Man Who Sold the Moon / Orphans of the Sky (47 page)

Joe-Jim relieved Alan. They climbed.

Ertz relieved Joe-Jim. Hugh relieved Ertz.

They reached the level on which they lived forward of their group apartments. Hugh turned in that direction. “Put him down,” commanded Joe. “Where do you think you are going?”

Hugh settled the wounded man to the deck. “Home. Where else?”

“Fool! That’s where they will look for us first.”

“Where
do
we go?”

“Nowhere—in the Ship. We go out of the Ship!”

“Huh?”

“The Ship’s boat.”

“He’s right,” agreed Ertz. “The whole Ship’s against us now.”

“But . . . but—” Hugh surrendered. “It’s a long chance—but we’ll try it.” He started again in the direction of their homes.

“Hey!” shouted Jim. “Not that way.”

“We have to get our women.”

“To Huff with the women! You’ll get caught. There’s no time.” But Ertz and Alan started off without question. “Oh—all right!” Jim snorted. “But hurry! I’ll stay with Bobo.”

Joe-Jim sat down, took the dwarf’s head in his lap, and made a careful examination. His skin was gray and damp; a long red stain ran down from his right shoulder. Bobo sighed bubblingly and rubbed his head against Joe-Jim’s thigh. “Bobo tired, Boss.”

Joe-Jim patted his head. “Easy,” said Jim, “this is going to hurt.” Lifting the wounded man slightly, he cautiously worked the blade loose and withdrew it from the wound. Blood poured out freely.

Joe-Jim examined the knife, noted the deadly length of steel, and measured it against the wound. “He’ll never make it,” whispered Joe.

Jim caught his eye. “Well?”

Joe nodded slowly. Joe-Jim tried the blade he had just extracted from the wound against his own thigh, and discarded it in favor of one of his own razor-edged tools. He took the dwarf’s chin in his left hand and Joe commanded, “Look at me, Bobo!”

Bobo looked up, answered inaudibly. Joe held his eye. “Good Bobo! Strong Bobo!” The dwarf grinned as if he heard and understood, but made no attempt to reply. His master pulled his head a little to one side; the blade bit deep, snicking the jugular vein without touching the windpipe. “Good Bobo!” Joe repeated. Bobo grinned again.

When the eyes were glassy and breathing had unquestionably stopped, Joe-Jim stood up, letting the head and shoulders roll from him. He shoved the body with his foot to the side of the passage, and stared down the direction in which the others had gone. They should be back by now.

He stuck the salvaged blade in his belt and made sure that all his weapons were loose and ready.

They arrived on a dead run. “A little trouble,” Hugh explained breathlessly. “Squatty’s dead. No more of your men around. Dead maybe—Narby probably meant it. Here—” He handed him a long knife and the body armor that had been built for Joe-Jim, with its great wide cage of steel, fit to cover two heads.

Ertz and Alan wore armor, as did Hugh. The women did not—none had been built for them. Joe-Jim noted that Hugh’s younger wife bore a fresh swelling on her lip, as if someone had persuaded her with a heavy hand. Her eyes were stormy though her manner was docile. The older wife, Chloe, seemed to take the events in stride. Ertz’s was crying softly; Alan’s wench reflected the bewilderment of her master.

“How’s Bobo?” Hugh inquired, as he settled Joe-Jim’s armor in place.

“Made the Trip,” Joe informed him.

“So? Well, that’s that—let’s go.”

They stopped short of the level of no-weight and worked forward, because the women were not adept at weightless flying. When they reached the bulkhead which separated the Control Room and boat pockets from the body of the Ship, they went up. There was neither alarm nor ambush, although Joe thought that he saw a head show as they reached one deck. He mentioned it to his brother but not to the others.

The door to the boat pocket stuck and Bobo was not there to free it. The men tried it in succession, sweating with the strain. Joe-Jim tried it a second time, Joe relaxing and letting Jim control their muscles, that they might not fight each other. The door gave. “Get ’em inside!” snapped Jim.

“And fast!” Joe confirmed. “They’re on us.” He had kept lookout while his brother strove. A shout from down the line reinforced his warning.

The twins faced around to meet the threat while the men shoved the women in. Alan’s fuzzy-headed mate chose that moment to go to pieces, squalled, and tried to run, but weightlessness defeated her. Hugh nabbed her, headed her inside and booted her heartily with his foot.

Joe-Jim let a blade go at long throwing range to slow down the advance. It accomplished its purpose; his opponents, half a dozen of them, checked their advance. Then, apparently on signal, six knives cut the air simultaneously.

Jim felt something strike him, felt no pain, and concluded that the armor had saved him. “Missed us, Joe,” he exulted.

There was no answer. Jim turned his head, tried to look at his brother. A few inches from his eye a knife stuck through the bars of the helmet; its point was buried deep in Joe’s left eye. His brother was dead.

Hugh stuck his head back out of the door. “Come on, Joe-Jim,” he shouted. “We’re all in.”

“Get inside,” ordered Jim. “Close the door.”

“But—”

“Get inside!” Jim turned, and shoved him in the face, closing the door as he did so. Hugh had one startled glimpse of the knife and sagging, lifeless face it pinned. Then the door closed against him, and he heard the lever turn.

Jim turned back at the attackers. Shoving himself away from the bulkhead with legs which were curiously heavy, he plunged toward them, his great arm-long knife, more a bolo than a sword, grasped with both hands. Knives sang toward him, clattered against his breastplate, bit into his legs. He swung—a wide awkward two-handed stroke which gutted an opponent—nearly cut him in two. “That’s for Joe!”

The blow stopped him. He turned in the air, steadied himself, and swung again. “That’s for Bobo!”

They closed in on him; he swung widely, caring not where he hit as long as his blade met resistance. “And that’s for me!”

A knife planted itself in his thigh. It did not even slow him up; legs were dispensable in no-weight.

“‘One for all!’”

A man was on his back now—he could feel him. No matter—here was one before him, too—one who could feel steel. As he swung, he shouted, “All for o—” The words trailed off, but the stroke was finished.

Hugh tried to open the door which had been slammed in his face. He was unable to do so—if there were means provided to do so, he was unable to figure them out. He pressed an ear against the steel and listened, but the airtight door gave back no clue.

Ertz touched him on the shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Where’s Joe-Jim?”

“He stayed behind.”

“What! Open the door—get him.”

“I can’t, it won’t open. He meant to stay, he closed it himself.”

“But we’ve got to get him—we’re blood-sworn.”

“I think,” said Hugh, with a sudden flash of insight, “that’s why he stayed behind.” He told Ertz what he had seen.

“Anyhow,” he concluded, “it’s the
End of the Trip
to him. Get on back and feed mass to that Converter. I want power.” They entered the Ship’s boat proper; Hugh closed the airlock doors behind them. “Alan!” he called out. “We’re going to start. Keep those damned women out of the way.”

He settled himself in the pilot’s chair, and cut the lights.

In the darkness he covered a pattern of green lights. A transparency flashed on the lap desk: drive ready. Ertz was on the job. Here goes! he thought, and actuated the launching combination. There was a short pause, a short and sickening lurch—
a twist.
It frightened him, since he had no way of knowing that the launching tracks were pitched to offset the normal spinning of the Ship.

The glass of the viewport before him was speckled with stars; they were free—moving!

But the spread of jeweled lights was not unbroken, as it invariably had been when seen from the veranda, or seen mirrored on the Control Room walls; a great, gross, ungainly shape gleamed softly under the light of the star whose system they had entered. At first he could not account for it. Then with a rush of superstitious awe he realized that he was looking at the Ship itself, the true Ship, seen from the Outside. In spite of his long intellectual awareness of the true nature of the Ship, he had never visualized looking at it. The stars, yes—the surface of a planet, he had struggled with that concept—but the outer surface of the Ship, no.

When he did see it, it shocked him.

Alan touched him. “Hugh, what is it?”

Hoyland tried to explain to him. Alan shook his head, and blinked his eyes. “I don’t get it.”

“Never mind. Bring Ertz up here. Fetch the women, too—we’ll let them see it.”

“All right. But,” he added, with sound intuition, “it’s a mistake to show the women. You’ll scare ’em silly—they ain’t even seen the stars.”

Luck, sound engineering design, and a little knowledge. Good design, ten times that much luck, and a precious little knowledge. It was luck that had placed the Ship near a star with a planetary system, luck that the Ship arrived there with a speed low enough for Hugh to counteract it in a ship’s auxiliary craft, luck that he learned to handle it after a fashion before they starved or lost themselves in deep space.

It was good design that provided the little craft with a great reserve of power and speed. The designers had anticipated that the pioneers might need to explore the far-flung planets of a solar system; they had provided for it in the planning of the Ship’s boats, with a large factor of safety. Hugh strained that factor to the limit.

It was luck that placed them near the plane of planetary motion; luck that, when Hugh did manage to gun the tiny projectile into a closed orbit, the orbit agreed in direction with the rotation of the planets.

Luck that the eccentric ellipse he achieved should cause them to crawl up on a giant planet so that he was eventually able to identify it as such by sight.

For otherwise they might have spun around that star until they all died of old age, ignoring for the moment the readier hazards of hunger and thirst, without ever coming close enough to a planet to pick it out from the stars.

There is a misconception, geocentric and anthropomorphic, common to the large majority of the earth-bound, which causes them to visualize a planetary system stereoscopically. The mind’s eye sees a sun, remote from a backdrop of stars, and surrounded by spinning apples—the planets. Step out on your balcony and look. Can you tell the planets from the stars? Venus you may pick out with ease, but could you tell it from Canopus, if you had not previously been introduced? That little red speck—is it Mars, or is it Antares? How would you know, if you were as ignorant as Hugh Hoyland? Blast for Antares, believing it to be a planet, and you will never live to have grandchildren.

The great planet that they crawled up on, till it showed a visible naked-eye disc, was larger than Jupiter, a fit companion to the star, somewhat younger and larger than the Sun, around which it swung at a lordly distance. Hugh blasted back, killing his speed over many sleeps, to bring the Ship into a path around the planet. The maneuver brought him close enough to see its moons.

Luck helped him again. He had planned to ground on the great planet, knowing no better. Had he been able to do so they would have lived just long enough to open the air lock.

But he was short of mass, after the titanic task of pulling them out of the headlong hyperbolic plunge around and past the star and warping them into a closed orbit about the star, then into a subordinate orbit around the great planet. He pored over the ancient books, substituted endlessly in the equations the ancients had set down as the laws for moving bodies, figured and refigured, and tried even the calm patience of Chloe.

The other wife, the unnamed one, kept out of his sight after losing a tooth, quite suddenly.

But he got no answer that did not require him to use some, at least, of the precious, irreplaceable ancient books for fuel. Yes, even though they stripped themselves naked and chucked in their knives, the mass of the books would still be needed.

He would have preferred to dispense with one of his wives. He decided to ground on one of the moons.

Luck again. Coincidence of such colossal proportions that one need not be expected to believe it—for the moon-planet was suitable for human terrestrial life. Never mind—skip over it rapidly; the combination of circumstances is of the same order needed to produce such a planet in the first place. Our own planet, under our feet, is of the “There ain’t no such animal!” variety. It is a ridiculous improbability.

Hugh’s luck was a ridiculous improbability.

* * *

Good design handled the next phase. Although he had learned to maneuver the little Ship out in space where there is elbow room, landing is another and a ticklish matter. He would have crashed any spacecraft designed before the designing of the
Vanguard.
But the designers of the
Vanguard
had known that the Ship’s auxiliary craft would be piloted and grounded by at least the second generation of explorers; green pilots must make those landings unassisted. They planned for it.

Hugh got the vessel down into the stratosphere and straightened it triumphantly into a course that would with certainty kill them all.

The autopilots took over.

Hugh stormed and swore, producing some words which diverted Alan’s attention and admiration from the view out of the port. But nothing he could do would cause the craft to respond. It settled in its own way and leveled off at a thousand feet, an altitude which it maintained regardless of changing contour.

“Hugh, the stars are gone!”

“I know it.”

“But Jordan! Hugh—what happened to them?”

Hugh glared at Alan. “I—don’t—know—and—I—don’t—care! You get aft with the women and stop asking silly questions.”

Alan departed reluctantly with a backward look at the surface of the planet and the bright sky. It interested him, but he did not marvel much at it—his ability to marvel had been overstrained.

It was some hours before Hugh discovered that a hitherto ignored group of control lights set in motion a chain of events whereby the autopilot would ground the Ship. Since he found this out experimentally he did not exactly choose the place of landing. But the unwinking stereo-eyes of the autopilot fed its data to the “brain”; the submolar mechanism selected and rejected; the Ship grounded gently on a rolling high prairie near a clump of trees.