Tales of the Flying Mountains Read online

  “They began on the borrowed shoestring that was usual then. Of course, in the Belt a shoestring had to be almighty long, and finances got stretched to the breaking point. The older men here will know how much had to be done by hand, in mortal danger, because machines were too expensive. But in spite of everything, they succeeded. The station was functional and they were ready to commence business when …”

  The Rogue

  It was no coincidence that the Jupiter craft were arriving steadily when the battleship came. Construction had been scheduled with this in mind, that the Sword should be approaching conjunction with the king planet, making direct shuttle service feasible, just as the chemical plant commenced action. We need not consider how much struggle and heartbreak had gone into meeting that schedule. As for the battleship, she appeared because the fact that a station in this exact orbit was about to start operations was news important enough to cross the Solar System and push through many strata of bureaucracy. The heads of the recently elected North American government became suddenly, fully aware of what had been going on.

  Michael Blades was outside, overseeing the installation of a receptor, when his earplug buzzed. He thrust his chin against the tuning plate, switching from gang to interoffice band. “Mike?” said Avis Page’s voice. “You’re wanted up front.”

  “Now?” he objected. “Whatever for?”

  “Courtesy visit from the NASS Altair. You’ve lost track of time, my boy.”

  “What the … the jumping blue blazes are you talking about? We’ve had our courtesy visit. Jimmy and I both went over to pay our respects, and we had Rear Admiral Hulse here to dinner. What more do they expect, for Harry’s sake?”

  “Don’t you remember? Since there wasn’t room to entertain his officers, you promised to take them on a personal guided tour later. I made the appointment the very next watch. Now’s the hour.”

  “Oh, yes, it comes back to me. Yeah. Hulse brought a magnum of champagne with him, and after so long a time drinking recycled water, my capacity was shot to pieces. I got a warm glow of good fellowship on, and offered—Let Jimmy handle it. I’m busy.”

  “The party’s too large, he says. You’ll have to take half of them. Their gig will dock in thirty minutes.”

  “Well, depute somebody else.”

  “That’d be rude, Mike. Have you forgotten how sensitive they are about rank at home?” Avis hesitated. “If what I believe about the mood back there is true, we can use the good will of high-level Navy personnel. And any other influential people in sight.”

  Blades drew a deep breath. “You’re too blinking sensible. Remind me to fire you after I’ve made my first ten million bucks.”

  “What’ll you do for your next ten million, then?” snipped his secretary-file clerk-confidante-adviser-et cetera.

  “Nothing. I’ll just squander the first.”

  “Goody! Can I help?”

  “Uh … I’ll be right along.” Blades switched off. His ears felt hot, as often of late when he tangled with Avis, and he unlimbered only a few choice oaths.

  “Troubles?” asked Carlos Odónoju.

  Blades stood a moment, looking around, before he answered. He was on the wide end of the Sword, which was shaped roughly like a truncated pyramid. Beyond him and his half dozen men stretched a vista of pitted rock jutting crags, gulf-black shadows, under the glare of floodlamps. A few kilometers away, the farthest horizon ended chopped off like a cliff. Beyond lay the stars, crowding that night which never ends. It grew very still while the gang waited for his word. He could listen to his own lungs and pulse, loud in the spacesuit; he could even notice its interior smell, blend of plastic and oxygen cycle chemicals, flesh and sweat. He was used to the sensation of hanging upside down on the surface, grip-soled boots holding him against that fractional g by which the asteroid’s rotation overcame its feeble gravity. But it came to him that this was an eerie bat-fashion way for an Oregon farm boy to stand.

  Oregon was long behind him, though, not only the food factory where he grew up but the coasts where he had fished and the woods where he had tramped. No loss. There’d always been too many tourists. You couldn’t escape from people on Earth. Cold and vacuum and raw rock and everything, the Belt was better. It annoyed him to be interrupted here.

  Could Carlos take over as foreman? N-no, Blades decided, not yet. A gas receptor was an intricate piece of equipment. Carlos was a good man of his hands. Every one of the hundred-odd in the station necessarily was. But he hadn’t done this kind of work often enough.

  “I have to quit,” Blades said. “Secure the stuff and report to Buck Meyers over at the dock, the lot of you. His crew’s putting in another recoil pier, as I suppose you know. They’ll find jobs for you. I’ll see you here again on your next watch.”

  He waved—being half the nominal owner of this place didn’t justify snobbery, when everyone must work together or die—and stepped off toward the nearest entry lock with that flowing spaceman’s pace which always keeps one foot on the ground. Even so, he didn’t unshackle his inward-reeling lifeline till he was inside the chamber.

  On the way he topped a gaunt ridge and had a clear view of the balloons that were attached to the completed receptors. Those that were still full bulked enormous, like ghostly moons. The Jovian gases that strained their tough elastomer did not much blur the stars seen through them; but they swelled high enough to catch the light of the hidden sun and shimmer with it. The nearly discharged balloons hung thin, straining outward. Two full ones passed in slow orbit against the constellations. They were waiting to be hauled in and coupled fast, to release their loads into the station’s hungry chemical plant. But there were not yet enough facilities to handle them at once—and the Pallas Castle would soon be arriving with another. Blades found that he needed a few extra curses.

  Having cycled through the air lock, he removed his suit and stowed it, also the heavy gloves which kept him from frostbite as he touched its space-cold exterior. Tastefully clad in a Navy surplus zipskin, he started down the corridors.

  Now that the first stage of burrowing within the asteroid had been completed, most passages went through its body, rather than being plastic tubes snaking across the surface. Nothing had been done thus far about facing them. They were merely shafts, two meters square, lined with doorways, ventilator grilles, and fluoropanels. They had no thermocoils. Once the nickel-iron mass had been sufficiently warmed up, the waste heat of man and his industry kept it that way. The dark, chipped-out tunnels throbbed with machine noises. Here and there a girlie picture or a sentimental landscape from Earth was posted. Men moved busily along them, bearing tools, instruments, supplies. They were from numerous countries, those men, though mostly North Americans, but they had acquired a likeness, a rangy leathery look and a free-swinging stride, that went beyond their colorful coveralls.

  “Hi, Mike.… How’s she spinning? … Hey, Mike, you heard the latest story about the Martian and the bishop? … Can you spare me a minute? We got troubles in the separator manifolds.… What’s the hurry, Mike, your batteries overcharged?” Blades waved the hails aside. There was need for haste. You could move fast indoors, under the low weight which became lower as you approached the axis of rotation, with no fear of tumbling off. But it was several kilometers from the gas receptor end to the people end of the asteroid.

  He rattled down a ladder and entered his cramped office out of breath. Avis Page looked up from her desk and wrinkled her freckled snub nose at him. “You ought to take a shower, but there isn’t time,” she said. “Here, use my antistinker.” She threw him a spray cartridge with a deft motion. “I got your suit and beardex out of your cabin.”

  “Have I no privacy?” he grumbled, but grinned in her direction. She wasn’t much to look at—not ugly, just small, brunette, and unspectacular—but she was a supernova of an assistant. Make somebody a good wife some day. He wondered why she hadn’t taken advantage of the situation here to snaffle a husband. A dozen women, all but two of them marrie
d, and a hundred men, was a ratio even more lopsided than the norm in the Belt. Of course, with so much work to do, and with everybody conscious of the need to maintain cordial relations, sex didn’t get much chance to rear its lovely head. Still …

  She smiled back with the gentleness that he found disturbing when he noticed it. “Shoo,” she said. “Your guests will be here any minute. You’re to meet them in Jimmy’s office.”

  Blades ducked into the tiny washroom. He wasn’t any 3V star himself, he decided as he smeared cream over his face: big, homely, red-haired. But not something you’d be scared to meet in a dark alley, either, he added smugly. In fact, there had been an alley in Aresopolis.… Things were expected to be going so smoothly by the time they approached conjunction with Mars that he could run over to that sinful ginful city for a vacation. Long overdue … whooee! He wiped off his whiskers, shucked the zipskin, and climbed into the white pants and high-collared blue tunic that must serve as formal garb.

  Emerging, he stopped again at Avis’ desk. “Any message from the Pallas?” he asked.

  “No,” the girl said. “But she ought to be here in another two watches, right on sked. You worry too much, Mike.”

  “Somebody has to, and I haven’t got Jimmy’s Buddhist ride-with-the-punches attitude.”

  “You should cultivate it.” The brown eyes lingered on him. “Worry’s contagious. You make me fret about you.”

  “Nothing’s going to give me an ulcer but the shortage of booze on this rock. Uh, if Bill Mbolo should call about those catalysts while I’m gone, tell him …” He ran off a string of instructions and headed for the door.

  Chung’s hangout was halfway around the asteroid, so that one chief or the other could be a little nearer the scene of any emergency. Not that they spent much time at their desks. Shorthanded and undermechanized, they were forever having to help out in the actual construction. Once in a while Blades found himself harking wistfully back to his days as an engineer with Solar Metals: good pay, interesting if hazardous work on flying mountains where men had never trod before, and no further responsibilities. But most asterites had the dream of becoming their own bosses.

  When he arrived, the Altair officers were already there, a score of correct young men in white dress uniforms. Short, squat, and placid looking, Jimmy Chung stood making polite conversation. “Ah, there,” he said, “Lieutenant Ziska and gentlemen, my partner, Michael Blades. Mike, may I present…”

  Blades’s attention stopped at Lieutenant Ziska. He heard vaguely that she was the head quartermaster officer. But mainly she was tall and blonde and blue-eyed, with a bewitching dimple when she smiled, and filled her gown the way a Cellini Venus doubtless filled its casting mold.

  “Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Blades,” she said as if she meant it. Maybe she did! He gulped for air.

  “And Commander Liebknecht,” Chung said across several lightyears. “Commander Liebknecht. Commander Liebknecht.”

  “Oh. Sure. ’Scuse.” Blades dropped Lieutenant Ziska’s hand in reluctant haste. “Hardjado, C’mander Liebfraumilch.”

  Somehow the introductions were gotten through. “I’m sorry we have to be so inhospitable,” Chung said, “but you’ll see how crowded we are. About all we can do is show you around, if you’re interested.”

  “Of course you’re interested,” said Blades to Lieutenant Ziska. “I’ll show you some gimmicks I thought up myself.”

  Chung scowled at him. “We’d best divide the party and proceed along alternate routes,” he said. “We’ll meet again in the mess for coffee. Lieutenant Ziska, would you like to——”

  “Come with me? Certainly,” Blades said.

  Chung’s glance became downright murderous. “I thought——” he began.

  “Sure.” Blades nodded vigorously. “You being the senior partner, you’ll take the highest ranking of these gentlemen, and I’ll be in Scotland before you. C’mon, let’s get started. May I?” He offered the quartermistress his arm. She smiled and took it. He supposed that eight or ten of her fellows trailed them.

  The first disturbing note was sounded on the verandah.

  They had glanced at the cavelike dormitories where most of the personnel lived; at the recreation dome top-side which made the life tolerable; at kitchen, sick bay, and the other service facilities; at the hydroponic tanks and yeast vats which supplied much of the station’s food; at the tiny cabins scooped out for the top engineers and the married couples. Before leaving this end of the asteroid, Blades took his group to the verandah. It was a clear dome jutting from the surface, softly lighted, furnished as a primitive officers’ lounge, open to a view of half the sky.

  “Oh-h,” murmured Ellen Ziska. Unconsciously she moved closer to Blades.

  Young Lieutenant Commander Gilbertson gave her a somewhat jaundiced look. “You’ve seen deep space often enough before,” he said.

  “Through a port or a helmet.” Her eyes glimmered enormous in the dusk. “Never like this.”

  The stars crowded close in their wintry myriads. The galactic belt glistened, diamond against infinite darkness. Vision topped endlessly outward, toward the far mysterious shimmer of the Andromeda Nebula; silence was not a mere absence of noise, but a majestic presence, the seething of suns.

  “What about the observation terrace at Leyburg?” Gilbertson challenged.

  “That was different,” Ellen Ziska said. “Everything was safe and civilized. This is like being on the edge of creation.”

  Blades could see why Goddard House had so long resisted the inclusion of female officers on ships of the line, despite political pressure at home and the Russian example abroad. He was glad they’d finally given in. Now if only he could build himself up as a dashing, romantic type.… But how long would the Altair stay? Her stopover seemed quite extended already, for a casual visit in the course of a routine patrol cruise. He’d have to work fast.

  “Yes, we are pretty isolated,” he said. “The Jupiter ships just unload their balloons, pick up the empties, and head right back for another cargo.”

  “I don’t understand how you can found an industry here, when your raw materials only arrive at conjunction,” Ellen said.

  “Things will be different once we’re in full operation,” Blades assured her. “Then we’ll be doing enough business to pay for a steady input, transshipped from whatever depot is nearest Jupiter at any given time.”

  “You’ve actually built this simply to process … gas?” Gilbertson interposed. Blades didn’t know whether he was being sarcastic or asking a genuine question. It was astonishing how ignorant Earthsiders, even space-traveling Earthsiders, often were about such matters.

  “Jovian gas is rich stuff,” he explained. “Chiefly hydrogen and helium, of course; but the scoopships separate out most of that during a pickup. The rest is ammonia, water, methane, a dozen important organics, including some of the damn—doggonedest metallic complexes you ever heard of. We need them as the basis of a chemosynthetic industry, which we need for survival, which we need if we’re to get the minerals that were the reason for colonizing the Belt in the first place.” He waved his hand at the sky. “When we really get going, we’ll attract settlement. This asteroid has companions, waiting for people to come and mine them. Home-ships and orbital stations will be built. In ten years there’ll be quite a little city clustered around the Sword.”

  “It’s happened before,” nodded tight-faced Commander Warburton of Gunnery Control.

  “It’s going to happen a lot oftener,” Blades said enthusiastically. “The Belt’s going to grow!” He aimed his words at Ellen. “This is the real frontier. The planets will never amount to much. It’s actually harder to maintain human-type conditions on so big a mass, with a useless atmosphere around you, than on a lump in space like this. And the gravity wells are so deep. Even given nuclear power, the energy cost of really exploiting a planet is prohibitive. Besides which, the choice minerals are buried under kilometers of rock. On a metallic asteroid, you can find alm
ost everything you want directly under your feet. No limit to what you can do.”

  “But your own energy expenditure—” Gilbertson objected.

  “That’s no problem.” As if on cue, the worldlet’s spin brought the sun into sight. Tiny but intolerably brilliant, it flooded the dome with harsh radiance. Blades lowered the blinds on that side. He pointed in the opposite direction, toward several sparks of equal brightness that had manifested themselves.

  “Hundred-meter parabolic mirrors,” he said. “Easy to make; you spray a thin metallic coat on a plastic backing. They’re in orbit around us, each with a small geegee unit to control drift and keep it aimed directly at the sun. The focused radiation charges heavy-duty accumulators, which we then collect and use for our power source in all our mobile work.”

  “Do you mean you haven’t any nuclear generator?” asked Warburton.

  He seemed curiously intent about it. Blades wondered why, but nodded. “That’s correct. We don’t want one. Too dangerous for us. Nor is it necessary. Even at this distance from the sun, and allowing for assorted inefficiencies, a mirror supplies better than five hundred kilowatts, twenty-four hours a day, year after year, absolutely free.”

  “Hm-m-m. Yes.” Warburton’s lean head turned slowly about, to rake Blades with a look of calculation. “I understand that’s the normal power system in stations of this type. But we didn’t know if it was used in your case, too.”

  Why should you care? Blades thought.

  He shoved aside his faint unease and urged Ellen toward the dome railing. “Maybe we can spot your ship, Lieutenant, uh, Miss Ziska. Here’s a telescope. Let me see, her orbit ought to run about so.…”

  He hunted until the Altair swam into the view-field. At this distance the spheroid looked like a tiny crescent moon, dully painted; but he could make out the sinister shapes of a rifle turret and a couple of missile launchers. “Have a look,” he invited. Her hair tickled his nose, brushing past him. It had a delightful sunny odor.