_McGinty's first love was Moon-shaped;
gutted and inhumanly beautiful. And it served
him well all the days of his short life._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I guess you could say I hated Kolomar. Not with the same hatred I had
for the Comrades, but I hated him. There were the obvious reasons--he'd
beat me out of my general's star, and got the top job with Security
that I'd been promised for the last five years. It was because of him
that I was still stuck with the command of a second-rate satellite.
But there was an even more obvious reason, and it was the same one
everybody else had.
Kolomar had the authority, both above and below the 120-mile limit,
that went with being Director-General of the FBSI. He took that to mean
head cop, and judge and jury as well.
There are a lot of ways of handling authority.
You could be human. Or you could be like Kolomar. And if you were like
him, you never made any mistakes: you'd go to the end of the Universe
if you had to, and when you wound up a case, the front office would
always have a gold star waiting for your report card. The only thing
good anybody else would have to say for you was that at least, you were
on the right side and not pitching on the Comrades' team.
He was towering over me now as I knelt in front of the wrecked safe;
he couldn't have missed the look in my eyes, but it was like shooting
a pistol at an atomic screen. I might as well have kept looking at the
thing in my hand that I'd just picked up off the deck.
He towered over me, that sour face of his hard as rock, and only
the cold blue eyes showing that he was two jumps ahead of me; that
he understood all about the thing in my hand, and that I wasn't as
innocent about it as I was trying to make him think.
"Mark it Exhibit 1," he rattled, "and add the name of the man to whom
it belongs."
I straightened up. I tossed the good luck piece to my desk; it was like
any ordinary good luck charm--a century-old 1900 50-cent piece--and
under the satellite's one-third G it just floated down to the desk top
like a leaf falling off a tree.
"How do I know whose it is?" I bluffed. "I'm boss of sixty men here,
Kolomar. Besides the twenty that come up every week on the supply
shuttle. And they're a different twenty each time at that--"
He stared me straight down.
"How long have you been here, Colonel Kenton? Ten years, isn't it?"
I didn't answer him. He knew. He'd been a shuttle-lieutenant when I'd
first arrived on the satellite. He had a brother who was floor leader
of the Senate. It was ten years later, and now he was Director-General
of the Federal Bureau of Space Investigation. I was still a colonel. My
brother was a schoolteacher.
"The crews here still have to sign contracts for five-year tricks.
You've known two full crews, and whoever did this--" he turned his
close-cropped head and nodded at the gaping Top Secret file in the
blown safe "--is obviously a member of the crew you've got now. You
know it; I know it. You've got a reputation, Kenton, for getting to
know your men. They say you know 'em as if they were your own brothers
in six months' time."
He didn't bother making it a verbal accusation.
"I could only--I couldn't even make a bad guess as to whose it is, sir."
"You've got twenty-four hours to make a good one. I want him by 1700,
Earth-Standard, tomorrow. That's an order."
Then he just turned around, the light of the cold cathodes glittering
off his shoulder insignia and the silver trim on his black leatherite
space tunic, and left my office cubicle the way he'd come. Fast.
Murderous. Accusing.
If he had to go to Hell and back to win, he would.
* * * * *
I waited until Control signalled that he'd got back aboard his official
shuttle and blasted into a return orbit, and then I buzzed for my
execs, Haliburton, Knight and Loftus.
Even a second rate satellite of a second rate power has three execs,
although I guess a lot of people back home think it's a one man show,
putting in time to save national face while the grade A job--the one
with the big red star on the side--circles Earth five hundred miles
further out doing all the "important" work. The one that beat us up
here by ten years. The one owned by the government which said we could
put up a satellite of our own if we wanted to, but suggested just how
big it would be, just what equipment it would and wouldn't carry, how
far up it'd circle, how big a crew it would have.
Suggested, you know, the way they do when treaties are drawn up around
the New-U.N. conference tables. It never says in the treaties what
will happen if certain agreements aren't adhered to. It doesn't say who
has "the edge," as McGinty calls it; it doesn't carefully point out who
was firstest with the mostest. It doesn't have to.
This is peace, Comrade. Just don't get egg on your face.
It was a couple of minutes before my execs walked in. I was still
standing, still looking down at the ancient good luck piece on my desk
when they did. Major Haliburton, Meteorology detail; Major Knight,
Astronomical; Lieutenant Loftus, Records and Research.
Military?
Only the personnel. Nothing else of a military nature ever found its
way into the treaty. Strangely enough, it had somehow never even been
mentioned.
"Take the weight off your feet. Rest, smoke, and hold onto your heads.
Look at the safe; no, I didn't do it. Followed Procedure Eighteen dash
whatever-the-hell-it-is, called Kolomar's headquarters; he came in
person. Just blasted off. Now _you_ know. I don't have to tell you what
was in that top file."
Short, stocky, red-headed Loftus, the youngest of the three was the
first to open up. Haliburton had his tall, starved-looking frame still
half in and half out of his plasti-foam chair; Knight's beefy face was
still kind of blank, as though he hadn't quite yet taken it all in.
Well, they knew me. I was short and sweet, always answered questions,
and tried never to bore people. Too lax, some people liked to say. But
still here after ten years.
"The--microstats, Ken?" Loftus was half-asking, half-saying.
"Yeah. And this." I picked up the good luck piece, tossed it to him. He
took one look, passed it to the others. "Kolomar gives me twenty-four
hours to give him the man who owns it. It was dropped in front of
the safe. The only clue, if you can call it a clue. But to Kolomar's
traffic-ticket mind, it's automatic evidence of guilt. And he'd fly
clear to Aldebaran to prove it. O.K., questions."
It was silent in the little cubicle for a second or so. I didn't hurry
them; I wanted it to sink in, and they'd need some time. I audioed my
orderly room, told the sergeant on duty to black the office out to the
rest of the installation for the next ten minutes.
Then after a minute or so Knight looked up from the good luck piece,
and a soft voice that didn't match his beefy build simply said,
"McGinty's," in that half-statement, half-question way Loftus had used.
"Nuts," Haliburton said. And "nuts" from Haliburton was like "god-damn
nonsense" from anybody else who wasn't quite the scholarly type
Haliburton was. He didn't look like a Spaceman or have the breezy talk
of one, but he sure knew his meteorology. The Comrades at least let us
figure out weather reports.
"Doesn't make sense; I second the nuts," Loftus said. "What the hell
would McGinty, McGinty of all people, do with stuff like--like that?
Unless--"
"Eight years and still a maintenance-tech third. They don't get much
beer money," Knight said half to the rest of us and half to the
plastalloy deck. "He--"
Haliburton laughed a funny, halting little chuckle. "That's ridiculous.
McGinty likes his beer, his accordion, his science-fiction and hates
cheap women. If possible, he hates the very sight of a Comrade to an
even greater extent. We all know McGinty. Our 21st Century Gunga Din,
gentlemen. Not a latter-day Quisling."
There was a quiet second. Then Loftus said,
"We've all seen him walk that thing across his knuckles a thousand
times."
"Maybe a plant," Knight said.
"He'd say that, of course," Loftus answered. "But--"
"Hold it a minute," Haliburton broke in again. "Question, Ken."
"Now we're getting places," I said. "Shoot."
"Granting for the moment that that big Irishman, unhappy and moody as
he sometimes gets when he recalls his failure to qualify for a degree
in science, might have the sudden desire to take it out on the world,
to sell us out. Might even have, at the moment, the spark of genius it
would take to make off with those microstats. Only how the devil would
he know they even existed, much less were even in duplicate copy and on
file here?"
That was the nub of it, of course. Aside from myself and the three men
before me, it was impossible that any other man in the station, or
any man crewing a shuttle could know of the Pentagon's plan to get a
full-sized, full-rigged satellite into Space, with real Military, which
would leave the Comrades screaming about a busted treaty, but powerless
to do anything about it. No, it wouldn't give us the edge, but at least
it would put us on a par, and after twenty years of being second-rate,
that at least would be some thing.
The political end I didn't know much about, conference table
double-talk that would invalidate a treaty that hadn't been morally
valid in the first place, but had been agreed to by interests instead
of by the people they allegedly represented. It had always been a shade
too fast for me to follow. All I knew was that even though first-rate
powers could command more resources to do a job than second-rate ones,
intellectually free scientists could always come up with smarter
answers than those whose inventiveness had been stifled by the demands
and limitations of a police state, however all-powerful militarily and
politically.
Brains are brains; both sides have 'em. It's what you're motivated to
do with them that counts. That, and the importance attached by people
to the product of those brains.
* * * * *
Twenty years ago, the Comrades had really gotten motivated. After they
got what they wanted, they forgot about motivation and sat back to let
the newest Hundred-Year Plan take care of the rest.
Twenty years ago, somebody on our side was short four billion bucks'
worth of preventive medicine.
Now, after a couple of decades second-besting it, our side wanted to
make up for lost time.
It was supposed to be a _coup d'etat_ sort of thing, a fast shuffle,
both at the conference tables and out here in Space. Now you see it,
now you don't.
As topkick on the Space end of it I was supposed to know what was going
on; me, and my execs, down to the day, the hour and the split second.
But only the four of us. And none of us, studying those damned plans
night after night for the last two months, had ever let the things
further than arm's reach away from the safe in my office. They'd never
been out of it except in our collective presence.
So I'd come on duty from my sleeping quarters that morning and relieved
Loftus, whose week it was for the late duty behind my desk. Things
had been Space-shape then. And as I'd told Kolomar when he got up
from Earthside after my frantic triple-E signal, I'd only been out of
that office for about twenty minutes from the time I'd taken over from
Loftus to the moment I'd triple-E'd FBSI. There'd been a breakdown in
the water-recovery plant. Nothing serious, but regulations said I had
to be on hand personally to supervise any major maintenance.
While I was gone the door to my office was automatically sono-sealed.
And I had the key.
When I came back it was gaping open, and the safe was still smoking. My
orderly room duty sergeant was sprawled across his desk, a nasty bluish
lump on his forehead. When I finally brought him around he could hardly
remember his name, let alone who or what had hit him.
Loftus' young, impatient voice snapped me out of my back tracking.
"--couldn't have known, of course," he was saying, answering
Haliburton. "Neither McGinty nor anybody else. And that--that sort of
narrows things down, doesn't it?" He threw a nervous look at Haliburton
and Knight and at me, compressed his lips in a straight little line,
and fumbled self-consciously for a cigarette.
"That's just as ridiculous," Haliburton said. "If any one of the
four of us was attempting to outwit the other three, the planting of
McGinty's talisman would be a little stupid, wouldn't it?"
I tried to stop walking back and forth; I tried to think about McGinty
instead of wondering who I was sorest at, Kolomar or the Comrades.
Patrick Michael McGinty, maintenance technician third class, as simple
and straightforward as they come. He'd play that beat-up accordion
for the sixty of us to make us smile and think about home, while he
listened to the music by himself and thought his own thoughts.
Either that, on his own time, or good naturedly griping on the job
about what slow pokes all scientists were, especially the Comrades, who
with all their big muscles still hadn't got a workable Moon-landing
ship together. Our side could build one, McGinty would tell you--"Sure,
an' it's a bunch o' misers we are, or we'd be a-wadin' the canals o'
Mars by now," he'd tell you, and sometimes made you half believe it.
McGinty was just a tech-third, but he was an honest-to-God Spaceman,
maybe even more than the rest of us. "The further out y'go, the more
th' edge y'got--an' leave all the other dir-rty business behind
besides!"
He'd play that accordion of his and just look out a port hole at the
stars while he did it. And when he did you could sort of link up that
science degree disappointment, that scolding of the scientists for
their "slowness," that business about the misers and the canals of
Mars, and the watching out the port hole as he played.
A brawny, rough-and-ready spaceman, yes.
A spy and a thief of top-secret documents, no.
No, and good luck piece be damned.