Someone to Watch Over Me, Floyd C. Gale and H. L. Gold [story books to read txt] 📗

a few drinks with him whenever the Perseus and the Valkyrie had happened to hit port at the same time. Schiemann had a favorite joke he kept repeating over and over: "If you ever get sick of the Perseus, Lennie—sick of good food and hot water and decent quarters—you can always come to the Valkyrie. I'll take care of you."

Now Mattern went to him and said he'd like to take Schiemann up on that offer.

The old man's pale green eyes protruded even further from his head. "You want to leave the Perseus for a berth on my ship! You're madder than Balas!"

"Not a berth, Pop," Mattern told him. "A share of her—a half share."

Schiemann grinned. "Now you must think I'm crazy, to hand over half my ship just like that. Maybe you'd like me to sign her over to you entirely." And he puffed savagely upon his Venuswood pipe.

"Look," Len said, "let's not kid ourselves. You're a crook, Pop, but such a lousy crook that you make it look as if crime really doesn't pay. And I'll tell you what's wrong with the way you operate. You have no organization, no system, no imagination. I have 'em all. You contribute the ship; I'll contribute my know-how. Together, we'll make a fortune."

"Modest, aren't you?" the old man jeered. "What kind of know-how do you get working as a deckhand on a starboat? All right, maybe you're the universe's best metal polisher, but—"

"Look, Pop," Len interrupted, "I'll make a deal with you. We work together for a year. If you don't pull in at least three times the amount you got before, as just your share, my half of the ship reverts to you. What could be fairer than that?"

Schiemann still wasn't convinced that he was not being played for a sucker. Being what he was, he could never expose himself to a court battle, no matter how much justice might be on his side in a particular instance. But he didn't think Len could be so rotten as to figure on something like that. Besides, the old captain couldn't help liking the boy. So he agreed, saying as he did so, "I should have my head examined." But before the fourth voyage was out, he realized that he had never done a wiser thing in his life. Under Len's direction, the Valkyrie as a business enterprise was cleaning up.

Only in relative terms, of course. It took six months, over a dozen voyages, before Len managed to save enough for that night with Lyddy. And every time he made the Jump in the Valkyrie, the hyperspacers told him, "One night won't be enough," and the honey-minded one had insisted, "You must want more than that. You must. Who could be satisfied with so little?"

Finally, the night came. It was wonderful, it was ecstasy, it was everything he had dreamed of—but it was too short. "Good-by, honey," Lyddy said as he left, "come back and see me again."

"When you have some more money," she meant. And it was all over.

For her, not for him. He found he couldn't get her out of his mind. One night was not enough. The xhindi had been right. Now he wanted her for his own, for the rest of his life if not for all eternity.

He had no romantic fancies that she would be willing to go off with him for the sake of true love and himself alone. He had seen himself too often in the mirror panel on the door of his tiny cabin, and he looked there now, with a chill objectivity. Undersized, crippled, pallid with the unhealthy color that comes from spending too little time in any kind of sunlight, Len Mattern was twenty-four and looked forty. Not even an ordinary woman of the planets could love him, let alone a love goddess.

But a love goddess who loved money could be bought. However, in order to win her, he'd need to have really big money. No matter how efficiently he organized the Valkyrie's operations, the ship was just a battered old hulk and, in her sphere, could never be more than small-time. There was only one answer—hyperspace.

He found Schiemann puffing contentedly at his pipe in the Valkyrie's control room. "Look, Pop," he said, "we've been wasting our time on stardust. We have to aim for something big."

Schiemann looked trustfully at the young man. He had no relatives, so he had come to think of Len as his son, and, in fact, had made him his heir. "Whatever you say, Lennie. Figure on breaking out of this sector and moving in closer to Earth, do you?"

"Not exactly. We're going into hyperspace."

"Sure," Schiemann said, blowing a smoke ring. "Can't leave the sector without passing through hyperspace; that stands to reason. But where are we Jumping to?"

Len tried to keep the tautening of his body from becoming apparent. "We're not Jumping anywhere. We're stopping in hyperspace."

The pipe dropped from the old man's mouth. He caught it in his hand and gave a muffled exclamation as the heat burned his palm. Then he looked at his partner. "Of course you're joking, Lennie." And he arranged his face for laughter.

Len shook his head. "No joke, Pop; I'm dead serious. We're going to take a cargo into hyperspace. To the mem—the mem—oh, hell, I can't pronounce it—the queen, I guess, of Ferr. That's one of their planets. She wants Earth stuff, she says, and she promises to do right by us if we bring it to her. Sounds like a good deal."

The silence thickened as the two men face each other. At last Schiemann got up. "Look, Lennie, I don't make out I'm a saint. I've smuggled and cheated and stolen. But this I will not do. For the laws of the Federation, I don't give a damn—men made 'em and men can break 'em—but to go against the laws of nature, that is a different thing." He turned on his heel and went out of the control room.

Len went to his cabin and began to pack his gear. As he had expected, Schiemann interrupted him when he was halfway through. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Leaving," Len said. "I'm sick of small-time operations."

"Leaving me? Just like that? Does our friendship mean nothing at all to you?"

"Sure it does," Len told him. "When I get a chance, I'll write."

The old man's face crumpled. "Look, Lennie, if we did move into one of the more important sectors, maybe—"

"You know we wouldn't have a chance there," Len said harshly, to conceal his true emotions. "The sectors closer in to Earth have bigger, faster ships, and bigger, tougher men to run 'em. And they wouldn't like us trying to jet in!"

"I'd rather take a chance on that than—"

"We wouldn't have a chance; it'd just be a massacre, with us on the receiving end. The only way we can break into the big time ourselves is through hyperspace. We've got to do what's never been done before."

That wasn't quite true, from what the xhindi had told him, but near enough. It had been done before, but not very often, and not very recently. However, it had been done, so it was possible to do. Otherwise he wouldn't think of chancing it ... or would he?

"Why do you want money so much, Lennie?" Schiemann asked. "What do we need the big-time stuff for? It's nice and quiet and practically secure the way you've got things running for us, almost like we were honest businessmen. So why go looking for trouble?"

"If I'd wanted a quiet life," Len said, "I'd have stuck with the Perseus. So don't sing me security."

The hand that held the pipe was trembling. "Look, Lennie, at least give me time to think."

"Okay," Len said. He was, in his way, fond of the old man, but there were bigger things at stake. He had to have Lyddy; he had to have money; he had to have ... something he couldn't put a name to, but desperately important nonetheless. "I'll give you six months."

At the end of half a year, Schiemann said no, he positively wouldn't do it. Len said "Good-by." Schiemann said, "All right, but you'll be sorry; we'll all be sorry," and gave in.

So they took the Valkyrie, the two of them—and Balas, of course, but naturally nobody would consult a madman—and headed for hyperspace. Len knew exactly where to go, even though he had no charts. The breakthrough he wanted was in their own sector and it had been carefully marked for him in his mind.

Schiemann left all the details to him, even the selection of cargo. Len chose coal. He knew that what the xhindi wanted was normspace materials, but not precisely what materials. Their normspace value did not matter, because normspace matter changed to another form of itself when it got to hyperspace, and that was where the possibility of enormous profit came in. Something cheap in normspace could become something quite rare and expensive in hyperspace, and vice versa. The distribution of elements was different between the two universes; each one essentially complemented the other.

There was one hitch: a stable form in normspace could become an unstable one in hyperspace. Without empiric knowledge, it was impossible for anyone going from one universe into the other to tell whether any substance he was carrying or wearing or was would remain stable. If unstable, it could turn into liquid or gas; it could turn into energy and blow up; it could cease to be a solid in any one of a number of ways.

As if that weren't bad enough, it could also happen that even a stuff previously proven to be stable in both universes could become unstable, if there was even the trace of a potentially unstable element, or if something that, stable in itself, combined with it in unstable fashion. Such an admixture could be accidental, which was what made the whole business especially tricky, and what made the reason for the inter-universe ban necessary.

The reason why that first load of the Valkyrie's had been coal was a simple one. Somewhere, Len had read that coal and diamonds were different forms of the same normspace element, and he'd thought that might carry over into the other continuum. However, even an education wouldn't have helped him know what a right first cargo to take would have been. The xhindi had told him what they did know, but their terminology was not clear. They spoke his language with outward correctness but with imperfect conceptualization; he spoke theirs not at all. Much of what they did know, they appeared to have forgotten, or only half-learned.

They managed to make him understand that certain stuffs would be definitely unsafe; they could not make it clear which stuffs would be safe, or which they would find most desirable as trade goods. He gathered that they would be satisfied with anything that came through. So he chose coal, hoping to make a splendid initial impression.

The Valkyrie reached hyperspace. It slowed down. The throbbing of its creaky engines ebbed to a hum. And it stopped and hung there in the quiet darkness of utterly alien time and place. Schiemann and Balas, expectedly, changed their appearance, but he had seen them in their monster guises before. The coal changed to something pale and glittering, but not diamonds. Everything remained quiet. The ship's instruments recorded no temperature change, but it seemed to grow colder and colder inside her.

Suddenly, Mattern knew the truth. A trap had been laid for him, and he had tumbled neatly into it. And the most shameful part was that his own desires and yearnings—deliberately fostered by the xhindi—had been the bait.

He wanted to turn to the horrible thing that Schiemann had become to scream, "Let's go back!" But he couldn't. Something held tight grip of his mind. And, looking out the portholes, he saw that the xhindi had begun to swarm.

The flickering terror of their appearance became more awesome to him than it had been at the beginning, when he'd been only a transitory shadow in hyperspace. Now, although he had no doubt that they were friendly—indeed, almost ardent in their welcoming—horror chilled him all over again. He could almost feel the molecules inside his body slow down as his viscera quivered faintly and then froze into stillness.

He looked at Schiemann and Balas. Neither of them could, he knew, see the hyperspacers. Their conditioning back on Earth's space schools had ensured this. That was the real reason for the schools; any actual training was incidental. But Schiemann knew the creatures were there, and so he could sense them. And Balas, too, certainly seemed to sense something as he stood there, tense and wary and almost understanding. It must be even worse, Len thought, to know the hyperspacers were out there and not be able to see them.

"We—we can