Microcosmic God (50 page)

“It’s pseudoscience,” he chuckled. “I might even say that it’s pseudological pseudoscience. But, it’s lovely!” He regarded his withered frame quizzically. “Pity I don’t have muscles and a widow’s peak,” he said. “I’ve got the science but I rather fear I lack glamour. Have you the next issue?”

Hughie had.

Then, on the sixth day, Hughie’s reading was interrupted by a shrill whine from the forward instrument panel. A light flashed under a screen; Nudnick walked over to it and flipped a switch. The screen glowed, showing the blackness of space and its crystal points of light. He turned a knob; the points of light swung slowly across the screen until the tiny black ring of the juncture of the crosshairs encircled a slightly luminous spot.

“What is it?” Hughie asked, regretfully laying down his book.

“Company,” said Nudnick tersely. “No telling who it is at this distance, unless they want to tell us about themselves by ultraradio. They’re on our course, and overtaking.”

Hughie stared into the screen. “You had this stern detector running all the time, didn’t you? Gee—You don’t think it’s a pirate, do
you?” There was something hopeful in Hughie’s tone. Nudnick laughed.

“You want to see science in action, don’t you? Heh. I’m afraid I’m going to be a disappointment to you, youngster. We can’t travel any faster than we are going now, and that ship quite obviously can.” Hughie flushed. “Well, professor, if you think it’s all right—” Nudnick shook his head. “I don’t think it’s all right,” he said. “Now that we have established that fact, let’s get back to your story. To think that Captain Jaundess would be careless enough to let his betrothed get into the clutches of that evil fellow! What will he do to her?”

“But, Professor Nudnick—”

Nudnick took Hughie’s arm and steered him across the control room to his chair. “My dear, overanxious young crew, the ship that is pursuing us presents no problem until it overtakes us. That will be in forty-eight hours. In the meantime, Captain Jaundess’ girl friend is in far greater danger than we are. Pray proceed.”

Most unwillingly, Hughie read on.

Forty-eight hours later, the brisk crackle of an ultraradio ordered them to stand by to be boarded in the name of the Joint Patrol. The destroyer pulled alongside, and a lifeboat carried a slim, strong cable around the
Stoutfella
and, through the mooring eyes, back to the Patrol ship. The cable was used because magnetic grapples are useless on a Nudnick Metal hull. A winch drew the craft together, and a “wind tunnel” boarding stage groped against the outside of the
Stoutfella
’s air lock.

“What are you going to do?” asked Hughie desperately.

“We are going to say as little as possible,” said Nudnick meaningly, “and we are going to let them in, of course.” He actuated the airlock controls; the boarding stage was hermetically sealed to their hull as the outer and inner doors slid back.

A purple-uniformed Martian yeoman stepped down into the room, followed by his equally ranking shipmate from Earth. The Martian swore and shut his nostril flaps on the sides of his stringy neck with an unpleasant click. “This air is saturated,” he squeaked.
“You might have had the courtesy to dehydrate it.”

“What?” grinned the Earth Patrolman. “And deprive me of the only breath of decent air I’ve had in nineteen days?” He drew a grateful breath, letting the moisture sink into his half-parched lungs.

The air in Patrol ships was always, since there was no happy medium, too dry for Earthlings and too humid for Martians; for the Martians, living for countless generations on a water-starved planet, had developed a water-hoarding metabolism which had never evolved a use for a water surplus.

“Who is in command?” piped the Martian. Nudnick gestured; the Martian immediately turned his back on Hughie. “We have orders from headquarters that this ship is to be searched and disarmed according to Section 398 of the Earth-Mars Code.”

“Suspicion of piracy,” supplemented the Earthman.

“Piracy?” shouted Hughie, his resentment at last breaking through. “Piracy? Who do you think you are? What do you mean by—”

Three tiny eyes in the back of the Martian’s head flipped open. “Has this unpleasantly noisy infant a function?” he demanded, fingering the blaster at his hip.

“He’s my crew. Be quiet, Hughie.”

“Yeah—take it easy, kiddo,” said the Earthman, not unkindly. “Orders are orders in this outfit. You got no fight with us. We just work here.”

“Let them alone, Hughie,” chimed in Nudnick. “We’ve little enough armament and they’re welcome to it. They have every right.” While the Martian stalked out, the scientist turned to the other Patrolman. “This is a Patrol Council order?”

“Of course.”

“Who signed it?”

“Councilman Emil Bjornsen.”

“Bjornsen? The new member? How has he the right?”

“Council regulations. ‘If any matter should be put to a vote, the resulting decision shall be executed in the name of the president of the council, except in such cases where the decision is carried by one vote, when the order shall be executed in the name of the councilman whose vote carrried the measure.’ Bjornsen, as the most recently
appointed councilman, has the last vote. In this case the action was deadlocked and his vote carried it.”

“I see. Thank you. I suppose you can’t tell me who proposed this order?”

“Sorry.”

The Patrolman moved swiftly about the room, covering every inch of space. In spite of his resentment, Hughie had to admire the man’s efficiency. The kid stood sullenly against the bulkhead; when the man came to him, he ran his hands quickly over the boy, and with the skill of a practiced “dip,” extracted a low-powered pellet-gun from Hughie’s side pocket. “You won’t want this,” he said. “It won’t kill anything but cockroaches and they’re too easily fumigated.” Glancing around swiftly to see if the Martian had returned from the storerooms yet, he clapped his hand over Hughie’s mouth and whispered something. When the Martian came back, the Patrolman was finishing up on the other side of the room, and Hughie was staring at him with an affectionately resentful wonderment.

“Hardly a thing,” complained the Martian shrilly, displaying a sparse armload of side arms and one neuro ray bow chaser. “Never heard of a Martian councilman sending a destroyer after a couple of nitwits on a pleasure cruise.”

They saluted and left. In two minutes the ships drifted apart; in five, the destroyer was nothing but a memory and a dwindling spot on the stern visiscreen. Nudnick smiled at Hughie.

“Tsk!
You certainly flew off the handle, Hughie. When that fellow took away your peashooter, I thought you were going to bite him.”

“Nah,” said Hughie, embarrassed. “He was O.K. I guess I didn’t want the gun much anyhow.”

There was a silence, while Nudnick inspected the inner airlock gate and then the air-pressure indicator. Finally Nudnick asked:

“Well, aren’t you going to tell me?”

“What?”

“What it was that the Patrolman whispered in your ear. Or are you going to save it for a climax in the best science-fiction tradition?”

Hughie was saving it for just that. “You don’t miss much, do you?” he said. “It wasn’t nothing much. He said, ‘There’s a lousy little Martian private ship on your tail. Probably will stay on our spot on your visiscreen for a few days and be on top of you before you know it. Better watch him.”

“Hm-m-m.” Nudnick stared at the screen. “Anything else?” He spoke as if he knew damn well there was something else. Hughie blushed, robbed of the choicest part of his secret.

“Only just that Bjornsen’s aboard.”

“That still isn’t all.” Nudnick approached the boy, absolutely dead pan.

“Honest,” stammered Hughie, wide-eyed.

Nudnick shook his head, put his hand in his pocket, gave something to Hughie. “There’s just this,” he said. “He slipped it into my pocket on the way out, just as easily as he slipped it out of yours.”

Hughie stared at the gun in his hand with a delight approaching tears.

“A very efficient young man,” said Nudnick. “You will notice that he unloaded it.”

Three weeks later Professor Nudnick took it upon himself to disconnect the stern visiscreen because Hughie could not pry himself loose from it. The Patrolman had been right; the destroyer had dwindled there until it reached a .008 intensity and then had stayed right there for several days, after which it had grown again until the boy could make out the ship itself. It was no longer the destroyer, it was a plump-lined wicked little Martian sportster. He knew without asking that the little ship was fast and maneuverable beyond all comparison with the
Stoutfella
. It annoyed him almost as much as Nudnick’s calm acceptance of the fact that they were being followed, and that there was every possibility of their never returning to Earth, to say nothing of locating and claiming the prosydium asteroid. He took the trouble to say as much. Nudnick merely raised his eyebrows to uncover his logic and said:

“Don’t go off half-cocked, younker. Granted, the Martian is following us. I was apparently right about Bjornsen’s hunch; he knows
that I have been looking all over the system for prosydium and that it is rather unusual for me to go sailing off personally into space. Ergo, I must have found some. But he doesn’t want me, or you. All he wants is the prosydium. He can get it only by following this ship. Until we tie on to something, we’re as safe as a babe in a bassinet. So why worry?”

“Why worry?” The kid’s brains almost crackled audibly in their attempt to transmit his worry to the scientist. “Here’s something! Has it occurred to you that all the Martian has to do is to determine our course, continue it ahead on a chart, and then know our destination?”

“It has occurred to me,” said Nudnick gently. “Our course will intercept Mercury in twenty days.”

“Mercury!” Hughie cried. “You told me the prosydium was on an asteroid!”

“It is on an asteroid.” Nudnick was being assiduously patient. “You know it, and I know it. But our course is for Mercury. That’s all
they
know. If we lose them, we will change course for the Belt. If we don’t lose them, we will go to Mercury. If they’re persistent, we’ll go back to Earth and try again some time, though I will admit there’s only a billion to one chance of our slipping away without being followed again.”

“I’m sorry,” said Hughie after a while. “I have no business in trying to tell you off, Professor Nudnick. Only I hate like hell to see that Bjornsen guy keep you away from what you want to get. That heel. That lousy wart on the nose of progress!”

“End quotes,” said Nudnick dryly. “Captain Jaundess.”

“O.K., O.K.,” said Hughie, grinning in spite of himself. “But I can’t seem to get over that guy Bjornsen. He got in my hair for nearly two years at school, and now that he’s kicked me out he seems to want to get under my scalp as well. I dunno—I never saw a guy like that before. I can’t figger him—the way he thinks. That rotten business of ganging up on kids. He’s inhuman!”

“You may be right,” said Nudnick slowly. “You may just possibly be right.” After a long pause, he said, “I picked the right assistant, Hughie. You’re doing fine.”

Hughie was so tickled by that remark that he didn’t think to ask what provoked it.

Two days before they were due on Mercury, the professor heaved a sigh, glanced at Hughie, and connected up the stern visiscreen. “There you are,” he said quietly. Hughie looked up from his magazine, dropped it with a gasp of horror. The Martian ship was not two hundred yards behind them, looming up, filling the screen. He sprang to his feet.

“Professor Nudnick!
Do
something!”

Nudnick shook his head, spread his hands. “Any ideas?”

“There must be something. Can’t you blast them, professor?”

“With what? The Patrol took even our little neuro ray.”

Hughie waved the defeatist philosophy aside impatiently. “There ought to be something you could do. Heck—you’re supposed to be ten times the scientist that Harry Petrou is—”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Harry Petrou … Petrou!” Hughie swept up the magazine, thrust the too-bright cover in the scientist’s face. “The writer! The author of—”

“Satan Strong!” The dried-up old man let out an astonishingly hearty peal of laughter.

“Well,” said Hughie defensively, “anyway—” Furiously he began to shout half-hysterical phrases. He was scared, and he had a bad case of hero worship, and he was also very young. He said, “You go ahead and laugh. But Harry Petrou has some pretty damn good ideas. Maybe they’re not scientific. Not what you’d call scientific. Why doesn’t anybody ever do anything scientific without studying for fifty years in a dusty old laboratory? Why does one of the greatest scientists in history,” he half sobbed, “sit back and b-be bullied by a l-louse like Bjornsen?”

“Hughie—take it easy, there.” Nudnick put out his hand, then turned away from those young, accusing eyes. “Things aren’t done that way, Hughie. Science isn’t like that—made to order for melodramatic adventures. I know—you’d like me to burrow into the air conditioner, throw a few connections around, and come out with a space-warp.”

Hughie turned on the lower forward screen. It showed, blindingly, the flaming crescent of the inner planet. They were descending swiftly toward the night-edge of the twilight strip, the automatic pilot taking care of every detail of deceleration and gravity control.

“You’re quitting,” said Hughie, his lip quivering. “You’re running away!” And he turned his back to Nudnick, to stare at the evil menacing bulk of the Martian ship.

Nudnick sighed, went and sat at the controls, and took over the ship from the pilot.

After two silent hours, Hughie observed that Nudnick was preparing to land. He said in a dead voice:

“If you land, they’ll catch us.”

“That’s right.” Nudnick’s voice was brisk.

“And if they catch us, they’ll torture us.”

“Yep.” Nudnick glanced over his shoulder. “Will you obey my orders implicitly?”

“Sure,” said Hughie hopelessly. His eyes were fixed in fearful fascination on the Martian ship.

“Start now, then. Get rid of all the metal on your clothes. Belt buckle, buttons—everything. You have fiber soled boots?