The Man Who Staked the Stars Part 9

Bryce smiled. "No, Pierce," he said. He had turned on the two-way speaker and tuned it to the s.h.i.+p as he came in.

Immediately the voice came in the corridor behind them. "Stand still.

You're covered."

There was no chance that anyone could genuinely be behind them, but the rear one whirled and snapped a startled shot into the darkened corridor, and the other leaped sidewise down from the doorway, drawing his gun with blurred speed, and leveling on Bryce as his feet left contact with the sill. He was falling slowly, almost floating, and it should have been an easy shot, except for something he had obviously forgotten, or he never would have leaped.

Bryce disregarded him as a danger, and threw three shots at the other, who still stood startled and off balance in the corridor, firing three with his inexperienced right hand to make sure of placing even one.

The figure dropped out of sight in the corridor.

In the flick of time that Bryce's eyes had been away from the falling one, the path of the man's leap had begun to curve strangely, until now he seemed to be floating in a curve, flying sidewise and upward, faster and faster as he approached the hull. The rule of conservation of momentum was having its way. To the man's dizzied eyes, as he tried to keep Bryce within his sights long enough to fire, it must have seemed that the ground began inexplicably to turn and slide by, that suddenly the whole sh.e.l.l was turning around him like a big wheel, carrying his target up the wall and over his head.

He was almost to the sliding ground when a bush caught at his feet and yanked them from under him with a crackling of branches, and the bottom tread of a flight of stairs swung at his head like a gigantic club. Among the sudden splintering of branches and snapping of vines was a crunching thud which sounded final.

To anyone within a globe, it did not ordinarily appear to be spinning, the only sign it was, was the comfortable pseudo-gravity for anyone standing on hull level. But to those who approached the ground from the lighter G corridor, the stairs were necessary--stairs whose treads were oddly dipped in the middle in a shallow U. By bracing against one side of the U coming down, and on the other going up, one invisibly picked up enough speed to match the speed of the ground level. Jumping was the equivalent of jumping out of a moving car at forty feet a second, the sixteen feet a second, half of the corridor plus an extra thirty feet a second spin, the side slip speed of an eighteen foot drop where it had looked like five.

It was probably these added extra distances in the air, Bryce decided, that sometimes made the bird flights look so bewilderingly variable in speed and direction. He had not thought before how difficult it would be to plot a straight course from one side of the globe to the other.

He waited for a sign of motion, his magnomatic ready, looking up at the gunman lying overhead, forty feet away on the other side of the globe. The limp figure was unmoving, it looked badly tangled in vines, and its gun was gone. There was no need to shoot, but he wondered suddenly, if he had, what kind of a curve would the bullet have followed?

There was no sound from the other, but Bryce hesitated to climb the stairs and put his head above floor level of the corridor. A voice might give the other direction for a snap shot if that was what he was waiting for. Bryce chanced speaking.

"I've got this one, Pierce. How's the other?"

The televiewer in the entrance hall replied, "Lying on his back with his gun five feet away. You all right?"

"Yes." Bryce walked around the circ.u.mference of the globe and searched in the vines for the missing weapon of number one. The body in the s.p.a.cesuit nearby was quite definitely a corpse. He saw the gun glittering a little further on and picked it up, wiping off leaf pulp on a clean patch of moss. It was a heavy duty police pacifier, a distance stunner, adjusted to a narrow beam.

He climbed to the corridor and collected the other weapon. It was a police pacifier too. They had not meant direct murder then, but only to stun him and deliver him to Orillo, C. O. D.

"How are you doing with their s.h.i.+p?" Bryce asked, "Is it armed?"

Armament for s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps was illegal, and careful official inspection made it rare.

"I didn't wait to see," Pierce's voice came apologetically after a pause in which some background noise sounding like a crash came over the televiewer speaker. "It started swinging around when I came in sight, so I just rammed it with that pretty ornamental nose spike. I'm backing off now with the forward braking jets."

"Then whoever's inside is probably either s.p.a.cefrozen or cooked.

Jockey that s.h.i.+p around on the spike and give her a four minute shove toward Earth, then push that b.u.t.ton that collapses the ornamental vanes on the spike and let it pull loose when you start braking. I don't want any s.h.i.+p hulks floating around here."

"Aye-aye, Cap."

"Go slow on those braking jets when you pull loose. The back wash could touch your hull."

Pierce returned and came in to help Bryce drag the corpses through the airlock and into s.p.a.ce.

They braced against the silver curve of the floating s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p and gave the body a combined strong shove towards Earth. Spinning slowly end over end it dwindled into a dark speck against the glowing orb of Earth, destined to be a meteorite and make a small bright streak in the Earth sky several days later.

_When the tubes conk out, the fuel runs down, The cold creeps in to where I lie._

Pierce was reciting as they went back into the globe for the second corpse.

_I'll take the meteor's trail--go home to Earth And make a Viking's funeral in the sky._

"This is too easy," Bryce complained as they watched the second corpse fade from sight. "The trouble is, in s.p.a.ce all corpses are delicti.

It's an incentive. Launch your enemies."

"Gaucho country did all right under that system," Pierce said somberly, "and so did the American frontier." He floated motionless, a s.p.a.cesuited figure turned toward the gray-green misted globe of Earth that shone against the black star-sprinkled sky as if he could have reached out and touched it. The sun caught the planet on its day hemisphere and reflected brilliantly from a shadowy blue glaze of water that was the Mediterranean, turning half of it to white fire.

Bryce's earphones picked up Pierce's voice again. "Frontier-born nations always look back and say that the first years were the best."

The words caught at something Bryce had felt before. He looked at Earth hanging splendidly in s.p.a.ce. It was beautiful and he was fond of it, but--He said, "I don't think we'll ever go back." Nor would mankind itself. Never again--through all conquests from this point in time--would mankind go back down into the mesh of gravity to be a thin film over the surface of a planet.

"Give old Earth a smile, Bryce, we've hatched."

For a moment longer Bryce hung, watching Earth turning below. The management of UT was down there. He'd be d.a.m.ned if he'd let them get away with thinking they could tell him what to do, or tell the Belt where a line should be extended and a colony planted. The belt was his country, not theirs. s.p.a.ce belonged to the people who lived in it.

"No taxation without representation," Pierce said irrelevantly, as if he had been reading Bryce's thoughts. They jetted back to the s.h.i.+p and into the s.p.a.celock.

"Frontier country--" Bryce said as he stepped into the cubical of the revolving door. Gently tightening elastic bands drew him into position within the man-shaped mold. "What's a frontier on your terms, Roy?"

When he was in place the other half of the rubbery, air-excluding mold closed on him and the airtight cylinder rotated, delivering him into the interior of the s.h.i.+p. He pushed the b.u.t.ton impatiently to have it revolve back for Pierce, but it remained obstinately open, its servo refusing to close on a mold full of air and rotate air back for release into s.p.a.ce.

Bryce remembered then. This was something he didn't have to bother with when he flew alone, for when going in or out he was always in the door when it rotated; it never turned empty. Beside the door on a hook hung an inflated pressure suit, complete with gloves, boots, and helmet. Except for the absence of any sign of a head or face inside the dark translucence of the helmet it looked like a full-sized man.

Bryce reached it down and placed it in the mold, and watched grinning as the mold closed and the door rotated, delivering the man-form to an equivalent hook in the s.p.a.celock. The doll was known by all s.p.a.cemen as Hector Dimwitty, and every s.h.i.+p had one or two. There were a thousand yarns and jokes circulating about the adventures of the Hectors, most of them lewd, and a few of them true.

Pierce's answer was in his earphones, "A frontier is where people go when they are young, broke, or have the cops after them."

"Right. Suppose I stake the broke, and loan them transport, and offer the fugitives unregistered safety to receive mail and to buy supplies?"

"You do that?" Pierce stepped out of the door and they took off their helmets.

"Yes, when I am my own man, not working for UT."

"If you do that, you bring in ten times as many of the broke who wanted to settle there, and--" Pierce took a long jump in understanding, saying softly, "They're dependent on you. Handcuffed to you and praying for your health and prosperity as long as you hold their loans and secrets, for with your death or bankruptcy, another man might come to your books to read the records of your loans, and demand payment, and give the secrets to the police or keep them for his blackmail. But to do it is to take a risk of murder or arrest, and a high cost in hard work and money. Why do you want to do this? What payment do you take?"

"They pay by being my men, grateful and ready to back me up when I want help later. They don't have to be grateful, for they know I can call any loan if the owner crosses me, and I've built a reputation for an occasional fit of irrational temper that is threat enough for anyone to avoid crossing me, without feeling that I have wanted to threaten or force them. As for the fugitives they pay enough by wanting the Belt to be organized as a nation independent of Earth, so that the hand of the law can't stretch out and drag them back, and they can become wealthy in open business, in the million chances for wealth that lie around them in the Belt. They don't know that they want this yet, but they will see it when it is told to them. I can't do any of this now--it's suspended for as long as I am part of UT and have to drag the dead weight of ten Earth-tied conservatives with me in every decision."

VIII

He stopped to set in the coordinates of the Moon for the robot pilot, but he found himself still wanting to talk. "Man has reached s.p.a.ce--do you think he'll ever go back to the ground? In s.p.a.ce he has gravity only when he wants it, and any weight of gravity he likes, depending on how fast he spins his house. And no gravity when he wants that. You see what that means to engineers in the advantage of building things?

No weight in transportation, no weight in travel, limitless speed and almost no cost as long as he stays away from planet pulls. His house is in the sky, and when he steps out of it he can fly like a bird. And food. To grow food there is sunlight Earth never dreamed of. For heat and power there is sunlight to focus. s.p.a.ce is flooded with heat, irradiated with power--

"It's not child's play taming it, and those on the ground don't see it yet. But the next step of mankind is out into s.p.a.ce, and it's never coming back."

Pierce, sitting in one of the shock tank armchairs, asked, "What part do you have in this?"

Bryce looked at him with a feeling almost of surprise, as if he had been called back from a long distance. "Me?" he laughed, a little awed by the immensity of the goal, and the ease of it.... "First President of the Belt and political boss for life. That's enough."