The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (71 page)

The
Stallifer
bored on through space. From her ports the cosmos was not that hostile, immobile curtain of unwinking stars the early interstellar travelers knew. At twelve hundred light-speeds with the Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times per second for velocity control, the stars moved visibly. Forty glimpses of the galaxy about the ship in every second made it seem that the universe were always in view. And the stars moved. The nearest ones moved swiftly and the farther ones more slowly, but all moved. From force of habit the motion gave the feeling of perspective, so that the stars appeared to be distributed in three dimensions. From the ship they seemed very small, like fireflies. All the cosmos seemed small and almost cosy. The Rim itself appeared no more than a few miles away. The
Stallifer
headed for Earth and Rhesi II. She had been days upon her journey; she had come a distance which it would stagger the imagination to compute.

In his cell, though, Stan Buckley could see only four walls. There was no variation of light; no sign of morning or night or afternoon. At intervals, a guard brought him food. That was all—except that his deep and fierce and terrible anger grew until it seemed that he would go mad with it.

He had no idea of the hour or the day when, quite suddenly, the pitiless light in the corridor dimmed. Then the door he had not seen since his entrance into the prison corridor clanked open. Footsteps came toward the cell. It was not the guard who fed him. He knew that much. It was a variation of routine, which should not have varied until his arrival on Earth.

He sat still, his hands clenched. A figure loomed outside the cell door. He looked up coldly. Then fury so great as almost to be frenzy filled him. Rob Torren looked in at him.

There was silence. Stan Buckley’s muscles tensed until it seemed that the bones of his body creaked. Then Rob Torren said caustically:

“It’s lucky there are bars, or there’d be no chance to talk! Either you’d kill me and be beamed for murder, or I’d kill you and Esther would think me a murderer. I’ve come to get you out of this if you’ll accept my terms.”

Stan Buckley made an inarticulate, growling noise.

“Oh, surely!” said Rob Torren. “I denounced you, and I’m the witness against you. At your trial, I’ll be believed and you won’t. You’ll be broken and disgraced. Even Esther wouldn’t marry you under such circumstances. Or maybe,” he added sardonically, “maybe you wouldn’t let her.”

Stan Buckley licked his lips. He longed so terribly to get his hands about his enemy’s throat that he could hardly hear the other’s words.

“The trouble is,” said Rob Torren, “that she probably wouldn’t marry me either, if you were disgraced by my means. So I offer a bargain. I’ll help you to escape—I’ve got it all arranged—on your word of honor to fight me. A duel. To the death.”

His eyes were cold. His tone was cold. His manner was almost contemptuous. Stan Buckley said hoarsely:

“I’ll fight you anywhere, under any conditions!”

“The conditions,” Rob Torren told him coldly,” are that I will help you to escape. You will then write a letter to Esther, saying that I did so and outlining the conditions of the duel as we agree upon them. I will, in turn, write a letter to the Space Guard brass, withdrawing my charges against you. We will fight. The survivor will destroy his own letter and make use of the other. Do you agree to that?”

“I’ll agree to anything,” said Stan Buckley fiercely,” that will get my hands about your throat!”

Rob Torren shrugged.

“I’ve turned off the guard photocells,” he said shortly. “I’ve a key for your cell. I’m going to let you out. I can’t afford to kill you except under the conditions I named or I’ll have no chance to win Esther. If you kill me under any other conditions, you’ll simply be beamed as a murderer.” He paused, and said shortly, “And I have to come and fight you because a letter from you admitting that I’ve behaved honorably is the only possible thing that would satisfy Esther. You give your word to wait until you’ve escaped and I come for you before you try to kill me?”

Stan Buckley hesitated a long, long time. Then he said in a thick voice:

“I give my word.”

Without hesitation, Rob Torren put a key in the cell door and turned it. He stood aside. Stan Buckley walked out, his hands clenched. Torren closed the door and re-locked it. He turned his back and walked down the corridor. He opened the door at its end. Again he stood aside. Stan Buckley went through. Torren closed the door, took a bit of cloth from his pocket, wiped off the key, hung it up again on a tiny hook, with the same bit of cloth threw a switch, and put the cloth back in his pocket.

“The photocells are back on,” he said in a dry voice. “They say you’re still in your cell. When the guard contradicts them, you’ll seem to have vanished into thin air.”

“I’m doing this,” said Stan hoarsely, “to get a chance to kill you. Of course I’ve no real chance to escape!”

That was obvious. The
Stallifer
was deep in the void of interstellar space. She traveled at twelve hundred times the speed of light. Escape from the ship itself was absurd. And concealment past discovery when the ship docked was preposterous.

“That remains to be seen,” said Torren coldly. “Come this way.”

Down a hallway. He slipped into a narrow doorway, invisible unless one looked. Stan followed. He found himself in that narrow, compartmented space between the ship’s inner and outer skins. A door, another compartment; another door. Then a tiny airlock—used for the egress or a single man to inspect or repair such exterior apparatus as the scanners for the ship’s vision screens. There was a heap of assorted apparatus beside the airlock door.

“I prepared for this,” said Torren curtly. “There’s a spacesuit. Put it on. Here’s a meteor miner’s space skid. There are supplies. I brought this stuff as luggage, in watertight cases. I’ll fill the cases with my bath water and get off the ship with the same weight of luggage I had when I came on. That’s my coverup.”

“And I?” asked Stan harshly.

“You’ll take this chrono. It’s synchronized with the ship’s navigating clock. At two-two even you push off from the outside of the ship. The drive field fluctuates. When it collapses, you’ll be outside it. When it expands—”

Stan Buckley raised his eyebrows. This was clever! The Bowdoin-Hall field which permits of faster than speed of light travel is like a pulsating bubble expanding and contracting at rates ranging from hundreds of thousands of times per second to the forty per second of deep space speed. When the field is expanding, and bars of an artificial allotrope of carbon are acted upon by electrostatic forces in a certain particular fashion, a ship and all its contents accelerate at a rate so great that it simply has no meaning. As the field contracts, a ship decelerates again. That is the theory, at any rate. There is no proof in sensations or instrument readings that such is the case. But velocity is inversely proportional to the speed of the field’s pulsations, and only in deep space does a ship dare slow the pulsations too greatly, for fear of complications.

A man in a spacesuit could detach himself from a space ship traveling by the Bowdoin-Hall field, though. He could float free at the instant of the field’s collapse, and be left behind when it expanded again. But he would be left alone in illimitable emptiness.

“You’ll straddle the space skid,” said Torren shortly. “It’s full-powered—good for some millions of miles. At two-two exactly the
Stallifer
will be as close to Khor Alpha as it will go. Khor Alpha’s a dwarf white star that’s used as a course marker. It has one planet that the directories say has a breathable atmosphere, and list as a possible landing refuge, but which they also say is unexamined. You’ll make for that planet and land. You’ll make for that planet and wait for me. I’ll come!”

Stan Buckley said in soft ferocity:

“I hope so!”

Torren’s rage flared.

“Do you think I’m not as anxious to kill you as you are to kill me?”

For an instant the two tensed, as if for a struggle to the death there between the two skins of the space ship. Then Torren turned away.

“Get in your suit,” he said curtly. “I’ll get a private flier and come after you as soon as the hearing about your disappearance is over. Push off at two-two even. Make it exact!”

He went angrily away, and Stan Buckley stared after him, hating him, and then grimly turned to the apparatus on an untidy heap beside the airlock door.

Five minutes later he opened the outer door of the lock. He was clad in space armor and carried with him a small pack of supplies—the standard abandon ship kit—and the little space drive unit. The unit was one of those space skids used by meteor miners—merely a shaft which contained the drive and power unit, a seat, and a cross-shaft by which it was steered. It was absurdly like a hobby-horse for a man in a spacesuit, and it was totally unsuitable for interplanetary work because it consumed too much power when fighting gravity. For Stan, though, starting in mid-space with only one landing to make, it should be adequate.

He locked the chrono where he could see it on the steering bar. He strapped the supply kit in place. He closed the airlock door very softly, he waited, clinging to the outer skin of the ship with magnetic shoes.

The cosmos seemed very small and quite improbable. The specks of light which were suns seemed to crawl here and there. Because of their motion it was impossible to think of them as gigantic, ravening balls of unquenchable fire. They moved! To all appearances, the
Stallifer
flowed onward in a cosmos perhaps a dozen miles in diameter, in which many varicolored fireflies moved with vast deliberations.

The hand of the chrono moved, and moved, and moved. At two-two exactly, Stan pressed the drive stud. At one instant he and his improbable space steed rested firmly against a thousand-foot hill of glistening chrome steel. The waverings of the Bowdoin-Hall field were imperceptible. The cosmos was small and limited and the
Stallifer
was huge. Then the skid’s drive came on. It shot away from the hull—and the ship vanished as utterly as a blown out candle flame. The universe was so vast as to produce a cringing sensation in the man who straddled an absurd small device in such emptiness, with one cold white sun—barely near enough to show a disk—and innumerable remote and indifferent stars on every hand.

On the instant the ship’s field contracted and left him outside, Stan had lost the incredible velocity the field imparts. In the infinitesimal fraction of a second required for the field to finish its contraction after leaving him, the ship had traveled literally thousands of miles. In the slightly greater fraction of a second required for it to expand again, it had moved on some millions of miles. By the time Stan’s mind had actually grasped the fact that he was alone in space, the ship from which he had separated himself was probably fifty or sixty millions of miles away.

He was absolutely secure against recapture, of course. If his escape went unnoticed for even half a minute, it would take all the ships of all the Space-Guard a thousand years to search the volume of space in which one small space-suited figure might be found. It was unlikely that his escape would be noticed for hours.

He was very terribly alone. A dwarf white sun glowed palely, many, many millions of miles away. Stars gazed at him incuriously, separated by light centuries of space.

He started the minute gyroscopes that enabled him to steer the skid. He started in toward the sun. He had a planet to find and land on. Of course, Rob Torren could simply have contrived his escape to emptiness so that he might die and shrivel in the void, and never, never, never through all eternity be found again. But somehow, Stan had a vast faith in the hatred which existed between the two of them.

CHAPTER 2

It was two days later when he approached the solitary planet of Khor Alpha. The air in his spacesuit had acquired that deadly staleness which is proof that good air is more than merely a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. He felt sluggish discomfort which comes of bottled, repurified breathing mixture. As the disk of the planet grew large, he saw little or nothing to make him feel more cheerful. The planet rotated as he drew near, and it seemed to be absolutely featureless. The terminator—the shadow line as sunlight encroached on the planet’s night side—was a perfect line. There were, then, no mountains. There were no clouds. There seemed to be no vegetation. There was, though, a tiny polar icecap—so small that at first he did not discover it. It was not even a dazzling white, but a mere whitishness where a polar cap should be, as if it were hoar frost instead of ice.

He went slanting down to match the planet’s ground speed in his approach. Astride the tiny space skid, he looked rather like an improbable witch astride an incredible broomstick. And he was very, very tired.

Coming up in a straight line, half the planet’s disk was night. Half the day side was hidden by the planet’s bulge. He actually saw no more than a quarter of the surface at this near approach, and that without magnification. Any large features would have been spotted from far away, but he had given up hope of any variation from monotony when—just as he was about to enter the atmosphere—one dark patch in the planet’s uniformly dazzling white surface appeared at the very edge of day. It was at the very border of the dawn belt. He could only be sure of its existence, and that it had sharp, specifically straight edges. He saw rectangular extensions from the main mass of it. Then he hit atmosphere, and the thin stuff thrust at him violently because of his velocity, and he blinked and automatically turned his head aside, so that he did not see the dark patch again before his descent put it below the horizon.