Perhaps he could think up some fitting punishment for the pilot, who had taught him this game.
The pilot and copilot sat motionless in the control room. From time to time the pilot used his hands to change course a trifle. Every fourteen hours or so the copilot would bring Kzanol a bowl of water and then return to her seat. Actinic gas streamed from the belly of the ship, pushing it to ever higher velocities.
It was a beautiful night. Years had passed since Garner last saw the stars; in the cities they couldn’t shine through the smog and the neon glare, and even the American continents were mostly city. Soon he would see them more clearly than he had in half a century. The air was like the breath of Satan. Garner was damp with sweat, and so were Anderson and Neumuth.
“I still say we could do this by ourselves,” said Anderson.
“You wouldn’t know what to look for,” Garner countered. “I’ve trained myself for this. I’ve been reading science fiction for decades. Centuries! Neumuth, where are you going?”
Neumuth, the short dark one, had turned and was walking away. “Time to get strapped down,” he called back. “Bon voyage!”
“He’s going forward, to the cockpit of the booster,” said Anderson. “We go up that escalator to the ship itself.”
“Oh. I wish I could see it better. It’s just one big shadow.”
The shadow was a humped shadow, like a paper dart with a big lizard clinging to its back. The paper glider was a ramjet-rocketplane, hydrogen fueled in the ramjet and using the cold liquid hydrogen to make its own liquid oxygen in flight. The slim cylinder clinging to its upper surface was a fusion drive cruiser with some attachments for rescue work. It carried two men.
Using its fusion motor in Earth’s atmosphere would have been a capital offense. In taking off from ground eighteen hours earlier, Masney and Kzanol/Greenberg had broken twelve separate local laws, five supranational regulations and a treaty with the Belt.
Another ship roared a god’s anger as it took off. Garner blinked at the light. “That was our rendezvous ship,” Anderson said matter-of-factly.
Luke was tired of having to ask silly-seeming questions. He wasn’t going to like Anderson, he decided. If the kid wanted to tell him why they needed a rendezvous ship, he would.
They had reached the bottom of the escalator. “Meet you at the top,” said Garner, reaching into his ashtray. Anderson stared, jolted, as an invalid’s travel chair became a flying saucer. An Arm using an illegal flying machine? An Arm?
Anderson rode up the stairs, whistling. This trip might be fun after all.
“Just leave the chair on the escalator platform,” he said at the top. “We’ve made arrangements to have it delivered to the local Struldbrugs’ Club. They’ll take good care of it. I’ll carry you in, sir.”
“You get my medikit. I’ll walk,” said Garner. And he did, wobbling and using his arms freely. He barely reached his gee chair. Anderson found the medikit and followed. He checked Garner’s crash web before he used his own.
“Neumuth? Ready,” said Anderson, as if into empty air. He continued, “The other ramjet-rocket carried a bundle of solid fuel rockets as big as this ship. They’re strap-ons. We don’t have any more power than the Golden Circle, and we’re a day and a half behind them, so we use the strap-ons to give us an initial boost. Inefficient, but if it works—”
“—It’s good,” Garner finished for him. His voice was thickened by the pull of the linear accelerator. For five seconds the soundless pressure lasted, two gravities of pull. Then the rams fired and they were off.
It would take two days of uncomfortable two-gee acceleration to get there first, thought Garner, compressed in his chair. His old bones would take a beating. Already he was missing the gadgets in his own chair. This trip wasn’t going to be fun.
Lars was eating a very messy sardine-and-egg sandwich when the buzzer buzzed. He put it down gently, using both hands, so that it wouldn’t bounce in the nearly nonexistent gravity. He wiped his hands on his coverall, which he washed frequently, and went to the transceiver.
The maser beam had crossed the void in one instantaneous beep. The radio translated it into sound, then thoughtfully scaled it down against the minute Doppler shift. What came out was the colorless voice of Cutter, duty man at Ceres.
“Thank you, Eros, your message received in full. No more emergencies this time, Lam. Topeka Base called us eight hours ago, giving us the time of takeoff and predicted course. According to your report the takeoff was four minutes late, but that’s typical. Keep us posted.
“Thank you, Eros, your—”
Lars switched it off and went back to his sandwich. Briefly he wondered if Cutter had noticed that the Navy ship was following the two he had tracked eighteen hours ago. No doubt he had.
“You’re taking it too hard,” said Dale Snyder.
Judy shrugged.
Again Dale took in the puffy eyelids showing beneath the makeup, the unfamiliar lines in Judy’s pretty twenty-eight-year-old face, the death-grip on her coffee glass, her rigid position in what should have been an easy chair. “Look here,” he said. “You’ve got far too many things working on you. Have you considered—I mean, have you given any thought to invoking your agreement with Larry concerning adultery? At least you could eliminate one of your tensions. And you’re not helping him by worrying.”
“I know. I’ve thought about it. But—” she smiled, “not with a friend, Dale.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” Dale Snyder said hastily. And blushed. Fortunately the bandages covered most of it. “What about going to Vegas? The town’s full of divorcees of both sexes, most of them temporarily terrified of getting married again. Great for a short-term affair. You could cut it short when Larry comes back.”
He may have put too much assurance into the last sentence, because Judy’s grip tightened on her glass and relaxed immediately. “I don’t think so,” she said listlessly.
“Think about it some more. You could even do some gambling.”
Two gravities! Twelve hours ago he would have sneered at himself. Two gravities, lying on his back? Luke could have done it on his head. But that was twelve hours ago, twelve hours of double weight and throbbing metal and noise and no sleep. The strap-on fission/fusion motors roared in pairs outside the hull. Two had been dropped already. Ten remained, burning two at a time. It would be a day and a half before ship’s weight returned to normal.
The stars were hard, emphatic points. Never had the sky been so black; never had the stars been so bright. Luke felt that they would have burned tiny holes in his retinae if he could have held his eyes fixed on one point. Tiny multicolored blindnesses to add to his enviable collection of scars. The Milky Way was a foggy river of light, with sharp actinic laser points glaring through.
So here he was.
He’d been seventy-two the day they launched the first passenger ship: an orbital craft, clumsy and spavined and oversized by today’s standards, nothing more than a skip-glider. They’d told him he was too old to buy a ticket. What was he now? He wanted to laugh, but there was pressure on his chest.
With an effort he turned his head. Anderson was locking a sheet of transparent plastic over part of the complex wraparound control panel. Most of the panel was already under the plastic sheets. He saw Luke looking at him, and he said, “Nothing to do from now on but watch for rocks. I’ve put us above the plane of the Belt.”
“Can we afford the extra time?”
“Sure. If they’re going to Neptune.” Anderson’s voice came cheerful and energetic, though slurred by the extra weight on his cheeks. “Otherwise they’ll beat us anyway, to wherever they’re going. And we won’t know it until they make turnover.”
“We’ll have to risk that.”
The extra weight wasn’t bothering Anderson at all.
One gravity is standard for manned spacecraft. Some rescue ships; and a few expresses in the Belt, have attachments for clusters of fusion/fission strap-on engines to cut their transi
t time. Often it makes sense. More often it doesn’t. Given continuous acceleration, the decrease in trip time varies as the square root of the increase in power. Greenberg and the ET should have expected their pursuers, had they known of them, to stay a day and a half behind all the way to Neptune.
A strap-on can only be used once. The smooth cylindrical shell contains only hydrogen gas under pressure and a core of uranium alloy. The fusion shield generator is external; it stays with the ship when the strap-on falls away. The moment the shield forms on the inside of the shell, neutrons from the core begin to reflect back into the uranium mass, and everything dissolves in the chain reaction. As time decreases the pressure inside the trapped star, the tiny exhaust aperture is designed to wear away, keeping the acceleration constant.
This time the strap-ons were vital. The Heinlein would beat the others to Neptune by six hours—
If they were headed for Neptune! But if Diller were wrong, or if Diller had lied—if Diller, like Greenberg, thought he was an alien—if the fleeing ships were en route to some asteroid—then the Heinlein would overshoot. When the others made turnover it would be too late. The Heinlein would be going too fast.
Of course, there were always the missiles. And the Belt would consider it a violation of treaty if the Golden Circle or the Iwo Jima landed in the Belt. They might be persuaded to attack.
But there was Lloyd Masney.
With a full minute’s delay in transmission, his discussion with Chick Watson had been both tiring and unproductive. Now Chick knew everything he knew, except for the exhaustive details he’d collected on Greenberg’s life. They’d reached some obvious decisions. They would not send any more ships from Earth, ships which would obviously arrive far too late to help. Earth would fire at sight if either of the target ships reached anywhere and started back. Chick would keep his communications open for Garner, ready to search out any information he might need. And one other decision—
“No, we can’t call on the Belt for help.” Chick’s expression dismissed the idea with the contempt he felt it deserved. “Not with Belt relations the way they are now. They know what they’d do to us with an embargo on uranium, and we know what we’d do to them by holding off their vitamins, and both sides are just itching to see who’d collapse first. You think they’d believe a story like ours? All the proof we can offer is second hand, from their point of view. They’d think we were setting up our own mining operation, or trying to claim a moon. They’d think anything at all, because all they can tell for sure is that three ships from Earth are on their way to Neptune.
“Worse yet, they might just assume that this telepathy amplifier won’t reach beyond Earth. In which case they could make a better deal with Greenberg, king of the world, than they can with us.”
“I’ll never buy that,” Garner had answered. “But you’re right, there’s no point in crying for help. There may be a better answer.”
And so they waited. If they were right, if the stolen ships were going to the eighth planet, they would be turning in six days. Luke and Anderson had nothing to do until the ET’s gave them their orders.
Luke went to sleep, finally, smiling. He smiled because the gees were pulling on his cheeks. Anderson was sleeping too, letting the autopilot do the work.
At twenty-one hundred the next day the last pair of strap-ons burned out, and were dropped. Now six tumbling pairs of thick-walled metal cylinders followed the Heinlein in a line millions of miles long. In a century all would reach interstellar space. Some would eventually pass between the galaxies.
The ship went on at a comfortable one gee. Luke scowled ferociously to exercise his facial muscles, and Anderson stepped into the airlock to do isometric exercises.
The rocks of the Belt slipped by below, faster every second.
He was a clerkish-looking man with a droning voice, and he called himself Ceres Base. From his appearance he might never have had a name of his own. He wanted to know what an Earth Navy ship was doing in the Belt.
“We have passage,” Anderson told him curtly.
Yes, said Ceres, but what is the Heinlein’s purpose?
Garner whispered, “Let me have the mike.”
“Just talk. He can hear you.”
“Ceres, this is Lucas Garner, Arm of the UN. Why the sudden shift?”
“Mr. Garner, your authority does not exist here in—”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You just now realized we’re following the Golden Circle. Didn’t you?”
“Are you really? To what purpose?”
“None of your business. But I may tell one of your superiors, if you pick the right superior. Get him on fast, were getting further away every minute.”
“The Belt will not allow you passage unless you explain your purpose here.”
“The Belt won’t touch us. Good-by.”
At the sound of the bell Marda rolled off the couch and walked smoothly into the phone booth. Already there was only a slight pull in her abdomen from the surgical cement, though the operation was just twelve hours old. A slight pull when she moved, to remind her of what she had lost.
“Lit!” she called. “Ceres. It’s for you.”
Lit trotted in from the garden.
Cutter looked apprehensive for once. “Remember the two bandit ships from Topeka Base? Someone’s joined the procession.”
“Took them long enough. We warned them days ago. When did it take off?”
“Two days ago.”
“Two days, Cutter?”
“Lit, the Heinlein gave us plenty of warning and an accurate course projection. She also used strap-on boosters. The time/position curve looks completely different from the curves for the bandits. It took me this long to see that everybody’s going in the same direction.”
“Damn it, Cutter—never mind. Anything else?”
“The Heinlein’s passing Ceres now. Do you want to talk to Lucas Garner, Arm of the UN?”
“An Arm? No. What’s an Arm doing out here?”
“He won’t say. He might tell you.”
“What makes you so sure the Belt won’t stop us?”
“Well, they can’t catch us and board us. All they could do is throw missiles at us, right?”
“You make me so happy.”
“Belters aren’t stupid, Anderson. Uh, oh.”
A space-tanned Caucasian with black hair and wrinkled eyes looked out of the screen at them and said, “Do I have the honor of addressing Lucas Garner aboard the Heinlein?”
“Right. Who’s this?”
“Charles Martin Shaeffer. First Speaker, Belt Political section. May I ask—”
“‘Little’ Shaeffer?”
The mahogany man’s face froze for an instant, then barely smiled. “They call me Lit. What are you up to, Garner?”
“You I’ll tell, Shaeffer. Now don’t interrupt, because it’s a long story…”
It took fifteen minutes to tell. Shaeffer listened without comment. Then there were questions. Shaeffer wanted details, clarification. Then some of the questions were repeated. There were veiled accusations, which became less veiled. Anderson kept the beam fixed and sensibly let Luke do the talking. After an hour of question-and-answer, Luke shut it off.
“That’s as much cross examination as I’m taking today, Shaeffer.”
“What did you expect me to do, swallow your tale whole? Your opinion of Belters needs revision.”
“No, Shaeffer, it doesn’t. I never expected to be believed. You can’t afford to believe me; the propaganda value would be enormous if Earth took you in on such a wild story.”
“Naturally. On the other hand, what you’re trying to tell me is that an alien monster is threatening all of human civilization. In view of this it seems odd that you object to answering a few questions.”
“Nuts. Shaeffer, do this. Send a few armed—”
“I’m not taking orders—”
“Don’t interrupt me, Shaef
fer. Send a few armed ships to follow me to Neptune. I’m sure that’s where they’re going; they’ve already passed turnover for most of the asteroids. It’ll take your ships a while to catch us. They may get there in time to help us out, and they may not. If you think I’m a liar, then send your ships along only to make sure I don’t do any poaching. Regardless of what you suspect me of, you’ll need ships to stop me, right? But arm them, Shaeffer. Arm them good.
“Your only other choice is to start a war, right? Right. If you want my story confirmed call the Arms office in Los Angeles, then call the UN Comparative Cultures Exhibit in Brasilia Ciudad and ask if they’ve still got the Sea Statue. That’s all you can do. So call me back and tell me how many ships you’re sending.” Luke gestured to Anderson, who turned him off.
“Jerk,” said Anderson, with feeling.
“Not at all. He did the right thing. He’ll keep on doing it. First he’ll send ships after us, including one with antiradar which will have to get there later than the others because of the extra weight. He’ll call Earth and get my story confirmed as well as he can. The worst he can think of me then is that I’m thorough. Finally he’ll call us and tell us he’s sending one less ship than he is, leaving out the antiradar. That ship gives the Belt every chance to catch me red-handed, doing whatever illegal treaty-breaking thing they think I’m doing, especially since I don’t know the Belt’s discovered antiradar—”
“Uh huh.”
“But if they don’t catch me at anything then they cooperate with me.”
“Uh huh. It’s perfect. But will they be able to handle it when we turn out to be telling the truth?”
“Sure. They’ll be armed for us, and a weapon is a weapon. Besides which, some of them will believe me. Belters, they’re always waiting for the first alien contact. They’ll be armed for bear, regardless.” Garner rubbed his scalp. “I wonder what the Sea Statue is armed for?”