"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid--their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this _what_?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around--human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like _this_ one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
* * * * *
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll--"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or _was_
suffocation a better death...? _Sixty minutes._
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then _food_. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
* * * * *
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that--right or wrong--you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me--" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel _that_?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"