I opened my mouth. I closed it again. Ferries are considered public services, under the law. The only way I could get a vacation that was sure to last was to apply for one in advance, and I hadn’t done that.
“Okay,” I said wearily. “When do I sign the contract?”
“Miss Vanderweghe is at my office now,” Cooper said. “How soon can you get here?”
I was in a surly mood as I rode downtown to Cooper’s place. For the thousandth time I resented the casual way he could pluck me out of some relaxation and make me take a job. I wasn’t looking forward to catering to the whims of some dried-up old museum curator all the way out to Ganymede. And I wasn’t too pleased with the notion of carrying relics of the Venusian Insurrection.
The Insurrection had caused quite a fuss, a hundred years back. Bunch of Venusian colonists decided they didn’t like Earth’s rule—the taxation-without-representation bit, though their squawk was unjustified—and set up a wildcat independent government, improvising their equipment out of whatever they could grab. A chap name of Jud Tangay was in charge; the insurrectionists holed up in the jungle and held off the attacking loyalists for a couple of weeks. Then the Venusian local government appealed to Earth; a regiment of Bluecoats was shipped to Venus; and inside of a week Tangay was a prisoner and the Insurrection ended. But some diehard Venusians still venerated the insurrectionists, and there had been a few murders and ambushes every year since the Tangay’s overthrow. I could have done without carrying Venusian cargo.
I was going to say as much to Cooper, too, in hopes that some clause of my charter would get me out of the assignment and back on vacation. But I didn’t get a chance. I went storming into Cooper’s office.
There was a girl sitting in the chair to the left of his desk. She was about twenty-five, well built in most every way possible, with glossy short-cropped hair and an attractive face.
Cooper stood up and said, “Sam, I’d like you to meet Miss Vanderweghe, this is Sam Diamond, one of the best ferry men there is. He’ll get you to Ganymede in style.”
“I’m sure of that,” she said, smiling.
“Hello,” I said, gulping.
I didn’t bother raising a fuss about the political implications of my cargo. I didn’t grouse about weight limits, space problems aboard ship, accommodation difficulties, or anything else. I reached for the contract—it was the standard printed form, with the variables typed in by Cooper—and signed it.
“I’d like to leave tonight,” she said.
“Sure. My ship’s at the spaceport. Can you have your cargo delivered there by—oh, say, 1700 hours? That way we can blast off by 2100.”
“I’ll try. Will you be able to help me get my goods out of storage and down to the spaceport?”
I started to say that I’d be delighted to, but Cooper cut in sharply, as I knew he would. “I’m sorry, Miss Vanderweghe, but Sam’s contract and charter prohibit him from any landside cargo-handling except within the actual bounds of the spaceport. You’ll have to use a local carrier for getting your stuff to the ship, I’m afraid. If you want me to, I’ll arrange for transportation…”
My mood was considerably different as I returned to the hotel Deimos to check out. My tub would need five days for the journey between Mars and Ganymede. Now, conditions aboard my ship allow for a certain amount of passenger privacy, but not a devil of a lot. Log cabin or no log cabin, I was going to enjoy the proximity of Miss Erna Vanderweghe. I could think of worse troubles than having to spend five days in the same small ferry with her, and only a log cabin and a cannon for chaperones.
I was grinning as I walked over to the desk to let them know I was pulling out. Nat, the desk clerk, interpreted the grin logically enough, but wrongly.
“You talked them out of giving you the job, eh, Sam? How’d you work it?”
“Huh? Oh—no, I took the job. I’m checking out of here at 1800 hours.”
“You took it? But you look happy!”
“I am,” I said with a mysterious expression. I started to saunter away, but Nat called me back.
“You had a visitor a little while ago, Sam. He wanted me to let him into your room to wait for you, but naturally I wouldn’t do it.”
“Visitor? Did he leave his name?”
“He’s still here. Sitting right over there, next to the potted palm tree.”
Frowning, I walked toward him. He was a thin, hunched-up little man with the sallow look of a Venusian colonist. He was busily reading some cheap dime-novel sort of magazine as I approached.
“Hello,” I said affably. “I’m Sam Diamond. You wanted to see me?”
“You’re ferrying Erna Vanderweghe to Ganymede tonight, aren’t you?” His voice was thinly whining, nasty-sounding, mean.
“I make a practice of keeping my business to myself,” I told him. “If you’re interested in hiring a ferry, you’d better go to the Transport Registry. I’m booked.”
“I know you are. And I know who you’re carrying. And I know what you’re carrying.”
“Look here, friend, I…”
“You’re carrying General Tangay’s cabin, and other priceless relics of the Venusian Republic—and all stolen goods!” His eyes had a fanatic gleam about them. I realized who he was as soon as he used the expression “Venusian Republic.” Only an Insurrectionist-sympathizer would refer to the rebel group that way.
“I’m not going to discuss business affairs with you,” I said. “My cargo has been officially cleared.”
“It was stolen by that woman! Purchased with filthy dollars and taken from Venus by stealth!”
I started to walk away. I hate having some loudmouthed fanatic rant at me. But he followed, clutching at my elbows, and said in his best conspiratorial tone, “I warn you, Diamond—cancel that contract or you’ll suffer! Those relics must return to Venus!”
Whirling around, I disengaged his hands from my arm and snapped, “I couldn’t cancel a contract if I wanted to—and I don’t want to. Get out of here or I’ll have you jugged, whoever you are.”
“Remember the warning…”
“Go on! Shoo! Scat!”
He slinked out of the lobby. Shaking my head, I went upstairs to pack. Damned idiotic cloak-and-dagger morons, I thought. Creeping around hissing warnings and leaving threatening notes, and in general trying to keep alive an underground movement that never had any real reason for existing from the start. It wasn’t as if Earth had oppressed the Venusian colonists. The benefits flowed all in one direction, from Earth to Venus, and everyone on Venus knew it except for Tangay’s little bunch of ultranationalistic glory-hounds. Nobody on Venus wanted independence less than the colonists themselves, who had dandy tax exemptions and benefits from the mother world.
I forgot all about the threats by the time I was through packing my meager belongings and had grabbed a meal at the hotel restaurant. Around 1800 hours I went down to the spaceport to see what was happening there. The mechanics had already wheeled my ferry out of the storage hangars; she was out on the field getting checked over for blastoff. Erna Vanderweghe and her cargo had arrived, too. She was standing at the edge of the field, supervising the unloading of her stuff from the van of a local carrier.
The log cabin had been taken apart. It consisted of a stack of stout logs, the longest of them some sixteen feet long and the rest tapering down.
“You think you’re going to be able to put that cabin back the way it was?” I asked.
“Oh, certainly. I’ve got each log numbered to correspond with a diagram I’ve made. The re-assembling shouldn’t be any trouble at all,” she said, smiling sweetly.
I eyed the other stuff—several crates, a few smaller packages, and a cannon, not very big. “Where’d you get all these things?” I asked.
She shrugged prettily. “I bought them on Venus, of course. Most of them were the property of descendants of the insurrectionists—they were quite happy to sell. There weren’t any ferries available on Venus, so I took a commercial liner on the shut
tle from Venus to Mars. They said I’d be able to get a ferry here.”
“And you did,” I said. “In five days we’ll be landing on Ganymede.”
“I can’t wait to get there—to set up my exhibit!”
I frowned. “Tell me something, Miss Vanderweghe. Just how did you manage to—ah—make such an early start in the museum business?”
She grinned. “My father and grandfather were museum curators. I just come by it naturally, I suppose. And I was just about the only colonist on Ganymede who was halfway interested in having the job!”
I chuckled softly and said, “When Cooper told me I was ferrying a museum curator, I pictured a dried-up old spinster who’d nag me all the way to Ganymede. I couldn’t have been wronger.”
“Disappointed?”
“Not very much,” I said.
We had the ship loaded inside of an hour, everything stowed neatly away in the hold and Miss Vanderweghe’s personal luggage strapped down in the passenger compartment. Since there wasn’t any reason for hanging around longer, I recomputed my takeoff orbit and called the control center for authorization to blast off at 2000 hours, an hour ahead of schedule.
They were agreeable, and at 1955 hours the field sirens started to scream, warning people of an impending blast. Miss Vanderweghe—Erna—was aft, in her acceleration cradle, as I jabbed the keys that would activate the autopilot and take us up.
I started to punch the keys. The computer board started to click. There was nothing left for me to do but strap myself in and wait for brennschluss. A blastoff from Mars is no great problem in astronautics.
As the automatic took over, I flipped my seat back, converting it into an acceleration cradle, and relaxed. It seemed to me that the takeoff was a little on the bumpy side, as if I’d figured the ship’s mass wrong by one or two hundred pounds. But I didn’t worry about the discrepancy. I just shut my eyes and waited while the extra gees bore down on me. The sanest thing for a man to do during blastoff is to go to sleep, and that’s what I did.
I woke up half an hour or so later to discover that the engines had cut out, the ship was safely in flight, and that a bloody and battered figure was bent over my controls, energetically ruining them with crowbar and shears.
I blinked. Then the fog in my head cleared and I got out of my cradle. The stowaway turned around. He was quite a mess. The capillaries of his face had popped during the brief moments of top acceleration, and fine purplish lines now wriggled over his cheeks and nose, giving him a grade-A rum blossom, and bloodshot eyes to go with it. He had some choice bruises that he must have acquired while rattling around during blastoff, and his nose had been bleeding all over his shirt. It was the little Venusian fanatic who had threatened me at the hotel.
“How the hell did you get aboard?” I demanded.
“Slipped through the security checkers…but the ship took off ahead of schedule. I did not expect to be on board when blastoff came.”
“Sorry to have fouled up your plans,” I told him.
“But I regained consciousness in time. Your ship is ruined! You refused to heed my warning, and now you will never reach Ganymede alive. So perish all enemies of the Venusian Republic! So perish those who have desecrated our noble shrines!”
He was practically foaming at the mouth. I started toward him. He swung the crowbar and might have bashed my head in if he had known how to handle himself under nograv conditions, but he didn’t, and the only result of his exertion was to send himself drifting toward the roof of the cabin. I yanked on his leg as it went past me and dragged him down. The crowbar dropped from his numb hand. I caught it and poked him across the head with it.
There isn’t any hesitation in a spaceman’s mind when he finds a stowaway. Fuel is a precious thing, and so is air and food; stowaways simply aren’t allowed to live. I didn’t feel any qualms about what I did next, but all the same I was glad that Erna Vanderweghe wasn’t awake and watching me while I went about it.
I slipped into my breathing-helmet and sealed off the cabin. Opening the airlock, I carried the unconscious Venusian out the hatch and gave him a good push, imparting enough momentum to send him out on an orbit of his own. The compensating reaction pushed me back into the airlock. I closed the hatch. The Venusian must have died instantly, without ever knowing what was happening to him.
Then I had a look-see to determine just how much damage the stowaway had been able to do before I woke up and caught him.
It was plenty.
All our communication equipment was gone, but permanently. The radio was a gutted ruin. The computer was smashed. Two auxiliary fuel tanks had been jettisoned. We were hopelessly off course in asteroid country, and the odds on reaching Ganymede looked mighty slim. By the time I finished making course corrections, we’d be down to our reserve fuel supply. Ganymede was about 350 million miles ahead of us. I didn’t see how we were going to travel more than a tenth that distance before air and food troubles set in.
It was time to wake Miss Vanderweghe and tell her the news, I figured.
She was lying curled up tight in her acceleration cradle, asleep, with a childlike, trusting expression on her face. I watched her for perhaps five minutes before I woke her. She sat up immediately.
“What—oh. Is everything all right? Did we make a good blastoff?”
“Fine blastoff,” I said quietly. “But everything isn’t all right.” I told her about the stowaway and how thoroughly he had wrecked us.
“Oh—that horrible little man from Venus! I knew he had followed me to Mars—that’s why I wanted to leave for Ganymede so soon. He made all sorts of absurd threats, as if the things I had bought were holy relics…”
“They are, in a way. If you worship Tangay and his fellow rebels, then the stuff you carried away is equivalent to the True Cross, I suppose.”
“I’m so sorry I got you into this, Sam.”
I shrugged. “It’s my own fault all the way. Your Venusian friend approached me at the hotel this afternoon and warned me off, but I didn’t listen to him. I had my chance to pull out.”
“Where’s the stowaway now? Unconscious?”
I shook my head, jerking my thumb toward the single port in her cabin. “He’s out there. Without a suit. Stowaways aren’t entitled to charity under the space laws.”
“Oh,” she said quietly, turning pale. “I—see. You—ejected him.”
I nodded. Then, to get off what promised to be an unpleasant topic, I said, “We’re in real trouble. We’re off course and we don’t have enough fuel for making corrections—not without jettisoning everything on board, ourselves included.”
“I don’t mind if the cargo goes. I mean, I’d hate to lose it, but if you have to dump it…”
“Uh-uh. The ship itself is the bulk of our mass. The problem isn’t the cargo. If there were only some way of jettisoning the ship…”
My mouth sagged open. No, I thought. It won’t ever work. It’s too fantastic to consider.
“I have an idea,” I said. “We will jettison the ship. And we’ll get to Ganymede.”
Luckily our saboteur friend hadn’t bothered to rip up my charts. I spent half an hour feverishly thumbing through the volume devoted to asteroid orbits, while Erna hovered over my shoulder, not daring to ask questions but probably wondering just what in blazes I was figuring out.
Pretty soon I had a list of a dozen likely asteroids. I narrowed it down to five, then to three, then to one. I missed the convenience of my computer, but regulations require a pilot to be able to get along without one in a pinch, and I got along.
I computed a course toward the asteroid known as (719)-Albert. Luck was riding with us. (719)-Albert was on the outward swing of his orbit. On the basis of some extremely rough computations I worked out an orbit for our crippled ship that would match Albert’s in a couple of hours.
Finally, I looked up at Erna and grinned. “This is known as making a virtue out of necessity,” I said. “Want to know what’s going on?”
; “You bet I do.”
I leaned back. “We’re on our way to a chunk of rock known as (719)-Albert, which is chugging along not far from here on its way through the asteroid belt. (719)-Albert is a rock about three miles in diameter. Figure that it’s half the size of Deimos—and Deimos is about as small as a place can get.”
“But why are we going there?” she said, puzzled.
“(719)-Albert has an exceedingly eccentric orbit—and I mean eccentric in its astronomical sense: not a peculiar orbit, just one that’s very highly elongated. At perihelion (719)-Albert passes around 20 million miles from the orbit of Earth. At aphelion, which is where he’s heading now, he comes within 90 million miles of the orbit of Jupiter. Unless my figures are completely cockeyed, Jupiter is going to be about 150 million miles from Albert about a week from now.”
I saw I had lost her completely. She said dimly, “But you said a little while ago that we hardly had enough fuel to take us 50 million miles.”
“In the ship,” I said. “Yes. But I’ve got other ideas. We’ll land on Albert and abandon the ship. Then we ride pickaback on the asteroid until its closest approach to Jupiter—and blast off without the ship.”
“Blast off—how?”
I smiled triumphantly. “We’ll make a raft out of your blessed logs,” I said. “Attach one of the ship’s rocket engines at the rear, and shove off. Escape velocity from Albert is so low it hardly matters. And since the mass of our raft will only be six or seven hundred pounds—Earthside weight, of course—instead of the thirty tons or so that this ship weighs, we’ll be able to coast to Ganymede with plenty of fuel left to burn.”
She was looking at me as if I’d just delivered a lecture in the General Theory of Relativity. Apparently the niceties of space travel just weren’t in her line at all. But she smiled and tried to look understanding. “It sounds very clever,” she said with an uncertain grin.
I felt pretty clever about everything myself, three hours later, when we landed on the surface of an asteroid that could only be (719)-Albert. It had taken only one minor course correction to get us here. Which meant that my rule-of-thumb astrogation had been pretty good.