Satan's World Page 12

  XIII

  Reflex cast him down and rolled him into a ball an instant before the slide arrived. Then he was in darkness and bass noise, tumbled about, another object among the boulders and ice chunks that smashed against his armor.

  Concussion struck through metal and padding. His head rocked in the helmet. Blow after blow kicked him loose from awareness.

  The cataract ground to a halt. Falkayn realized dazedly that he was buried in it. His knees remained next to his belly, his arms across the faceplate. He mumbled at the pain that throbbed through him, and tried to stir. It was impossible. Terror smote. He yelled and strained. No use. Sheer surrounding bulk locked him into his embryonic crouch.

  The freezing began. Radiation is not an efficient process. Conduction is, especially when the stuff around drinks every calorie that a far higher temperature will supply. Falkayn’s heating coils drained their powerpack before he had recovered consciousness. He could not thresh about to keep warm by effort. He tried to call on his radio, but it seemed to be knocked out; silence filled his skull, darkness his vision, cold his body.

  The thought trickled: I’m helpless. There is not one thing in the continuum I can do to save myself. It’s an awful feeling.

  Defiance: At least my mind is my own. I can go out thinking, reliving memories, like a free man. But nothing came to mind save blackness, stillness, and cold.

  He clamped his jaws together against the clatter of teeth and hung bulldog-wise onto the resolution that he would not panic again.

  He was lying thus, no more than a spark left in his brain, when the glacial mass steamed away from him. He sprawled stupid in fog and evaporating liquid. Beta Crucis burned off the mists and beat on his armor. Elsewhere the avalanche was boiling more gradually off the valley floor. But Muddlin’ Through cruised overhead, slowly, fanning a low-level energy beam across the snows. When her scanners detected Falkayn, a tractor beam extended. He was snatched up, hauled through a cargo port, and dumped on deck for Chee Lan’s profane ministrations.

  A couple of hours later he sat in his bunk, nursing a bowl of soup, and regarded her with clear eyes. “Sure, I’m fine now,” he said. “Give me a nightwatch’s sleep and I’ll be my old self.”

  “Is that desirable?” the Cynthian snorted. “If I were so tubeheaded as to go out on dangerous terrain without a gravbelt to flit me aloft, I’d trade myself in on a newer model.”

  Falkayn laughed. “You never suggested it either,” he said. “It’d have meant I could carry less gear. What did happen?”

  “Ying-ng-ng . . . the way Muddlehead and I reconstruct it, that glacier wasn’t water. It was mostly dry ice—solid carbon dioxide—with some other gases mixed in. Local temperature has finally gotten to the sublimation point, or a touch higher. But the heat of vaporization must be fed in. And this area chills off fast after dark; and daylight lasts just a few hours; and, too, I suspect the more volatile components were stealing heat from the main frozen mass. The result was an unstable equilibrium. It happened to collapse precisely when you were outside. How very like the fates! A major part of the ice pack sublimed, explosively, and dislodged the rest from the escarpment. If only we’d thought to take reflection spectra and thermocouple readings—”

  “But we didn’t,” Falkayn said, “and I for one don’t feel too guilty. We can’t think of everything. Nobody can. We’re bound to do most of our learning by trial and error.”

  “Preferably with someone standing by to retrieve us when it really hits the fan.”

  “Uh-huh. We ought to be part of a regular exploratory fleet. But under present circumstances, we aren’t, that’s all.” Falkayn chuckled. “At least I’ve had my opinion strengthened as to what this planet should be named. Satan.”

  “Which means?”

  “The enemy of the divine, the source of evil, in one of our terrestrial religions.”

  “But any reasonable being can see that the divine itself is—Oh, well, never mind. I thought you humans had run out of mythological names for planets. Surely you’ve already christened one Satan.”

  “I don’t remember. There’s Lucifer, of course, and Ahriman, and Loki, and—Anyhow, the traditional Satan operates an underworld of fire, except where it’s icy, and amuses himself thinking up woes for wicked souls. Appropriate, no?”

  “If he’s like some other anti-gods I’ve met,” Chee said, “he can make you rich, but you always find in the end that it was not a good idea to bargain with him.”

  Falkayn shrugged. “We’ll see. Where are we at the moment?”

  “Cruising over the night side, taking readings and pictures. I don’t see any point in lingering. Every indication we’ve gotten, every extrapolation we can make, indicates that the course of events will gladden van Rijn to the clinkered cockles of his greedy heart. That is, the whole cryosphere will fluidify, and in a decade or so conditions will be suitable for industry. Meanwhile, however, things are getting more dangerous by the hour.”

  As if to underline Chee’s words, the ship lurched and her wind-smitten hull plates belled. She was through the storm in a minute or two. But Falkayn reflected what that storm must be like, thus to affect a thermonuclear-powered, gravity-controlling, force-screened, sensor-guided and computer-piloted vessel capable of crossing interstellar space and fighting a naval engagement.

  “I agree,” he said. “Let’s collect as much more data as we safely can in . . . oh, the next twenty-four hours . . . and then line out for home. Let somebody else make detailed studies later. We’ll need a combat group here anyway, I suppose, to mount guard on this claim.”

  “The sooner Old Nick learns it’s worth his while to send that group, the better.” Chee switched her tail. “If enemy pickets are posted when it arrives, we’ve all got troubles.”

  “Don’t worry,” Falkayn said. “Our distinguished opponents must live quite a ways off, seeing they haven’t even a scout here yet.”

  “Are you certain their advance expedition did not come and go while we were en route?” Chee asked slowly.

  “It’d still be around. We spent a couple of weeks in transit and a bit longer at work. We’re quitting early because two beings in one ship can only do so much—not because we’ve learned everything we’d like to know—and because we’ve a sense of urgency. The others, having no reason to suspect we’re on to their game, should logically have planned on a more leisurely and thorough survey.” Falkayn scratched his chin. The stubble reminded him that he was overdue for a dose of antibeard enzyme. “Of course,” he said, “their surveyors may have been around, detected us approaching, and run to fetch Daddy. Who might be on his way as of now, carrying a rather large stick.” He raised his voice, jocularly: “You don’t spot any star ships, do you, Muddlehead?”

  “No,” said the computer.

  “Good.” Falkayn eased back on his pillows. This craft was equipped to register the quasi-instantaneous “wake” of troubled space that surrounded an operating hyperdrive, out almost to the theoretical limit of about one light-year. “I hardly expected—”

  “My detectors are turned off,” Muddlehead explained.

  Falkayn jerked upright. The soup spilled from his bowl, across Chee Lan, who went into the air with a screech. “What?” the man cried.

  “Immediately before our run to take orbit, you instructed me to keep every facility alert for local dangers,” Muddlehead reminded him. “It followed that computer capability should not be tied up by monitoring instruments directed at interstellar space.”

  “Judas in a reactor,” Falkayn groaned. “I thought you’d acquired more initiative than that. What’d those cookbook engineers on Luna do when they overhauled you?”

  Chee shook herself, dog fashion, spraying soup across him. “Ya-t’in-chai-ourh,” she snarled, which will not bear translation. “Get cracking on those detectors!”

  For a moment, silence hummed, under the shriek outside. The possessions that crowded Falkayn’s cabin—pictures, books, taper and spools and viewer, a half
-open closet jamful of elegant garments, a few souvenirs and favorite weapons, a desk piled with unanswered letters—became small and fragile and dear. Human and Cynthian huddled together, not noticing that they did so, her fangs shining within the crook of his right arm.

  The machine words fell: “Twenty-three distinct sources of pulsation are observable in the direction of Circinus.”

  Falkayn sat rigid. It leaped through him: Nobody we know lives out that way. They must be headed here. We won’t be sure of their course or distance unless we run off a base line and triangulate, or wait and see how they behave. But who can doubt they are the enemy?

  As if across an abyss he heard Chee Lan whisper: “Twenty . . . mortal . . . three of them. That’s a task force! Unless—Can you make any estimates?”

  “Signal-to-noise ratio suggests they are within one half light-year,” the computer said, with no more tone in its voice than ever before. “Its time rate of change indicates a higher pseudo-speed than a Technic shipmaster would consider wise in approaching a star like Beta Crucis that is surrounded by an unusual density of gas and solid material. The ratio of the separate signal amplitudes would appear to fit the hypothesis of a fleet organized around one quite large vessel, approximately equivalent to a League battleship, three light cruisers or similar units, and nineteen smaller, faster craft. But of course these conclusions are tentative, predicated on assumptions such as that it is indeed an armed force and is actually bound our way. Even under that class of hypotheses, the probable error of the data is too large at present to allow reliable evaluations.”

  “If we wait for those,” Chee growled, deep in her throat, “we’ll be reliably dead. I’ll believe it’s not a war fleet sent by our self-appointed enemies, with orders to swat anybody it finds, when the commander invites us to tea.” She moved away from Falkayn. “Now what’s our next move?”

  The man drew a breath. He felt the damp cold leave his palms, the heartbeat within him drop back to a steady slugging, a military officer take command of his soul. “We can’t stay on Satan, or nearby,” he declared. “They’d pick up our engines on neutrino detectors, if nothing else, and blast us. We could run away on ordinary gravities, take an orbit closer to the sun, hope its emission would screen us till they go away. But that doesn’t look any good either. They’ll hardly leave before we’d’ve taken a lethal cumulative radiation dose . . . if they intend to leave at all. We might, alternatively, assume a very large orbit around Beta. Our minimal emission would be detectable against the low background; but we could pray that no one happens to point an instrument in our direction. I don’t like that notion either. We’d be stuck for some time, with no way to get a message home.”

  “We’d send a report in a capsule, wouldn’t we? There’s a full stock of four aboard.” Chee pondered. “No, effectively two, because we’d have to rob the others of their capacitors if those two are going to have the energy to reach Sol—or any place from which the word could go on to Sol, I’m afraid. Still, we do have a pair.”

  Falkayn shook his head. “Too slow. They’d be observed—”

  “They don’t emit much. It’s not as if they had nuclear generators.”

  “A naval-type detector can nevertheless spot a capsule under hyperdrive at farther range than we’ve got available, Chee. And the thing’s nothing more than a tube, for Judas’ sake, with an elementary sort of engine, a robopilot barely able to steer where it’s programmed for and holler, ‘Here I am, come get me,’ on its radio at journey’s end. No, any pursuer can zero in, match phase, and either blow the capsule up or take it aboard.”

  The Cynthian eased her thews somewhat. Having assimilated the fact of crisis, she was becoming as coldly rational as the Hermetian. “I gather you think we should run for home ourselves,” she said. “Not a bad idea, if none of those units can outpace us.”

  “We’re pretty fast,” he said.

  “Some combat ships are faster. They fill space with power plant and oscillators that we keep for cargo.”

  “I know. It’s uncertain what the result of a race would be. Look, though.” Falkayn leaned forward, fists clenched on knees. “Whether we have longer legs than they, or vice versa, a half light-year head start will scarcely make any difference across two hundred. We don’t much increase the risk by going out to meet them. And we just might learn something, or be able to do something, or . . . I don’t know. It’s a hand we’ll have to play as she is dealt. Mainly, however, think of this. If we go hyper with a powerful surge of ‘wake,’ we’ll blanket the takeoff of a tiny message capsule. It’ll be out of detection range before anybody can separate its emission from ours . . . especially if we’re headed toward him. So whatever happens to us, we’ll’ve got our information home. We’ll’ve done the enemy that much damage.”

  Chee regarded him for a while that grew quite silent, until she murmured: “I suspect your emotions are speaking. But they make sense.”

  “Start preparing for action,” Falkayn rapped. He swung his feet to the deck and stood up. A wave of giddiness went through him. He rested against the bulkhead until it passed. Exhaustion was a luxury he couldn’t afford. He’d take a stim pill and pay the metabolic price later, if he survived.

  Chee’s words lingered at the back of his mind. No doubt she’s right. I’m being fueled by anger at what they did to me. I want revenge on them. A jag went along his nerves. He gasped. Or is it fear . . . that they might do it to me again?

  I’ll die before that happens. And I’ll take some of them with me to . . . to Satan!

  TO BE CONTINUED

  Part III of IV.

  The terrible heat of a blue-white giant sun,

  versus the terrible cold of a space-cold planet was only

  half of what made Satan’s World deadly.

  The other half was an alien race almost equally cold—

  Illustrated by Kelly Freas

  SYNOPSIS

  The Polesotechnic League is theoretically just a mutual-benefit organization of interstellar companies. In practice—given the scale of its operation and the spread of laissez-faire economics—it represents a kind of super-feudalism. Its members act like nearly independent barons, dealing with entire governments on the planets, sometimes making or breaking them, dominating even the powerful nations of the Solar Commonwealth. But the League has its own problems and limitations. Space is too huge; there are too many worlds. Several score light-years from Sol begin those regions which are almost entirely unexplored. Closer in, exploration and development are still incomplete. The sheer volume of data makes it impossible to understand the total situation at any given time, or to lay rational plans for the future.

  A new enterprise, Serendipity, Inc., offers a partial solution. Its computers, advanced in this respect beyond any other known machines, do more than collect and correlate information. They search their memory banks along association chains beginning with a particular client or problem, somewhat as a living brain does but with vastly greater scope. Thus many a datum, recorded but then forgotten, is found to be useful to someone. Naturally, the highly competitive merchant princes of the League are suspicious at first of an outfit which sets up to buy and sell information. But Serendipity soon proves that it favors no one, keeps the secrets entrusted to it, and renders an invaluable service. Over the years, it grows immensely. This despite the fact that the six founder-partners, though human, are of unknown background and keep strictly to themselves. After all, Technic civilization has a high regard for privacy, and eccentrics are common.

  David Falkayn, born on the autonomous colony planet Hermes, takes a vacation in the Solar System. While there, he decides to visit Serendipity’s office in Lunograd on the Moon, and see if it can turn up anything for him. He is a trade pioneer for Nicholas van Rijn’s Solar Spice & Liquors Company. His job is to discover new sources and new markets in space, which can then be quietly exploited before the competition learns about them. But through various exploits, he has become somewhat prominent. A girl who ca
lls herself Veronica has latched onto him. He can tell that she is a commercial spy, out to learn what she can about van Rijn’s operations so that the rivals of the latter can get the jump on him. Such attempts are taken for granted, along with bribery, blackmail, burglary, and much else. Falkayn isn’t worried. Competition is not literally cutthroat; it is regulated by the covenant of the League so as to protect the psychobiological integrity of the individual, hence ruling out procedures like murder, kidnapping, and brainscrub. Enjoying Veronica’s company, Falkayn simply jollies her along, and leaves her behind when he goes to Serendipity, Inc.

  There he talks to Thea Beldaniel, one of the owners. She leads him to an isolation room where he consults a computer. The machine associates him with his discovery, some years ago, of planets freakishly captured by a blue giant star. No other case has ever been found. But nonhuman explorers did come upon one analogous oddity. A sunless “rogue” planet is approaching the B-type star Beta Crucis, some two hundred light-years hence. It will pass by in a tight hyperbolic orbit and recede into space. The explorers saw no significance in this cosmic accident, and their report never reached the Solar System until the ceaseless information-gathering activity of SI chanced to net it. Even then, the machine did not “think” of the matter until Falkayn’s presence “reminded” it. Now it suggests that here may be the greatest bonanza in galactic history. Absolute secrecy should be preserved. Falkayn agrees.

  Emerging, he finds Thea Beldaniel friendlier than before. She invites him to visit her and her partners in their Lunar Alpine castle, to discuss a mutually profitable idea. Since no one but nonhuman guards and servants has ever been there before, and since the cenobitical owners of SI may change their minds at any moment, Falkayn leaps at the opportunity to learn something more about their by now key operation. He postpones doing anything about the rogue planet and goes straight from Lunograd, stopping only to notify the other members of his trade team.