A Coffin for Jacob, Edward W. Ludwig [uplifting novels .txt] 📗

well tell you it's going to be an asteroid. I won't say which one."

"Don't get the idea that we're outlaws. Sure, about half our group is wanted by the Bureau, but we make honest livings. We're just people like yourself and Jacob."

"Jacob? Your husband?"

She laughed. "Makes you think of a Biblical character, doesn't it? Jacob's anything but that. And just plain 'Jake' reminds one of a grizzled old uranium prospector and he isn't like that, either."

She lit a cigarette. "Anyway, the wanted ones stay out beyond the frontiers. Jacob and those like him can never return to Earth—not even to Hoover City—except dead. The others are physical or psycho rejects who couldn't get clearance if they went back to Earth. They know nothing but rocketing and won't give up. They bring in our ships to frontier ports like Hoover City to unload cargo and take on supplies."

"Don't the authorities object?"

"Not very strongly. The I. B. I. has too many problems right here to search the whole System for a few two-bit crooks. Besides, we carry cargoes of almost pure uranium and tungsten and all the stuff that's scarce on Earth and Mars and Venus. Nobody really cares whether it comes from the asteroids or Hades. If we want to risk our lives mining it, that's our business."

She pursed her lips. "But if they guessed how strong we are or that we have friends planted in the I. B. I.—well, things might be different. There probably would be a crackdown."

Ben scowled. "What happens if there is a crackdown? And what will you do when Space Corps ships officially reach the asteroids? They can't ignore you then."

"Then we move on. We dream up new gimmicks for our crates and take them to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. In time, maybe, we'll be pushed out of the System itself. Maybe it won't be the white-suited boys who'll make that first hop to the stars. It could be us, you know—if we live long enough. But that Asteroid Belt is murder. You can't follow the text-book rules of astrogation out there. You make up your own."

Ben stiffened. "And that's why you want me for an astrogator."

Maggie rose, her eyes wistful. "If you want to come—and if you get well." She looked at him strangely.

"Suppose—" He fought to find the right words. "Suppose I got well and decided not to join Jacob. What would happen to me? Would you let me go?"

Her thin face was criss-crossed by emotion—alarm, then bewilderment, then fear. "I don't know. That would be up to Jacob."

He lay biting his lip, staring at the photo of Jacob. She touched his hand and it seemed that sadness now dominated the flurry of emotion that had coursed through her.

"The only thing that matters, really," she murmured, "is your walking again. We'll try this afternoon. Okay?"

"Okay," he said.

When she left, his eyes were still turned toward Jacob's photo.

He was like two people, he thought.

Half of him was an officer of the Space Corps. Perhaps one single starry-eyed boy out of ten thousand was lucky enough to reach that goal.

He remembered a little picture book his mother had given him when she was alive. Under the bright pictures of spacemen were the captions:

"A Space Officer Is Honest" "A Space Officer Is Loyal." "A Space Officer Is Dutiful."

Honesty, loyalty, duty. Trite words, but without those concepts, mankind would never have broken away from the planet that held it prisoner for half a million years.

Without them, Everson, after three failures and a hundred men dead, would never have landed on the Moon twenty-seven years ago.

Ben sighed. He had a debt to pay. A good officer would pay that debt. He'd surrender and take his punishment. He'd rip the crimson braid from his uniform. He'd prevent the Academy for the Conquest of Space from being labeled the school of a murderer and a coward.

And by doing these things, the haunting image of a dead man would disappear from his vision.

But the other half of Ben Curtis was the boy who'd stood trembling beneath a night sky of beckoning stars.

The eyes in Jacob's photo seemed to be staring at the boy in him, not at the officer. They appeared both pleading and hopeful. They were like echoes of cold, barren worlds and limitless space, of lurking and savage death. They held the terror of loneliness and of exile, of constant flight and hiding.

But, too, they represented a strength that could fulfill a boy's dream, that could carry a man to new frontiers. They, rather than the neat white uniform, now offered the key to shining miracles. That key was what Ben wanted.

But he asked himself, as he had a thousand times, "If I follow Jacob, can I leave the dead man behind?"

He tried to stretch his legs and he cursed their numbness. He smiled grimly. For a moment, he'd forgotten. How futile now to think of stars!

What if he were to be like this always? Jacob would not want a man with dead legs. Jacob would either send him back to Earth or—Ben shuddered—see that he was otherwise disposed of. And disposal would be the easier course.

This was the crisis. He sat on the side of the bed, Maggie before him, her strong arm about his waist.

"Afraid?" she asked.

"Afraid," he repeated, shaking.

It was as if all time had been funneled into this instant, as if this moment lay at the very vortex of all a man's living and desiring. There was no room in Ben's mind for thoughts of Jacob now.

"You can walk," Maggie said confidently. "I know you can."

He moved his toes, ankles, legs. He began to rise, slowly, falteringly. The firm pressure around his waist increased.

He stood erect. His legs felt like tree stumps, but here and there were a tingling and a warmth, a sensitivity.

"Can you make it to the window?" Maggie asked.

"No, no, not that far."

"Try! Please try!"

She guided him forward.

His feet shuffled. Stomp, stomp. The pressure left his waist. Maggie stepped away, walked to the window, turned back toward him.

He halted, swaying. "Not alone," he mouthed fearfully. "I can't get there by myself."

"Of course you can!" Maggie's voice contained unexpected impatience.

Ashamed, he forced his feet to move. At times, he thought he was going to crash to the floor. He lumbered on, hesitating, fighting to retain his balance. Maggie waited tensely, as if ready to leap to his side.

Then his eyes turned straight ahead to the window. This was the first time he'd actually seen the arid, dust-cloaked plains of the second planet. He straightened, face aglow, as though a small-boy enthusiasm had been reborn in him.

His tree-stump legs carried him to the window. He raised shaking hands against the thick glassite pane.

Outside, the swirling white dust was omnipresent and unchallenged. It cut smooth the surfaces of dust-veiled rocks. It clung to the squat desert shrubbery, to the tall skeletal shapes of Venusian needle-plants and to the swish-tailed lizards that skittered beneath them.

The shrill of wind, audible through the glassite, was like the anguished complaint of the planet itself, like the wail of an entity imprisoned in a dark tomb of dust. Venus was a planet of fury, eternally howling its wrath at being isolated from sunlight and greenery, from the clean blackness of space and the warm glow of sister-planet and star.

The dust covered all, absorbed all, eradicated all. The dust was master. The dome, Ben felt, was as transitory as a tear-drop of fragile glass falling down, down, to crash upon stone.

"Is it always like this?" he asked. "Doesn't the wind ever stop?"

"Sometimes the wind dies. Sometimes, at night, you can see the lights from the city."

He kept staring. The dome, he thought, was a symbol of Man's littleness in a hostile universe.

But, too, it was a symbol of his courage and defiance. And perhaps Man's greatest strength lay in the very audacity that drove him to build such domes.

"You like it, don't you?" Maggie asked. "It's lonely and ugly and wild, but you like it."

He nodded, breathless.

She murmured, "Jacob used to say it isn't the strange sights that thrill spacemen—it's the thoughts that the sights inspire."

He nodded again, still staring.

She began to laugh. Softly at first, then more loudly. It was the kind of laughter that is close to crying.

"You've been standing there for ten minutes! You're going to walk again! You're going to be well!"

He turned to her, smiling with the joyous realization that he had actually stood that long without being aware of it.

Then his smile died.

Standing behind Maggie, in an open doorway, was a gray, scaly, toadlike monster—a six-and-a-half-foot Venusian. He was motionless as a statue, his green-lidded eyes staring curiously at Ben. His scaly hand was tight about the butt of an old-fashioned heat pistol holstered to his hip.