Methuselah's Children Read online

  That settled it. The skipper called together his men from the announcing system microphone at the passenger lock; Lazarus counted them as they arrived-twenty-nine, a figure he had been careful to learn on his first visit. He assigned two men to hold each of them. Then he took a look at the man he had shot.

  "You aren't really hurt, bub," he decided shortly and turned to the skipper-engineer. "Soon as we transfer you, get some radiation salve on that burn. The Red Cross kit's on the after bulkhead of the control room."

  "This is piracy! You can't get away with this."

  "Probably not," Lazarus agreed thoughtfully. "But I sort of hope we do." He turned his attention back to his job. "Shake it up there! Don't take all day."

  The Chili was slowly being emptied. Only the one exit could be used but the pressure of the half hysterical mob behind them forced along those in the bottleneck of the trunk joining the two ships; they came boiling out like bees from a disturbed hive.

  Most of them had never been in free fall before this trip; they burst out into the larger space of the giant ship and drifted helplessly, completely disoriented. Lazarus tried to bring order into it by grabbing anyone he could see who seemed to be able to handle himself in zero gravity, ordered him to speed things up by shoving along the helpless ones-shove them anywhere, on back into the big ship, get them out of the way, make room for the thousands more yet to come. When he had conscripted a dozen or so such herdsmen he spotted Barstow in the emerging throng, grabbed him and put him in charge. "Keep 'em moving, just anyhow. I've got to get for'ard to the control room. If you spot Andy Libby, send him after me."

  A man broke loose from the stream and approached Barstow. "There's a ship trying to lock onto ours. I saw it through a port."

  "Where?" demanded Lazarus.

  The man was handicapped by slight knowledge of ships and shipboard terms, but he managed to make himself understood. "I'll be back," Lazarus told Barstow. "Keep 'em moving-and don't let any of those babies get away-our guests there." He holstered his blaster and fought his way back through the swirling mob in the bottleneck.

  Number three port seemed to be the one the man had meant. Yes, there was something there. The port had an armor-glass bull's-eye in it, but instead of stars beyond Lazarus saw a lighted space. A ship of some sort had locked against it.

  Its occupants either had not tried to open the Chili's port or just possibly did not know how. The port was not locked from the inside; there had been no reason to bother. It should have opened easily from either side once pressure was balanced . . . which the tell-tale, shining green by the latch, showed to be the case. Lazarus was mystified.

  Whether it was a traffic control vessel, a Naval craft, or something else, its presence was bad news. But why didn't they simply open the door and walk in? He was tempted to lock the port from the inside, hurry and lock all the others, finish loading and try to run for it.

  But his monkey ancestry got the better of him; he could not leave alone something he did not understand. So he compromised by kicking the blind latch into place that would keep them from opening the port from outside, then slithered cautiously alongside the bull's-eye and sneaked a peep with one eye.

  He found himself staring at Slayton Ford.

  He pulled himself to one side, kicked the blind latch open, pressed the switch to open the port. He waited there, a toe caught in a handihold, blaster in one hand, knife in the other.

  One figure emerged. Lazarus saw that it was Ford, pressed the switch again to close the port, kicked the blind latch into place, while never taking his blaster off his visitor. "Now what the hell?" he demanded. "What are you doing here? And who else is here? Patrol?"

  "I'm alone."

  "Huh?"

  "I want to go with you . . . if you'll have me."

  Lazarus looked at him and did not answer. Then he went back to the bull's-eye and inspected all that he could see. Ford appeared to be telling the truth, for no one else was in sight. But that was not what held Lazarus' eye.

  Why, the ship wasn't a proper deep-space craft at all. It did not have an airlock but merely a seal to let it fasten to a larger ship; Lazarus was staring right into the body of the craft. It looked like-yes, it was a "Joyboat Junior," a little private strato-yacht, suitable only for point-to-point trajectory, or at the most for rendezvous with a satellite provided the satellite could refuel it for the return leg.

  There was no fuel for it here. A lightning pilot possibly could land that tin toy without power and still walk away from it . . . provided he had the skill to play Skip-to-M'Lou in and out of the atmosphere while nursing his skin temperatures-but Lazarus wouldn't want to try it. No, sir! He turned to Ford. "Suppose we turned you down. How did you figure on getting back?"

  "I didn't figure on it," Ford answered simply.

  "Mmm- Tell me about it, but make it march; we're minus on minutes."

  Ford had burned all bridges. Turned out of office only hours earlier, he had known that, once all the facts came out, life-long imprisonment in Coventry was the best he could hope for-if he managed to avoid mob violence or mind-shattering interrogation.

  Arranging the diversion was the thing that finally lost him his thin margin of control. His explanations for his actions were not convincing to the Council. He had excused the storm and the withdrawing of proctors from the reservation as a drastic attempt to break the morale of the Families-a possible excuse but not too plausible. His orders to Naval craft, intended to keep them away from the New Frontiers, had apparently not been associated in anyone's mind with the Howard Families affair; nevertheless the apparent lack of sound reason behind them had been seized on by the opposition as another weapon to bring him down. They were watching for anything to catch him out-one question asked in Council concerned certain monies from the Administrator's discretionary fund which had been paid indirectly to one Captain Aaron Sheffield; were these monies in fact expended in the public interest?

  Lazarus' eyes widened. "You mean they were onto me?"

  "Not quite. Or you wouldn't be here. But they were close behind you. I think they must have had help from a lot of my people at the last."

  "Probably. But we made it, so let's not fret. Come on. The minute everybody is out of this ship and into the big girl, we've got to boost." Lazarus turned to leave.

  "You're going to let me go along?"

  Lazarus checked his progress, twisted to face Ford. "How else?" He had intended at first to send Ford down in the Chili. It was not gratitude that changed his mind, but respect. Once he had lost office Ford had gone straight to Huxley Field north of Novak Tower, cleared for the vacation satellite Monte Carlo, and had jumped for the New Frontiers instead. Lazarus liked that. "Go for broke" took courage and character that most people didn't have. Don't grab a toothbrush, don't wind the cat-just do it! "Of course you're coming along," he said easily. "You're my kind of boy, Slayton."

  The Chili more than half emptied now but the spaces near the interchange were still jammed with frantic mobs. Lazarus cuffed and shoved his way through, trying not to bruise women and children unnecessarily but not letting the possibility slow him up. He scrambled through the connecting trunk with Ford hanging onto his belt, pulled aside once they were through and paused in front of Barstow.

  Barstow stared past him. "Yeah, it's him," Lazarus confirmed. "Don't stare-it's rude. He's going with us. Have you seen Libby?"

  "Here I am, Lazarus." Libby separated himself from the throng and approached with the ease of a veteran long used to free fall. He had a small satchel strapped to one wrist.

  "Good. Stick around. Zack, how long till you're all loaded?"

  "God knows. I can't count them. An hour, maybe."

  "Make it less. If you put some husky boys on each side of the hole, they can snatch them through faster than they are coming. We've got to shove out of here a little sooner than is humanly possible. I'm going to the control room. Phone me there the instant you have everybody in, our guests here out, and the Chili broken
loose. Andy! Slayton! Let's go."

  "Lazarus-"

  "Later, Andy. We'll talk when we get there."

  Lazarus took Slayton Ford with him because he did not know what else to do with him and felt it would be better to keep him out of sight until some plausible excuse could be dreamed up for having him along. So far no one seemed to have looked at him twice, but once they quieted down, Ford's well-known face would demand explanation.

  The control room was about a half mile forward of where they had entered the ship. Lazarus knew that there was a passenger belt leading to it but he didn't have time to look for it; he simply took the first passageway leading forward. As soon as they got away from the crowd they made good time even though Ford was not as skilled in the fishlike maneuvers of free fall as were the other two.

  Once there, Lazarus spent the enforced wait in explaining to Libby the extremely ingenious but unorthodox controls of the star ship. Libby was fascinated and soon was putting himself through dummy runs. Lazarus turned to Ford. "How about you, Slayton? Wouldn't hurt to have a second relief pilot."

  Ford shook his head. "I've been listening but I could never learn it. I'm not a pilot."

  "Huh? How did you get here?"

  "Oh. I do have a license, but I haven't had time to keep in practice. My chauffeur always pilots me. I haven't figured a trajectory in many years."

  Lazarus looked him over. "And yet you plotted an orbit rendezvous? With no reserve fuel?"

  "Oh, that. I had to."

  "I see. The way the cat learned to swim. Well, that's one way." He turned back to speak to Libby, was interrupted by Barstow's voice over the announcing system:

  "Five minutes, Lazarus! Acknowledge."

  Lazarus found the microphone, covered the light under it with his hand and answered, "Okay, Zack! Five minutes." Then he said, "Cripes, I haven't even picked a course. What do you think, Andy? Straight out from Earth to shake the busies off our tail? Then pick a destination? How about it, Slayton? Does that fit with what you ordered Navy craft to do?"

  "No, Lazarus, no!" protested Libby.

  "Huh? Why not?"

  "You should head right straight down for the Sun."

  "For the Sun? For Pete's sake, why?"

  "I tried to tell you when I first saw you. It's because of the space drive you asked me to develop."

  "But, Andy, we haven't got it."

  "Yes, we have. Here." Libby shoved the satchel he had been carrying toward Lazarus. Lazarus opened it. Assembled from odd bits of other equipment, looking more like the product of a boy's workshop than the output of a scientist's laboratory, the gadget which Libby referred to as a "space drive" underwent Lazarus' critical examination. Against the polished sophisticated perfection of the control room it looked uncouth, pathetic, ridiculously inadequate.

  Lazarus poked at it tentatively. "What is it?" he asked. "Your model?"

  "No, no. That's it. That's the space drive."

  Lazarus looked at the younger man not unsympathetically. "Son," he asked slowly, "have you come unzipped?"

  "No, no, no!" Libby sputtered. "I'm as sane as you are. This is a radically new notion. That's why I want you to take us down near the Sun. If it works at all, it will work best where light pressure is strongest."

  "And if it doesn't work," inquired Lazarus, "what does that make us? Sunspots?"

  "Not straight down into the Sun. But head for it now and as soon as I can work out the data, I'll give you corrections to warp you into your proper trajectory. I want to pass the Sun in a very flat hyperbola, well inside the orbit of Mercury, as close to the photosphere as this ship can stand. I don't know how close that is, so I couldn't work it out ahead of time. But the data will be here in the ship and there will be time to correlate them as we go."

  Lazarus looked again at the giddy little cat's cradle of apparatus. "Andy . . . if you are sure that the gears in your head are still meshed, I'll take a chance. Strap down, both of you." He belted himself into the pilot's couch and called Barstow. "How about it, Zack?"

  "Right now!"

  "Hang on tight!" With one hand Lazarus covered a light in his leftside control panel; acceleration warning shrieked throughout the ship. With the other he covered another; the hemisphere in front of them was suddenly spangled with the starry firmament, and Ford gasped.

  Lazarus studied it. A full twenty degrees of it was blanked out by the dark circle of the nightside of Earth. "Got to duck around a corner, Andy. We'll use a little Tennessee windage." He started easily with a quarter gravity, just enough to shake up his passengers and make them cautious, while he started a slow operation of precessing the enormous ship to the direction he needed to shove her in order to get out of Earth's shadow. He raised acceleration to a half gee, then to a gee.

  Earth changed suddenly from a black silhouette to a slender silver crescent as the half-degree white disc of the Sun came out from behind her. "I want to clip her about a thousand miles out, Slipstick," Lazarus said tensely, "at two gees. Gimme a temporary vector."

  Libby hesitated only momentarily and gave it to him. Lazarus again sounded acceleration warning and boosted to twice Earth-normal gravity. Lazarus was tempted to raise the boost to emergency-full but he dared not do so with a shipload of groundlubbers; even two gees sustained for a long period might be too much of a strain for some of them. Any Naval pursuit craft ordered to intercept them could boost at much higher gee and their selected crews could stand it. But it was just a chance they would have to take . . . and anyhow, he reminded himself, a Navy ship could not maintain a high boost for long; her mile-seconds were strictly limited by her reaction-mass tanks.

  The New Frontiers had no such old-fashioned limits, no tanks; her converter accepted any mass at all, turned it into pure radiant energy. Anything would serve-meteors, cosmic dust, stray atoms gathered in by her sweep field, or anything from the ship herself, such as garbage, dead bodies, deck sweepings, anything at all. Mass was energy. In dying, each tortured gram gave up nine hundred million trillion ergs of thrust.

  The crescent of Earth waxed and swelled and slid off toward the left edge of the hemispherical screen while the Sun remained dead ahead. A little more than twenty minutes later, when they were at closest approach and the crescent, now at half phase, was sliding out of the bowl screen, the ship-to-ship circuit came to life. "New Frontiers!" a forceful voice sounded. "Maneuver to orbit and lay to! This is an official traffic control order."

  Lazarus shut it off. "Anyhow," he said cheerfully, "if they try to catch us, they won't like chasing us down into the Sun! Andy, it's a clear road now and time we corrected, maybe. You want to compute it? Or will you feed me the data?"

  "I'll compute it," Libby answered. He had already discovered that the ship's characteristics pertinent to astrogation, including her "black body" behavior, were available at both piloting stations. Armed with this and with the running data from instruments he set out to calculate the hyperboloid by which he intended to pass the Sun. He made a half-hearted attempt to use the ship's ballistic calculator but it baffled him; it was a design he was not used to, having no moving parts of any sort, even in the exterior controls. So he gave it up as a waste of time and fell back on the strange talent for figures lodged in his brain. His brain had no moving parts, either, but he was used to it.

  Lazarus decided to check on their popularity rating. He switched on the ship-to-ship again, found that it was still angrily squawking, although a little more faintly. They knew his own name now-one of his names-which caused him to decide that the boys in the Chili must have called traffic control almost at once. He tut-tutted sadly when he learned that "Captain Sheffield's" license to pilot had been suspended. He shut it off and tried the Naval frequencies . . . then shut them off also when he was able to raise nothing but code and scramble, except that the words "New Frontiers" came through once in clear.

  He said something about "Sticks and stones may break my bones-" and tried another line of investigation. Both by long-range radar and by
paragravitic detector he could tell that there were ships in their neighborhood but this alone told him very little; there were bound to be ships this close to Earth and he had no easy way to distinguish, from these data alone, an unarmed liner or freighter about her lawful occasions from a Naval cruiser in angry pursuit.

  But the New Frontiers had more resources for analyzing what was around her than had an ordinary ship; she had been specially equipped to cope unassisted with any imaginable strange conditions. The hemispherical control room in which they lay was an enormous multi-screened television receiver which could duplicate the starry heavens either in view-aft or view-forward at the selection of the pilot. But it also had other circuits, much more subtle; simultaneously or separately it could act as an enormous radar screen as well, displaying on it the blips of any body within radar range.

  But that was just a starter. Its inhuman senses could apply differential analysis to doppler data and display the result in a visual analog. Lazarus studied his lefthand control bank, tried to remember everything he had been told about it, made a change in the set up.

  The simulated stars and even the Sun faded to dimness; about a dozen lights shined brightly.

  He ordered the board to check them for angular rate; the bright lights turned cherry red, became little comets trailing off to pink tails-all but one, which remained white and grew no tail. He studied the others for a moment, decided that their vectors were such that they would remain forever strangers, and ordered the board to check the line-of-sight doppler on the one with a steady bearing.

  It faded to violet, ran halfway through the spectrum and held steady at blue-green. Lazarus thought a moment, subtracted from the inquiry their own two gees of boost; it turned white again. Satisfied he tried the same tests with view-aft.

  "Lazarus-"

  "Yeah, Lib?"

  "Will it interfere with what you are doing if I give you the corrections now?"