Have space suit-- will travel (16 page)

So- ½ x 30 x 93,000,000 x 5280 = ½ x 8 x 32.2 x t2 -and you wind up with the time for half the trip, in seconds. Double that for full trip. Divide by 3600 to get hours; divide by 24 and you have days. On a slide rule such a problem takes forty seconds, most of it to get your decimal point correct. It’s as easy as computing sales tax.

It took me at least an hour and almost as long to prove it, using a different sequence-and a third time, because the answers didn’t match (I had forgotten to multiply by 5280, and had “miles” on one side and “feet” on the other-a no-good way to do arithmetic)-then a fourth time because my confidence was shaken. I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls.

But I got a proved answer. Five and a half days. I was on Pluto.

Or maybe Neptune-

No, on Neptune I would not be able to jump to a twelve-foot ceiling; Pluto alone matched all facts. So I erased and computed the trip at one gravity, with turnover.

Fifteen days.

It seemed to me that it ought to take at least eight times as long at one gee as at eight-more likely sixty-four. Then I was glad I had bulled my way through analytical geometry, for I made a rough plot and saw the trouble. Squared time cut down the advantage-because the more boost, the shorter the trip, and the shorter the trip the less time in which to use the built-up speed. To cut time in half, you need four times as much boost; to cut it to a quarter, you need sixteen times the boost, and so on. This way lies bankruptcy.

To learn that I could get home in about two weeks at one gravity cheered me. I couldn’t starve in two weeks. If I could steal a ship. If I could run it. If I could climb out of this hole. If- Not “if,” but “when!” I was too late for college this year; fifteen more days wouldn’t matter.

I had noticed, in the first problem, the speed we had been making at skew-flip. More than eleven thousand miles per second. That’s a nice speed, even in space. It made me think. Consider the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, four and three-tenths light-years away, the distance you hear so often on quiz shows. How long at eight gees?

The problem was the same sort but I had to be careful about decimal points; the figures mount up. A lightyear is-I had forgotten. So multiply 186,000 miles per second (the speed of light) by the seconds in a year (365.25 x 24 x 3600) and get-5,880,000,000,000 miles -multiply that by 4.3 and get- 25,284,000,000,000 Call it twenty-five trillion miles. Whew!

It works out to a year and five months-not as long as a trip around the Horn only last century.

Why, these monsters had star travel!

I don’t know why I was surprised; it had been staring me in the face. I had assumed that Wormface had taken me to his home planet, that he was a Plutonian, or Plutocrat, or whatever the word is. But he couldn’t be.

He breathed air. He kept his ship warm enough for me. When he wasn’t in a hurry, he cruised at one gee, near enough. He used lighting that suited my eyes. Therefore he came from the sort of planet I came from.

Proxima Centauri is a double star, as you know if you do crossword puzzles, and one is a twin for our own Sun-size, temperature, special pattern. Is it a fair guess that it has a planet like Earth? I had a dirty hunch that I knew Wormface’s home address.

I knew where he didn’t come from. Not from a planet that runs a couple of centuries in utter airlessness with temperatures pushing absolute zero, followed by a “summer” in which some gases melt but water is solid rock and even Wormface has to wear a space suit. Nor from anywhere in our system, for I was sure as taxes that Wormface felt at home only on a planet like ours. Never mind the way he looked; spiders don’t look like us but they like the things we like-there must be a thousand spiders in our houses for every one of us.

Wormface and his kin would like Earth. My fear was that they liked it too much.

I looked at that Proxima Centauri problem and saw something else. The turn-over speed read 1,110,000 miles per second, six times the speed of light. Relativity theory says that’s impossible.
                    

I wanted to talk to Dad about it. Dad reads everything from The Anatomy of Melancholy to Acta Mathematica and Paris-Match and will sit on a curbstone separating damp newspapers wrapped around garbage in order to see continued-on-page-eight. Dad would haul down a book and we’d look it up. Then he would try four or five more with other opinions. Dad doesn’t hold with the idea that it-must-be-true-or-they-wouldn’t-have-printed-it; he doesn’t consider any opinion sacred-it shocked me the first time he took out a pen and changed something in one of my math books.

Still, even if speed-of-light was a limit, four or five years wasn’t impossible, or even impractical. We’ve been told for so long that star trips, even to the nearest stars, would take generations that we may have a wrong slant. A mile of lunar mountains is a long way but a trillion miles in empty space may not be.

But what was Wormface doing on Pluto?

If you were invading another solar system, how would you start? I’m not joking; a dungeon on Pluto is no joke and I never laughed at Wormface. Would you just barge in, or toss your hat in first? They seemed far ahead of us in engineering but they couldn’t have known that ahead of time. Wouldn’t it be smart to build a supply base in that system in some spot nobody ever visited?

Then you could set up advance bases, say on an airless satellite of a likely-looking planet, from which you could scout the surface of the target planet. If you lost your scouting base, you would pull back to main base and work out a new attack.

Remember that while Pluto is a long way off to us, it was only five days from Luna for Wormface. Think about World War II, back when speeds were slow. Main Base is safely out of reach (U.S.A./Pluto) but only about five days from advance base (England/The Moon) which is three hours from theater-of-operations (France-Germany/Earth). That’s a slow way to operate but it worked for the Allies in World War II.

I just hoped it would not work for Wormface’s gang.

Though I didn’t see anything to prevent it.

Somebody chucked down another can-spaghetti and meat balls. If it had been canned peaches, I might not have had the fortitude to do what I did next, which was to use it for a hammer before I opened it. I beat an empty can into a flat narrow shape and beat a point on it, which I sharpened on the edge of the catch basin. When I was through, I had a dagger -not a good one, but it made me feel less helpless.

Then I ate. I felt sleepy and went to sleep in a warm glow. I was still a prisoner but I had a weapon of sorts and I believed that I had figured out what I was up against. Getting a problem analyzed is two-thirds of solving it. I didn’t have nightmares.

The next thing tossed down the hole was Fats.

Skinny landed on him seconds later. I backed off and held my dagger ready. Skinny ignored me, picked himself up, looked around, went to the water spout and got a drink. Fats was in no shape to do anything; his breath was knocked out.

I looked at him and thought what a nasty parcel he was. Then I thought, oh, what the deuce!-he had massaged me when I needed it. I heaved him onto his stomach and began artificial respiration. In four or five pushes his motor caught and he was able to breathe. He gasped, “That’s enough!”

I backed off, got my knife out. Skinny was sitting against a wall, ignoring us. Fats looked at my feeble weapon and said, “Put that away, kid. We’re bosom buddies now.”

“We are?”

“Yeah. Us human types had better stick together.” He sighed wretchedly. “After all we done for him! That’s gratitude.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

“Huh?” said Fats. “Just what I said. He decided he could do without us. So Annie doesn’t live here any more.”

“Shaddap,” the skinny one said flatly.

Fats screwed his face into a pout. “You shaddap,” he said peevishly. “I’m tired of that. It’s shaddap here, shaddap there, all day long-and look where we are.”

“Shaddap, I said.”

Fats shut up. I never did find out what had happened, because Fats seldom gave the same explanation twice. The older man never spoke except for that tiresome order to shut up, or in monosyllables even less helpful. But one thing was clear: they had lost their jobs as assistant gangsters, or fifth columnists, or whatever you call a human being who would stooge against his own race. Once Fats said, “Matter of fact, it’s your fault.”

“Mine?” I dropped my hand to my tin-can knife.

“Yours. If you hadn’t butted in, he wouldn’t have got sore.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Says you. You swiped his two best prizes, that’s all, and held him up when he planned to high-tail it back here.” “Oh. But that wasn’t your fault.”

“So I told him. You try telling him. Take your hand away from that silly nail file.” Fats shrugged. “Like I always say, let bygones be bygones.”

I finally learned the thing I wanted most to know. About the fifth time I brought up the matter of Peewee, Fats said, “What d’you want to know about the brat for?”

“I just want to know whether she’s alive or dead.”

“Oh, she’s alive. Leastwise she was last time I seen her.”

“When was that?”

“You ask too many questions. Right here.”

“She’s here?” I said eagerly.

“That’s what I said, wasn’t it? Around everywhere and always underfoot. Living like a princess, if you ask me.” Fats picked his teeth and frowned. “Why he should make a pet out of her and treat us the way he did, beats me. It ain’t right.”

I didn’t think so, either, but for another reason. The idea that gallant little Peewee was the spoiled darling of Wormface I found impossible to believe. There was some explanation-or Fats was lying. “You mean he doesn’t have her locked up?”

“What’s it get him? Where’s she gonna go?”

I pondered that myself. Where could you go?-when to step outdoors was suicide. Even if Peewee had her space suit (and that, at least, was probably locked up), even if a ship was at hand and empty when she got outside, even if she could get into it, she still wouldn’t have a “ship’s brain,” the little gadget that served as a lock. “What happened to the Mother Thing?”

“The what?”

“The-“ I hesitated. “Uh, the non-human who was in my space suit with me. You must know, you were there. Is she alive? Is she here?”

But Fats was brooding. “Them bugs don’t interest me none,” he said sourly and I could get no more out of him.

But Peewee was alive (and a hard lump in me was suddenly gone). She was here! Her chances, even as a prisoner, had been enormously better on the Moon; nevertheless I felt almost ecstatic to know that she was near. I began thinking about ways to get a message to her.

As for Fats’ insinuation that she was playing footy with Wormface, it bothered me not at all. Peewee was unpredictable and sometimes a brat and often exasperating, as well as conceited, supercilious, and downright childish. But she would be burned alive rather than turn traitor. Joan of Arc had not been made of sterner stuff.

We three kept uneasy truce. I avoided them, slept with one eye open, and tried not to sleep unless they were asleep first, and I always kept my dagger at hand. I did not bathe after they joined me; it would have put me at a disadvantage. The older one ignored me, Fats was almost friendly. I pretended not to be afraid of my puny weapon, but I think he was. The reason I think so comes from the first time we were fed. Three cans dropped from the ceiling; Skinny picked up one, Fats got one, but when I circled around to take the third, Fats snatched it.

I said, “Give me that, please.”

Fats grinned. “What makes you think this is for you, sonny boy?”

“Uh, three cans, three people.”

“So what? I’m feeling a mite hungry. I don’t hardly think I can spare it.”

“I’m hungry, too. Be reasonable.”

“Mmmm-“ He seemed to consider it. “Tell you what. I’ll sell it to you.”

I hesitated. It had a shifty logic; Wormface couldn’t walk into Lunar Base commissary and buy these rations; probably Fats or his partner had bought them. I wouldn’t mind signing I.O.U.s-a hundred dollars a meal, a thousand, or a million; money no longer meant anything. Why not humor him?

No! If I gave in, if I admitted I had to dicker with him for my prison rations, he would own me. I’d wait on him hand and foot, do anything he told me, just to eat.

I let him see my tin dagger. “I’ll fight you for it.”

Fats glanced at my hand and grinned broadly. “Can’t you take a joke?”

He tossed me the can. There was no trouble at feeding times after that, We lived like that “Happy Family” you sometimes see in traveling zoos: a lion caged with a lamb. It is a startling exhibit but the lamb has to be replaced frequently. Fats liked to talk and I learned things from him, when I could sort out truth from lies. His name-so he said-was Jacques de Barre de Vigny (“Call me ‘Jock.’ “) and the older man was Timothy Johnson-but I had a hunch that their real names could be learned only by inspecting post office bulletin boards. Despite Jock’s pretense of knowing everything, I soon decided that he knew nothing about Wormface’s origin and little about his plans and purposes. Wormface did not seem the sort to discuss things with “lower animals”; he would simply make use of them, as we use horses.