Part 8

Back in the days of Ross’s early teens he had seen a good many situations like this in the tri-dis, and the hero had never failed to extricate himself by a simple exercise of superhuman strength, intellect, and ingenuity. That, Ross told himself, was just what he needed now. The trouble was, he didn’t have them.

All he had was the secret of faster-than-light travel. And, here on Azor as on the planet of the graybeards, it had laid a king-sized egg. Women, Ross thought bitterly, women were basically inward-directed and self-seeking; trust them with the secret of F-T-L; make them, like the Cavallos, custodians of a universe-racking truth; and see the secret lost or embalmed in sterile custom. What, he silently demanded of himself, did the greatest of scientific discoveries mean to a biological baby-foundry? How could any female—no single member of which class had ever painted a great picture, written a great book, composed a great sonata, or discovered a great scientific truth—appreciate the ultimate importance of the F-T-L drive? It was like entrusting a first-folio Shakespeare to a broody hen; the shredded scraps would be made into a nest. For the egg came first. Motherhood was all.

That explained it, of course. That, Ross told himself moodily, explained everything except why the F-T-L secret had fallen into apparently equal or worse desuetude on such planets as Gemsel, Clyde, Cyrnus One, Ragansworld, Tau Ceti II, Capella’s family of eight, and perhaps a hundred others.

Ragansworld was gone entirely, drowned in a planetary nebula.

The planet of the graybeard had gone to seed; nothing new, nothing not hallowed by tradition had a chance in its decrepit social order.

His home, Halsey’s Planet, was rapidly, calmly, inevitably depopulating itself.

And Azor had fallen into a rigid, self-centered matriarchal order that only an act of God could break.

Was there a pattern? Were there any similarities?

Ross searched desperately in his mind; but without result. The image of Helena kept intruding itself between him and his thoughts. Was he getting sentimental about that sweet little chucklehead? Who, he hastily added, had come near to criminally assaulting him, who had climbed the....

He turned to the little waiter and demanded: “Will she—Helena—be on the orbital station with us if we’re all convicted?”

“Hmm—no, I should think not. As a responsible person, she gets the supreme penalty.”

Ross numbly asked after a long pause, “How? Nothing—painful?” It was hard to think of Helena dangling grotesquely at a rope’s end or jolting as she sat strapped in a large, ugly chair. But there were things he had heard of which were horribly worse.

Bernie had been watching him. “I’m sorry,” the little man said soberly. “It’s up to the judge. She’s a foreigner, so they may consider that an extenuating circumstance and place some quick-acting poison aboard for her to take. Otherwise it’s slow starvation.”

A faint, irrational hope had begun to dawn in Ross’s mind. “Aboard what? Exactly how does it work?”

“They’ll put her aboard some hulk with the rockets disabled, fire it off into space—and that’s that. I suppose they’ll use the ship she came in——”

Ross was frantically searching his pockets. He had a stylus. “Got any paper?” he briskly demanded of Bernie.

“Yes, but——?” The waiter blankly passed over an order book. Ross sprawled on the floor and began to scribble: “Never mind how or why this works. Do it. You saw me work the big fan-shaped computer in the center room and you can do it too. Find the master star maps in the chart room. Look up the co-ordinates of Halsey’s System. Set these co-ordinates on the twenty-seven dials marked Proximate Mass. Take the readings on the windows above the dials and set them on the cursors of the computer——” He scribbled furiously, from time to time forcing himself deliberately to slow down as the writing became an unreadable scrawl. He filled the ruled fronts of the order pages and then the backs—perhaps ten thousand closely-written words, and not one of them wasted. Haarland’s precise instructions, mercilessly drilled into him, flowed out again.

He flung the stylus down at last and read through the book again, ignoring the gaping Bernie. It was all there, as far as he could tell. Grant her a lot of luck and more brains than he privately credited her with, and she had a fighting chance of winding up within radar range of Halsey’s Planet. GCA could take her down from there; an annoying ship-like object hanging on the radarscopes would provoke a reconnaissance.

She knew absolutely nothing about F-T-L or the Wesley drive, but then—neither did he. That fact itself was no handicap.

He might rot on “Minerva,” but some word might get back to Haarland. And so would the ship. And Helena would not perish miserably in a drifting hulk.

Bernie saw the mysterious job was ended and dared to ask, “A letter?”

“No,” Ross said jubilantly. “By God, if things break right they won’t get her. It’s like this——”

He happily began to explain that his F-T-L ship’s rockets were only auxiliaries for fine maneuvering, but he counted on the court not knowing that. If he and Helena could persuade....

As he went on the look on Bernie’s face changed very slowly from hope to pity to politely-simulated interest. Correspondingly Ross’s accounting became labored and faulty. The pauses became longer and at last he broke off, filled with self-contempt at his folly. He said bitterly, “You don’t think it’ll work.”

“Oh, no!” Bernie protested with too much heartiness. “I could see she’s awfully mechanically-minded for a woman, even if it wouldn’t be polite to say so. Sure it’ll work, Ross. Sure!”

The hell it would.

At least he had disposed of a few hours. And—perhaps some bungling setting would explode the ship, or end a Wesley Jump in the heart of a white dwarf star—sudden annihilation, whiffing Helena out of existence before her body could realize that it had died, before the beginning of apprehension could darken happy absorption with a task she thought would bring her to safety.

For that reason alone he had to carry the scheme through.

* * * * *

The courtroom was a chintzy place bright with spring flowers. Ross and Helena looked numbly at one another from opposite corners while the previous order of business was cleared from the docket. A wedding.

The judge, unexpectedly sweet-faced and slender though gray, obviously took such parts of her work seriously. “Marylyn and Kent,” she was saying earnestly to the happy couple, “I suppose you know my reputation. I lecture people a bit before I tie the knot. Evidently it’s not such a bad idea because my marriages turn out well. Last week in Eleanor one of my girls was arrested and reprimanded for gross infidelity and a couple of years ago right here in Novj Grad one of my boys got five hundred lashes for nonsupport. Let’s hope it did them some good, but the cases were unusual. My people, I like to think, know their rights and responsibilities when they walk out of my court, and I think the record bears me out.

“Marylyn, you have chosen to share part of your life with this man. You intend to bear his children. This should not be because your animal appetites have overcome you and you can’t win his consent in any other way but because you know, down deep in your womanly heart, that you can make him happy. Never forget this. If you should thoughtlessly conceive by some other man, don’t tell him. He would only brood. Be thrifty, Marylyn. I have seen more marriages broken up by finances than any other reason. If your husband earns a hundred Eleanors a week, spend only that and no more. If he makes _fifty_ Eleanors a week spend only that and no more. Honorable poverty is preferable to debt. And, from a practical standpoint, if you spend more than your husband earns he will be jailed for debt sooner or later, with resulting loss to your own pocket.

“Kent, you have accepted the proposal of this woman. I see by your dossier that you got in just under the wire. In your income group the antibachelor laws would have caught up with you in one more week. I must say I don’t like the look of it, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. I want to talk to you about the meaning of marriage. Not just the wage assignment, not just the insurance policy, not just the waiver of paternity and copulation ‘rights’, so-called. Those, as a good citizen, you will abide by automatically—Heaven help you if you don’t. But there is more to marriage than that. The honor you have been done by this woman who sees you as desirable and who wishes to make you happy over the years is not a sterile legalism. Marriage is like a rocket, I sometimes think. The brute, unreasoning strength of the main jets representing the husband’s share and the delicate precise steering and stabilizing jets the wife’s. We have all of us seen too many marriages crash to the ground like a rocket when these roles were reversed. It is not reasonable to expect the wife to provide the drive—that is, the income. It is not reasonable to expect the husband to provide the steering—that is, the direction of the personal and household expenditures. So much for the material side of things. On the spiritual side, I have little to say. The laws are most explicit; see that you obey them—and if you don’t, you had better pray that you wind up in some court other than mine. I have no patience with the obsolete doctrine that there is such a legal entity as seduction by female, despite the mouthings of certain so-called jurists who disgrace the bench of a certain nearby city.

“Having heard these things, Marylyn and Kent, step forward and join hands.”

They did. The ceremony was short and simple; the couple then walked from the courtroom under the beaming smile of the judge.

A burly guard next to Ross pointed at the groom. “Look,” she said sentimentally. “He’s crying. Cute!”

“I don’t blame the poor sucker,” Ross flared, and then, being a man of conscience, wondered suddenly if that was why, on Halsey’s Planet, women cried at weddings.

A clerk called: “Dear, let’s have those egalitarians front and center, please. Her honor’s terribly rushed.”

Helena was escorted forward from one side, while Ross and Bernie were jostled to the fore from the other. The judge turned from the happy couple. As she looked down at the three of them the smile that curved her lips turned into something quite different. Ross, quailing, suddenly realized that he had seen just that expression once before. It was when he was very, very young, when a friend of his mother’s had come bustling into the kitchen where he was playing, just after she had smelled, and just before she had seen, the long-dead rat he had fetched up from the abandoned cellar across the street.

While the clerk was reading the orders and indictment, the judge’s stare never wavered. And when the clerk had finished, the judge’s silent stare remained, for a long, terrible time.

In the quietest of voices, the judge said, “So.”

Ross caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye. He turned just in time to see Bernie, knees buckling, slip white-faced and unconscious to the floor. The guards rushed forward, but the judge raised a peremptory hand. “Leave him alone,” she ordered soberly. “It is kinder. Defendants, you are charged with the gravest of crimes. Have you anything to say before sentence is passed on you?”

Ross tried to force words—any words, to protest, to plead, to vilify—through his clogged throat. All he managed was a croaking sound; and Helena, by his side, nudged him sharply to silence. He turned to her sharply, and realized that this was the best chance he’d be likely to get. He clutched at her, rolled up his eyes, slumped to the floor in as close an imitation of Bernie’s swoon as he could manage.

The judge was visibly annoyed, and this time she didn’t stop the attendants when they rushed in to kick him erect. But he had the consolation of seeing a flash of understanding cross Helena’s face, and her hand dart to a pocket with the paper he had handed her. In the confusion no one saw.

The rest of the courtroom scene was kaleidoscopic in Ross’s recollection. The only part he remembered clearly was the judge’s voice as she said to him and Bernie, “——for the rest of your lives, as long as Almighty God shall, in Her infinite wisdom, permit you the breath of life, be banished from Azor and all of its allied worlds to the prison hulk in ‘Orbit Minerva.’”

And they were hustled out as the judge, even more wrathful than before, turned to pronounce sentence on Helena.

..... 9

THE guard spat disgustedly. “Fine lot of wrecks we’re getting,” she complained. “Not like the old days. They used to send real men here.” She glowered at Ross and Bernie, holding their commitment papers loosely in her hand. “And for treason, too!” she added. “Used to be it took guts to commit a crime against the state.” She shook her head, then made a noise of distaste and scribbled initials on the commitment papers. She handed them back to the pilot who had brought them up from Azor, who grinned, waved, and got out of there. “All right,” said the guard, “we have to take what we get. I’ll have to put you two on construction; you’ll never stand up under hard work. Keep your noses clean, that’s all. Up at 0500; breakfast till 0510; work detail till 1950; dinner and recreation till 2005; then lights out. Miss a formation and you miss a meal. Miss two, and you get punishment detail. Nobody misses three.”

Ross and Bernie found themselves sharing a communal cell. They had all of five minutes to look around and get oriented; then they were out on their first work detail.

It wasn’t so bad as it sounded. Their shiftmates were a couple of dozen ragged-looking wrecks, half-heartedly assembling a sort of meccano-toy wall out of sheets of perforated steel and clip-spring bolts. All the parts seemed well worn; some of the bolts hardly closed. It took Ross the better part of his first detail, whispering when the guards were looking the other way, to find out why. Their half of the prisoners were Construction; the other half was Demolition. What Construction in the morning put up, Demolition in the evening tore down. Neither side was anxious to set any speed records, and the guards without exception were too bored to care.

With any kind of luck, Ross found, he could hope eventually to get a real job—manning the “Minerva’s” radar, signal, or generating facilities, working in the kitchens or service shops, perhaps even as an orderly in the guard quarters. (Although Ross quite by accident chanced to see a guard’s orderly as he passed through a corridor near the work area, a handkerchief held daintily to his nose. And though the orderly’s clothing was neat and his plump cheeks indicated good eating, the haunted expression in his eyes made Ross think twice.)

The one thing he could not do, according to the testimony of every man he spoke to, was escape.

The fifth time Ross got that answer, the guard had stepped out of the room. Ross took the opportunity to thrash the thing through. “Why?” he demanded. “Back where I come from we’ve got lots of prisons. I never heard of one nobody escaped from.”

The other prisoner laughed shortly. “Now you have,” he said. “Go ahead, try. Every one of us has tried, one time or another. There’s only one thing stopping you—there’s no place to go. You can get past the guards easy enough—they’re lazy, when they’re not either drunk or boy-chasing. You can roam around ‘Minerva’ all you like. You can even get to the spacelock, and if you want to you can walk right through it. But not in a spacesuit, because there aren’t any on board. And not into the tender that brings us up from Azor, because you aren’t built right.”

Ross looked puzzled. “Not built right?”

“That’s right. There’s telescreens and remote-control locks built into that tender. The pilot brings you up, but once she couples with ‘Minerva’ the controls lock. And the only way they get unlocked is when three women, in three different substations down on Azor, push the RC releases. And they don’t do that until they look in their screens, and see that everybody who has turned up in the tender has stripped down to nothing at all, and every one of them is by-God female. Any further questions?” He grinned wryly. “Don’t even think about plastic surgery, if that happens to cross your mind,” he said. “We have two men here who tried it. You don’t have much equipment here; you can’t do a neat enough job.”

Ross gulped. “Hadn’t given it a thought,” he assured the other man. “You can’t even hide away in a trunk or something?”

The prisoner shook his head. “Aren’t any trunks. Everything’s one way—Azor to ‘Minerva’—except pilots and guards. No men ever go back. When you die, you go out the lock—without a ship. Same with everything else that they want to get rid of.”

Ross thought hard. “What if they—well, what if you’re sent up here and all, and then some new evidence turns up and you’re found innocent? Don’t they send you back then?”

“Found innocent?” The man looked at Ross pityingly. “Man, you _are_ new. Hey,” he called. “Hey, Chuck! This guy wants to know what happens if they find out back on Azor that he’s innocent!”

Chuck exploded into laughter. Wiping his eyes, he walked over to Ross. “Thanks,” he grinned. “Haven’t had a good laugh in fifteen years.”

“I don’t see that that’s so funny,” Ross said defensively. “After all, the judge can make a mistake, none of us is per—awk!”

“Shut up!” Chuck hissed, holding a hand over Ross’s mouth. “Do you want to get us all in _real_ trouble? Some of these guys would rat to the guards for an extra hunk of bread! The judges never make a mistake.” And his lips formed the silent word: “Officially.”

He let go of Ross and stood back, but didn’t walk away. He scratched his head. “Say,” he said, “you ask some stupid questions. Where are you from, anyhow?”

Ross said bitterly, “What’s the use? You won’t believe me. I happen to be from a place called Halsey’s Planet, which is a good long distance from here. About as far as light will travel in two hundred years, if that gives you an idea. I came here in an F-T-L—that is, a faster-than-light ship. You don’t know what that is, of course, but I did. It was a mistake, I admit it. But here I am.”

Somewhat to Ross’s surprise, Chuck didn’t laugh again. He looked dubious, and he scratched his head some more, but he didn’t laugh. To the other prisoner he said, “What do you think, Sam?”

Sam shrugged. “So maybe we were wrong,” he observed.

Ross demanded, “Wrong about what?”

“Well,” Chuck said hesitantly, “there’s a guy here named Flarney. He’s a pretty old son-of-a-gun by now, must be at least ninety, and he’s been here a good long time. Dunno how long. But he talks crazy, just like you. No offense,” he added, “it’s just that we all thought he’d gone space-happy. But maybe we’re wrong. Unless——” his eyes narrowed “unless the two of you are both space-happy, or trying to kid us, or something.”

Ross said urgently, “I swear, Chuck, there’s no such thing. It’s true. Who’s this Flarney? Where does he say he came from?”

“Who can make sense out of what he says? All I know is, he talked a lot about something faster than light. That’s crazy; that’s like saying slower than dark, or bigger than green, or something. But I don’t know, maybe it means something.”

“Believe me, Chuck, it does! Where is this man—can I see him?”

Chuck looked uncertain. “Well, sure. That is, you can see him all right. But it isn’t going to do you a whole hell of a lot of good, because he’s dead. Died yesterday; they’re going to pitch him out into space sometime today.”

Sam said, “This is when Whitker flips. One week without his old pal Flarney and he’ll begin to look funny. Two weeks and he starts acting funny. Three and he’s talking funny and the guards begin to crack down. I give him a month to get shot down and heaved through the locker.”

Old pal? Ross demanded, “Who’s this Whitker? Where can I get in touch with him?”

“Him and Flarney were both latrine orderlies. That’s where they put the feeble old men, mopping and polishing. Number Two head, any hour of the day or night. Old buzzard has his racket—we’re supposed to get a hank of cellosponge per man per day, but he’s always ‘fresh out’—unless you slip him your saccharine ration every once in a while.”

Ross asked the way to Number Two head and the routine. But it was an hour before he could bring himself to ask the hulking guard for permission.

“Sure, sonny,” she boomed. “I’ll show you the way. Need any help?”

“No, thanks, ma’am,” he said hastily, and she roared with laughter. So did the members of the construction gang; it must have been an ancient gag. He hurried on his way thinking dark and bloody thoughts.

“Whitker?” he asked a tottering ancient who nodded and drowsed amid the facilities of the head.

The old man looked up blearily and squeaked: “Fresh out. Fresh out. You should’ve saved some from yesterday.”

“That’s all right. I’m a new man here. I want to ask you about your friend Flarney——”

Whitker bowed his head and began to cry noiselessly.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Whitker. I heard. But there’s something we can do about it—maybe. Flarney was a faster-than-light man. He must have told you that. So am I. Ross, from Halsey’s Planet.”

He hadn’t the faintest idea as to whether any of this was getting through to the ancient.

“It seems Flarney and I were both on the same mission, finding out how and why planets were dropping out of communication. You and he used to talk a lot, they tell me. Did he ever tell you anything about that?”

Whitker looked up and squeaked dimly. “Oh, yes. All the time. I humored him. He was an old man, you know. And now he’s dead.” The tears leaked from his rheumy eyes and traced the sad furrows beside his nose.

Was he getting through? “What did he _say_, Mr. Whitker? About faster-than-light?”

The old man said, “L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus T-over-two-N.”

That damned formula again! “But what does it mean, Mr. Whitker? What did he say it meant?” Ross softly urged.

The old man looked surprised. “Genes?” he asked himself hazily. “Generations? I don’t remember. But you go to Earth, young man. Flarney said _they’d_ know, and know what to do about it, too, which is more than he did. His very words, young man!”

Ross didn’t dare stay longer. Furthermore he suspected that the old man’s attention span had been exhausted. He started from the room with a muttered thanks, and was stopped at the door by Whitker’s hand on his shoulder.

“You’re a good boy,” Whitker squeaked. “Here.”

Ross found himself walking down the corridor with an enormous wad of cellosponge in his hand.

The bunks were hard, but that didn’t matter. Dormitories were the outermost layer of the hulk, pseudogravity varies inversely as the fourth power of the distance, and the field generator was conventionally located near “Minerva’s” center. When your relative weight is one-quarter normal you can sleep deliciously on a gravel driveway. This was the dormitory’s only attractive feature. Otherwise it was too many steel slabs, tiered and spotted too close, too many unwashed males, too much weary snoring. The only things in short supply were headroom and air.

Not everybody slept. Insomniacs turned and grunted; those who had given up the struggle talked from bunk to bunk in considerately low tones.

Bernie muttered from a third-tier bunk facing Ross’s: “I wonder if she made it.”