Operation Interstellar, George O. Smith [best mobile ebook reader .txt] 📗

enough to Neoterra's Z-wave Central for you to make connection and get whatever contact you need for your Z-wave line across space.

"Now, Grayson, Item One: Your ship is a bit roughed-up because of a hard landing, so you can't take off. You've been very busy laying a line from the station to your ship so you can tap into the radio beacon, and so you've used up quite a bit of your air. Since you have not the keys to this station, you cannot get in there, and besides you'll find that your space suit is inclined to be dangerously leaky. In shorter words you're trapped on this ship for want of air, and you'll find that whatever you think you can think of, several others have thought of it first and done something about it.

"Item Two: Harrigan will not be checking this station upon beam-arrival. Like the rest it is automatic, and it will register. Harrigan is going to be very busy elsewhere. In other words, you'll find that your one chance for salvation is to establish Z-wave communications back to Neoterra so you can call for help.

"Item Three: regardless of what you do about it, you will be found here about four months from now, the victim of asphyxiation, caused by being trapped here. You will have done a major effort toward making your Z-wave gadget work. Having failed in the moment of desperation, the two worlds will hear about it, and men will then discount your wild theories."

"And if I should succeed?"

"You won't. We're better chess-players than that."

"In other words, Harrigan is a friend of yours."

"That's part of it."

"And I suppose when I'm found there will be all sorts of records and data and frantic experimentation to show that I tried and failed?"

"You get closer and closer all the time."

"But you can't stop progress."

"Maybe we don't want progress completely stopped. Only stalled for some time."

"But what reason can you give—"

"We're not stating any reasons, Grayson. We have our reasons and to us they're good ones."

"But—"

"Stow it, Grayson. And—have a good time!"

Paul got a good view of the picture after they left. His masquerader might have returned from Proxima I with honest data about the beam, but Paul Grayson might as well have been found in a wrecked landing on Terra with evidence that indicated complete failure in the Z-wave. There—or here—what difference?

So in the next few hours Paul ransacked his spacecraft in complete futility. He was trapped on Harrigan's Horror. Had Paul been ten times as proficient as he was with tools and calculations, the BurAst P.G.1. still would have remained where it stood snuggled down in the heat-eroded ground of Harrigan's Horror. His spacesuit—the one they left him—was nothing to wear while wandering around on the sunside of a close-in planet. He doubted whether he could cross the distance between the BurAst P.G.1. and the relay station even had he the air to spare.

Of course he had quite a bit of air, both bottled and revitalized from the greenery in the hold. But the greenery was none too healthy and the bottled goods was almost gone. His compressor could have been made to work and Paul could have made it to the station, but for what? To stand there and die? Or to die along the route in a leaky suit? Breaking into a fort was no more problem than breaching a relay station from the ground. They had been built to last for years against wind, erosion, burglars, pirates, and/or the pressures of the inner air against airless planets such as this.

But Paul's problem was not merely escape. He might have tried to make the relay station if this place offered any hope. Even then, Paul might have been able as a last-ditch measure, to break into the relay station somehow.

Assuming that he could break into the station, that would let the air out. The only way one could break into such a station without letting the air out would be through the airlock, and breaking into that sort of bank-vault construction was no easier than cracking the wall without letting the air out.

The nearest radio receiving set was five light years away at Neosol, and if he could beam the radio call, it would take five years—

He looked at the Z-wave equipment and thought. Could it—?

Whatever the rest of the universe thought about Paul Grayson and his idea about the Z-wave, Paul still had faith. Furthermore he knew as much about Z-wave gear as any other man alive, up to and including Haedaecker himself. Evans said that the Z-wave wouldn't work; how bad could they foul Z-wave equipment? Could they foul the junk so bad that Paul wouldn't be able to make repair? Or would they—

Paul tried the radio. Naturally it was silent. But it was not dead. It gave a rattle of cosmic static.

Four thundering blasts came in across the ultra-short wave band, four of the beacon's outgoing transmitters unmodulated, directed at other stations across space to the nearer stars. He tried listening along the frequencies of the local oscillators of the receiving sets set to collect any incoming beacons but he realized that they would not be turned on yet; there was a point in keeping the transmitters on, but there was no use in turning on a receiver four or five years before the signal got there. He hit another transmitter and as he listened to the unmodulated signal, it began to pip in a timing-signal sequence that some technician would use five to fifteen—or more—years from now when it arrived at some other star-station.

They had not fouled the radio. But that was like letting a prisoner on Antarctica keep his hearing-aid. Not worth a damn for helping him escape.

Paul then tried the Z-wave. It was not dead, so far as Paul could tell. It did not crackle with cosmic static, but there was a faint hiss. Paul wondered about the connection to the station across the plain. They must have some sort of connection otherwise the flanged-up evidence would not ring true.

Paul began to tune the Z-wave receiver, just partly in hope and partly for lack of something to do.

"Damn!" he swore.

"Grayson! Grayson! That you?"

Paul blinked. Hearing things—?

"Grayson! Paul Grayson! Is that you?"

Paul grabbed the microphone like a drowning man clutching a straw. "Hello! Hello Neoterra. This is Paul Grayson marooned on Harrigan's Horror with a low air supply. I'm about two miles from the radio beac—"

"Grayson! Forget it. I know where you are. This isn't Neoterra. This is your old friend Evans waiting around in space until you stop trying things. For all we know, you might be able to figure a way out. Take it easy, pal. Such energy takes a lot of air—and you haven't much left...."

CHAPTER 12

Nine days had passed according to the Solar clock on Paul's instrument panel. Nine days with the air slowly becoming stale. It was beginning to smell a bit, now. Paul did not notice it particularly, but someone just in from a planetary atmosphere would say that the air reeked to high heaven. His senses were beginning to numb. This was not a fast death, but slow and sordid. Paul yawned constantly, and took deep heaving gulps of air only to try again.

Paul fought sleep. He fought it because he knew that he might drift off to sleep never to awaken. But he had no recourse. Most of his time he spent a-sprawl on the cot in the instrument room because he had too little energy to be up and around and when he fought himself to get erect, there was nothing to do but to curse at the inert machinery. He had tried everything. He had considered everything, even up to and including the start of a diary in the hope that someday someone might find it.

But it was a fruitless task. Sort of like putting a daily account on the bottom of a cave in the hope that someone, someday, might investigate the cave and find out what happened.

He did not know the periodicity of Harrigan's Horror. But the sun—still a catalog number—was running lower along the horizon. The beacon had been placed near enough to the South Pole of rotation so that it could always look at the distant stars to and from which the radio beacons ran. This was a nice job of latitude selection regarding the plane of the planet's ecliptic and rotation for the Galactic Survey beams.

But Paul was dully uninterested in facts. He slept more than he knew, and was awake much less than he believed. His dreams were vivid enough to make him believe that he was awake, excepting those that dealt with Nora Phillips and John Stacey, neither of whom could have been there.

He was asleep, dreaming fitfully, when the spacecraft dropped down in a landing that would have made the air on any normal planet scream. It came down at nearly five gravities, its deceleration calculated to a fine degree of precision so that the zero-velocity moment of its computation coincided with the instant of contact. The drivers ceased and the ship settled into the gritty ground of Harrigan's Horror.

He did not hear the swift manipulation of the airlock from the outside controls.

"Grayson" came the cry. "Paul Grayson!"

Paul looked up dazedly, sitting up. He was weak, and dizzy. But Paul pulled himself erect with the determination that he would not let them see how badly off he was. The very deliberate attempt showed them—showed them a man whose cheeks were hollow, whose lips were a bit blue, eyes glazed and whose mind was dull.

He believed that he greeted them blithely, but what came from his mouth was a dry croak. Then he went to sleep again, sitting up on the cot, complete with a five day beard, and a shot-to-hell nervous system.

But they wasted no time. Bundling him into a spacesuit, they let the air out of the BurAst P.G.1. with a blast and hurried him to their own ship. Then they took off at six gravities, a force that bent them all into their cushions. It did not touch Paul. He was dead to the world in the first pleasant, honest, comfortable sleep he had since the air began to go foul.

And once again there were a couple of days of timelessness. It was very pleasant to have someone massage your muscles, to be steamed to the boiled-lobster point and then quick-frozen in a cold shower, followed by the ministrations of three dozen professional wrestlers. Gallons of cold water and miles of fresh air, a daily shave with a hot towel and a facial massage, good food and boiling tea, a pipe of aromatic tobacco, forty-eight hours of deep sleep....

And Paul, dressed in clean shirt and slacks and once more back to normal, was facing an elderly gentleman that looked like Santa Claus.

"I'll come to the point," said the elderly gentleman. "I am Franklin Huston. I am one of a group of men whose desire is completely political. This time it is also a bit personal. Perhaps you are one of the few men we can talk to who knows something about Nora Phillips."

"I have met Nora Phillips."

"We know."

"I'd like to meet Miss Phillips again."

"That all depends."

"On what?"

Huston spread his hands. "Possibly upon whether she is still alive."

"Alive!" roared Paul.

"Yes. Alive."

Paul shook his head. "If they killed Stacey, they would not stop at—"

There was a moment of silence. "Stacey was killed?"

Paul looked up. "Almost a year ago. Of course, it is barely possible that the news would be here by now. We took off very shortly afterwards in a fast ship, and the official news might be still on the way."

Huston hit his palm with his other fist. "We need something faster than ten months communication-time!" he cried. "Hell! We're no better off than the Pilgrims, hoping for some news from England. Grayson, what happened?"

Grayson started to explain, but half way through he stopped thoughtfully. "I've missed a point," he said. "I don't know that Stacey was killed. After all, the men that arrested me weren't officers. Just henchmen of that guy Hoagland."

"Quite! Now, while there is a school that seems to apply logic to human motives, or tries to, there is another school that claims that the way people do things are entirely dependent upon their point of view and no one can catalog human nature. Grayson, I've known Hoagland a long time and spent most of that time fighting him one way or another. He is as cold-blooded about murder as a snake. But he is a sort of 'string-saver' as well. Anyone who has a bare chance of chipping in something toward the furthering of Hoagland's plans he will keep alive—and it is no great problem to keep them sequestered off somewhere away from contact until he needs 'em.

"For instance,