Earthbound (Winston Science Fiction Book 1) (3 page)

“Take it back!”

“I . . . I take it. . . back. . . .” Roger blubbered.

Shaking with rage, Pete stood up, and all the other cadets milled about and thumped his back and told him it was a fair fight which he had won. They did not understand at all when Garr told them to get out of the room, but one by one they left.

Roger scrambled up off the floor and wiped his face with a handkerchief. “You jumped me when my back was turned,” he mumbled, which wasn’t true at all. “You jumped me when my back was turned and you kicked me. I’m going to tell my father, and then we’ll see what the Chief Marshal thinks of a coward who jumps people from behind just because they try to be sympathetic. You haven’t heard the last of this, Hodges.”

Laughing, Garr pushed him out of the room and closed the door. Then he sobered. “It’s not so funny, Pete. His father has a lot of influence, he could cause a lot of trouble.”

Pete shrugged, fingering a bruise on his jaw. “So what? You forget that I’m already kicked out.”

“Yeah,” Garr said. “Yeah.”

Every night the Cadets became more boisterous. They sang the
Spaceman’s Chant
in town, sang it again on the athletic field, roared its chorus around great bonfires under the light of the moon. They sang it on their way to classes each morning as well, but a memo came through from the Marshal’s office, telling them that the lowerclassmen couldn’t do their work. On the same day — four days after his fight with Roger — Pete received another office-gram from the Marshal.

The gray-haired man was as impersonal as ever, but he did not look friendly. “Cadet Hodges,” he began at once, “have you made preparations for your departure?”

“‘Yes, sir. I have. I leave tomorrow morning, at seven hundred.”

“Very well. But until that time, you are to remember this, Cadet Hodges: you are still a Cadet. You will remain a Cadet until you leave the Academy tomorrow, and I want you to behave like one.”

“Yes, sir.”

“‘Naturally, you know to what I have reference.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I do not.”

“Four days ago you made an unwarranted attack on Cadet Gorham, striking him from behind and . . .”

“It was not unwarranted, Sir. And I did not strike him from behind. If you wish, sir, you may ask any of the Cadets in my dormitory.”

The Marshal shook his head. “That would prove nothing. Gorham is unpopular; naturally, they would side with you. The point I am trying to make is this, Cadet Hodges: you merit a medical discharge. I would not like to find myself forced to change that . . . .”

“Forced, Sir?”

“Cadet Hodges! That is the second time you have interrupted me. The fact that you add a ‘sir’ to what you say doesn’t alter things. Forced by your behavior, I was about to say. Don’t misunderstand: we appreciate the gravity of the situation, we can sympathize with you.”

“Thank you, sir. But as you say, that doesn’t alter . . . .”

“Off the record, Hodges, I knew your father well. Ask him about Brian Mahoney sometime, won’t you? Together, Big Pete and I blasted open the path to the Jovian moons. We stood side by side on the bridge of the first ship that cut jets over Callisto. . . .”

Pete nodded eagerly. “He was a great captain, wasn’t he, sir?”

“The greatest, son! There was that time in Venusport, many years ago, it was, when we were a couple of kids fresh out of the Academy . . .”

The Marshal rambled on and on, completely off the record now, and friendly once more. Pete listened avidly; he could listen to tales of space all day long and far into the night. But he sensed a difference. Oh, he wanted to hear about his father and the wonderful things Big Pete had done, for Big Pete himself wasn’t prone to talk much. But all the glowing accounts of different places and alien things reminded Pete that he’d never rocket out to them himself. Someday, if he had the money, he might go as a tourist, but it wouldn’t be the same thing. He wouldn’t like it at all.

Garr was smiling secretively when Pete returned to their room. “Hiya, Little Pete,” he said.

“Little Pete? Only my dad, only Big Pete calls me that.”

“True,” Garr grinned broadly. “Very true — Little Pete.”

A big, broad-shouldered man came out from behind the door. He was tall, a head taller than Pete but with the same sensitive features and bright gray eyes. His hair was gray at the temples, but he walked with a firm, youthful stride, “Hello, Pete,” he said.

“Dad!”

Garr smiled. “I sent him a wire, Pete. I thought you might like to see him.”

“See him?” Pete cried, hardly aware of the words. “What do I want to see him for?” How could he face his father? How could he face Big Pete, who had dreamed of a son who would astrogate the first rocket to Neptune or to Pluto? His older brother, Jerry, had died trying to rescue a miner out in the asteroid belt, and it had been a long time before Big Pete had recovered from the shock. Now this — an earthbound son, and the proud roll call of spacemen would not again know the name Hodges.

“It’s been months, son,” Big Pete was saying. “I haven’t seen you since your last Christmas vacation. Umm-mm, yes, you’ve grown. You’ve —”

“Let me alone!” Pete said, turning away, “Garr, Garr — why’d you have to send for him? Don’t you see I can’t look him in the face? Don’t you see?”

And then Big Pete’s strong hands were on his shoulders, and for a moment he wanted to find his own strength from them. But he knew how it would be. Big Pete would be sorry for him, and so would his mother. All the neighbors in White Sands would feel the same way. They would drown him with sympathy. It couldn’t be that way, ever.

He tore himself loose, ran for the door without looking back. He heard his father pounding through the halls after him, but he ducked into a sink closet and waited until the footsteps faded away. He took an escalator down to ground level and set out for the highway.

One thing was clear. He must never see Garr again, nor Big Pete — nor anything else that would remind him of what could have been. But he had to watch the space-liners. He couldn’t live without watching.

Three jet-cars streaked by before an old, obsolete gasoline truck stopped for him. “How far you going?” the driver demanded as Pete climbed into the cab.

“All the way,” Pete told him.

The man looked at his tunic. “You a Cadet?”

Wordless, Pete ripped the epaulets from his shoulders, removed the shining buttons from his tunic. He threw them out the window as the truck rolled off down the highway and said, “No. No, I’m not a Cadet. It was just part of a masquerade, Mister.”

Chapter 3 — Carnival of the Worlds

Once every ten years, White Sands became more than a sprawling Spaceport city. Millions of dollars were spent and millions of people amused, while White Sands took on a carnival atmosphere. Games and customs and artifacts were gathered from all the habitable worlds of the Solar System. The ultimate development of the mid-twentieth century State Fair could be seen in this, but it was a State Fair a hundred times over.

And now, during Carnival year, Pete’s wanderings brought him to White Sands. He got a job collecting tickets at the Exhibition of Interplanetary Flight, and after hours he lost himself completely in the glittering, make-believe worlds of the Carnival. He had left the Academy a month ago, hitch-hiking from town to town until, hardly realizing it, he had covered the thousand miles to White Sands. He never would have done that out of direct choice: White Sands was his home city, someone he knew might discover him. Still, the cheerful, raucous atmosphere of the Carnival dimmed his painful memories, and Pete was not sorry he had come to the Spaceport city.

After working hours one night he walked along the Midway and took in the sights like any gawking tourist. Here was the pleasure-dome of Phobos — and, in truth, such a dome had been built on the tiny Martian moon; over there were the Venusian Botanical Gardens, featuring the huge, multicolored orchids which had fared so well in the hothouse climate of Venus; and there, quaint tools and pottery of a long-vanished Martian civilization, now gone into decadence.

Anything and everything — and Pete liked it all, for it could make him forget.

Pete first thought he was being followed when he passed the Dome of Asteroid Mineralogy. It was nothing more than a hunch, but the same bright cap bobbed up and down in the crowd behind him. He walked faster, and his heart began to thump wildly. Had someone discovered him? A White Sands neighbor, perhaps? He started running, and people looked at him queerly.

He paused to catch his breath outside the Venusian Aquashow, turning halfway around to look at the crowd. There it was again — the checkered cap!

He ducked through the crowd, breathless now, until he found himself in the shadows behind the Dome of Interplanetary Oddities. Dimly, he could hear the hawker’s chanting cry. “Come in! Come in! For only a slim quarter — one slim quarter with nothing more to pay on the inside — you’ll see all the Oddities of the six inhabited worlds. Items to tickle your fancy from the four Jovian moons, from Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Europa — heart-stopping puzzlers from the sands of ancient Mars — exotic items from the steaming water-world of Venus! Come in, come in — it’s only a slim quarter, with nothing more to pay. . . .”

A figure flitted in and out through the shadows. It was too dark to see the checkered cap, but Pete knew the man would be wearing it.

“All right,” Pete called through the darkness. “‘I know you’re following me. What do you want?” He hoped his voice didn’t sound all choked up, but he was scared.

The voice which answered him was thin and reedy, and almost impossibly nasal. “I wondered when you’d stop and let me have a word with you, sonny! That’s all I wanted, a word with you.”

Pete nodded, then realized the motion would be lost in darkness. “I’m listening,” he said.

The nasal voice laughed. “You’d be Peter Hodges.”

Pete felt as if his heart had bobbed up into his throat and was stuck there. How did the man know? How did he know, and more important, who was he? “I’m Pete Wilson,” Pete said. That was the name he had used as a ticket collector, the name he had given his landlady at the boarding house.

“Sonny,” the nasal voice insisted, “if it wasn’t Peter Hodges, I never would have followed you. Like I said, you’re Hodges.”

“What do you want?” Pete knew he could run away, but the man had seen him once and might be able to find him again.

“I was reading this newspaper,” the voice told him, “and I saw your picture. Two, three hours later I spotted you at that ticket window. There’s a reward out for you, sonny: your father will pay five hundred bucks to whoever finds you.”

Pete backed away, ready to run, but the voice went on:

“Wait a minute! Let me talk, huh? If I wanted that reward, I could have visited your father and told him to look for you at the ticket window. I don’t want the money. That was a bad break sonny, getting kicked out of the Cadets right before graduation.”

“How — how did you know?”

“It’s in the papers. It’s all in the papers. How you hit this guy and then ran away, how they decided to give you a dishonorable discharge instead of a medical one on account of you couldn’t stay and face the music. It’s all here, sonny.”

Pete moved toward the shadowy figure. “Let me see that!”

One of those new permanent matches flared and then flared again, giving a steady glow on its second try. Pete caught a brief glimpse of a craggy, gaunt face, but then he forgot all about it. He was looking at one of the middle pages of a newspaper, the
White Sands Herald
. The headline wavered in the flickering light, but he could just make it out: WHITE SANDS YOUTH STILL MISSING; EX-CADET AT LARGE FOUR WEEKS.

Pete squinted, could not make out the rest of it in the dim light; and soon after that his unknown companion snuffed the match.

“Here, sonny,” he said. “You can take the paper with you. Read it later, read it any time you want. Go ahead.” And Pete felt the newspaper thrust into his hand.

He folded it, tucked it under his arm, then said, “You still haven’t told me what you wanted, Mr. —”

“Call me Gus. Ganymede Gus. Listen, sonny, they gave you a raw deal, and you’d be the last one to say otherwise. Ain’t that right?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, okay! How would you like to get back at them?”

“I haven’t thought about it one way or the other, but I have nothing against the Cadets.”

“Forget it. How would you like to make a lot of money, maybe twice as much as you would have made out in space?”

“I don’t know,” Pete said. “What would I do with it?”

“Well, keep that in mind. How would you like to spend your time around spacemen who can tell you all about the far worlds?”

Pete answered that one at once. “Oh, I’d like that!”

Ganymede Gus chuckled softly. “Good. You’ll find an address on the margin of that newspaper, sonny. I’ll be there, any time tomorrow morning. Why don’t you read the article — got a nice picture of you, too — get a good night’s sleep, then drop in and see old Gus? I’ll be waiting, sonny.”

And before Pete could answer, the shadowy figure faded away into the night. Pete ran around to the front of the Dome of Interplanetary Oddities, where the Midway lights glared down brilliantly. But Ganymede Gus had disappeared completely.

Back in his small room, Pete spread the newspaper out on his bed and read it thoughtfully. The article went into considerable detail, telling how Big Pete had offered five hundred dollars for information leading to the whereabouts of his son. Pete frowned. Five hundred dollars, that was a lot of money. Big Pete wanted him desperately, Pete knew, and for a moment he wondered. He could go home, it would be so easy. His folks lived in a little White Sands suburb, not five miles away. Still . . .

No! The balance of the newspaper article changed his mind. Roger Gorham had concocted a whole series of lies, all showing how Pete had been disgruntled, unhappy, unfit for Cadet life, and their denial by an obscure Cadet named Garr MacDougal did not convince the authorities. Further, Pete’s discharge still hung in the balance — medical or dishonorable.