The Past Through Tomorrow (54 page)

The Captain bit his lip and said, “Master-at-Arms! Have this man removed.”

The ship’s policeman fixed his eyes on the overhead struts. “Can’t rightly do it, Captain. I’ve sprained my shoulder.” The other crew members, present a moment before, had faded into the bulkhead paint.

“Well, get a working party!”

“Aye, aye, sir.” He, too, went away.

Rhysling spoke again. “Now look, Skipper—let’s not have any hard feelings about this. You’ve got an out to carry me if you want to—the ‘Distressed Spaceman’ clause.”

“‘Distressed Spaceman’, my eye! You’re no distressed spaceman; you’re a space-lawyer. I know who you are; you’ve been bumming around the system for years. Well, you won’t do it in my ship. That clause was intended to succor men who had missed their ships, not to let a man drag free all over space.”

“Well, now, Captain, can you properly say I haven’t missed my ship? I’ve never been back home since my last trip as a signed-on crew member. The law says I can have a trip back.”

“But that was years ago. You’ve used up your chance.”

“Have I now? The clause doesn’t say a word about how soon a man has to take his trip back; it just says he’s got it coming to him. Go look it up, Skipper. If I’m wrong, I’ll not only walk out on my two legs, I’ll beg your humble pardon in front of your crew. Go on—look it up. Be a sport.”

Rhysling could feel the man’s glare, but he turned and stomped out of the compartment. Rhysling knew that he had used his blindness to place the Captain in an impossible position, but this did not embarrass Rhysling—he rather enjoyed it.

Ten minutes later the siren sounded, he heard the orders on the bull horn for Up-Stations. When the soft sighing of the locks and the slight pressure change in his ears let him know that take-off was imminent he got up and shuffled down to the power room, as he wanted to be near the jets when they blasted off. He needed no one to guide him in any ship of the Hawk class.

Trouble started during the first watch. Rhysling had been lounging in the inspector’s chair, fiddling with the keys of his accordion and trying out a new version of
Green Hills
.

And “something, something, something ‘Earth’”—it would not come out right. He tried again.

That was better, he thought. “How do you like that, Archie?” he asked over the muted roar.

“Pretty good. Give out with the whole thing.” Archie Macdougal, Chief Jetman, was an old friend, both spaceside and in bars; he had been an apprentice under Rhysling many years and millions of miles back.

Rhysling obliged, then said, “You youngsters have got it soft. Everything automatic. When I was twisting her tail you had to stay awake.”

“You still have to stay awake.” They fell to talking shop and Macdougal showed him the direct response damping rig which had replaced the manual vernier control which Rhysling had used. Rhysling felt out the controls and asked questions until he was familiar with the new installation. It was his conceit that he was still a jetman and that his present occupation as a troubadour was simply an expedient during one of the fusses with the company that any man could get into.

“I see you still have the old hand damping plates installed,” he remarked, his agile fingers flitting over the equipment.

“All except the links. I unshipped them because they obscure the dials.”

“You ought to have them shipped. You might need them.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think—” Rhysling never did find out what Macdougal thought for it was at that moment the trouble tore loose. Macdougal caught it square, a blast of radioactivity that burned him down where he stood.

Rhysling sensed what had happened. Automatic reflexes of old habit came out. He slapped the discover—and rang the alarm to the control room simultaneously. Then he remembered the unshipped links. He had to grope until he found them, while trying to keep as low as he could to get maximum benefit from the baffles. Nothing but the links bothered him as to location. The place was as light to him as any place could be; he knew every spot, every control, the way he knew the keys of his accordion.

“Power room! Power room! What’s the alarm?”

“Stay out!” Rhysling shouted. “The place is ‘hot.’” He could feel it on his face and in his bones, like desert sunshine.

The links he got into place, after cursing someone, anyone, for having failed to rack the wrench he needed. Then he commenced trying to reduce the trouble by hand. It was a long job and ticklish. Presently he decided that the jet would have to be spilled, pile and all.

First he reported. “Control!”

“Control aye aye!”

“Spilling jet three-emergency.”

“Is this Macdougal?”

“Macdougal is dead. This is Rhysling, on watch. Stand by to record.”

There was no answer; dumbfounded the Skipper may have been, but he could not interfere in a power room emergency. He had the ship to consider, and the passengers and crew. The doors had to stay closed.

The Captain must have been still more surprised at what Rhysling sent for record. It was:

Rhysling went on cataloguing the Solar System as he worked, “—harsh bright soil of Luna—”, “—Saturn’s rainbow rings—”, “—the frozen night of Titan—”, all the while opening and spilling the jet and fishing it clean. He finished with an alternate chorus—

—then, almost absentmindedly remembered to tack on his revised first verse:

The ship was safe now and ready to limp home shy one jet. As for himself, Rhysling was not so sure. That “sunburn” seemed sharp, he thought. He was unable to see the bright, rosy fog in which he worked but he knew it was there. He went on with the business of flushing the air out through the outer valve, repeating it several times to permit the level of radiation to drop to something a man might stand under suitable armor. While he did this he sent one more chorus, the last bit of authentic Rhysling that ever could be:

“
DON
’
T BE
a sentimental fool, Sam!”

“Sentimental, or not,” Jones persisted, “I know human slavery when I see it. That’s what you’ve got on Venus.”

Humphrey Wingate snorted. “That’s utterly ridiculous. The company’s labor clients are employees, working under legal contracts, freely entered into.”

Jones’ eyebrows raised slightly. “So? What kind of a contract is it that throws a man into jail if he quits his job?”

“That’s not the case. Any client can quit his job on the usual two weeks notice—I ought to know; I—”

“Yes, I know,” agreed Jones in a tired voice. “You’re a lawyer. You know all about contracts. But the trouble with you, you dunderheaded fool, is that all you understand is legal phrases. Free contract—nuts! What I’m talking about is
facts
, not legalisms. I don’t care what the contract says—those people are slaves!”

Wingate emptied his glass and set it down. “So I’m a dunderheaded fool, am I? Well, I’ll tell you what you are, Sam Houston Jones—you are a half-baked parlor pink. You’ve never had to work for a living in your life and you think it’s just too dreadful that anyone else should have to. No, wait a minute,” he continued, as Jones opened his mouth, ‘listen to me. The company’s clients on Venus are a damn sight better off than most people of their own class here on Earth. They are certain of a job, of food, and a place to sleep. If they get sick, they’re certain of medical attention. The trouble with people of that class is that they don’t want to work—”

“Who does?”

“Don’t be funny. The trouble is, if they weren’t under a fairly tight contract, they’d throw up a good job the minute they got bored with it and expect the company to give ’em a free ride back to Earth. Now it may not have occurred to your fine, free charitable mind, but the company has obligations to its stockholders—you, for instance!—and it can’t afford to run an interplanetary ferry for the benefit of a class of people that feel that the world owes them a living.”

“You got me that time, pal,” Jones acknowledged with a wry face, “—that crack about me being a stockholder. I’m ashamed of it.”

“Then why don’t you sell?”

Jones looked disgusted. “What kind of a solution is that? Do you think I can avoid the responsibility of
knowing
about it just unloading my stock?”

“Oh, the devil with it,” said Wingate. “Drink up.”

“Righto,” agreed Jones. It was his first night aground after a practice cruise as a reserve officer; he needed to catch up on his drinking. Too bad, thought Wingate, that the cruise should have touched at Venus—

“All out! All out! Up
aaaall
you idlers! Show a leg there! Show a leg and grab a sock!” The raucous voice sawed its way through Wingate’s aching head. He opened his eyes, was blinded by raw white light, and shut them hastily. But the voice would not let him alone. “Ten minutes till breakfast,” it rasped. “Come and get it, or we’ll throw it out!”

He opened his eyes again, and with trembling willpower forced them to track. Legs moved past his eyes, denim clad legs mostly, though some were bare—repulsive hairy nakedness. A confusion of male voices, from which he could catch words but not sentences, was accompanied by an obbligato of metallic sounds, muffled but pervasive—shrrg, shrrg, thump! Shrrg, shrrg, thump! The thump with which the cycle was completed hurt his aching head but was not as nerve stretching as another noise, a toneless whirring sibilance which he could neither locate nor escape.

The air was full of the odor of human beings, too many of them in too small a space. There was nothing so distinct as to be fairly termed a stench, nor was the supply of oxygen inadequate. But the room was filled with the warm, slightly musky smell of bodies still heated by bedclothes, bodies not dirty but not freshly washed. It was oppressive and unappetizing—in his present state almost nauseating.

He began to have some appreciation of the nature of his surroundings; he was in a bunkroom of some sort. It was crowded with men, men getting up, shuffling about, pulling on clothes. He lay on the bottom—most of a tier of four narrow bunks. Through the interstices between the legs which crowded around him and moved past his face he could see other such tiers around the walls and away from the walls, stacked floor to ceiling and supported by stanchions.

Someone sat down on the foot of Wingate’s bunk, crowding his broad fundament against Wingate’s ankles while he drew on his socks. Wingate squirmed his feet away from the intrusion. The stranger turned his face toward him. “Did I crowd ’ja, bud? Sorry.” Then he added, not unkindly, “Better rustle out of there. The Master-at-Arms’ll be riding you to get them bunks up.” He yawned hugely, and started to get up, quite evidently having dismissed Wingate and Wingate’s affairs from his mind.

“Wait a minute!” Wingate demanded hastily.

“Huh?”

“Where am I? In jail?”

The stranger studied Wingate’s bloodshot eyes and puffy, unwashed face with detached but unmalicious interest. “Boy, oh boy, you must ‘a’ done a good job of drinking up your bounty money.”

“Bounty money? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Honest to God, don’t you know where you are?”

“No.”

“Well…” The other seemed reluctant to proclaim a truth made silly by its self-evidence until Wingate’s expression convinced him that he really wanted to know. “Well, you’re in the
Evening Star
, headed for Venus.”

A couple of minutes later the stranger touched him on the arm. “Don’t take it so hard, bud. There’s nothing to get excited about.”

Wingate took his hands from his face and pressed them against his temples. “It’s not real,” he said, speaking more to himself than to the other. “It can’t be real—”

“Stow it. Come and get your breakfast.”

“I couldn’t eat anything.”

“Nuts. Know how you feel…felt that way sometimes myself. Food is just the ticket.” The Master-at-Arms settled the issue by coming up and prodding Wingate in the ribs with his truncheon.

“What d’yuh think this is—sickbay, or first class? Get those bunks hooked up.”

“Easy, mate, easy,” Wingate’s new acquaintance conciliated, “our pal’s not himself this morning.” As he spoke he dragged Wingate to his feet with one massive hand, then with the other shoved the tier of bunks up and against the wall. Hooks clicked into their sockets, and the tier stayed up, flat to the wall.

“He’ll be a damn sight less himself if he interferes with my routine,” the petty officer predicted. But he moved on. Wingate stood barefooted on the floorplates, immobile and overcome by a feeling of helpless indecision which was re-inforced by the fact that he was dressed only in his underwear. His champion studied him.