Nelsen, who moved around, clipping the nuclear battery into one Archer
for a minute, to freshen the air, and then into another. It was the only
trick--or gimmick--that they found. After a while, Lester made the
rounds, while Nelsen rested.
They got a few more miles by swapping batteries in quick succession. But
the accumulating carbon dioxide in the air they breathed, made them
sleepier. They had to sit down, then lie down. Frank figured that they
had come something over a quarter of the eight hundred miles. This was
about the end of Frank Nelsen, would-be Planet Strapper from Jarviston,
Minnesota. Well--his coffin would be a common one--an Archer Five...
Somehow, he thought of a line from Kipling: "If you can keep your head
when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you..."
He tried to clip the nuclear battery back in Helen's armor, again. She
_might_ make the remaining five hundred-something miles, alone...! He
just barely managed to accomplish it... There was still a little juice,
from his chemical cell, feeding his helmet phone... Now, he thought he
heard someone singing raucously one of those improvised doggerel songs
of spacemen and Moonmen... Folklore, almost...
"If this goddam dust
Just holds its crust,
I'll get on to hell
If my gear don't bust..."
"Hey!" Nelsen gurgled thickly into his phone. "Hey..." Then it was as if
he sort of sank...
Hell was real, all right, because, with needles in his eyes and all
through his body, Nelsen seemed to be goaded on by imps to crawl, in
infinite weariness, through a hot steel pipe, to face Old Nick
himself--or was it somebody he'd met before?
Maybe he asked, because he got an answer--from the grinning, freckled
face bending over him, as he lay, armorless, on a sort of pallet, under
the taut stellene roof of a Moontent.
"Sure Frankie--me, Gimp Hines, the itinerant trader and repairman of the
lunar wilderness... What a switch--didn't think _you'd_ goof! The
Bunch--especially Two-and-Two--couldn't contact you. So I was sort of
looking, knowing about where you'd be. Just made it in time. Les and the
girl, and that ornery professor-or-whatever, are right here, too--still
knocked out with a devil-killer. You've been out twenty hours, yourself.
I'll fill you in on the news. Just shut up and drink up. Good Earth
whiskey--a hundred bucks just to shoot a fifth into orbit."
Frank gulped and coughed. "Thanks, Gimp." His voice was like pumice.
"Shut up, I said!" Gimp ordered arrogantly. "About me--first. When I got
to Serene, I could have convinced them I was worth a job. But I'm
independent. I hocked my gear, bought some old parts, built myself a
tractor and trailer, loaded it with water, oxygen, frozen vegetables,
spare parts, cigarettes, pin-up pictures, liquor and so forth, and came
travelling. I didn't forget tools. You'd be astonished by what you can
sell and fix--and for what prices--out in the isolated areas, or what
you can bring back. I even got a couple of emeralds as big as pigeon
eggs. I'm getting myself a reputation, besides. What difference does
just one good leg make--at only one-sixth Earth grav? You still hop
along, even when you don't ride. And everywhere I go, I leave that left
boot print behind in the dust, like a record that could last a thousand
ages. I'm getting to be Left Foot, the legend."
Nelsen cleared his throat, found his voice. "Cocky, aren't you, Pal?" he
chuckled. So another thing was happening in reverse from what most
people had expected. Gimp Hines was finding a new, surer self, off the
Earth.
"It's all right, Gimp," Nelsen added. "I figured that I saw your tracks
and your tractor tread marks, up in the hills, just before I decided to
break away from Rodan..."
Then he was telling the whole story.
"Yes, I was there," Gimp said at the end. "I missed you on the first
pass, prospected for a couple of Earth-days, found a small copper
deposit. High ground gave me a good position to receive short-wave
messages--thought I heard your voices a couple of times. So I doubled
back, and located what is left of Rodan's camp, and yours and Les'
initialed blastoff drums, which I've brought along in my trailer. Lucky
a trader needs an atom-powered tractor that can move at night. I
followed your tracks, though going through rough country, you were
screened from my radio calls until I was almost on you. Though on my
first pass, when you were still in camp, I guess I could have reached
you by bouncing a beam off a mountain top, had I known... Well, it
doesn't matter, now. I'm out of stock, again, and full of money--got to
head back to Serene... You were trying for the Tovie station, eh?"
"What else could we do?"
"I see what you mean, Frank. If you could have made it, and missed
getting shot by some trigger-happy guard--where a frontier isn't even
supposed to exist--they probably would have held you for a while, and
then let you go."
"About the rest of the Bunch?" Frank Nelsen prompted.
"The Kuzaks got to the Belt okay--though they had to fight off some
rough and humorous characters. Storey reached his Mars. Charlie Reynolds
and Two-and-Two got to Venus, and hooked up with the exploring
expedition. Tiflin? Who knows?"
"Ramos?"
"Ah--a real disappointing case, Frank. Darn wild idiot who ought to be
probing the farther reaches of the solar system, got himself a job in a
chemical plant in Serene. A synthesizing retort exploded. He was burned
pretty bad. Just out of the hospital when I last left. It was on account
of a woman that he was on the Moon at all."
"Eileen, the Queen of Serene? Gimp!--is _that_ so, too?"
"Yep--sort of. Our Eileen. Back in Jarviston, Ramos found out that she
was there. She's a good kid. Even admits that she hasn't got much
competition, on a mostly--yet--masculine world... Well, I guess we start
rolling, eh? I didn't want to jolt any of you poor sick people, so I
camped. Let's get you all into Archers, for which I have a few spare
parts left. Then, after we roll up this sealed, air-conditioned tent of
a familiar material, we can be on our way."
"Just let's watch Rodan--that's all," Frank Nelsen warned.
"Sure--we'll keep him good and dopey with a tranquilizer..."
They aroused Dave Lester and Helen Rodan, helped them armor up,
explained briefly what the situation was, stuffed Xavier Rodan into his
Archer, and climbed with him into the sealable cab of the tractor. Here
they could all remove their helmets.
After several hours of bumping over rugged country, with the tractor's
headlights blazing through the star-topped blackness, they reached a
solid trail over a mare. Then they could zip along, almost like on a
highway. There were other rough stretches, but most of the well selected
route was smooth. Half the time, Nelsen drove, while Gimp rested or
slept. They ate spaceman's gruel, heated on a little electric stove. And
after a certain number of hours, they climbed over the side of the Moon,
and made their own sunrise. After that, the going seemed easier.
Gimp and Frank were just about talked out, by then. Helen Rodan looked
after her slumbering father. Otherwise, she and Lester seemed wrapped up
in each other. Frank hardly listened to the few words they exchanged.
They kept peering eagerly and worriedly along the trail, that wound
past fantastic scenery.
Nelsen was eager and tense, himself. Serene, he was thinking with
gratitude. Back to some of civilization. Back to freedom--if there
wasn't too much trouble on account of all that had happened. Speeding
along, they passed the first scattered domes, a hydroponic garden, an
isolated sun-power plant.
It was another hour before they reached the checking-gate of one of the
main airlocks. Frank Nelsen didn't try any tricks before the
white-armored international guards.
"There have been some difficulties," he said. "I think you will want all
of our names."
"I am Helen Rodan," Helen interrupted. "My father, Xavier Rodan, here,
is sick. He needs a hospital. I will stay with him. These are our
friends. They brought us all the way from Far Side."
Within the broad airlock compartment, Lester also got down from the
tractor. "I'll stay, too," he said. "Go ahead, Frank. You and Gimp have
had enough."
"A moment," gruffed one of the guards with a slight accent. "We shall
say who shall do what--passing this lock. Difficulties? Very well.
Names, and space-fitness cards, please, from everybody. And where you
will be staying, here in Serene..."
Gimp and Frank got permission to pass the lock after about fifteen
minutes. Without Helen and Les agreeing to stay, it might have been
tougher. They spoke their thanks. For the time being, Frank was free to
breathe open air under big, stellene domes. But he didn't know in what
web of questioning and accusation he might soon be entangled.
Looking back to his first action against Rodan--with a sharpened trowel
that had pierced the wall of a stellene dome--eventually leading up to
Dutch's death, and very nearly precipitating his own demise and that of
his other companions, he wondered if it wouldn't be regarded as
criminal. Now he wasn't absolutely sure, himself, that it hadn't been
criminal--or Moonmad. Yet he didn't hate Xavier Rodan any less.
"The S.O.B. might just get sent to a mental hospital--at the worst,"
Gimp growled loyally. "Well, come on, Frank--let's forget it, ditch our
Archies at the Hostel, get a culture steak, and look around to see what
you've missed..."
So that was how Frank Nelsen began to get acquainted with
Serene--fifteen thousand population, much of it habitually transient; a
town of vast aspirations, careful discipline, little spotless cubicles
for living quarters, pay twenty dollars a day just for the air you
breathe, Earth-beer twenty dollars a can, a dollar if synthesized
locally. Hydroponic sunflowers, dahlias, poppies, tomatoes, cabbages,
all grown enormous in this slight gravity. New chemical-synthesis
plants, above ground and far below; metal refineries, shops making
electronic and nuclear devices, and articles of fabric, glass, rubber,
plastic, magnesium. A town of supply warehouses and tanks around a great
space port; a town of a thousand unfinished enterprises, and as many
paradoxes and inconveniencies. No water in fountains, water in toilets
only during part of an Earth-day. English, French, Spanish, German,
Greek and Arabic spoken, to mention a few of the languages. An
astronomical observatory; a selenographic museum, already open, though
less than half completed. And of course it was against the law not to
work for more than seventy-two consecutive hours. And over the whole
setup there seemed to hang the question: Can Man really live in space,
or does his invasion of it signal his final downfall?
At a certain point, Nelsen gave up trying to figure out all of the
aspects of Serene. Of course he and Gimp had one inevitable goal. There
was a short walk, Gimp hopping along lightly; then there was an elevator
ride downward, for the place, aggressively named _The First Stop_, was
nestled cosily in the lava-rock underlying the dust of Mare Serenitatis.
It had an arched interior, bar, stage, blaring jukebox, tables, and a
shoulder-to-shoulder press of tough men, held in curious orderliness in
part by the rigid caution needed in their dangerous and artificial
existences, in part by the presence of police, and in part perhaps by a
kind of stored-up awe and tenderness for girls--all girls--who had been
out of their lives for too long. In a way, it was a crude, tawdry joint;
but it was not the place that Frank and Gimp--or even many of the
others--had come to see.
Eileen Sands was there, dancing crazy, swoopy stuff, possible at lunar
gravity, as Frank and Gimp entered. Her costume was no feminine fluff;
cheesecake, of which she presumably didn't have much, was not on
display, either. Dungarees, still? No, not quite. Slender black
trousers, like some girls use for ballet practice, instead.
Maybe she wasn't terribly good, or sufficiently drilled, yet, in her
routines. But she had a pert, appealing face, a quick smile; her hair
was brushed close to her head. She was a cute, utterly bold pixy to
remember smiling at you--just you--like a spirit of luck and love, far
out in the thick silence.
Her caper ended. She was puffing and laughing and bowing--and maybe
sweating, some, besides. The clapping was thunderous. She came out again
and sang _Fire Streak_ in a haunting, husky voice.
Meanwhile, a barman touched Frank's and Gimp's shoulders. "Hines and
Nelsen? She has spotted you two. She wants to see you in her quarters."
"Hi, lads," she laughed. "Beer for old times?... You look like hell,
Frank. Brief me on the missing chapter. You had everybody scared."
"Uh-uh--you first, Your Majesty," Nelsen chuckled in return.
She wrinkled her nose at him. "Well, I got here. There was a need.
Somebody decided that I was the best available talent. This is the first
step. Maybe I'll have my own spot--bigger and better. Or get back to my
own regular self, working Out There with the men."
Maybe it was bad taste, but Nelsen felt like teasing. "Ever hear of a
person named Miguel Ramos?"
That didn't bother her. She shrugged. "Still around, though I hope not
for long, the buffoon! Who could ever put up with a show-off small boy
like that for more than ten minutes? Besides, he's wasting himself. Why
should he pick me for a bad influence...? Now, your chapter, Frank."
He told her the story, briefly.
At last she said, "Frank, you must be spiritually all jammed up. Gimp is
set, I know..."
In a few minutes more, Eileen introduced him to a girl. Jennie Harper
had large dark eyes, and a funny, achy sort of voice. Gimp disappeared
discreetly with his date. Frank and Jennie sat at a table in a private
booth, high up in the arches of _The First Stop_, and watched Eileen do
another number.
Jennie explained herself. "I'm another one. I've got to go where the
heroes go. That's me--Frankie, is it? So I'm here..."
She had a perfume. While he was Rodan's prisoner for two and a half
months, there were special things that had driven him almost wild. Now
he made hints, inevitably.
"I don't need Eileen to tell me you're a good guy, Frank," she said with
a small, warm smile. "We're just entertainers. They wouldn't let us be
anything else--here..."
It hardly mattered what else they said. Maybe it was fifteen hours later
that Frank Nelsen found himself walking along a stellene-covered
causeway, looking for Left Foot Gimp Hines. He had memories of a tiny
room, very neat and compact, with even a single huge rose in a vase on
the bed table. But the time had a fierce velvet-softness that tried to
draw him to it forevermore. It was like the grip of home, and the lost
Earth, and the fear that he would chicken out and return.
He found Gimp, who seemed worried. "You might get stuck, here, on
account of Rodan," he said. "Even I might. We'd better go see."
Nelsen had bitter, vengeful thoughts of Rodan being set at liberty--with
himself the culprit.
The official at the police building was an American--a gruff one, but
human. "I got the dope from the girl, Nelsen," he said. "And from
Lester. You're lucky. Rodan confessed to a murder--another
employee--just before he hired you. Apparently just before he made his
discovery. He was afraid that the kid would try to horn in. Oh, he's not
insane--not enough to escape punishment, anyhow. Here the official means
of execution is simple exposure to the vacuum. Now, if you want to leave
Serene, you'd better do so soon, before somebody decides to subpoena you
as a witness..."
Frank felt a humbled wonder. Was Rodan really accountable, or was it the
Moon and space, working on people's emotions?
Leaving the building, Frank and Gimp found Dave Lester and Helen Rodan
entering. They talked for a moment. Then Lester said:
"Helen's had lots of trouble. And we're in love. What do we do, guys?"
"Dunno--get married?" Nelsen answered, shrugging. "It must happen here,
too. Oh, I get it--living costs, off the Earth, are high. Well--I've got
what Helen's father paid me. Of course I have to replace the missing
parts of my equipment. But I'll loan you five hundred. Wish it could be
more."
"Shucks, I can do better," Gimp joined in. "Pay us sometime, when you
see us."
"I--I don't know..." Lester protested worriedly, like an honest man.
But Gimp and Frank were already shelling out bills, like vagabonds who
happened to be flush.
"Poor simpletons," Gimp wailed facetiously afterwards, when they had
moved out of earshot. "Even here, it happens. But that's worse. And if
her Daddy had stayed human, she might almost have been an heiress...
Well, come on, Frank. I've got my space gear out of hock, and my tractor
sold. And an old buddy of ours is waiting for us at a repair and
outfitting shop near the space port. I hope we didn't jump the gun,
assuming you want to get out into the open again, too?"
"You didn't," Nelsen answered. "You sure you don't want to look at
Rodan's site--see if we can find any more Martian stuff?"
Gimp looked regretful for a second. "Uh-uh--it's jinxed," he said.
Ramos, scarred, somewhat, along the neck and left cheek, and a bit stiff
of shoulder, was rueful but very eager. Frank's gutted gear was out of
the blastoff drum, and spread around the shop. Most of it was already
fixed. Ramos had been helping.
"Well, Frankie--here's one loose goose who is really glad to be leaving
Luna," he said. "Are the asteroids all right with you for a start?"
"They are," Nelsen told him.
"Passing close to Mars, which is lined up orbitally along our route,"
Gimp put in. "Did you beam Two-and-Two and Charlie on Venus?"
"Uh-huh--they're just kind of bored," Ramos said. "I even got Storey at
the Martian Survey Station. But he's going out into those lousy
thickets, again. Old Paul, in Jarviston, sounds the same. Can't get him
right now--North America is turned away... I couldn't pinpoint the
Kuzaks in the Belt, but that's not unusual."
"I'll finance a load of trade stuff for them," Gimp chuckled. "We ought
to be able to move out in about five hours, eh?"
"Should," Ramos agreed. "Weapons--we might need 'em this trip--and
everything else is about ready."
"So we'll get a good meal, and then buy our load," Frank enthused.
He felt the texture of his deflated bubb. The hard lines of deep-space
equipment quickened his pulses. He forgot the call of Earth. He felt as
free and easy as a hobo with cosmic dust in his hair.
Blastoff from Serene's port, even with three heavily loaded trader
rockets, was comparatively easy and inexpensive.
Out in orbit, three reunited Bunch members inflated and rigged their
bubbs. For Nelsen it seemed an old, splendid feeling. They lashed the
supplies from the trader rockets into great bundles that they could tow.
Before the rockets began to descend, the trio of beautiful, fragile
rings, pushed by ions streaming from their centers, started to
accelerate.
V
"It's the life of Reilly, Paul," Ramos was beaming back to Jarviston,
Minnesota, not many hours after Frank Nelsen, Gimp Hines and he started
out from the Moon, with their ultimate destination--after the delivery
of their loads of supplies to the Kuzaks--tentatively marked in their
minds as Pallastown on Pallas, the Golden Asteroid.
Ramos was riding a great bale, drawn by his spinning and still
accelerating ring, to the hub of which it was attached by a thin steel
cable, passed through a well-oiled swivel bolt. One of his booted feet
was hooked under a bale lashing, to keep him from drifting off in the
absence of weight. He held a rifle casually, but at alert, across his
knees. Its needle-like bullets were not intended to kill. They were tiny
rockets that could flame during the last second of a long flight, homing
in on a target by means of a self-contained and marvelously miniaturized
radar guidance system. Their tips were anesthetic.
The parabolic antenna mounted on the elbow of Ramos' Archer, swung a
tiny bit, holding the beam contact with Paul Hendricks automatically,
after it was made. Yet Ramos kept his arm very still, to avoid making
the slender beam swing wide. Meanwhile, he was elaborating on his first
statement:
"... Not like before. No terrestrial ground-to-orbit weight problem to
beat, this trip, Paul. And we've got some of about everything that the
Moon could provide, thanks to Gimp, who paid the bill. Culture steak in
the shadow refrigerators. That's all you need, Out Here, to keep things
frozen--just a shadow... We've got hydroponic vegetables, tinned bread,
chocolate, beer. We've got sun stoves to cook on. We've got numerous
luxury items not meant for the stomach. We're living high for a while,
anyhow. Of course we don't want to use up too much of the fancy stuff.
Tell Otto Kramer about us..."
Frank Nelsen and Gimp Hines, who were riding the rigging of their
respective bubbs, which were also hauling big bales of supplies, were
part of the trans-spatial conversation, too. There was enough leakage
from Ramos' tightened beam, here at its source, for them to hear what he
said.
But when, after a moment, Paul Hendricks answered from the distance,
"Easy with the talk, fella--overinterested people might be listening,"
they suddenly forgot their own enthusiasms. They realized. Their hides
tingled unpleasantly.
Ramos' dark face hardened. Still he spoke depreciatingly. "Shucks, Paul,
this is a well-focused beam. Besides it's pointing Earthward and
sunward; not toward the Belt, where most of the real mean folks are..."
But he sounded defensive, and very soon he said, "'Bye for now, Paul."
A little later, Frank Nelsen contacted Art Kuzak, out in the Asteroid
Belt, across a much greater stretch of space. He thought he was cautious
when he said, "We're riding a bit heavy--for you guys..." But after the
twenty minute interval it took to get an answer back over ten
light-minutes of distance traversed twice--186,000 miles for every
second, spanned by slender threads of radio energy which were of
low-power but of low-loss low-dispersal, too, explaining their
tremendous range--Art Kuzak's warning was carefully cryptic, yet plain
to Nelsen and his companions.
"Thanks for all the favors," he growled dryly. "Now keep still, and be
_real_ thoughtful, Frankie Boy. That also goes for you other two naive
boneheads..."
Open space, like open, scarcely touched country, had produced its
outlaws. But the distances were far greater. The pressures of need were
infinitely harsher.
"Yeah, there's a leader named Fessler," Gimp rasped, with his phone
turned low so that only his companions could hear him. "But there are
other names... Art's right. We'd better keep our eyes open and our
mouths shut."
Asteroid miners who had had poor luck, or who had been forced to kill to
win even the breath of life; colonists who had left Mars after terrible
misfortunes, there; adventurers soured and maddened by months in a
vacuum armor, smelling the stench of their own unwashed bodies; men
flush with gains, and seeking merely to relieve the tensions of their
restrained, artificial existences in a wild spree; refugees from rigid
Tovie conformism--all these composed the membership of the wandering,
robbing, hijacking bands, which, though not numerous, were significant.
Once, most of these men had been reasonably well-balanced individuals,
easily lost in a crowd. But the Big Vacuum could change that.
Ramos, Hines, and Nelsen had heard the stories. Now, their watchfulness
became almost exaggerated. They felt their inexperience. They made no
more radio beam contacts. One of them was always on lookout, clutching a
rifle, peering all around, glancing every few seconds at the
miniaturized radar screen set inside the collar of his helmet. But the
spherical sky remained free of any unexplained blip or luminous speck.
Fragments of conversations picked up in their phones--widely separated
asteroid-miners talking to each other, for the most part--obviously came
from far away. There was a U.S.S.F. bubb cruising a few million miles
off. Otherwise, the enormous emptiness was safely and perversely empty,
all around.