Earthbound (Winston Science Fiction Book 1) (4 page)

He had done nothing dishonorable, and resentment welled up within him. It increased when he read about the graduation exercises at the Academy. In a matter of weeks the new junior Officers would be blasting off for the spacelanes, gay and carefree and devil-may-care in their snappy gray uniforms.

Pete shook his head stubbornly. He could never return home, never return to anything familiar. The sooner he settled on that idea the better off he would be. He noted Ganymede Gus’s address scrawled on the margin of page three, tucked it away in his memory and crumpled the paper, throwing it in the disposal chute. But he did not sleep well that night.

In the morning, he ate breakfast in a cafeteria just off the Midway, then walked idly into the Administration Building. There he checked the list of space-flights, marveling at the wonderful names of the ships.
Mars Queen
and
Sky Pilot
and
Starchaser
— each with its own particular, far-away kind of beauty. Pete snorted in disgust, told himself he was becoming incurably romantic, and started to leave Administration. But something else caught his eye on the way out, another poster on the far wall, and not knowing why, he found himself drawn to it.

Reaching it, he found half a dozen pictures of men wanted by the police, solidograms, in full color. Curious, he let his eyes rove over them, but suddenly his attention was riveted completely.

One of the solidograms pictured a man of about fifty, with a gaunt face, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes and sparse hair.
Gus Fletcher
, alias
Ganymede Gus
, wanted for. . . .

The words swam before his eyes. He found himself running outside, and he didn’t know what to do.

Ganymede Gus, the only person who knew Pete’s identity and his whereabouts, was wanted by the police!

Chapter 4 — Bargain with Ganymede Gus

The next few days Pete moved in a haze. Everything was unreal; everything had a dream quality. He wandered about aimlessly in the mornings or dropped into the library to do some reading. Afternoons and evenings he spent at his window, collecting tickets. The faces were white blobs, he never saw any of them clearly. After work he would wander some more, only half-aware of where he went or why. It could not go on this way, and he knew it. Something would happen, something had to happen. Meanwhile he lived in a world where nothing mattered but the tickets he collected and the food he ate.

Once he thought he’d been seen by a White Sands neighbor, and he lost himself in the Midway crowd. It could have been his imagination it probably was, but such a discovery was bound to come sooner or later. Unless he ran, and kept on running . . .

That same night he returned to his boarding house early, fed up with the sights along the Midway. It was all so phony — Mars this and Venus that and all the tourists came gawking. Pete wanted the real thing and could not get it, and the cheap carnival imitation only made him feel worse.

He pushed open the door to his room, slammed it shut. He flicked on the light panels, turned around. “Hello, sonny.”

“Ganymede Gus! How did you get here?”

“You didn’t keep your appointment with me, sonny. I waited. But you didn’t come.” Gus snickered.

Pete found something unwholesome about the man. The reedy sound his voice made, his slumped shoulders, the dissipated look on his face. But somehow his eyes did not fit. They were old eyes and tired eyes, but they seemed more at peace with the world than the rest of Ganymede Gus. “If you don’t get out of here,” Pete cried, “I’ll call the police.”

“Is that so?” The threat did not seem to bother Gus at all. “What for? What will you tell them? I just came on a friendly little visit, Sonny.”

“I saw the solidograms in the Administration Building.”

Ganymede Gus shrugged his thin shoulders. “So what? You know I’m wanted. That doesn’t mean you’re going to turn me in. Don’t jump before you think, sonny. It never pays off. You’re wanted, too.”

“The police don’t want —”

“Who said anything about the police? Your father wants you, doesn’t he? Would you like to go home?”

Pete shook his head.

“Okay. Then you’re not telling anyone I’m here, understand? It was easy to find you. I got your address from where you work; I told the landlady here I was your uncle.”

Pete didn’t sit down. “Just tell me what you want; then you get out of here. All right, I won’t call the police. But I can throw you out. Now talk!”

“Calm down, sonny. I just want to make a deal with you — wait, let me finish. We’re almost in the same boat, anyway. You want to go to space because you’ve always dreamed of what it would be like. I’ve been to space, and I . . .”

In spite of himself, Pete was interested. “You’ve been to space?”

“That’s what I said. Years ago, after the first couple of expeditions to the Jovian moons. That’s where I get my name. The Academy was a pretty new thing then, and if you had the guts you could go to space anyway. But they changed all that, you had to be an Academy graduate, and — bah! just because you wear a uniform an’ they taught you how to salute, that doesn’t mean you belong in space.”

“No,” Pete admitted, “it doesn’t. But there’s a lot of intensive training.”

“So what? The best training I ever knew was what you can get from experience. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. I said I have a proposition.”

“I’m listening,” Pete said, “but that doesn’t mean I’ll agree to it.”

“I work for a guy. You can work for him too. You’ll be working with men who go to space. . . .”

“Academy graduates?” Pete did not believe him, and said so.

“No! Who said other people don’t go to space, don’t put together their own ships with spit and string and fly ‘em despite injunctions? You got a lot to learn, sonny. Anyway, point is, you can be of help to our organization. We need an inside man, and you can got a job in the Spaceport. . . .”

“Doing what?”

Ganymede Gus shrugged eloquently. “We’re leaving that to you, sonny. You know your way around. We’ll need information on take-offs and schedules and things like that. No, don’t ask me what for. You just do your job, we’ll do ours.”

“Such as what?”

“Let me finish, sonny!”

Pete paced back and forth, then said, “You’re wasting your time, because the answer is no. Now, get out.”

“Temper, sonny. Temper —”

But Pete had had enough. He pulled Ganymede Gus to his feet and drew his face close. The ex-spaceman struggled, but Pete was lithe and strong, and shook him.

“That’s all!” he shouted angrily. “I don’t want any part of it. You can take your crooked schemes and — Get out! That’s all, just get out.”

He propelled Ganymede Gus to the door, opened it, pushed the man through. “Maybe I’ve sunk low,” Pete muttered. “But not that low. Next time I see you, Mister, I’m going to start swinging!”

Gus retreated and hustled down the stairs. Pete heard him laughing as he left, and all night he couldn’t get that laughter out of his ears.

They wanted an “inside” man, Gus had said, someone to keep track of the blast-offs from White Sands. That way, it would be easy for them, incredibly easy. Their own ship, armed to the teeth, would wait somewhere beyond the orbit of the moon, intercepting the commercial liners out in deep space and looting their cargoes while the crew watched helplessly.

On Earth during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, piracy had faded away until it virtually disappeared. The sea-lanes became heavy with traffic and all pirates could do was cling grimly in the remote regions of the planet, pouncing out briefly and plundering recklessly before they were caught. But space was different. Space was new, unknown — and vast. You might send the entire space-navy out after one battered pirate cruiser and never find it in the bleak, shoreless gulf between the planets.

And thus it was that the pirates prospered. They did not call themselves pirates any longer and they did not use the “Jolly Roger.” Even the term “hijacker” was obsolete, for piracy had become a refined profession. One ship plundered; another had a far rendezvous with it, took the cargo, altered it, and sold it on the frontier planets under the name of a legitimate trading organization. All very thorough — and deadly.

Savagely, Pete shook the thoughts from his mind. They might or they might not be pirates — he could be jumping to conclusions. But the safest course he could follow would be to keep away from Ganymede Gus.

In the days that followed, he found that all but impossible. Gus leered at him in his ticket window; Gus met him on the Midway; Gus was there in the cafeteria when he ate his meals.

“Hello, Pete!” and “You’re looking fine this morning, Pete,” and “Are you ready to do business yet, Pete?” Gus was everywhere.

More than once, it crossed Pete’s mind that he should report the man to the police. But Gus had warned him: Pete’s family would learn of his whereabouts if that happened, and Pete would have to face them with all his lost dreams.

A week after their meeting in Pete’s room, Gus sat down at his cafeteria table, getting down to cases at once. “I’ve had enough of your horsing around, son,” he said. “You’ll get that job — and you’ll get it soon.”

“I told you you’re wasting your time,” Pete declared, trying to keep his voice down.

“Think so? I don’t. Sonny, when you get to know me you’ll realize that’s one thing I never do, waste my time. Remember I said you won’t report me, because I’d tell your father if you did?”

“I remember.”

“Okay. If you don’t get that job, if you don’t play ball, I’ll also tell him. It’s no skin off my teeth, sonny. One reason’s as good as another. Now, do you play ball?”

“No!”

Ganymede Gus shrugged. “Your family lives on Wac Corporal Avenue, Number 2730. I’ll go there this afternoon, and . . .”

“Stop! Stop it! But I can’t help a bunch of pirates.”

Ganymede Gus shook his head in mock horror. “Pirates? The words you use, sonny. Who said anything about pirates?”

“What else could you be if you want information like that, except pirates?”

Gus lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling. “I represent a group of businessmen on the outworlds. We want to know when ships are blasting off so we can be first at the trading ports to receive them. That way, we’ll get goods at the lowest prices. There ain’t anything illegal about that, is there?”

“N-no,” Pete admitted doubtfully. “That isn’t illegal. But how do I know I can trust you?”

“You don’t, sonny. But you do know this: don’t play ball, and I talk. Right now, today. Well?”

Pete could picture his mother hovering over him sympathetically, watching the hurt look in his eyes. He could see Big Pete telling him — but not meaning it at all — that there were other things in life besides space travel. He would balk at every move. . .

“All right, Gus,” he said slowly. “I’ll get that job. I’ll do it for you. But if I find out it’s piracy, I’ll go to the police so fast —”

Ganymede Gus shook hands with him. “Don’t you worry your head about it, sonny. From now on you’re working for the best little trading organization in the Solar System.”

Pete nodded vaguely. Traders — or pirates?

Chapter 5 — At the Spaceport

“Five-fifteen-fifteen, Wilson!”

He must get used to his name — Wilson, that was his name. “Ready!”

“Fifteen-twenty!”

Five hours, fifteen minutes, twenty seconds. In another thirty seconds, sunrise. Or blast-off! For it was the same thing when you calculated orbits for an outbound ship. At sunrise a spaceship would add its own speed to Earth’s orbital velocity of eighteen and a half miles per second. In other words, the ship, going too fast to be maintained in Earth’s orbit by the sun, would drift out in space toward Mars, or the asteroids, or the Jovian moons. After that, it was up to the ship’s astrogator.

Blasting off for Venus, or for the outer planets when they were not in opposition, a ship followed the setting sun. Then it would subtract its own speed from Earth’s orbital velocity, and, moving too slowly to be held in place by the Earth’s gravity, it would drift in toward Venus or toward the sun and then beyond it.

“Fifteen-fifty, Wilson!”

Pete nodded, pressed his thumb down on the firing button. He heard an ear-shattering roar, ran quickly to the tower window to look outside. The Mars-bound freighter was rising slowly, majestically, on a growing pillar of flame. In seven seconds he had to crane his neck upward to see it, and soon all his eyes could follow was the streak of fire. An instant later, the ship disappeared.

“You really like to watch those ships go, don’t you, Wilson?”

“Yes sir, Captain Saunders.”

Smiling, the captain shook his head. “I can’t understand it, but then, I’m not complaining. Lord knows we need men like you here.”

“What can’t you understand, sir?” Pete had a pretty good idea what the man meant, but he asked his question anyway.

“Your knowledge of astrogation, Wilson. As if you’ve spent all your life on theory, and half of it on practice . . .”

Pete smiled. “It’s sort of been a hobby of mine, sir.”

“I’ll say! And the way you can map orbits in your head, without doing any paper work! Incredible.”

“Yes. At the Aca — uh, sometime ago, I was told that was unusual. Maybe it’s intuition and split-second reasoning instead of the accepted procedure. There are maybe a handful of men all over the planet who can do that, but . . .”

“I’ve heard of them,” Captain Saunders grinned. “But I’ve never been lucky enough to work with one, until you came along. Tell me, Wilson, do guys like you have to use radar?”

“Sure. Of course we use radar. Only we can interpret it directly in our heads. That saves a lot of time . . .”

“And,” Captain Saunders nodded enthusiastically, “it could also save lives. Wilson, when split-second decisions have to be made, I’d like to see you around to make them.”

By demonstrating that special ability, Pete had been hired quite readily at the Spaceport. White Sands always needed orbit men, for most of the good ones would become astrogators and leave for space. The result was that the Spaceports had to settle for overage astrogators who had lost some of their quick reflexes with the waning years. Yet paradoxically, the orbiteers were as important as the star-pilots themselves, for they had to plan the orbits, had to change them on a moment’s notice and then perhaps change them again, had to do the actual blasting-off. Yes, even that — and it never ceased to amaze Pete. Only the smallest ships blasted off on their own accord. All the larger ones began their great elliptical flights almost like guided missiles, fired into space by the orbiteers sitting in their tower.