Tales of the Flying Mountains (24 page)

Waiting out the transmission lag, he heard Golescu say, “Whoof! Looks as if there's going to be more excitement than I bargained for.”

West uttered a small chuckle. “Weren't you caroling about the mad, merry life of a transporteer?”

“Shucks, Ed, I was only practicing my act. Those blooming glamour boys from the scoopships and the prospector teams have been latching on to all the girls back home. Something's got to be done for our kind of spaceman.”

“That gas must positively not be released so close to Earth,” Bailey stated. “It would contaminate the entire inner region, causing damage estimated at ten billion dollars. You may valve it out when you are no less than one hundred sixty thousand kilometers from Earth sea level and/or basic Lunar surface. That's a direct order, by my authority under this jurisdiction and the Interplanetary Navigation Agreement. Are you recording? I repeat——”

“Judas priest!” Golescu yelled. “You expect us to haul away a bomb?”

A humming silence fell over the ship. Storrs became acutely aware of how the stars glistened, the power plant and ventilators murmured, the deck quivered ever so slightly with energies. He felt the roughness of his coverall on his skin, which had become damp and sharp-smelling. He stared at the meters on the pilot panel, and they stared back like troll eyes, and still the silence waxed.

Bailey broke it. “Yes. Unless you have some other plan, we do expect you to remove that stuff to a safe distance. Under terms of your company's franchise for terrestrial operations, it is your responsibility to dispose of this object in a manner not injurious to the public well-being. What's the problem, anyway? According to your rated thrust, you should be able to get the sailship's cargo section far enough away in four or five hours.”

“The hell you say,” Storrs barked. “We can't use full power on that big an outside load. Too much inertia. We'd rip our hull open. One-third of max'll be risky enough. And we've got to uncouple the sail first, to get proper trim—at least two hours' work.” Desperately: “You're giving us no safety margin. You know as well as I do, flare time can't be predicted much closer than an hour. If it happens sooner than you claim, and the radiation sweeps over us before we can disengage and get clear—and
that
takes time—the explosion will destroy us. And you'll still have space contamination. Plus a lot of ship fragments.”

“Also people fragments,” Golescu chimed in. “We got a legal right to refuse an impossible job, don't we?”

“But not an improbable one,” West said. His gaze went to Earth. “I did want to see Blighty again.”

“You will,” Storrs said. “We're not going to commit suicide for the benefit of a lot of Earthlings.”

“Like me, Sam?” West asked softly.

Bailey came back on: “You are not expected to act without due precautions. You can safely tow at the end of a cable several kilometers long, can't you?”

“Know how much mass that adds?” Storrs snapped. “But never mind. The fact is, our class of ship isn't designed for cable tows. We hook on directly by geegee. A cable ud tear us apart, just like hauling under max thrust.”

“Wait a bit,” West interrupted. He had skippered a European League ship before he reached compulsory retirement age and Beltline made him an offer. Asterite law based retirement on medical data rather than the calendar. “I know what sort of boat can do a cable tow. Not an ordinary tug—I mean the kind that starts a sailship off. It hasn't enough power, considering how fast we'll have to work. But a North American Navy tug of the
Hercules
class would serve. I should think four of them could be hitched on without their drive fields interfering. Or perhaps you can borrow some
Kubilai
types from the Asians. With that many engines at work, we can cover the required distance in ample time. Have 'em there when we arrive, will you? We'll make the attachments and supervise the whole job.”

Again the wait was longer than transmission lag would account for. At last Bailey's voice came, so small and shaken that the noise of the universe nearly drowned it. “I … guess you don't know. Both fleets are out near Venus. Joint maneuvers.”

After a moment, assuming briskness like a garment: “We'll do what we can—alert the International Rescue Service; commandeer whatever else we can find that may be of help. I can't make any promises, with so little time to go through channels. But I'll do whatever is humanly possible.”

“Amoebically possible, you mean,” Storrs said. He managed to keep it under his breath. Shaking himself, he answered aloud:

“We'll get started now. Have to fold our radio-radar net. Acceleration forces would wreck it otherwise. When we've made rendezvous with one hundred twenty-eight, we'll call you on the short-range ‘caster. Stand by for that.”

He didn't wait for a response, but snapped off transmission as if the switch were Evan Bailey's neck.

Once the web had been pulled in by the appropriate machinery and acceleration had commenced, there was little for men to do until the end of the run. But doctrine required that Storrs remain on the bridge during his pilot watch—in which time he was also the captain. He roused from a period of angry lip-gnawing and said, “How about fixing us some chow? God only knows when we'll get our next chance to eat, and He isn't passing the information on.

“Right-o.” West heaved his bulk out of the navigator's chair and started aft.

His body dragged at him as he went down the companionway and along the passage to the galley. There was, of course, no sensation of the ten gravities under which
Merlin
hurtled Earthward. The Emetts acted equally on every object inboard, and normally to the internal gyrogravitic field which furnished weight. But sometimes he wished the latter weren't kept at the standard Earth g. One of the few things he really liked about the asteroids was the sense of buoyancy on a rock where pull generators had not yet been installed. It was almost like being young again.

Oh, stop kidding yourself. Also stop feeling sorry for yourself
. He squeezed into the galley and got to work. Herdships always carried a gourmet assortment of food, as one means of keeping up morale on their long, lonely cruises. West enjoyed exploring the potentialities, whenever his turn came to cook. And he had the honor of his country to defend as well, against that ancient canard about English cuisine. Usually he built the sandwiches as elaborately as any Dane. But today his mind was elsewhere.

How much risk are we obliged to run?

Under the law, a transporteer crew had the right to refuse a task as being too dangerous. Afterward they would have to face a board of inquiry, and Beltline might well decide to fire them.
Would I honestly mind that?
In this particular instance, though, they'd probably be cleared.
Merlin
represented a considerable investment. The company's cost accountants would not be happy if she were lost. In fact, if the isonitrate was simply released into space, a moderately expensive sailship could also be saved.

However, that might well embroil Beltline in legal action, considering how much economic damage Earth ould suffer. No one could hold anyone responsible for the sun's picking this day to flare. But a lawyer could argue that Beltline's agents had made no effort to rescue the situation, and therefore a whopping claim should be paid. Earth's SCC might be put under pressure to rescind the terrestrial franchise. A protracted court battle, even if won, would doubtless prove more costly than two ships and three men.

West shook his head.
That's another thing I don't like about the Republic. They can brag as much as they want about free enterprise, but it still amounts to the rawest, most cold-blooded kind of capitalism. Maybe the welfare states on Earth have gotten stuffy and overbureaucratized
—
nevertheless, we don't let the devil take the hindmost!

He put the food and a pot of coffee on a tray and went forward. Storrs was busy with a slide rule and some bescribbled sheets of paper. He grabbed a sandwich with an automatic “Thanks,” and chewed as he worked on. Rations, to him, were only fuel; West and Golescu never looked forward to his turn in the galley.

“What're you doing?” the Englishman asked.

“Trying to figure if we can't boil off some of the liquid as we tow, so gradually that it won't affect space too much, so fast that we'll shed noticeable mass. But hell and sulfur! I don't have the thrust parameter. Not knowing what sort of tugs we'll have available—How about hitching that Bailey character to the load and cracking a whip over him? A big wire whip hooked up to five hundred volts A.C.”

West achieved a smile. “What'd he push against?”

“Hm-m-m, yeah, that's right. Okay, we'll get extra reaction by cutting Bailey into small pieces—very, very small pieces—and pitching him aft.”

West's look moved out to Earth. The half disk was becoming a crescent as
Merlin
approached the spaceward side, but it was also rapidly growing. He traced bands that were clouds, white in a summer sky, the mirror sheen of ocean and the blurred greenish-brown coast of Europe.

“Don't be too hard on the man, Sam,” he said. “When a world gets as crowded as that one there, you have to operate by a rigid system. Within the system, I presume he's doing his best.”

Storrs spoke an obscenity. “A machine is judged by its output. How's your precious system performing in this mess?”

“Oh, forget the political arguments. There's England.”

Storrs's features softened a trifle. “Kind of tough, huh? Passing this close to your wife and not getting a chance to see her.”

West thought of the little house in Kent, where the hollyhocks would now be in bloom, so tall that they overshadowed the windows. He shrugged. “I knew what I was letting myself in for when I signed up as a transporteer.”
Five years on the Beltline. I've waited out not quite three of them so far
.

He stared spaceward. Illimitable emptiness gaped at him, from here to the frost-cold stars. Out there plodded the sailships, unmanned, driven by the sun, slowly but cheaply carrying nonperishable cargo from the mineral-rich asteroids and the chemical-rich Jovian atmosphere to an Earth grown gaunt in natural resources, returning with such manufactured goods as the Republic had not yet gotten around to producing for itself. And there, too, flitted the herdships on the interweaving orbits,
Apollonius of Tyana, Simon Magus, Hermes Trismegistus, Morgan le Fay, Gandalf
a score of them with radio webs outreaching, listening until an automaton cried for help. It was a chilly concept, somehow. He shivered.

Two more years
.

After that, the real retirement, with Margaret in flowering Kent. He didn't yet know if his decision had been right. Gardens, green hills, four-hundred-year-old homes were not anything a man could afford on a space officer's pension. Not with today's land values and taxes. But the pay scale in the asteroids was fantastic, the Republic did not levy on income, and Earth needed out-planet exchange so badly that every terrestrial government also exempted such earnings from impost. The house would be mortgage free by the time he came back to Margaret, and there would be enough in the bank as well for them to do everything they once promised themselves.

On the other hand, they paid for it with five years when they might have been together.

And if he got killed, they never would collect the goods. Margaret would have to move in with one of the kids, and—

West picked up the tray. “I'll take Andy his lunch,” he said.

Storrs nodded absent-mindedly and returned to his calculations. No doubt they were his form of escape.

Passing through the tiny saloon, West heard the plink of Golescu's guitar. Words bounced after:

George Washington was a transporteer, he was, he was
.

George Washington was a transporteer, he was, he was
.

He paddled across the Delaware

To find the buck he'd shot-put there
.

Bravo, bravo, hurrah for the transporteers!

He entered the workshop just forward of the bulkhead which sealed off the nuclear generator. A man was always supposed to stand by here under acceleration, in case of trouble. But
Merlin
had yet to develop any colly-wobbles, and Golescu was sitting by. His chair was tilted back against the big lathe, his feet on the rungs and his instrument on his lap. He was a squat, dark young man with squirrel-bright eyes.

“Hi,” he said. “Also yum.”

West set the tray down and poured two cups of coffee. “By the bye,” he said, “I'm not too well up on American folklore, but wasn't it the Potomac that Washington threw the dollar over?”

“Don't ask me. My parents came to Ceres direct from Craiova.”

“Wherever that may be ….D'you want to go back and visit there some day?”

“Whatever for?” Golescu rose. “Hey, those sandwiches look great.”

“Thanks. I'm afraid my heart wasn't in them, though.”

Golescu made a face. “Yech! I should hope not.”

“I mean I had the wind up so about this confounded affair——”

“Wind up?”

“Forget it. A Briticism.” West shook his head. “D'you know, I can't help pitying children who've never felt wind or rain.”

“Everything I hear about weather makes it sound more dismal,” Golescu said through a mouthful. “Me, I feel sorry for kids that never get to ride a scooter with the whole universe shining around them.”

He chewed for a while, then blurted, “Hey, what
is
this problem of ours, Ed? There's no hazard in jettisoning boiloff cargo, not to anybody except the insurance carrier. Is there? It's not like when forty-three's sail rotation went crazy. I still get nightmares about that one! Why can't we just valve off the isowhatsit, adjust the sail to whatever new track is right, and get back inside
Merlin's
rad screen field long before the sun burps?”