure poison.”
“It’s Earth-type, oxygen, and the climate’s fine so far. Nothing to be afraid of. The analyzers gave it almost perfect rating.”
Doc groaned and held his head between his hands. “Those analyzers of ours do very well if they tell us whether it is hot or cold or if the air is fit to breathe. We’re a haywire outfit, Captain.”
“We do all right,” I said.
“We’re scavengers and sometimes birds of prey. We scour the Galaxy for anything that’s loose.”
I paid no attention to him. That was the way he always talked when he had a skin full.
“You get up to the galley,” I told him, “and let Pancake pour some coffee into you. I want you on your feet and able to do your fumbling best.”
But Doc wasn’t ready to go just yet. “What is it this time?”
“A silo. The biggest thing you ever saw. It’s ten or fifteen miles across and goes up clear out of sight.”
“A silo is a building to store winter forage. Is this a farming planet?”
“No,” I said, “it’s desert. And it isn’t a silo. It just looks like one.”
“Warehouse?” asked Doc. “City? Fortress? Temple—but that doesn’t make any difference to us, does it, Captain? We loot temples, too.”
“Get up!” I yelled at him. “Get going.”
He made it to his feet. “I imagine the populace has come out to greet us. Appropriately, I hope.”
“There’s no populace,” I said. “The silo’s just standing there alone.”
“Well, well,” said Doc. “A second-story job.”
He started staggering up the catwalk and I knew he’d be all right. Pancake knew exactly how to get him sobered up.
I went back to the port and found that Frost had everything all set. He had the guns ready and the axes and the sledges, the coils of rope and the canteens of water and all the stuff we’d need. As second in command, Frost was invaluable. He knew what to do and did it. I don’t know what I’d have done without him.
I stood in the port and looked out at the silo. We were a mile or so away from it, but it was so big that it seemed to be much closer. This near to it, it seemed to be a wall. It was just God-awful big.
“A place like that,” said Frost, “could hold a lot of loot.”
“If it isn’t empty,” I answered. “If there isn’t someone or so
mething there to stop us taking it. If we can get into it.”
“There are openings along the base. They look like entrances.”
“With doors ten feet thick.”
I wasn’t being pessimistic. I was being logical—I’d seen so many things that looked like billions turn into complicated headaches that I never allowed myself much hope until I had my hands on something I knew would bring us cash.
Hutch Murdock, the engineer, came climbing up the catwalk. As usual, he had troubles. He didn’t even stop to catch his breath.
“I tell you,” he said to me, “one of these days those engines will just simply fall apart and leave us hanging out in space light-years from nowhere. We work all the blessed time to keep them turning over.”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “Maybe this is it. Maybe after this we can buy a brand-new ship.”
But it didn’t cheer him up. He knew as well as I did that I was talking to keep up my spirit as well as his.
“Someday,” he said, “we’ll have bad trouble on our hands. Those boys of mine will drive a soap bubble across three hundred light-years if it’s got an engine in it. But it’s got to have an engine. And this wreck we got …”
He would have kept right on, but Pancake blew the horn for breakfast.
Doc was already at the table and he seemed to be functioning. He had a moderate case of shudders and he seemed a little pale. He was a little bitter, too, and somewhat poetic.
“So we gather glory,” he told us. “We go out and lap it up. We haunt the ruins and we track the dream and we come up dripping cash.”
“Doc,” I said, “shut up.”
He shut up. There was no one on the ship I had to speak to twice.
We didn’t dally with the food. We crammed it down and left. Pancake left the dishes standing on the table and came along with us.
We got into the silo without any trouble. There were entrances all around the base and there weren’t any doors. There was not a thing or anyone to stop us walking in.
It was quiet and solemn inside—and unspectacular. It reminded me of a monstrous office building.
It was all cut up with corridors, with openings off the corridors leading into rooms. The rooms were lined with what looked like filing cases.
We walked for quite a while, leaving paint markers along the walls to lead us back to the entrance. Get lost inside a place like that and one could wander maybe half a lifetime finding his way out.
We were looking for something—almost anything—but we didn’t find a thing except those filing cases.
So we went into one of the rooms to have a look inside the files.
Pancake was disgusted. “There won’t be nothing but records in those files. Probably in a lingo we can’t even read.”
“There could be anything inside those files,” said Frost. “They don’t have to be records.”
Pancake had a sledge and he lifted it to smash one of the files, but I stopped him. There wasn’t any use doing it messy if there was a better way.
We fooled around a while and we found the place where you had to wave your hand to make a drawer roll out.
The drawer was packed with what looked like sticks of dynamite. They were about two inches in diameter and a foot, or maybe a little more, in length, and they were heavy.
“Gold,” said Hutch.
“I never saw black gold,” Pancake said.
“It isn’t gold,” I told them.
I was just as glad it wasn’t. If it had been, we’d have broken our backs hauling it away. Gold’s all right, but you can’t get rich on it. It doesn’t much more than pay wages.
We dumped out a pile of the sticks and squatted on the floor, looking them over.
“Maybe it’s valuable,” said Frost, “but I wouldn’t know. What do you think it is?”
None of us had the least idea.
We found some sort of symbols on each end of the sticks and the symbols on each stick seemed to be different, but it didn’t help us any because the symbols made no sense.
We kicked the sticks out of the way and opened some more drawers. Every single drawer was filled with the sticks.
We went into some other rooms and we waved our hands some more and the drawers came popping out and we didn’t find anything except more sticks.
When we came out of the silo, the day had turned into a scorcher. Pancake climbed the ladder to stack us up some grub and the rest of us sat down in the shade of the ship and laid several of the sticks out in front of us and sat there looking at them, wondering what we had.
“That’s where we’re at a big disadvantage,” said Hutch. “If a regular survey crew stumbled onto this, they’d have all sorts of experts to figure out the stuff. They’d test it a dozen different ways and they’d skin it alive almost and they’d have all sorts of ideas and they’d come up with some educated guesses. And pretty soon, one way or another, they’d know just what it was and if it was any use.”
“Someday,” I told them, “if we ever strike it rich, we’ll have to hire us some experts. The kind of loot we’re always turning up, we could make good use of them.”
“You won’t find any,” said Doc, “that would team up with a bunch like us.”
“Where do you get ‘bunch-like-us’ stuff?” I asked him, a little sore. “Sure, we ain’t got much education and the ship is just sort of glued together and we don’t use any fancy words to cover up the fact that we’re in this for all we can get out of it. But we’re doing an honest job.”
“I wouldn’t call it exactly honest. Sometimes we’re inside the law and sometimes outside it.”
That was nonsense and Doc knew it. Mostly where we went, there wasn’t any law.
“Back on Earth, in the early days,” I snapped back, “it was folks like us who went into new lands and blazed the trails and found the rivers and climbed the mountains and brought back word to those who stayed at home. And they went because they were looking for beaver or for gold or slaves or for anything else that wasn’t nailed down tight. They didn’t worry much about the law or the ethics of it and no one blamed them for it. They found it and they took it and that was the end of it. If they killed a native or two or burned a village or some other minor thing like that, why, it was just too bad.”
Hutch said to Doc: “There ain’t no sense in you going holy on us. Anything we done, you’re in as deep as we are.”
“Gentlemen,” said Doc, in that hammy way of his, “I wasn’t trying to stir up any ruckus. I was just pointing out that you needn’t set your heart on getting any experts.”
“We could get them,” I said, “if we offered them enough. They got to live, just like anybody else.”
“They have professional pride, too. That’s something you’ve forgotten.”
“We got you.”
“Well, now,” said Hutch, “I’m not too sure Doc is professional. That time he pulled the tooth for me—”
“Cut it out,” I said. “The both of you.”
This wasn’t any time to bring up the matter of the tooth. Just a couple of months ago, I’d got it quieted down and I didn’t want it breaking out again.
Frost picked up one of the sticks and turned it over and over, looking at it.
“Maybe we could rig up some tests,” he suggested.
“And take the chance of getting blown up?” asked Hutch.
“It might not go off. You have a better than fifty-fifty chance that it’s not explosive.”
“Not me,” said Doc. “I’d rather just sit here and guess. It’s less tiring and a good deal safer.”
“You don’t get anywhere by guessing,” protested Frost. “We might have a fortune right inside our mitts if we could only find out what these sticks are for. There must be tons of them stored in the building. And there’s nothing in the world to stop us from taking them.
”
“The first thing”, I said, “is to find out if it’s explosive. I don’t think it is. It looks like dynamite, but it could be almost anything. For instance, it might be food.”
“We’ll have Pancake cook us up a mess,” said Doc.
I paid no attention to him. He was just needling me.
“Or it might be fuel,” I said. “Pop a stick into a ship engine that was built to use it and it would keep it going for a year or two.”
Pancake blew the chow horn and we all went in.
After we had eaten, we got to work.
We found a flat rock that looked like granite and above it we set up a tripod made out of poles that we had to walk a mile to cut and then had to carry back. We rigged up a pulley on the tripod and found another rock and tied it to the rope that went up to the pulley. Then we paid out the rope as far as it would go and there we dug a foxhole.
By this time, the sun was setting and we were tuckered out, but we decided to go ahead and make the test and set our minds at rest.
So I took one of the sticks that looked like dynamite and while the others back in the foxhole hauled up the rock tied to the rope, I put the stick on the first rock underneath the second and then I ran like hell. I tumbled into the foxhole and the others let go of the rope and the rock dropped down on the stick.
Nothing happened.
Just to make sure, we pulled up and dropped the rock two or three times more and there was no explosion.
We climbed out of the foxhole and went over to the tripod and rolled the rock off the stick, which wasn’t even dented.
By this time, we were fairly well convinced that the stick couldn’t be set off by concussion, although the test didn’t rule out a dozen other ways it might blow us all up.
That night, we gave the sticks the works. We poured acid on them and the acid just ran off. We tried a cold chisel on them and we ruined two good chisels. We tried a saw and they stripped the teeth clean off.
We wanted Pancake to try to cook one of them, but Pancake refused.
“You aren’t bringing that stuff into my galley,” he said. “You do, you can cook for yourselves from now on. I keep a good clean galley and I try to keep you guys well fed and I ain’t having you mess up the place …”