They were the hired gun-rabble of the System, engaged
in the dirtiest, most thankless racket in all
the worlds. But Ash Holcomb was doing all right,
until the girl walked out of his past with high
stakes in her pockets and murder in her eyes!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Rocket Stories, July 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Rocket Row is the Joy Street of three planets. It's got neon lights,
crummy dives, cheap hotels, and women to match. Every man who's ever
rode a ship into space knows about Rocket Row. It runs along the far
side of Flushing Spaceport, down toward the Sound.
The New Shanghai was full of dockworkers and crewmen on liberty. It was
noisy. I sat on a bar stool and watched the fog trying to infiltrate
the open door. It didn't have a chance against the tobacco smoke that
rolled out to meet it. Outside, the streets and alleys would be choked
with wet, creeping darkness, full of quiet footsteps, and the cops
would find empty-pocketed corpses behind the ashcans in the morning.
* * * * *
But none of that was any of my business. I was sick and tired of
fog--the real kind, the kind they grow on Venus--and I was sick of the
thought of blood. I'd seen too much of it, soaking into the hot mud,
and some of it spilled by my guns. I wanted to forget the night, and
fog that gave cover to every kind of dirty deal a man could imagine. I
wanted to pull the corners of my world together until all that was left
was the drink, the bar stool, and me. But it wasn't going to work out
that way, because I was in the New Shanghai on business.
And my kind of business was the dirtiest, lousiest, most thankless
racket in the world.
The bartender moved up to where I was sitting. "Have another one, Ash?"
he asked.
"Yeah, sure, Ming," I said. "You still make the best Stingers in the
System. Maybe that's because you don't brew your own gin."
"Could be, Ash, could be," he laughed. He shook up the drink and poured
it in my glass. "How'd it go on Venus?"
"It went," I said.
Ming was one of the few people who admitted knowing I was a D.O.--a
Detached Operative. It was a crummy job, but it suited me.
We were the hired-gun rabble of the System, thrown together into the
damnedest police force there had ever been. Spacial expansion hadn't
really gotten underway until after the Terro-Martian War, and after it
ended every would-be bigshot there was had realized that all he really
needed to set himself up as a pocket-size dictator was some salvaged
gear from the mess the war had left, a crew that wasn't too particular,
and a good-looking piece of territory in the practically limitless
areas of space. Most of them had picked slices of Venus. There were a
few in the Asteroids, hooked up with renegade Marties, and one or two
that had actually grabbed sections of Mars.
Sending regular law enforcement officers or Marines after each one of
these boys would have been physically impossible. Earth government had
come up with a cuter idea.
It was a lot more economical to fight one big decisive battle than to
endure a series of inconclusive skirmishes. There were a lot of us
boys out in space, most of us just drifting from one port to the next,
picking up a living by our wits, and by our skill with a gun, some of
us. Earth government had quietly picked out the ones they considered
trustworthy, sworn us in, and turned us loose with a few standing
orders and a lot of dependence on our discretion.
* * * * *
Whenever something brewed between two of these minor warlords, we'd
come flocking in and hire ourselves out to whichever side we felt had
slightly more justice. Sometimes we wound up shooting at each other,
but you couldn't even be sure of that, since most of us didn't know,
beyond a guess or two, who the other D.O.'s were. Usually, though, we
had enough brains to pick the right side, and we'd make sure that was
the one that came out on top.
It was a process of elimination, actually. The warlords were helped
to knock each other off until, eventually, those who remained either
proved themselves to be strong leaders, which was what frontier planets
needed, or else megalomaniacs, in which case it paid to devote a
full-scale military campaign to them.
It was a highly informal system, but it had worked. It was tough on us,
but it wasn't any harder than freelance grifting had been. It left an
awful lot to personal discretion, and we paid ourselves out of whatever
came to hand, but there hadn't been any big totalitarian regimes
lately, either.
"Yeah, I did pretty well," I repeated.
Ming puckered his mouth and winked. I used to try and figure out how he
did it, standing behind his bar all day, never going out, never talking
much except to a few people like me. But I knew for sure that he could
have told me exactly how much I'd made on that Venus job--and the
gimmick I'd pulled to get it past Customs, too.
But that was why I was in here. Something was up--something big, and I
wanted to find out what it was before every grifter and chiseler in the
System tried to cut a piece of it for himself.
"I got a note in my mailbox today," I said casually.
"Yeah?" he asked, just as quietly.
"Must have been put there as soon as I touched down this morning.
Somebody wants me to go to work for them. They're paying high--too
high, maybe. Hear anything about a big job coming off somewhere?"
Ming grinned. "If you mean that little letter from Transolar, yeah, I
know about that." He got serious, and moved closer.
"But that's all I know, and nobody else knows even that much. Sure,
something's cooking, but nobody knows what it is. I--" He broke off.
"You've got company. Boy, _have_ you got company!"
I looked in the backbar mirror. A girl had come in the doorway and
was walking toward me. Her dress tightened in intriguing places. Her
face was as much of a treat. High-cheeked, brown-eyed, with a small,
uptilted nose and a full mouth, it was framed by short curly hair the
color of new copper wire. I liked it.
So did the spacemen and the dockworkers sitting at the bar. One or two
half-rose to invite her to join them, but they sat down again when they
saw who she was headed for.
There was something about that hair. I'd seen it before, somewhere.
The guy next to me got up and slid out of the way. I let my eyes stay
on the bottles on the backbar until she sat down beside me. I gave Ming
a look. He nodded, and moved down the bar.
"Ash?"
The voice was low, but crisp. It had whispers and murmurs in it, too,
and I knew I'd heard it before.
"I'm Pat McKay."
I turned my head and looked at her. Her dress, tight as paint from
hem to bodice, was mysteriously loose in the sleeves. Ruffles at each
shoulder hid bulges that Mother Nature never put there. They looked
more like twin shoulder holsters. They were.
* * * * *
And the last time I'd seen her, she was seventeen--eighteen, maybe--in
a ball gown, her hair long then, curling around her shoulders.
And the voice hadn't been as controlled, or as crisp, but she'd been
saying, "You're a good dancer, Mr. Holcomb. Not much on the light
conversation, but a good leader."
I'd swept her around another couple, and kept my cheek away from hers.
"The Academy is geared to the production of good leaders, Pat. Good
conversationalists, on the other hand, are born, not made."
She laughed--a giddy party laugh from a girl who dated Academy boys
exclusively, who loved the glitter and pomp of graduation ceremonies,
who hung around the Academy all she could, who had been to Graduation
Balls before, and would certainly be to a number of them again, before
she managed to separate all the black and silver uniforms she'd danced
with and found herself a man from inside one of them. An Academy
drag--a number in a score of little black books.
"Like Harry--oh, pardon me, it's Graduation Night--like Mr. Thorsten,
you mean?" And she looked up at me, raking my face with her green eyes.
"If you will."
"You're jealous, Mr. Holcomb," she said, breaking out her best little
tease manner.
"Maybe." I knew she was trying to get me angry. She was getting there
fast, too.
"Well, now, if you displayed some of Mr. Thorsten's other gifts, I
could forget about the conversation," she said lightly.
"Meaning you'd like me to dance you out on the terrace and make a pass
at you?"
"Maybe."
She was daring me.
I danced her out on the terrace, and found a darker corner. She looked
up at me, her eyes a little surprised, but her lips were parted.
I tightened my arms and kissed her. It started gently--just a kiss
sneaked in between dances--but her arms were growing tighter too, and
her fingers were hooking. We held it, while I listened to the blood
running in my ears, until we broke apart, both of us dropping our arms,
standing and looking at each other, dragging air down our throats.
"Ash! You--"
She started to say something, and broke it. It sounded a little too
much like a movie heroine, all of a sudden. She was holding the pose
a little too long, too. "Hell, she's a kid--she's doing it the way
the grown-ups in the movies do it," I told myself, but I'd danced her
out here for a purpose. Maybe she didn't deserve it, but I was sick
to death of the little bits of fluff that hung around, drinking in
borrowed glamor, getting the big play from boys like Harry Thorsten.