Asteroid Man (2 page)

"What's the trouble, chaps?" His eyes darted from one to the other like a striking snake.

The men decided simultaneously that Rotherson was a good man to have on their side. As an enemy he must be devastating.

"It's the check-screen," reported Krull quietly. "We've turned up a new one, sir."

"Put it through the usual tests, have you?"

Jonga nodded.

"I see, and what did it show up?"

"Negative, sir. But I still want an alarm put out. I'd like to have a survey taken."

"Pretty big step on a negative test, isn't it?" asked Rotherson. He grinned suddenly. "Want me to get the sack?"

Krull smiled. "No, sir. I'll take responsibility for ordering the test."

"You may want to—but you can't. If I waste too much of the system's credits, it's my head that rolls, not yours. They put me here to curb any hair-brained schemes." Rotherson's voice was gruff, but he was smiling as he spoke.

"I appreciate the sentiment, sir. You're really prepared to back it to that extent, are you?"

"Yes, I am."

"It occurs to me that if there is anything out here, anything we don't want in, if it's intelligent enough suddenly to spring up there without penetrating the other radar defenses on its way in, it's also intelligent enough to disguise its ship."

"Good Lord," jerked the general. "You mean some thing from out there has managed to build a space ship with a rock garden stuck on the top of it. Some thing can control a body several miles in diameter?"

"We don't know which one it is; some of those pebbles are not more than a few hundred yards across, and they still show on the screen. Others are as big as Scotland."

"Yes, I know," replied the general. "You don't know what size the intruder is yet?"

"No, sir. It belongs, as far as I can tell, in the odd eight hundred. We checked the fifteen hundred calculables."

"Yes, I see." The general was stroking his beard with one hand, while the fingers of the other still drummed out that remorseless tattoo on the blotting paper. "Yes…" Behind the superficial action, his ice-cool, lightning-fast brain was working at tremendous speed. "We'll have to risk it, then, that's all. If the politicians blow back and say we shouldn't have spent the money, the worst that will happen is that those of us involved will get quietly demoted." He looked from one to the other. "You men live the system as much as I do; you're as loyal to it as I am. If I asked you to go out there in a scouter, and die for it, you would. I'd go and do that myself. This isn't half so dramatic. All I'm asking you to do is to risk your careers for it… Do you really think we ought to probe, no matter what blows back from some tinhorn politician with more tongue than brain?"

"I'm prepared to gamble, sir," said Krull.

"And you, Jonga?"

"Me too!"

"Right, that's settled, then. I'll get the patrol up."

"Actually, sir, it'll only bring the usual survey forward a month."

"Yes—perhaps we can wriggle out of it that way. We can usually manage to cook something up. Right, then; I'll get the patrol." He pressed a button on his desk. The icy ash-headed one moved in. It wasn't till she came through the door that Jonga realized how tall she was. She must have been almost six feet. Then he realized she was a Juiptrean, a colonist anyway, raised from stock that had lived and fought against the fantastic gravity of the giant world. He saw the double meaning of her presence now. Despite her height, she looked comparatively feminine. Yet that silky exterior was highly deceptive. She was the general's bodyguard as well as his secretary. For those smooth feminine shoulders were capable of lifting as much as a ton of earthly weight. In a roughhouse, she would be of more use than half a dozen men. And any outsider trying to raid the general's inner sanctum would never know what hit him.

"Dolores," commanded Rotherson, "get the general call out. We're sending the surveys a month early."

"Certainly, sir." She smiled and glided out through the doorway. A few moments later the landing ramps were a scene of frenzied activity…

There were five patrol ships in all, under the command of Squadron-Leader Masterson. He was a typical space fleet officer of the 23rd century. His ships and his men were the finest the solar system could provide. Long, dart-like ships, gleaming like silver in the light of the early morning sun, stood in readiness on their ramps. Masterson looked at them with justifiable pride. Fine ships—fine men, he thought to himself. Then he looked up to the grey infinity of misty morning space above him. Five ships, twenty-five men against infinity. Twenty-five over infinity. He gave a dismal laugh. What a horrible, un-funny joke. What daring little devils we are, he thought to himself. What crazy, courageous pigmies. We have plumbed the depths of the ocean in our bathospheres. We have gone out into space in our tiny little ships; we are dots in the cosmos. We are so small that we are not even measurable. We don't count for anything, and yet we've got something those stars haven't got. We've got brain, we've got mind, maybe we've got souls. I don't know. Sometimes I think we have; sometimes I think we haven't. He looked back mentally over the years that had elapsed since man had first begun to think. He imagined the first prehistoric Greek philosophers, sitting amidst the rugged grandeur of their mountains and rivers; sitting among their peaceful olive groves, looking over the calm waters of the blue Aegean, dotted with islands as the universe is dotted with stars…

He thought of how they must have pondered and reflected on the great mysteries of philosophy. How they must have considered the three elements of earth and air and fire. How they must have cogitated on the wildness of the sea, the unfathomable depths of the ocean, its uttermost reaches and outermost bounds. Poor little pigmies, he thought to himself. Pigmies with one advantage only, the advantage of a mind. Pigmies whose only salvation was the ability to say, "I am." He thought of René Descartes, and how much he had made of that one observation, "I think, therefore, I am." He had gone to prove the reality of the universe from that one supposition. A real pigmy, even among his fellow men. A little man with a mighty mind. He brought himself back swiftly and ruthlessly. In the beginning, he realized, men had speculated on the existence of the human soul and had found no real answer. And although man in the course of millennia had solved many problems, he had not solved that one. That was still the great uncertainty, the enormous enigma, the eternal question mark. A question which would, perhaps, never be answered. A mystery which would forever be unsolved. Masterson liked mysteries. He had first taken an interest in them when he had been absorbed by the fascinating hobby of genealogy. He had set off one vacation twenty years ago as a young student to trace back his own parentage. He had taken it back as far as the English registers would allow; then he had lost it. He had lost it because his family had sailed with the Mayflower. He checked again from the other side of the Atlantic, and found to his utter amazement that he could claim a pretty direct line of descent from the famous Western sheriff of the 19th century—"Bat" Masterson. He had taken a great pride in that discovery. It had meant more to him than discovering that he had been related to William the Conqueror, or Hannibal, or Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar. For those figures, romantic as they were, had not held such personal qualities as the Western sheriff of a bygone age. From that moment he had found himself thinking more and more about his remote ancestor. He had read all he could find about the sheriff's life, about his appearance, his attributes, his courage; his strength and determination, his toughness, his tenacity; his ability to fight with or without a gun. He felt that in some small way he could understand just a little of the rather remote Oriental principal that prompted the Asiatic in his weird cult of ancestor worship.

Greg Masterson, 23rd century space pilot, had realized that he had something to live up to. He had gone advenuring all over the system and beyond. He had been one of the few who had crossed the long weary miles to Proxima Centauri with its four satellite worlds. He had been among the few who had been there and returned. He could had spent many lifetimes on those four worlds. He still had a burning curiosity to find out the whole truth about our nearest stellar neighbor. But that was as far as man had gotten. He felt as the prehistoric Scott and Amundsen must have felt when they had reached the Antarctic, when they had crossed the icy waste and achieved their ambition. They had arrived at their destination, but knew very little of what lay beneath that ice. They knew nothing of the fantastic deposits of mineral wealth that rested there. They had been the pioneers, just as the pioneers had crossed the deserts to California, not dreaming of a Hollywood that was to be born centuries later, and that was still flourishing… Not dreaming of the wealth that would one day spring up from the land that had seemed so hard beneath their weary feet. So it was now with the Outworlds, as they were called. Men had gone and taken many years of suffering, hardship and privation to reach them; had reached them, and returned and resumed their own jobs as pilots, spacemen… and yet when all was said and done, they knew no more about them than the early men had known about the polar regions of earth. They were aware of their existence, but of nothing else. That was the limit of their knowledge.

It was a strange business, he reflected, very strange.

And now, from those apparently uncrossable wastes of interstellar space, something appeared to have come…

He and the other pilots of the expedition knew why the survey had been put forward a month. He thought back grimly to an account he had read of the so-called World War II of 1939-1945. He remembered seeing some ancient films about it. One of them had been entitled "One of Our Aircraft Is Missing," a phrase that had been all too familiar to those who had lived through those troubled times. One of our asteroids is missing, he grinned to himself, only of course it wasn't missing! There was one too many. Greg Masterson wondered whether asteroids had a love life, whether those lumps of cold, hard rock had been quietly breeding there, in the depths of space, as though the things were alive; not in the sense that flesh and blood is alive, nor even as plants are alive, but in some weird way of their own. Can rock have a metabolism which we, creatures of flesh and blood, do not understand? He did not think it likely…

There was, of course, rational explanations, he assured himself as he climbed aboard his ship and made final checks with his fellow pilots. They settled back on the anti-grav couches and blasted off.

There was no real reason, no reason at all, why the asteroids shouldn't have increased their number. The most likely thing was that one orbit, rather more erratic and extended than the others, had just come into the field of vision. There was about ninety-nine to one in favor of that. They had always been notorious for erratic behavior, and after all, how long had first-class astronomic observation been going on? Certainly not more than three or four centuries at the outside. Was there any reason why one of those undisciplined bodies out there in the asteroid belt should not have decided to wander outside the range of the checking equipment for a mere four centuries? Good heaven, he told himself. What was four centuries in astronomical time? The mere ticking of a watch in the mechanism of celestial chronology. They were blasting into the early light of morning, while the earth behind them turned into a vast spinning globe, no longer flat, a huge spherical ball. A terrestrial sphere among the other spheres. Suddenly it didn't look like earth any more. It was just a receding globe behind the lightning-fast ships, streaking off, a tiny squadron of intrepid men. Tiny ants leaving their colony and going out into the great unknown. Mind you, this section wasn't as unknown as some of the other sections. They had blasted off this way before. In his analogy, he felt that it was like one of the paths leading to the ant colony, one of the paths that led to other ant hills where the ants were friendly. Paths which they were following through the media of their course computers, in the same way that ants relied upon their instincts to guide them along well-traveled ways. The journey, in the first stage, was comparatively uneventful, as uneventful as any journey through space can be. The breathtaking wonder of it was magnificent and glorious. There was freedom out here. They felt as though they had escaped from the toils of gravity. Oddly, he found himself thinking about the Three Little Fishes that Swam Over the Dam—here they were, five little fishes, swimming over the dam of gravity into the great deep space beyond. Swimming out into the unknown depths of space. It was just a routine survey, he kept telling himself. They would find either that one of the old faithfuls had collided with one of the others and split, or that one of the other bodies had wandered in. When they arrived they would find a mass of rock, dead and dull and uninteresting…

Greg always tried to imagine that what was coming would be dull and uninteresting. That way he would sometimes get a pleasant surprise…

He had decided long ago that blessed was the man who expected nothing, for he would not be disappointed.

As a boy he had often imagined space being peopled with weird, exciting, interesting things, with spider men and monsters and inter-galactic intelligentsia, but when he had grown up and gone and looked for himself, he had found that reality was exceptionally quiet, exceptionally dull. Truth had not been stranger than fiction. In fact, by the standards of fiction, truth had been decidedly disappointing. He found space explanation as dull and boring as he had found geography at school…

One planet was very much like another. Its gravity was different, its life forms were different, but they were not bizarre and weird as he had hoped they would be. It was just an extension of everyday knowledge and everyday life; at least all the world he had seen, and he had seen all the worlds the solar system had boasted of. When he got out here, he was quite content to expect there would be nothing but another asteroid which had wandered in or one that had broken from a larger parent body and caused a temporary excitement, and that was all.