Between Planets Read online

  “Yes. Yes, that’s right.”

  “Good!” Jack glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to run—or they’ll throw my chow to the pigs. Sure you’re not coming?”

  “Sure.”

  “See you.” He dashed out.

  Don stood for a moment, rearranging his ideas. Old Jack must be taking this seriously—giving up Yale for pilot training. But he was wrong—he had to be wrong.

  Presently he went out to the corral.

  Lazy answered his call, then started searching his pockets for sugar. “Sorry, old fellow,” he said sadly, “not even a carrot. I forgot.” He stood with his face to the horse’s cheek and scratched the beast’s ears. He talked to it in low tones, explaining as carefully as if Lazy could understand all the difficult words.

  “So that’s how it is,” he concluded. “I’ve got to go away and they won’t let me take you with me.” He thought back to the day their association had begun. Lazy had been hardly more than a colt, but Don had been frightened of him. He seemed huge, dangerous, and probably carnivorous. He had never seen a horse before coming to Earth; Lazy was the first he had ever seen close up.

  Suddenly he choked, could talk no further. He flung his arms around the horse’s neck and leaked tears.

  Lazy nickered softly, knowing that something was wrong, and tried to nuzzle him. Don raised his head. “Goodbye, boy. Take care of yourself.” He turned abruptly and ran toward the dormitories.

  II

  “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin”

  DANIEL V:25

  THE SCHOOL copter dumped him down at the Albuquerque field. He had to hurry to catch his rocket as traffic control had required them to swing wide around Sandia Weapons Center. When he weighed in he ran into another new security wrinkle. “Got a camera in that stuff, son?” the weighmaster had inquired as he passed over his bags.

  “No. Why?”

  “Because we’ll fog your film when we fluoroscope, that’s why.” Apparently X-ray failed to show any bombs hidden in his underwear; his bags were handed back and he went aboard—the winged-rocket Santa Fé Trail, shuttling between the Southwest and New Chicago. Inside, he fastened his safety belts, snuggled down into the cushions, and waited.

  At first the noise of the blast-off bothered him more than the pressure. But the noise dopplered away as they passed the speed of sound while the acceleration grew worse; he blacked out.

  He came to as the ship went into free flight, arching in a high parabola over the plains. At once he felt great relief no longer to have unbearable weight racking his rib cage, straining his heart, turning his muscles to water—but, before he could enjoy the blessed relief, he was aware of a new sensation; his stomach was trying to crawl up his gullet.

  At first he was alarmed, being unable to account for the unexpected and unbearably unpleasant sensation. Then he had a sudden wild suspicion—could it? Oh, no! It couldn’t be…not space sickness, not to him. Why, he had been born in free fall; space nausea was for Earth crawlers, groundhogs!

  But the suspicion grew to certainty; years of easy living on a planet had worn out his immunity. With secret embarrassment he conceded that he certainly was acting like a groundhog. It had not occurred to him to ask for an anti-nausea shot before blast-off, though he had walked past the counter plainly marked with a red cross.

  Shortly his secret embarrassment became public; he had barely time to get at the plastic container provided for the purpose. Thereafter he felt better, although weak, and listened half-heartedly to the canned description coming out of the loudspeaker of the country over which they were falling. Presently, near Kansas City, the sky turned from black back to purple again, the air foils took hold, and the passengers again felt weight as the rocket continued glider fashion on a long, screaming approach to New Chicago. Don folded his couch into a chair and sat up.

  Twenty minutes later, as the field came up to meet them, rocket units in the nose were triggered by radar and the Santa Fé Trail braked to a landing. The entire trip had taken less time than the copter jaunt from the school to Albuquerque—something less than an hour for the same route eastward that the covered wagons had made westward in eighty days, with luck. The local rocket landed on a field just outside the city, next door to the enormous field, still slightly radioactive, which was both the main spaceport of the planet and the former site of Old Chicago.

  Don hung back and let a Navajo family disembark ahead of him, then followed the squaw out. A movable slideway had crawled out to the ship; he stepped on it and let it carry him into the station. Once inside he was confused by the bustling size of the place, level after level, above and below ground. Gary Station served not merely the Santa Fé Trail, the Route 66, and other local rockets shuttling to the Southwest; it served a dozen other local lines, as well as ocean hoppers, freight tubes, and space ships operating between Earth and Circum-Terra Station—and thence to Luna, Venus, Mars, and the Jovian moons; it was the spinal cord of a more-than-world-wide empire.

  Tuned as he was to the wide and empty New Mexico desert and, before that, to the wider wastes of space, Don felt oppressed and irritated by the noisy swarming mass. He felt the loss of dignity that comes from men behaving like ants, even though his feeling was not thought out in words. Still, it had to be faced—he spotted the triple globes of Interplanet Lines and followed glowing arrows to its reservation office.

  An uninterested clerk assured him that the office had no record of his reservation in the Valkyrie. Patiently Don explained that the reservation had been made from Mars and displayed the radiogram from his parents. Annoyed into activity the clerk finally consented to phone Circum-Terra; the satellite station confirmed the reservation. The clerk signed off and turned back to Don. “Okay, you can pay for it here.”

  Don had a sinking feeling. “I thought it was already paid for?” He had on him his father’s letter-of-credit but it was not enough to cover passage to Mars.

  “Huh? They didn’t say anything about it being prepaid.”

  At Don’s insistence the clerk again phoned the space station. Yes, the passage was prepaid since it had been placed from the other end; didn’t the clerk know his tariff book? Thwarted on all sides, the clerk grudgingly issued Don a ticket to couch 64, Rocket Ship Glory Road, lifting from Earth for Circum-Terra at 9:03:57 the following morning. “Got your security clearance?”

  “Huh? What’s that?”

  The clerk appeared to gloat at what was a legitimate opportunity to decline to do business after all. He withdrew the ticket. “Don’t you bother to follow the news? Give me your ID.”

  Reluctantly Don passed over his identity card; the clerk stuck it in a stat machine and handed it back. “Now your thumb prints.”

  Don impressed them and said, “Is that all? Can I have my ticket?”

  “‘Is that all?’ he says. Be here about an hour early tomorrow morning. You can pick up your ticket then—provided the I.B.I. says you can.”

  The clerk turned away. Don, feeling forlorn, did likewise. He did not know quite what to do next. He had told Headmaster Reeves that he would stay overnight at the Hilton Caravansary, that being the hotel his family had stopped at years earlier and the only one he knew by name. On the other hand he had to attempt to locate Dr. Jefferson—“Uncle Dudley”—since his mother had made such a point of it. It was still early afternoon; he decided to check his bags and start looking.

  Bags disposed of, he found an empty communication booth and looked up the doctor’s code, punched it into the machine. The doctor’s phone regretted politely that Dr. Jefferson was not at home and requested him to leave a message. He was dictating it when a warm voice interrupted: “I’m at home to you, Donald. Where are you, lad?” The view screen cut in and he found himself looking at the somewhat familiar features of Dr. Dudley Jefferson.

  “Oh I’m at the station, Doctor—Gary Station. I just got in.”

  “Then grab a cab and come here at once.”

  “Uh, I don’t want to put you to any trouble, Do
ctor. I called because mother said to say goodbye to you.” Privately he had hoped that Dr. Jefferson would be too busy to waste time on him. Much as he disapproved of cities he did not want to spend his last night on Earth exchanging politeness with a family friend; he wanted to stir around and find out just what the modern Babylon did have to offer in the way of diversion. His letter-of-credit was burning a hole in his pocket; he wanted to bleed it a bit.

  “No trouble. See you in a few minutes. Meanwhile I’ll pick out a fatted calf and butcher it. By the way, did you receive a package from me?” The doctor looked suddenly intent.

  “A package? No.”

  Dr. Jefferson muttered something about the mail service. Don said, “Maybe it will catch up with me. Was it important?”

  “Uh, never mind; we’ll speak of it later. You left a forwarding address?”

  “Yes, sir—the Caravansary.”

  “Well whip up the horses and see how quickly you can get here. Open sky.”

  “And safe grounding, sir.” They both switched off. Don left the booth and looked around for a cab stand. The station seemed more jammed than ever, with uniforms much in evidence, not only those of pilots and other ship personnel but military uniforms of many corps—and always the ubiquitous security police. Don fought his way through the crowd, down a ramp, along a slidewalk tunnel, and finally found what he wanted. There was a queue waiting for cabs; he joined it.

  Beside the queue was sprawled the big, ungainly saurian form of a Venerian “dragon.” When Don progressed in line until he was beside it, he politely whistled a greeting.

  The dragon swiveled one fluttering eyestalk in his direction. Strapped to the “chest” of the creature, between its forelegs and immediately below and in reach of its handling tendrils, was a small box, a voder. The tendrils writhed over the keys and the Venerian answered him, via mechanical voder speech, rather than by whistling in his own language. “Greetings to you also, young sir. It is pleasant indeed, among strangers, to hear the sounds one heard in the egg.” Don noted with delight that the outlander had a distinctly Cockney accent in the use of his machine.

  He whistled his thanks and a hope that the dragon might die pleasantly.

  The Venerian thanked him, again with the voder, and added, “Charming as is your accent, will you do me the favor of using your own speech that I may practice it?”

  Don suspected that his modulation was so atrocious that the Venerian could hardly understand it; he lapsed at once into human words. “My name is Don Harvey,” he replied and whistled once more—but just to give his own Venerian name, “Mist on the Waters”; it had been selected by his mother and he saw nothing funny about it.

  Nor did the dragon. He whistled for the first time, naming himself, and added via voder, “I am called ‘Sir Isaac Newton.’” Don understood that the Venerian, in so tagging himself, was following the common dragon custom of borrowing as a name of convenience the name of some earth-human admired by the borrower.

  Don wanted to ask “Sir Isaac Newton” if by chance he knew Don’s mother’s family, but the queue was moving up and the dragon was lying still; he was forced to move along to keep from losing his place in line. The Venerian followed him with one oscillating eye and whistled that he hoped that Don, too, might die pleasantly.

  There was an interruption in the flow of autocabs to the stand; a man-operated flatbed truck drew up and let down a ramp. The dragon reared up on six sturdy legs and climbed aboard. Don whistled a farewell—and became suddenly and unpleasantly aware that a security policeman was giving him undivided attention. He was glad to crawl into his autocab and close the cover.

  He dialed the address and settled back. The little car lurched forward, climbed a ramp, threaded through a freight tunnel, and mounted an elevator. At first Don tried to keep track of where it was taking him but the tortured convolutions of the ant hill called “New Chicago” would have made a topologist dyspeptic; he gave up. The robot cab seemed to know where it was going and, no doubt, the master machine from which it received its signals knew. Don spent the rest of the trip fretting over the fact that his ticket had not yet been turned over to him, over the unwelcome attention of the security policeman, and, finally, about the package from Dr. Jefferson. The last did not worry him; it simply annoyed him to have mail go astray. He hoped that Mr. Reeves would realize that any mail not forwarded by this afternoon would have to follow him all the way to Mars.

  Then he thought about “Sir Isaac.” It was nice to run across somebody from home.

  Dr. Jefferson’s apartment turned out to be far underground in an expensive quarter of the city. Don almost failed to arrive; the cab had paused at the apartment door but when he tried to get out the door would not open. This reminded him that he must first pay the fare shown in the meter—only to discover that he had pulled the bumpkin trick of engaging a robot vehicle without having coins on him to feed the meter. He was sure that the little car, clever as it was, would not even deign to sniff at his letter-of-credit. He was expecting disconsolately to be carted by the machine off to the nearest police station when he was rescued by the appearance of Dr. Jefferson.

  The doctor gave him coins to pay the shot and ushered him in. “Think nothing of it, my boy; it happens to me about once a week. The local desk sergeant keeps a drawer full of hard money just to buy me out of hock from our mechanical masters. I pay him off once a quarter, cumshaw additional. Sit down. Sherry?”

  “Er, no, thank you, sir.”

  “Coffee, then. Cream and sugar at your elbow. What do you hear from your parents?”

  “Why, the usual things. Both well and working hard and all that.” Don looked around him as he spoke. The room was large, comfortable, even luxurious, although books spilling lavishly and untidily over shelves and tables and even chairs masked its true richness. What appeared to be a real fire burned in one corner. Through an open door he could see several more rooms. He made a high, and grossly inadequate, mental estimate of the cost of such an establishment in New Chicago.

  Facing them was a view window which should have looked into the bowels of the city; instead it reflected a mountain stream and fir trees. A trout broke water as he watched.

  “I’m sure they are working hard,” his host answered. “They always do. Your father is attempting to seek out, in one short lifetime, secrets that have been piling up for millions of years. Impossible—but he makes a good stab at it. Son, do you realize that when your father started his career we hadn’t even dreamed that the first system empire ever existed?” He added thoughtfully, “If it was the first.” He went on, “Now we have felt out the ruins on the floor of two oceans—and tied them in with records from four other planets. Of course your father didn’t do it all, or even most of it—but his work has been indispensable. Your father is a great man, Donald—and so is your mother. When I speak of either one I really mean the team. Help yourself to sandwiches.”

  Don said, “Thank you,” and did so, thereby avoiding a direct answer. He was warmly pleased to hear his parents praised but it did not seem to be quite the thing to agree heartily.

  But the doctor was capable of carrying on the conversation unassisted. “Of course we may never know all the answers. How was the noblest planet of them all, the home of empire, broken and dispersed into space junk? Your father spent four years in the Asteroid Belt—you were along, weren’t you?—and never found a firm answer to that. Was it a paired planet, like Earth-Luna, and broken up by tidal strains? Or was it blown up?”

  “Blown up?” Don protested. “But that’s theoretically impossible—isn’t it?”

  Dr. Jefferson brushed it aside. “Everything is theoretically impossible, until it’s done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen. Studied any mathematical philosophy, Don? Familiar with infinite universe sheafs and open-ended postulate systems?”

  “Uh, I’m afraid not, sir.”
/>   “Simple idea and very tempting. The notion that everything is possible and I mean everything—and everything has happened. Everything. One universe in which you accepted that wine and got drunk as a skunk. Another in which the fifth planet never broke up. Another in which atomic power and nuclear weapons are as impossible as our ancestors thought they were. That last one might have its points, for sissies at least. Like me.”

  He stood up. “Don’t eat too many sandwiches. I’m going to take you out to a restaurant where there will be food, among other things…and such food as Zeus promised the gods and failed to deliver.”

  “I don’t want to take up too much of your time, sir.” Don was still hoping to get out on the town by himself. He had a dismaying vision of dinner in some stuffy rich man’s club, followed by an evening of highfalutin talk. And it was his last night on Earth.

  “Time? What is time? Each hour ahead is as fresh as was the one we just used. You registered at the Caravansary?”

  “No, sir, I just checked my bags at the station.”

  “Good. You’ll stay here tonight; we’ll send for your luggage later.” Dr. Jefferson’s manner changed slightly. “But your mail was to be sent to the hotel?”

  “That’s right.”

  Don was surprised to see that Dr. Jefferson looked distinctly worried. “Well, we’ll check into that later. That package I sent to you—would it be forwarded promptly?”

  “I really don’t know, sir. Ordinarily the mail comes in twice a day. If it came in after I left, it would ordinarily wait over until morning. But if the headmaster thought about it, he might have it sent into town special so that I would get it before up-ship tomorrow morning.”

  “Mean to say there isn’t a tube into the school?”

  “No, sir, the cook brings in the morning mail when he shops and the afternoon mail is chuted in by the Roswell copter bus.”

  “A desert island! Well…we’ll check around midnight. If it hasn’t arrived then—never mind.” Nevertheless he seemed perturbed and hardly spoke during their ride to dinner.