Behind the silver door a bell rang suddenly. A spaceship was
approaching.
It was still early. They would see the globe alone and assume that
Bryce had not yet arrived. The spaceship itself might be armed
illegally, but those within would not blast the globe without checking
its interior. Bryce glanced up at the silver door in the cliff and
arranged his position so as to be lounging on one elbow, with his gun
hand lying relaxed under a thin curtain of leaves. The magnomatic was
pointing up towards the corridor door.
There were a few tall bushes between the base of the cliff and
himself, but the silver central door was five feet up a flight of
steps and in clear view.
Four flights of steps radiated away from the circular door to the
hull, like spokes from an axle, all of them leading "down" to the
inside surface of the globe. As he waited he heard the faint clang of
magnetic soles hitting the metal of the airlock, and then the door
chimes that announced that the airlock was being used. Someone was
coming in.
He could follow their actions in his mind, timing them. Now they would
be floating in the vestibule, facing a circular wall with a door, the
wall spinning silently and rapidly, and the door in its center turning
slowly end over end. The door marked the axis of rotation. There was a
turning bar with handles running through the center of the airlock.
They would float up to that and grip it to pick up spin, until the
vestibule seemed to be rotating around them and only the circular wall
and the central door seemed to be steady. Beyond it would be the
corridor, and then the silver door.
The door in the cliff dilated silently. Two spacesuited men stood in
it.
It was incredible that he had let them come in without seeing the door
open. In the first split second he saw that neither of them was
Orillo. In the second instant he saw that no weapons were visible, but
that one stood slightly behind the other and his right arm was hidden.
They had happened to come to the entrance at an angle to his
orientation, almost at right angles, and they would be confused for a
moment, before they identified his shape, for to their orientation if
they used Earth-thought for it, he would seem to be leaning head
downward on an almost vertical slope. He took advantage of the lag to
move his gun under its curtain of leaves and get the sights lined on
them.
They swung their eyes around the circle and saw him. "Mister Carter?"
asked the foremost one. Their faceplates were still closed, and their
voices slightly distorted by transmission through the helmet speaker,
but he could hear a note of surprise. As the first one spoke the
second one moved his hidden arm slightly, as if he were holding
something.
Bryce did not tighten his finger on the trigger. These could be mere
innocent sight-seers. The position of his head, almost upside down
relative to theirs, was probably confusing them, though almost
certainly they had studied trimensional photographs of him. At any
rate they probably were aware that they were standing like targets in
the corridor doorway and would be in no mood to postpone action.
"Take off your helmets, gentlemen, make yourselves at home." It was a
partial admission that he was the man they wanted, but not certain
enough for a decision. He saw the shoulder-twitch that meant that the
second one's hidden hand jerked in a moment of uncertainty, and he
thought he saw something glitter under the first one's arm--the old
trick of shooting from under a friend's screening arm....
"Mr. Bryce Carter?" the foremost one was asking again.
Bryce smiled. "No, Pierce," he said. He had turned on the two-way
speaker and tuned it to the ship as he came in.
Immediately the voice came in the corridor behind them. "Stand still.
You're covered."
There was no chance that anyone could genuinely be behind them, but
the rear one whirled and snapped a startled shot into the darkened
corridor, and the other leaped sidewise down from the doorway, drawing
his gun with blurred speed, and leveling on Bryce as his feet left
contact with the sill. He was falling slowly, almost floating, and it
should have been an easy shot, except for something he had obviously
forgotten, or he never would have leaped.
Bryce disregarded him as a danger, and threw three shots at the other,
who still stood startled and off balance in the corridor, firing three
with his inexperienced right hand to make sure of placing even one.
The figure dropped out of sight in the corridor.
* * * * *
In the flick of time that Bryce's eyes had been away from the falling
one, the path of the man's leap had begun to curve strangely, until
now he seemed to be floating in a curve, flying sidewise and upward,
faster and faster as he approached the hull. The rule of conservation
of momentum was having its way. To the man's dizzied eyes, as he tried
to keep Bryce within his sights long enough to fire, it must have
seemed that the ground began inexplicably to turn and slide by, that
suddenly the whole shell was turning around him like a big wheel,
carrying his target up the wall and over his head.
He was almost to the sliding ground when a bush caught at his feet and
yanked them from under him with a crackling of branches, and the
bottom tread of a flight of stairs swung at his head like a gigantic
club. Among the sudden splintering of branches and snapping of vines
was a crunching thud which sounded final.
To anyone within a globe, it did not ordinarily appear to be spinning,
the only sign it was, was the comfortable pseudo-gravity for anyone
standing on hull level. But to those who approached the ground from
the lighter G corridor, the stairs were necessary--stairs whose treads
were oddly dipped in the middle in a shallow U. By bracing against one
side of the U coming down, and on the other going up, one invisibly
picked up enough speed to match the speed of the ground level. Jumping
was the equivalent of jumping out of a moving car at forty feet a
second, the sixteen feet a second, half of the corridor plus an extra
thirty feet a second spin, the side slip speed of an eighteen foot
drop where it had looked like five.
It was probably these added extra distances in the air, Bryce decided,
that sometimes made the bird flights look so bewilderingly variable in
speed and direction. He had not thought before how difficult it would
be to plot a straight course from one side of the globe to the other.
He waited for a sign of motion, his magnomatic ready, looking up at
the gunman lying overhead, forty feet away on the other side of the
globe. The limp figure was unmoving, it looked badly tangled in vines,
and its gun was gone. There was no need to shoot, but he wondered
suddenly, if he had, what kind of a curve would the bullet have
followed?
There was no sound from the other, but Bryce hesitated to climb the
stairs and put his head above floor level of the corridor. A voice
might give the other direction for a snap shot if that was what he was
waiting for. Bryce chanced speaking.
"I've got this one, Pierce. How's the other?"
The televiewer in the entrance hall replied, "Lying on his back with
his gun five feet away. You all right?"
"Yes." Bryce walked around the circumference of the globe and searched
in the vines for the missing weapon of number one. The body in the
spacesuit nearby was quite definitely a corpse. He saw the gun
glittering a little further on and picked it up, wiping off leaf pulp
on a clean patch of moss. It was a heavy duty police pacifier, a
distance stunner, adjusted to a narrow beam.
He climbed to the corridor and collected the other weapon. It was a
police pacifier too. They had not meant direct murder then, but only
to stun him and deliver him to Orillo, C. O. D.
"How are you doing with their ship?" Bryce asked, "Is it armed?"
Armament for spaceships was illegal, and careful official inspection
made it rare.
"I didn't wait to see," Pierce's voice came apologetically after a
pause in which some background noise sounding like a crash came over
the televiewer speaker. "It started swinging around when I came in
sight, so I just rammed it with that pretty ornamental nose spike. I'm
backing off now with the forward braking jets."
"Then whoever's inside is probably either spacefrozen or cooked.
Jockey that ship around on the spike and give her a four minute shove
toward Earth, then push that button that collapses the ornamental
vanes on the spike and let it pull loose when you start braking. I
don't want any ship hulks floating around here."
"Aye-aye, Cap."
"Go slow on those braking jets when you pull loose. The back wash
could touch your hull."
Pierce returned and came in to help Bryce drag the corpses through the
airlock and into space.
They braced against the silver curve of the floating spaceship and
gave the body a combined strong shove towards Earth. Spinning slowly
end over end it dwindled into a dark speck against the glowing orb of
Earth, destined to be a meteorite and make a small bright streak in
the Earth sky several days later.
_When the tubes conk out, the fuel runs down,
The cold creeps in to where I lie._
Pierce was reciting as they went back into the globe for the second
corpse.
_I'll take the meteor's trail--go home to Earth
And make a Viking's funeral in the sky._
"This is too easy," Bryce complained as they watched the second corpse
fade from sight. "The trouble is, in space all corpses are delicti.
It's an incentive. Launch your enemies."
"Gaucho country did all right under that system," Pierce said
somberly, "and so did the American frontier." He floated motionless, a
spacesuited figure turned toward the gray-green misted globe of Earth
that shone against the black star-sprinkled sky as if he could have
reached out and touched it. The sun caught the planet on its day
hemisphere and reflected brilliantly from a shadowy blue glaze of
water that was the Mediterranean, turning half of it to white fire.
Bryce's earphones picked up Pierce's voice again. "Frontier-born
nations always look back and say that the first years were the best."
The words caught at something Bryce had felt before. He looked at
Earth hanging splendidly in space. It was beautiful and he was fond of
it, but--He said, "I don't think we'll ever go back." Nor would
mankind itself. Never again--through all conquests from this point in
time--would mankind go back down into the mesh of gravity to be a thin
film over the surface of a planet.
"Give old Earth a smile, Bryce, we've hatched."
For a moment longer Bryce hung, watching Earth turning below. The
management of UT was down there. He'd be damned if he'd let them get
away with thinking they could tell him what to do, or tell the Belt
where a line should be extended and a colony planted. The belt was his
country, not theirs. Space belonged to the people who lived in it.
"No taxation without representation," Pierce said irrelevantly, as if
he had been reading Bryce's thoughts. They jetted back to the ship and
into the spacelock.
"Frontier country--" Bryce said as he stepped into the cubical of the
revolving door. Gently tightening elastic bands drew him into position
within the man-shaped mold. "What's a frontier on your terms, Roy?"
When he was in place the other half of the rubbery, air-excluding mold
closed on him and the airtight cylinder rotated, delivering him into
the interior of the ship. He pushed the button impatiently to have it
revolve back for Pierce, but it remained obstinately open, its servo
refusing to close on a mold full of air and rotate air back for
release into space.
Bryce remembered then. This was something he didn't have to bother
with when he flew alone, for when going in or out he was always in the
door when it rotated; it never turned empty. Beside the door on a hook
hung an inflated pressure suit, complete with gloves, boots, and
helmet. Except for the absence of any sign of a head or face inside
the dark translucence of the helmet it looked like a full-sized man.
Bryce reached it down and placed it in the mold, and watched grinning
as the mold closed and the door rotated, delivering the man-form to an
equivalent hook in the spacelock. The doll was known by all spacemen
as Hector Dimwitty, and every ship had one or two. There were a
thousand yarns and jokes circulating about the adventures of the
Hectors, most of them lewd, and a few of them true.
Pierce's answer was in his earphones, "A frontier is where people go
when they are young, broke, or have the cops after them."
"Right. Suppose I stake the broke, and loan them transport, and offer
the fugitives unregistered safety to receive mail and to buy
supplies?"
"You do that?" Pierce stepped out of the door and they took off their
helmets.
"Yes, when I am my own man, not working for UT."
"If you do that, you bring in ten times as many of the broke who
wanted to settle there, and--" Pierce took a long jump in
understanding, saying softly, "They're dependent on you. Handcuffed to
you and praying for your health and prosperity as long as you hold
their loans and secrets, for with your death or bankruptcy, another
man might come to your books to read the records of your loans, and
demand payment, and give the secrets to the police or keep them for
his blackmail. But to do it is to take a risk of murder or arrest, and
a high cost in hard work and money. Why do you want to do this? What
payment do you take?"
"They pay by being my men, grateful and ready to back me up when I
want help later. They don't have to be grateful, for they know I can
call any loan if the owner crosses me, and I've built a reputation for
an occasional fit of irrational temper that is threat enough for
anyone to avoid crossing me, without feeling that I have wanted to
threaten or force them. As for the fugitives they pay enough by
wanting the Belt to be organized as a nation independent of Earth, so
that the hand of the law can't stretch out and drag them back, and
they can become wealthy in open business, in the million chances for
wealth that lie around them in the Belt. They don't know that they
want this yet, but they will see it when it is told to them. I can't
do any of this now--it's suspended for as long as I am part of UT and
have to drag the dead weight of ten Earth-tied conservatives with me
in every decision."