En Route to Venus
A coldness gripped Lane's heart; his breath caught in his throat. In a
moment the sentry's flashlight would dart its questing beam upon their
group. Their shoddy disguise could brook no such probing revelation.
He guessed right. A sudden shaft of silver split the darkness
dazzlingly, revealing the round, stunned face of Dr. Anjers lifted in
woebegone chagrin.
And the sentry cried again, "Say, hold on! What does this mean?"
It was no time for considered action. Lane did what must be done ...
and did it swiftly. In a single, swooping motion he whirled, raced,
dove for the sentry's legs. Both men went down in a flurry of tangling
limbs. Arms strained to escape Gary's viselike grip that a marksman's
hand might find its weapon.
But if strength and armed superiority was the sentry's, the element of
surprise favored Gary. Before the patrolman could reach his weapon,
before even his startled wits advised him to lift his voice in a cry
of warning, Lane's arm lifted once ... twice. The spaceman sighed--and
slumbered.
Gary leaped to his feet, lashing a cry of command out over the now
swiftly wakening rocketdrome.
"Take his other arm, there, Hawkins! We'll carry him. There, that's it!
Now, to the ship, folks--quickly! There's not a second to lose!"
And with the aid of the little steward he swept Anjers to his feet,
half-lifted, half-bore him to the entrance port of the _Liberty_, now
shining like a white rectangular beacon in the darkness before them.
An instant later, all five were within the craft. The airlock closed
behind them, and Captain Hugh Warren was rasping swift commands over
the audiophone system:
"_Lift gravs! Throw all thrusts at five gees immediately! No time to
warm hypos. Give her the gun! Hurry! For God's sake--!_"
The shrill, high whine of straining hypatomic motors coursed through
the ship, losing itself in the thunderous rumble of spluttering jets as
the fuel chambers stirred to power.
A voice clacked over the audio system, "Course and trajectory, Captain?"
"Later!" roared Warren. "Later. Lift gravs--quickly!"
Then a brutal, invisible hand smashed down on Gary Lane's head and
shoulders with crushing force. His knees buckled beneath him and the
blood drained from his head as he pitched forward helplessly on his
face, caught in the grip of a bruising acceleration. The roar of
exploding jets smashed furiously at his eardrums. The ship beneath him
seemed to pick itself up, shake itself like a huge, metallic beast, and
leap into the shrouded darkness.
Earth, an already dwindling ball of glowing green, lay a multitude of
miles beneath and behind them. Their journey was begun.
* * * * *
When eons of agony later it seemed his laboring lungs could no longer
supply his wracked body with precious oxygen, when it seemed but a
matter of seconds before his very veins must burst beneath the crushing
of that horrid acceleration, there descended upon Gary Lane a brief
moment of vertigo. Darkness spun dizzily before his eyes. And when the
instant passed, the pressure was gone. He was free to rise again from
the hard metal deck to which gravitation had skewered him.
It was a measure of his fortitude that of all his companions save only
the space-hardened Captain Hugh Warren, Gary should have been the first
to regain his feet. Muldoon followed his example seconds later, to be
followed slowly by the girl and the cockney steward, then the two older
men. It was 'Erby 'Awkins who broke the labored silence.
"Well," he said with shaken satisfaction. "Well, it were touch-and-go
for a moment, weren't it? But we seems to be orl right now. Wot
blinkin' cheer, eh, shipmates?"
Nora said with a palpable effort toward regaining a vestige of her
usual composure, "Touch-and-go is right! I've lifted gravs before, but
never so swiftly nor so suddenly. If you ask me, that's no way for a
girl to keep her figure."
"I'm sorry," said little Dr. Anjers contritely. "I am deeply sorry,
my friends. It was all my fault. Had I not stumbled and fallen,
inadvertently roused an alarm--"
"Forget it," said Flick Muldoon. "Everybody pulls a pancake once in a
while. It's just tough luck that you happened to pull yours at a bad
moment. The main thing is, what are we going to do now?"
He looked at Warren questioningly, but Warren's eyes were upon Gary.
"That's your cue, Gary. I'm just flying this ship; you're plotting the
course."
Lane said soberly, "Well, Venus is our first logical stop, but I don't
know--now. The whole Patrol will be out after us like a pack of hounds."
Hugh Warren chuckled grimly, "Let them. They'll never catch the
_Liberty_. This is the fastest little ship afloat in space. We can run
circles around anything that ever punched holes in the ether."
"Yeah?" said Muldoon interestedly. "What's your speed?"
"On test flights," answered Warren proudly, "about a thousand. But that
was straight cruising speed. In an emergency we might be able to make
as much as twelve-fifty."
"What! A cruising speed of a thousand miles per second? But--but that's
over ten million miles per day!"
"And with Venus in inferior conjunction," said Nora excitedly, "we can
be there in two and a half days!"
"Well, not quite. You have to allow a time lag for acceleration and
deceleration. But--" Captain Warren grinned happily--"three days should
do the trick. Not bad, eh, Gary?"
Gary Lane said dazedly, "Not bad! Mister, when they start giving medals
for understatement, you ought to get one as big as the United Nations
Victory Tower. Why, the universal record for an Earth-Venus flight is
almost a day longer than that."
"Three days," supplied Warren, "eighteen hours, twenty-three and a
half minutes. Which same so-called 'record' we're going to bust six
ways to hell-and-gone on this little shuttle. Only--" he admitted
ruefully--"our new record won't count, seeing as how it's unofficial as
hell. Well, Venus it is? I'll be leaving you, then, to chart the course
and trajectory. Hawkins, show our guests to their quarters. We'll meet
later in the lounge."
And he vanished bridgeward.
* * * * *
So set the _Liberty_ forth upon the first leg of its argosy. The next
three days sped swiftly. So fraught with activity, indeed, were his
waking hours, that Gary Lane found scant time in which to acquaint
himself with the _Liberty_ and its personnel. One thing he learned from
his space commander friend: that there were, in addition to himself
and his companions, fifteen souls aboard the craft. Of these, three
were Patrol officers: Hugh Warren himself, his mate, Lieutenant Angus
MacDonald, and the Chief Engineer, a lean, taciturn man named Sebold.
Two more were subalterns: Bud Howard, the assistant engineer, and Tommy
Edwards, the ship's Sparks. The enlisted men included Herby Hawkins,
the steward; Tony, potentate of the galley; four able-bodied spacemen;
and four blasters of the jet-chamber crew.
"We're short," Hugh Warren pointed out, "five men. The five as whom
you masqueraded when you came aboard. Two of these were spacemen. We
can spare them. Another two were blasters. We can get by without them,
too, though it means longer shifts and harder work for the remaining
four. But the other one--" He shook his head--"we're really going to
need him. He was Fred Harkness, my first mate. A good spaceman with a
keen mind for figures and a swift, intuitive ability at handling a ship
in an emergency. If we run into any snags we're going to wish he was
along."
"Then why did you let him go?" asked Gary.
Warren grinned a tight, lopsided grin. "For the same reason I gave the
other four leave. Because I knew I'd never be able to convince him I
was doing the right thing. He was strong on discipline. He would have
wanted no part of this escapade."
That was something which had been troubling Dr. Gary Lane. He said
thoughtfully, "And you, Hugh? You're not sorry?"
"That I cast my lot in with yours? Made your cause mine? No." Warren
shook his head decidedly. "Decidedly not. I'm sorry I had to, on the
surface at least, play traitor to the uniform I wear. But under the
circumstances I believe I did the proper thing. This little emblem--"
he touched the small gold rocket pinned above his heart--"is inscribed
with the motto of the Solar Space Patrol: '_Order out of Chaos_.' That
is the duty to which we are charged above all others. And though for a
time it means flying in the face of orders and conventions, I feel the
importance of our task justifies my desertion.
"If--" his jaw set tightly--"if we succeed in doing that which you say
we must, exoneration will follow swiftly and surely."
"And," said Gary softly, "if we do not?"
Warren shrugged. "The question carries its own answer. If we do not,
then according to your own calculations, there will be no Hugh Warren
to stand trial, nor court to sit in judgment upon his sins."
* * * * *
Thus sped the _Liberty_ through space at a rate of speed attained by
no other spaceship before her. Each passing hour found Earth dwindling
smaller and dimmer behind them; each hour saw Earth's sister planet
looming ever larger and brighter before.
As they flashed sunward, the Sun grew greater, too. Its radiance,
down-pouring upon them with devastating beneficence, was like the
molten spuming of gaseous gold. Though the polarized quartzite of
the ship's viewpane blacked out its brazen light, nothing could stay
the increase of its heat. It grew warmer and ever more sultry in the
_Liberty_ despite the labors of the ship's air-conditioning system.
Flick Muldoon, shirt plastered wetly to his back, mopped his brow and
groaned, "It takes a trip away from home to make you realize what a
sweet little old gal Mama Earth is. Boy, I wouldn't live on Venus for
all the bubbles in a beauty bath! If it's like this out here in space,
what must it be like on the planet itself?"
From his seat at the control studs, Lieutenant Angus MacDonald grinned
companionably.
"Not so bad as you'd think. You see, even though Venus is 25,000,000
miles nearer the sun than Earth, she's protected from the sun's glare
by a cloud-layer almost three times as thick as the atmosphere layer
of Terra. As a result, the planet has neither a burning hot summer
season nor a frigid winter period, but a fairly pleasant and constant
temperature all the year 'round."
Dr. Anjers said, "I have been fearing recently that we may find
something else, too, not quite so pleasant."
"What's that?"
"The Space Patrol," said Anjers gravely, "waiting for us. We are
traveling at the greatest rate of speed ever attained by a spacecraft,
true, but the speed of light makes mockery of our efforts. And that is
the rate at which a warning message must have winged its way before us.
Is it not possible we are running directly into a trap? A Patrol fleet
grimly awaiting our arrival?"
Skipper Warren shook his head. "A couple of years ago, yes,
undoubtedly. But not now."
"No? Why not?"
"Because," explained Warren gravely, "the Solar Space Patrol is not
an interplanetary patrol any longer. Few earthmen realize that, but
it's true. The purpose for which it was formed, that of policing and
providing judicial protection to all the civilized planets, has been
overthrown. The militaristic ambitions of each world have heightened so
greatly in the last couple of years that now every other planet in the
system looks with disfavor upon the SSP, which was an invention of the
Earth government.
"One by one, its garrisons have been withdrawn from Venus, Mars,
Jupiter, the asteroids, until now the organization which used to
proudly boast the maintenance of order throughout the whole system has
become nothing more than an armed protective corps for Earth itself."
* * * * *
"Is that true?" gasped Nora Powell. "But why should the other planets
refuse to cooperate?"
"It's our own fault," confessed Warren glumly. "The Patrol was a good
idea, but it wasn't organized properly. Its membership should have
been drawn from the likeliest youths of each world. Instead, through
selfishness or cunning or greed--I don't know why--Earth undertook the
policing of the entire solar system with only the young men of her own
world.
"Then again, throughout many decades we have steadfastly refused to
aid the other worlds in developing spacecraft. Earth, and Earth alone,
knows the secret of the construction of hypatomic motors which make
spaceflight possible. It is a secret we guard jealously. That is why
there exists no Venusian fleet, no Martian fleet, Jovian fleet. Only
an Earth fleet which--and perhaps with reason--the denizens of all the
other planets fear as an aggressive force.
"Earth, too, has the only merchant fleet. And while it is no doubt true
that other planets profit somewhat by the interchange of commerce our
merchantmen make possible, it is into Earth's coffers pours the wealth
of the universe."
"Why--why, that's true," said Dr. Bryant. "I had never realized it
before, but that is undoubtedly responsible for the known disaffection
between Earth and the outlying planets. But, Captain Warren, the common
people of Earth don't realize this! They, like myself, are too busy
with the small details of their private lives to wonder more than
casually about such things. It never occurred to me to wonder at the
lack of other interplanetary merchantmen. I suppose I always took it
for granted that we of Earth were doing our solar neighbors a great
favor by regulating interplanetary commerce. Now I can see--"
He paused, his eyebrows knit in thought. Then--"But something must
certainly be done about this situation. What can we do?"
"Right now," replied Warren gravely, "nothing. We have a more important
task confronting us. But if and when this other affair is successfully
cleared up, something should be finally done to create a new world
order truly based on the principle of equal rights ... with liberty and
justice for all."
Muldoon said cautiously, "But, wait a minute. There's a bug in that
reasoning somewhere. You say the other planets haven't learned the
secret of the hypatomic motor? Well, ships crash, don't they? And ships
can be captured. It seems to me that if any nation really wanted to
learn that secret--"
"They could not do so," replied Warren, "any more than we in this ship
could learn the actual mechanism of the motor driving us."
"What? We can't--but why?"
"Because the hypatomic motors which drive us are encased in a steel
jacket equipped with a device so regulated that were any attempt made
to open it and study its mechanism it would instantly explode, blowing
itself and us into oblivion."
And Warren added softly, "I think you begin to understand now, my
friends, why every other world fears and distrusts Earth. And why our
task of pleading for their cooperation is harder than Gary expected."