Three Worlds to Conquer Page 10

  To be free again.

  No, that was a phrase for a 3V melodrama. Fraser looked at the implication and his bowels cramped inside him. Captain Manly Valiant, Terror of the Space ways, might load a few tons of necessities on a wheelbarrow, ram it through a cordon of guards, vault into the ship and be on his way before the astonished villains had gotten the wax out of their mustaches. But Mark Fraser, now, had seen an army, macerated, a man die in his arms, a leader bend the neck and go home with two cold lumps which had once been dear to him. Mark Fraser had Eve, Ann and Colin to look after. He had endured arbitrary government in the past, grumblingly, but not finding life too bad; he knew perfectly well that he could endure it again if he must. He was aging and staid and had learned that man’s fate is a series of compromises. He saw no way to accomplish anything but his own heroic death, and doubted that there would be much heroism. He would scream as loudly as the next slob when a laser beam punctured his belly; or cringe from their boots when they caught him—

  Foulest thought of all: this woman admitted that Swayne wanted his head.

  While Fraser was with Hoshi’s men, he came under the general amnesty. But if he was lured into the city and arrested, Ganymede wouldn’t revolt again merely to save him. In fact, his execution would be one more blow at the spirit of his fellows: maybe the last one that was needed before they made the interior surrender.

  “What do you want to do, Mark?”

  He barely heard through the querning in his brain.

  “Anything you decide is right by me,” she told him. “But you have to decide now.”

  “I hope—” His voice betrayed him with a squeak. He tried again. “I hope you’ve got some happypills in your place, Lory.”

  XII

  Theoretically, the most efficient procedure would have been to sleep in dormitories, eat in messhalls, and share a few washrooms. In practice, privacy was an urgent need. Every apartment had complete facilities, and Aurorans were not in the habit of dropping in on each other unannounced. Moreover, Lorraine was under a social boycott by the majority. Fraser had little fear of being surprised.

  Nonetheless his nervousness grew. Bachelor quarters amounted to a bed-sitting room, plus a tiny kitchen and bath. He felt trapped. And there was no tobacco, and his belly growled for more food than was available, and the small supply of psych medicine had to be saved for times of real need. The first “night” they were together, he and the woman had talked in circles, finding no answer, until sheer exhaustion put them to sleep; and, while a floor didn’t make too stiff a bed in this gravity, he had slept ill.

  She went back to work after breakfast, and he settled down to business. Whatever scheme they arrived at must be mostly his. Her mind was too occupied with maintaining her balance on the tightrope. For several hours his thoughts kept straying beyond the Glenns. Hoshi would have returned by now, bearing that letter he had scribbled for Eve.

  The leader had protested, called Fraser a lunatic, insisted that at least a younger man go with Lorraine. “No, I’m afraid not,” Fraser had said. “You see, the guys who were supposed to pilot the Olympia, who’re briefed and trained, they’re inaccessible. One’s in the brig for assaulting a Navy man, and the other, well, she isn’t sure about him. We can’t multiply risks more than we have to, can we? And in the getaway, the ship may have to dive into Jupiter’s atmosphere to escape pursuit. That’s not a situation an ordinary rocket jockey can handle. But I’ve piloted submersibles, back on Earth. The Olympia design is based on terrestrial bathyscaphes.” He shrugged. A tic in his cheek continued the gesture. “I wish to hell I could find a substitute. But if the job’s to have any chance of success, I seem to be elected.”

  In the end, Hoshi regarded him for minutes before saying, “Okay. And . . . win or lose, I envy your son.”

  Would Eve understand as much?

  She seemed very remote, the recollection of her blurred by his immediacies, as if she were someone he had known in a past that had long slipped through his fingers. Reality was these walls, the start in his pulse when feet passed in the corridor outside, the absence of his pipe, the occasional wondering whether Theor had gotten safely to land, the dreary round of plans for stocking the escape vessel and perception of their flimsiness.

  Item: Several guards were always posted on the field around the Vega. They’d see anyone who carried stores aboard the Olympia, and questions would follow.

  Item: Spacesuits had been returned to their owners after the colonial army left. One of Lorraine’s man-sized spares—every locker held extras—would equip Fraser for the sprint from a city airlock to the ship. But he’d never make the distance before a sentry shot him.

  Item: Lorraine might conceivably get together a few men who were willing to die in an attack on the guards, while Fraser used the diversion to get away. But sounding them out, overcoming their suspicions of her, assembling their gear, would take many cycles. In that long a time, Swayne might very well disable the Olympia. Some collaborationist could remind him of her potential. Besides, Lorraine wasn’t blindly trusted. She was hardly ever alone outside her dwelling—the nature of her work made that inevitable—and an eye was kept upon her. If she started having a number of visitors here, that would soon be noticed and investigated. In any event, the supply problem wouldn’t be solved thus.

  I got too damn fired up. I should have thought of this before committing myself. That ship might as well be in orbit around Alpha Centauri.

  No, wait. What do you do when a problem looks insoluble? You back up and look at it from another angle. A different approach.

  I’m too tense. Okay, I’ll invest one of these pills in the project.

  He swallowed coolness and determination, sprawled on the bed and turned his analytical mind loose. The answer grew before him.

  Lorraine came in. She shut the door behind her as Fraser sat up. “Hullo,” she said. “How’re you doing?”

  Her voice was dull and there were shadows under her eyes. Yet she moved elastically, and he noticed her high color and thought how much more she had in the way of looks than any conventional prettiness.

  “I may have our answer,” he said. “You do?” Weariness vanished from her like fog burnt off the sea by a morning sun. She reached the bed in a jump and clasped his shoulders. “I knew you could!”

  “Whoa, there. Let’s talk this over and see what the holes in the scheme are.” Still, he felt a glow, and if it was mostly chemical, was it any the less real for that?

  “Sure. But you wouldn’t say you ‘may’ have licked something unless you knew you had.” She pirouetted across the room. “Wheel”

  “Good Lord, Lory, you’re acting like—” for some reason he stopped before saying “my daughter”—“like a kid let out of school.”

  “That’s how I feel, too. With an end in sight to this horror, why not? Look, I’ve got a bottle of whisky

  I’ve been saving for some extraspecial occasion. What say we break it out now?”

  “I don’t like the taste of alcohol. Often wish I did, but I guess we all have some handicap or other. Don’t let me stop you, of course. Only, well, we do have to discuss this seriously.”

  “Uh-huh.” She sobered, though the vibrancy remained in her tone. “I’ll start dinner, with something nice that I’ve been saving too, and while it cooks we can be earnest.” She flushed a bit. “I’d like to change clothes, also.”

  “Sure.” He retreated to the bathroom till she said he could come back. A close-fitting black dress with a single aluminum-bronze pin, a stylized comet, did her a disturbing amount of justice. Light gleamed in her hair’s gold. He sat down and tried to arrange his thoughts while she bustled in the kitchen.

  Returning, she took a chair opposite his. “All right, Mark,” she said. “What’s your proposal?”

  “Well—” He squirmed about and stared past her, at a picture on the wall. It wasn’t the sentimental Earth landscape of the average colonial home; NGC 5457 coiled stark and glittering in space. “We
ll, the problem breaks into two parts—provisioning the ship and getting aboard her. Then a little warmup time is needed, and time to accelerate before a gun or a missile can hit, but that’s part of the whole boarding operation. What hung us up was assuming the two phases had to be in that order.”

  She slapped her knee. “I think I get your idea. Why didn’t I see? But go on.”

  “There are still radiophone lines to every outlying settlement. And with so much else to do, I don’t imagine Swayne’s gang monitors them.”

  “N-no. I have to make fairly frequent calls outside of town, to the mines for instance. And I can choose a moment when I’m alone in my office. Who should I contact?”

  “The people at Blocksberg. It’s nearly antipodal to Aurora, you recall. And Gebhardt was with us, so I’m certain they’ll cooperate. He can check your bona fides with Sam Hoshi if he wants. It’d be better to alert somebody on one of the other moons, but that goes through a different circuit.”

  “Which isn’t automatic, and the operators are collaborationists. Besides, you couldn’t get undetected past the picket boats. They’re posted on radar watch against ships from Earth, mainly, but each one has some missiles. Okay, it’ll be Blocksberg. I tell them to have your supplies ready for quick loading, right?”

  “Yes. The boxes can be slung through the cargo hatch in five minutes, and I can restow them when I’m in space. I won’t need too much. The crossing won’t take a dreadful lot of days. Mainly I’ll need air, water, food, and interplanetary navigation equipment, including an ephemeris and reduction tables. Nobody can cross the Solar System by the seat of his pants! Drugs would be helpful. With Antion I can pass nearer the sun than the screens would otherwise permit, and so shorten the passage time. And I’d prefer not to spend a week in hospital on Earth, recovering from the effects of so much high and zero gee, so booster pills would also be nice. But I can get along without the medicine chest if I have to.”

  “Check. You’ll blast off from here, then, and hop to Blocksberg?”

  “Yes. On a long curve. Maybe clear around Jupiter, so their radar won’t tell them where I’m bound. In fact, I’ll start out in such a way that it’ll seem I’m headed for another moon. I can reach any Galilean satellite without instruments or data, given as much reaction mass to waste as I know the Olympia has.”

  “But are you sure that what’s-his-name, Gebhardt, has the equipment you want?”

  “I’m sure he does not. Why should he? But the Glory Hole isn’t far from his place, and you remember it has a small, unmanned emergency spacefield. He can raid the depot there. I don’t dare land directly at the field, because Swayne might expect that.”

  “You’ll have to allow a few cycles for them to assemble your stuff.”

  “I know. Now as for Phase One of the plan, that depends on you. You’ve got to sneak me out of town.”

  “Hm. I’ve worried about that. They’ve gotten awfully cautious. Most of the airlocks are sealed off, and there’s a guard at every one still operational. You can’t take a cat without a crewman accompanying you.”

  “I don’t want a cat. I only have to get out on foot, with some tools.”

  “Still not easy. They require a pass. But tell me what you have in mind.”

  “I’ll walk beyond the horizon, circle around, and get in among the moonships. They won’t see me if I come from the north, as I did in meeting you. You told me the reaction regulators have been sequestered. Well, I’ll go aboard one of the boats, dismantle the safety cutoffs, and start the engine.”

  “What? It’ll blow up!”

  “Not exactly. Not like a bomb, anyhow. But there’ll be some fancy fireworks. If that doesn’t give me a chance to sneak into the Olympia, I resign.”

  Lorraine stared at her feet. “You could get killed, Mark,” she said.

  “There’ll be time to get clear before the engine blows. The warmup period is much less than for a thing the size of the Vega, but it still amounts to several minutes. The surrounding ships will screen off radiation pretty well. As for the Olympia’s own warmup, I count on things being so confused that nobody will notice she’s purring.”

  “Well—Damn! I don’t like it.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  “I haven’t any,” she said in a thin voice.

  He leaned over and patted her hand “Don’t be such a worry-wart, kid. I’ve even calculated my schedule. Ninety seconds from the moonship cluster to the Olympia. Thirty seconds to open the cargo hatch and get inside.”

  “Longer than that. The accommodation ladder isn’t there. You’d have to scramble up the jacks and balance yourself somehow, holding on with one hand while you undog the hatch with the other.”

  “Well—”

  “Two people could manage a lot faster,” she said. “One standing on die other’s shoulders, see? Also, there’s the problem of getting you out. I tell you, you can’t simply wander up to one of those sentries and ask him to let you through. I could try to fake a pass for you, but it’d be risky as the devil.”

  In spite of her words, she was looking happier. “What do you propose?” he asked.

  “That I go along.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “No. Look. I can manufacture an excuse to go out, myself, with no trouble. I’ll tell the entry control officer that I’ve gotten word of equipment failure at the Navajo diggings, and it might be sabotage. So I’ll tell him I want to stroll over, make an inspection and fix it myself. I’ve been doing a little electronics repair work right along, we’re so shprthanded. I’ll have him write a pass for me and an assistant, like say Chris Coulter; only I’ll have seen to it that Chris is working on the other side of town that watch. The sentry knows what I look like. Everybody does by now. But he’ll hardly know one technie in Aurora from another. He’ll let us through, and a bag of tools. I’ll help you detonate the moonship, board the Olympia with you, and get off at Blocksberg.”

  “But—reprisals against you—”

  “Gosh, I’ll be safer out of town than in, once this thing breaks. Though I don’t imagine Swayne will do much when he sees you’re well away. He can’t fight nuclear-armed ships that have been warned about him. He may surrender; or he may pull out; or at worst, he may hold Aurora hostage and bargain for a pardon. But he’ll know he’s lost the war.”

  “Even so . . . well, yes, I’ll be glad to have you clear of him. Agreed!” She thrust out her hand. Her eyes held a Valkyrie light. Their clasps joined, and they looked long at each other.

  Suddenly he kissed her. She hung back an instant, then responded, and it lasted quite a while.

  Breaking away, with a shaky laugh, she said: “I’d better go tend our celebration dinner.”

  “I suppose,” he mumbled. “Would . . . would you. . . are you sure you won’t have a drink?”

  “No. But go ahead yourself.”

  “I will. I need one.”

  They talked until very late, and she told him more of her past than was entirely wise, and he had a great deal of trouble getting to sleep afterward, down on the floor.

  XV

  The volcano stood isolated in Rollarik’s wilderness, a possible vantage point from which to see where Walfilo’s fugitive army was. Theor had spent days making his way to it. Now, at its foot, he admitted wearily to himself how poor the possibility was.

  He stood where the forest gave way to bare rock. The trees were mostly yorwar, thick-boled, with hollow upward-floating limbs and the characteristic Jovian leafage which would have reminded a man of lung tissue. Their “photosynthesis,” building complex molecules out of methane and ammonia, releasing hydrogen in the process, depended on synchrotron radiation as well as lightning and the feeble sun, and so required a maximization of internal surface. The crowns rarely reached more than fifteen feet above the roots. But they stretched endlessly on.

  Ahead of him, the volcano reared dark against the flicker in a slowly approaching rainstorm. Infrared light glanced off the smoke of disintegra
ted organic matter that poured from its crater and from a smaller vent halfway up. He heard the thing rumble, and felt the deep ground vibrations through his bones.

  He was not unfamiliar with natural firepots, he had helped cast implements over some of them in Ath. But that had been in a smithy, with tools and helpers. Today he was awesomely alone.

  And unarmed. His pike had been lost in his surf-troubled landfall, his knife broken against a bone in an animal he hunted. Now that he had abundant stone, the situation must be remedied. He climbed onto the slope and pawed about in the debris until he found a suitable pair of rocks. Chemically, they were water crystallized together with a small amount of silicon and magnesium compounds. But they fractured like obsidian. He quickly struck out a coup de poing and several spearheads. Returning to the woods, he used the handax to gnaw a fairly straight shaft off a larrik bush, and secured one of the points to this with a strip cut from the fibrous interior of the plant. The spares he wrapped in a leaf and slung at his belt. His weapons were cruder than any belonging to a local barbarian—those tribes had not lost skill in this art as had the civilized peoples to some degree—but he felt a good deal happier for them.

  Now, food. His last meal was already long behind him.

  Perhaps his luck had turned. He cast about for less than an hour before coming upon the fresh track of a skalpad. A while he hesitated. That was a formidable thing to attack, even with a good lance and fresh muscles. But there was a lot of food there.

  Also . . . . He clapped his hands together. An idea had come to him.

  Excitement thuttered in his veins. He suppressed it. “ ‘One step at a time,’ said the snakefish as he went ashore,” he cautioned himself. His voice was so small against the steadily rising wind and nearing thunder that he fell silent and concentrated on following the trail.

  It debouched in a meadow. The skalpad was feeding. Even through the troubled air, Theor could hear