Authors: Mike Jurist
"That Dale beat me again. But I don't mind it so much thinking of Jericho Foote's face when he hears this. Even in bed he's been gloating. He spent a hundred thousand on his blessed pirates; and all he got in exchange is a good caning."
The door slid open and Foote hobbled in. One arm was in a sling; his face was puffed and swollen; and he required a cane for support.
"Evidently Mr. Foote has already heard the good news," Kerry announced calmly. "I sent him a note as soon as I landed."
"You—you tricksters!" screamed Foote. "I'll have the law on all of you. My hundred thousand! My asteroid! My arm! You can't get away with this—"
Kerry stepped up to him. His voice was dangerous. "Careful what you say, you old Billy goat. You forget
I landed
on the asteroid. Your hirelings were so anxious to get back to you with their plunder that they left a bit of evidence behind. Something that belongs to you."
Foote shrank back in alarm. "It . . . it ain't so. They didn't dare . . . I mean, I don't know what you're talking about. Lemme see it!"
"You'll see it fast enough in court," Kerry assured him ominously. "On the very day, in fact, that your case against Mr. Kenton for assault and battery comes to trial."
Foote's face tried to wreathe itself into a smile and failed ignominiously. "Heh . . . heh! Maybe I was a bit hasty. After all, I'm willing to let bygones be bygones."
"You mean—you'll drop the action?"
"Well . . . that is . . . if—"
"If I don't produce my evidence. O. K. You sign a discontinuance and release, and I'll promise to keep what I've got out of public hands. But if at any time you—"
"I'll sign!" Foote croaked eagerly.
"I think," said Kerry, "Mr. Horn, as Mr. Kenton's attorney, is capable of drawing such a simple little document." Horn said pompously: "Young man, I—"
"Sit down and do it without palaver," rasped Simeon.
The lawyer sat down without another word. His pen made slow, dignified movements on a sheet of paper.
Foote snatched it tremblingly from him, and signed it without even reading the contents. "There!" he quavered. "Now how about that—"
"You have my word." Kerry's voice was awe-inspiring.
"Yes, of course; of course! Well, good day; good day to you all." And Foote hobbled out faster than he had come in.
Simeon cleared his throat. "Har-rumph, young man. I didn't want to interfere, but I think Foote belongs in jail. If your evidence—"
Kerry grinned. "Evidence? Do you think I'd have bargained to withhold evidence of a felony if I had any? I'm a lawyer, sir. I don't compound felonies."
"Then . . . then . . ."
"Not a scrap did I find. Sheer bluff, sir. And a guilty conscience on the part of the estimable Foote."
"Well, I'll be didgosted!"
Kerry bowed. "There's a bit on my conscience, too. After all,
I did
do you out of a valuable asteroid."
"Don't mention it, son. I'll do the same for you some day. No man ever got the final best of Simeon Kenton yet."
"Here's hoping. But in the meantime I still have my conscience." His glance rested on Sally. "If Miss Kenton could be induced to help me spend some of my ill-gotten gains in town this evening, I'd feel I'd made some reparation."
"Being my father's daughter," murmured Sally, "I accept."
CHAPTER 8
KERRY DALE was a most unhappy young man. Sally Kenton had just turned him down. Well, if not exactly refused his proposal of marriage, she had hedged her response about with such provisos and conditions that he was certain could never be surmounted.
He had chosen the time and place of his offer with the greatest care. No more romantic spot could be found in the entire System than the Pleasure Dome in which they were presently ensconced. Three hundred miles above the surface of the Earth, the great trans Lucite hemisphere swung in a counter-clockwise orbit around the parent globe at a speed that matched exactly the opposite rotation of the Earth. As a result, the artificial satellite sped forever within the shadow of the planet at the exact moment of midnight.
Above, through the lofty lucent dome, space was a gigantic black backdrop in which stars and constellations burned like festive torches. Beneath, through the equally transparent floor, the vast orb of Earth glimmered in pale moonshine, the dark blues of ocean alternating slowly with the lighter green of cultivated fields, the ochre’s of deserts and the sudden glow of night-time cities.
The Interplanetary Commission had not intended to emulate the legendary Kublai Khan in decreeing a stately Pleasure Dome of space. Its purposes had been far more prosaic. The artificial satellite had been originally constructed as an astronomical outpost, free of the distortions of blanketing atmosphere, and capable of twenty-four hours an Earth-day observation of practically every sector of space.
But the Commission had reckoned without the imaginative genius of the mighty Simeon Kenton. Or perhaps it was his daughter, the decorative Sally Kenton, now sitting at a table opposite the unhappy Kerry Dale, who first suggested the idea.
In any event, old Simeon bad broached his plan to the five-man Commission whose jurisdiction extended over the entire Solar System.
"Give me the concession of that doodad satellite you've got," he said, "and I'll pay you a million a year in rental."
"But our idea was to make it a space observatory, Mr. Kenton," protested Charles Melville, chairman of the Commission; "not an . . . er . . . commercial venture."
"Pure rot and didgosted fuddlement, Charlie," yelled old Simeon, his deceptive halo of wispy hair and wispier chin whiskers bristling with electricity. "Who said you can't have your telescopes and spectroscopes and radioscopes and all your blessed thingumbobs? They're already installed, ain’t they? An' look't all the floor space going to waste!" He shook his finger at the startled chairman. "You could have housed your instruments and quarters in an observatory five hundred yards in diameter at a cost of five to eight million. Instead you built a mile-wide affair, and it stood the people fifty million. Harrumph! I'm doing you a favor getting you out from under."
The five men looked hastily at one another. There had already been veiled hints and grumblings on some of the more popular telecasts. How were they to know that Simeon Kenton had skilfully planted the scripts before he came to them with his proposition?
Melville cleared his throat. "And suppose we don't accede to your
idea, Kenton?"
The finger moved closer to his nose. "Then I'll blast this thing wide open," shouted old Simeon. "I'll take it to the courts; I'll drag it up and down the whole ringtoaded System. I la I Har-rumph! Think o' the headlines!
Kellogg's Folly! Interplanetary Commission Prefers Taxing Plain Folk to Making Money on Mistake!"
The Commission thought of the headlines. They thought of their previous encounters with this angelic old man. Five heads converged with a mutter of whispers. Five heads separated; one of
them, slightly red faced, said somewhat sheepishly: "All right, Simeon. We'll draw the necessary contracts." Then Melville remembered the dignity of his office. "But remember, Mr. Kenton," he said sternly, "we want no vulgarization of what is essentially a scientific satellite. We expect your concession to be . . . ah . . . in good taste, conservative—"
"Fiddle and faddle!" Simeon interrupted rudely. "Of course it won't be conservative! We both want to make money at it, don't we?" Then he chuckled. "Don't you worry, Charlie. This'll be the talk o' the universe!"
It was. Nothing like the Pleasure Dome had ever been seen on any planet or in the space between. Even old Kublai Khan, through his laudanum-inspired ghost writer, a fellow named Samuel Taylor Coleridge, hadn't been able to dream up a layout like this.
The level trans Lucite floor accommodated ten thousand pleasure-seekers in spacious comfort. There were sleep rooms for those who wished to stay indefinitely; there were swimming pools and flowering arbors; there were game rooms and gymnasia, beauty parlors, theaters with live shows and canned; libraries for the studious, restorative spas for the convalescent or the jaded; and a great central restaurant for the epicures, to whose cuisine all the planets contributed their most exotic delicacies. Dispersed orchestras played toe-tickling music; and everyone agreed that dancing literally under the stars and a blazing moon, with nothing seemingly under foot except a turning Earth three hundred miles beneath, was a new thrill Sensation.
The Pleasure Dome became almost immediately the Number One resort of the gay young people of Earth, and of those who, no longer young, sought vainly to recapture the romance and splendor of their youth. Swift little rocket craft mounted in steady streams to the moon-drenched hemisphere, discharged their parties into the reception-ports, and either returned to Earth or clung like innumerable leeches to the magnetic plates awaiting their owners' will. All of which brought
beaucoup
Earth dollars into the already swollen coffers of that tycoon of the spaceways, old Simeon Kenton.
But though the music played its catchiest, and the full moon and the stars above glowed their romantic darndest, young Kerry Dale merely glowered. His blue eyes snapped and his square jaw became even more angular.
He leaned across the table and scowled at his companion. "I know he's your father and all that, Sally," he snapped. "But if Old Fireball . . . er . . . Simeon Kenton expects me to knuckle under to him just because I love his daughter, he's got another think coming."
Sally Kenton twinkled demurely at her angry escort; and when she twinkled, the average young male became like putty in
her shapely hands.
"But Old Fireball—as you so delicately call him—" she began.
Kerry reddened. "I'm sorry, Sally. It slipped out."
"Don't be sorry, Kerry. I know everyone calls him that; though you were the only one who ever dared say it to his face." The twinkle widened. "And he
does
explode like a fireball at the slightest provocation. However, you misunderstood. He doesn't expect you to knuckle under—that is, voluntarily. May I quote him?"
"Go ahead," said Kerry gloomily.
"’That impudent young scalawag'—remember, I'm quoting' has hornswoggled me on two deals; and that's just two more than any other man alive has done to Simeon Kenton. Sally, my girl, his dadfoozled head's getting too big for his breeches'
—remember again, I'm merely quoting my lovable old parent— 'and until he's taken down a peg or two or three, there'll be no living with him."'
"Bah!" said Kerry succinctly.
"And triple bah!" agreed Sally, while a curious smile sported among4 her dimples. "But he made me promise I'd . . . ah . . . not marry you until he'd taken you down that one or two or
three pegs—"
"Of all the consummate gall," exploded Kerry. "And you, like an obedient daughter, agreed!" he added bitterly.
"Of course!" She shot him a glance from under long, curving eyelashes calculated to melt the heart of a Venusian swamp snake. "Perhaps," she hinted, "it might be worthwhile to let my revered progenitor get the better of you in some . . . er . . . deal. It would make him happy; and we could then—"
Kerry's heart was not at all like that of a Venusian swamp snake; yet on this occasion it failed to melt. "Never!" he said violently. "If he beats me, it'll have to be—in a manner of speaking—fair and square, with no holds barred. And that," he added with a sudden grin, "will be—never."
"You
are
pretty confident of yourself, aren't you?" murmured Sally. "Or should I add, in the immortal words of my delightful but somewhat tongue-twisted ancestor: 'If I've told you a dozen times, I've told you once, Sally; that young man's liable to be like the beard of a comet's tail; he'll make his biggest splash just before he fades out completely! "
Kerry rose from the table with a suddenness that almost broke the magnetized dishes loose from their moorings. Sally looked startled. Had she perhaps overdone it? She loved this young man with the square jaw and the determined blue eyes; and it bad cost her a mighty effort to hold him off when he proposed marriage. But an alarm bell had sounded inside her at the too-easy way in which he had forged ahead since the bare few months ago when he had been in her father's legal department and laid irreverent hands on old Simeon when he had been denied a raise. "It's for the good of his own soul and of mine," she said to herself somewhat shakily. Then panic invaded her. "Suppose—suppose I lose him?" she thought.
But the young man's gaze was not fixed on her; nor on the moving belt alongside with its endless array of tempting dishes. Instead, his head tilted and he stared intently through the upward sweep of the translucent dome.
Sally followed his stare. A myriad stars spangled the velvet backdrop of space. Mighty Jupiter hung suspended like a red-tinged eardrop. But some ten degrees of arc away, seemingly emerging from the constellation Sagittarius, lay the new celestial phenomenon which had been agitating the scientific circles of the System for the preceding month. A comet flamed like a gigantic tadpole, its head pure white and showing a perceptible disk, its tail curving away with a golden hue over two degrees of arc.
"What's the matter?" demanded Sally somewhat resentfully. "One would think you hadn't seen that blessed comet before?"
Kerry brought his gaze back to the beautiful young heiress to the Kenton millions. He looked at her, but his eyes were abstracted, contemplative.
"You're quite right, Sally," he said softly. "I hadn't. So your father thinks I'll fade out like a comet's tail, eh?"
The girl was troubled. "I'm sorry, Kerry," she apologized. "I didn't mean to insult you; but—"
The abstracted look gave way to a wide grin. "On the contrary," he said heartily, "you've given me an idea; for which many thanks. Wait here for me, will you, Sally? I'll be back in a few minutes."
He had already jumped on the transverse moving platform when Sally cried: "Where are you going?"