John Maddox Roberts - Space Angel Read online

  "Minsk," the skipper said, "has cut the Angel in for a decent share of the profits of this voyage, plus a generous bonus for every member of the crew." At once it was clear that there was no regular ship's hire. If the voyage failed, the ship would be insolvent and they would all be stranded when they reached port. "Any objections?"

  "Hell, no," Torwald ventured when nobody spoke up. "When you roll for the big stakes, you take the big risks."

  "Why didn't Strelnikov come along personally?" Finn asked.

  "Unfortunately, Mr. Strelnikov was blinded during the fighting on Li Po. It will be several years before his new optics are reliable enough for him to space again."

  "Any more questions?" the Skipper asked. There were none. "All right, then, Lafayette, you and Kelly wash up after meals. We'll let the artists handle the preparation. Torwald, you'll be Michelle's assistant in the galley from now on." There was no objection from Torwald.

  "Tor," Ham said, "tomorrow, familiarize yourself with the supply room. That's your new bailiwick and it's a mess. Among other things, there's a set of short-

  pa beam cutters in there that we picked up at an auction on Earth. They were operative then. You'll have to maintain them as best you can."

  "Any other business?" asked the skipper.

  "One thing," Michelle chimed in, "Kelly, take this,"

  she tossed him a flat metal box, about five centimeters on a side, with a metal chain. "Wear that around your neck at all times from now on. Those are your tracetabs. They contain all the trace elements your body needs. There are about three thousand tabs in that box. If we go on xenorations, you'll

  need them."

  Kelly seemed puzzled.

  "There are about a thousand planets,"

  Sims ex-plained, "that supply native food edible by humans. On maybe half a dozen of them, all the trace elements necessary for human survival are present in the food."

  "If the soil and atmosphere are comparable to Earth's," Michelle continued, "native flora and fauna may give you all the protein, carbohydrates, and vitamins you need, but trace elements can be hard to come by. You'll die just as dead from lack of magnesium, phosphorous, or any number of other elements as from lack of water. If you get stranded on a xenoworld, that box can be your lifeline. Always keep it filled."

  Kelly looked down at the box in his palm, then he

  slipped the chain around his neck. It made him feel a bit more like a real spacer. "Thanks," he said. "And my compliments to the chef. I never ate like that in my life."

  "Gallantry, yet," said Michelle, smiling. "If that's true, they must not have fed you very well where you came from."

  "They starved us," Kelly said seriously.

  "Enjoy the good life while you can," Achmed chimed in. "Pretty soon we'll be out of fresh rations and on freezedrys, and when those run out we'll be

  eating concentrates unless we're lucky enough to find edible native stuff."

  "Ah . . ." Kelly started, unsure that he should say anything.

  "Speak up," the skipper urged. "We're all shipmates here."

  "This may sound pretty dumb."

  "Go ahead." Bert grinned "Everybody gets to say six dumb things on his first voyage. It's an old custom."

  "Well, it's just that, here I am in space, and I haven't seen space yet. I mean, not space, but the stars, and, you know—what I guess I'm saying is, is there a window or porthole or something on this ship? So far, it's like being in a building; just not very real. If I could just see the stars, I'd know I was really here."

  "Why, to be sure," Finn said, "there's an old navigator's bubble that opens off my instrument compartment. When the S,pace Angel was built, it was still required that there be a place where the navigator could take visual sightings if the instruments failed, though I never heard of such things being any use for charting a course in deep space. When you've finished your galley chores, drop in and I'll open her up. I've not had a look at the stars in a score of voyages."

  "I'll be along too, if you don't mind," Bert said. "It would be nice to resurrect the old thrill of being in space. At my age, such nostalgia has a rejuvenating effect."

  In all, eight of the ship's company showed up at the observation bubble. A circular area five meters in diameter, its instrument consoles had long since been ripped out, and the air was musty with disuse. Ham brought a box of Taurus cigars, Bert several bottles of wine and some glasses. Nancy arrived with her violin. While the Communications officer tuned up, Torwald whipped out his knife, produced a corkscrew, and began opening bottles.

  "Never be without a corkscrew," he instructed Kelly. "It's a tool of survival required throughout the civilized portions of the galaxy."

  Kelly sat on the carpeting covering the floor, looking up. Overhead stretched a dome of near-invisible glassite through which the stars and planets shone with a clarity never seen by ground-dwellers. Finn began to point out to Kelly the principal stars and name the planets.

  Bert took it upon himself to expound philisophi-cally. "My boy, out there you see the Universe, with a capital U. Of course, you have always been able to see the universe by looking in any direction. But, out here, you perceive it with a clarity lacking in any environment encumbered by an atmosphere. And let me tell you, it is strange and enigmatic."

  "Weird is a better word," said Ham.

  "Things happen out here," Finn nodded in agreement, "which I would consider unbelievable if they happened anywhere on Earth—except, perhaps, in Ireland."

  "Oh, no," Michelle whispered to Torwald. "Now they're going to bombard the poor kid with spacers' folklore."

  There was a brief pause, them a deep voice asked in sepulchral tones, "Son, have you ever heard of the Blue Lights?"

  "I think I read about them somewhere, Ham."

  "Well, they're little balls of blue flame that infest a ship just before some disaster occurs. I've known spacers who've seen them."

  "And then, there are the Ghost Ships," Finn added while mixing his wine with the contents of a small flask he carried in a hip pocket. "Old ships bearing the names of vessels that never reported home, and they appear to men on doomed expeditions. I saw one once."

  "I thought you never came out to the observation bubble, Finn."

  "I've a confession to make, Kelly. Secretly, I've of-tcn come out to the Navigation bubble to look at the Mars and meditate. Once, during the War, I was serving as navigator on a cargo transport supporting the Li I'o invasion. On the night before H-Hour, I was reclining in just such a bubble as this one. On a Navy ship, it's just about the only place a man can find some privacy and be safe from his superiors, since most of them don't even know the bubble exists. Suddenly, before my eyes, the specter of a ship appeared: one of those knobby, old-fashioned affairs, all tubes and spheres. Great rents marred her sides, and you could see the bones of the dead inside. Her bridge was lit by a red light, such as they used on the old ships, and enclosed in glassite. Across her nose I could just read the name Nevsky. I later learned the Nevsky disappeared during a routine run to Titan in 2022, with some of Earth's greatest scientists aboard. The next day—well, everybody knows what happened at Li Po."

  Unable to control himself, Bert exclaimeed, "Finn, were I not an old spacer, well versed in the strangeness of the spaces between the stars, I would call you a most thoroughgoing Irish liar. As it is, I shall merely reserve my judgment."

  "You don't need to believe Finn or Ham, Kelly," Torwald said, "but before you've been out too long, you'll have seen some strange things." The others nodded their heads in agreement. "The first thing you need to cultivate is a mind open to any possibility, because anything is possible out here. You abandoned the word impossible back a{ the pad when we left."

  None disputed this great truth.

  Nancy, tuned to her satisfaction at last, broke into a rhapsody by Kallio, the only major composer ever to be a spacer. She followed up the Kallio piece with others by Debussy, Ravel, Respighi, and Hoist. Of Earth's composers, these were the spacers
' favorites;

  their impressionistic melodies evoked the flavor of life between the stars better than any others, even though the composers had lived out their lives bound to Earth.

  One by one the crew began to retire to their cabins. The violin was put away, the empty bottles picked up, the aroma of cigar smoke faded as the smoke trailed down the ladder to the Navigation compartment. Fi-ally, no one was left in the bubble except Kelly, looking at the stars.

  Two

  Kelly passed through the hatch marked engine room. Faded letters below said unauthorized personnel keep out. Kelly wondered if the restriction applied to him, decided it didn't, and entered.

  The room was brightly illuminated, and its bulkheads were painted stark white, in contrast to the rest of the ship, which had been painted in various colors and patterns according to the whims of former skippers. Toward the rear, two pits contained the lower halves of the main thrusters. Between them was slung the tapering cone of the Whoopee Drive. Achmed and Lafayette had stripped the cowling from the off-duty thruster and were scrubbing it down with a variety of implements.

  "Hop in and get to work!" Achmed shouted. "Take Lafayette's side." Kelly dropped into the well next to the red-headed boy and reached toward a sonic disruptor of the kind he had seen used on Earth to clean buildings. Lafayette slapped his hand away before he could touch the instrument.

  "Naughty, naughty. Kiddies don't play with power tools in the engine room. Here, take some of this and start scrubbing." He thrust a wad of steel wool into Kelly's hand. "That's more your speed. Now, get to work."

  Kelly scrubbed at the piled-up engine gunge, fuming silently. It was like that all morning. The older boy kept finding fault with Kelly's work and passing Kelly the dirtiest jobs. Kelly refused to let the hectoring destroy the enjoyment of his first real spacer's work. He had performed harder, dirtier labor before, so the necessarily grimy work of engine maintenance didn't bother him. Eventually Achmed called Lafayette over to his side of the thruster and Kelly heard a brief, muffled exchange before Lafayette returned. For the rest of the job, Lafayette dropped the bullying, but Kelly resented Achmed's interference. He thought he could take care of himself.

  Toward the end of the morning shift, Torwald dropped in. "I've just been to the supply room, and it's the most disgusting mess I've ever seen. I'm not going to try to tackle it until Kelly's free to give me a hand." He picked up a disrupter and dropped into the pit next to Kelly. Lafayette had crossed to Achmed's side, to dismantle a coolant valve. "Who was my predecessor, anyway—a Vegan swamp farmer?"

  "A man named Krilencu," Achmed replied. "He had an excessive fondness for the bottle in his later years."

  "It shows." Torwald grimaced. "Why did the skipper keep him on if his veins were full of thruster fuel?"

  "He spaced with her wing during the War. They say he was a good man back then. Her wing saw some heavy combat. A lot of people took to the juice when things got so rough it looked like nobody was going to live through it. Some of them couldn't stop when it was all over. I guess the skipper felt kind of responsible."

  "Well, her loyalty's commendable," Torwald commented. "But, he's left me with the lousiest job of sorting and accounting I've ever contemplated."

  "A man with all your talents should find it easy," Achmed said blandly.

  "Hah! See if I ever come down to help you clean our lousy engines again." He turned to Kelly. "Well, kid, how do you like your first taste of real spacing?"

  "I love it!" Kelly's teeth flashed white in his grimy lace. "But, wouldn't it have been easier to do this job in port?"

  "Easier, sure," Torwald noted, "but not as efficient. A ship on the ground is earning nobody any money, not the owners nor the crew. Any job that can be done on shipboard by crew labor and with ship's equipment should be done en route to pickup or delivery. That's the most efficient use of a ship's time."

  "Coffee break!" Achmed yelled, and all four of them lined up at the engine room coffee urn. After several minutes of friendly banter about Torwald's quartermastering problems, Torwald kidded Achmed about the sweatshop the engineer was running.

  "It'll be cooler when we cut in the Whoopee Drive," Achmed said to Kelly, gesturing toward the drive housing. Intrigued by the strange object, Kelly walked over for a closer look at the drive mechanism, a big spindle suspended in line with the ship's long axis. It was featureless except for the clear glassite tip within which the boy could make out a revolving crystal Mobius band.

  "How does this thing work, Achmed? I heard it won't work within a solar system."

  "Damned if I know." The engineer shrugged. "I know how to run it, but I don't know how it runs. Do you know, Tor?"

  "Kelly," said Torwald, "there are maybe fifty physicists who can claim to understand the Whoopee Drive, but they understand only the principle which is quite a job in itself. It's like Einstein and relativity; you can learn its effects and harness the principle, but the whys of it are beyond the grasp of human brain power."

  "Hah!" Kelly chuckled. "I thought you old spacers were supposed to know everything about ships."

  "About running them, sure," said Torwald. "But as to what makes them go, that's a job for scientists. We're just glorified proletarians. We may be experts, but space drive isn't our realm of expertise. Look, I'll give you an example: There was never a more skilled professional in the world than the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century sailor. His craft was in making a fragile construction of wood and cloth take him just about anywhere there was water, and a bad sailor meant a sunk ship. They had a knowledge of wind and water a hundred times more intimate than any spacer has of space. Yet few men alive in those days knew why the wind blows, or why the ocean has currents."

  Achmed suddenly interrupted. "Speaking of wind, you're pretty long-winded yourself. I never would've expected it."

  "Look, I try to pass on to this kid the valuable lessons of a lifetime spent in space, and what do I get? Ridicule! Where's your sense of obligation, Achmed? It's the duty of us old hands to give the young a proper education."

  "Between your educating and Finn's tale-spinning, this kid will jump ship at the first port and never set foot on another. Back to work!"

  They scrubbed for another couple of hours. Once, they heard a bong from a timer on the bulkhead. Achmed jumped from his well, stripped and stepped under a sonic cleaner. When he was spotless, he opened a battered wall locker, withdrew and slipped on a white robe, then placed a small skullcap on the back of his head. Next, he removed a small rolled-up rug and spread it on the deck. He knelt and began his prayers, facing the thruster exit cones.

  When his devotions were over, the Arab changed back into his work clothes and picked up his scrub brush. An hour later, another bong sounded and Michelle's voice called from the intercom: "Torwald, Kelly, report to the galley."

  The two cleaned up and found Michelle in the galley, rolling out dough for pies. "The menu features roast beef and Yorkshire pudding today," she announced. "Kelly, get two kilos of dried apples out of the storeroom. Tor, start measuring out the sugar. The recipe's over there." She nodded toward a piece of paper clamped to the bulkhead over the range. Once they had established a work rhythm, Michelle began questioning Torwald and Kelly about their histories, standard procedure for a med officer: survivors of Arcturan Blight could not take penicillin, and quinine-4 would cause a harmless virus from Vega Prime to mutate into a deadly mankiller. The med officer needed detailed medical histories of all crew members, or disaster could result. Kelly presented no problems; he had been under State health care all his life and had never been exposed to alien diseases or conditions. On the other hand, Torwald's history was complex and colorful, and Michelle recorded occasional notes as he spoke.

  Once their physiological histories were taken care of, Michelle began to question them about their psychological histories. Kelly found himself unsure whether these were professional questions or the result of curiosity. He did notice that Michelle seemed far more interested in Torwald'
s background than in his own. Eventually she sent Kelly out to set the table, but he could still hear them talking.

  "Ever been married, Tor?"

  "Once. My wife was a scoutship officer like me. She was sent out to recon Toth before the landing. Only one ship of her wing returned, and it wasn't hers.

  We were expendable people in the scoutships. What about you?"

  "Twice. The first was a med officer in a hospital attached to the University of Lima. He was killed in a bombing before the Shield was developed. The other was an engineer on a troop transport. We met when I treated him for burns while I was serving aboard the Asklepios. He was killed a year later at Li Po." Neither wasted words on empty consolations. Everybody had lost someone in the War. If you tried to console everyone you met, little time would remain for anything else.

  After lunch, Torwald told Kelly to find a notebook before joining him in the supply room—there would be a good deal of paperwork for the boy to handle. Kelly headed back to his cabin. Notebooks and scribers had been among the supplies Torwald had dictated back on Earth. Returning with a pad, Kelly was crossing the hold when he noticed a motion from the corner of his eye. Holding tightly to the railing, he leaned over to peer into the dim, cavernous hold below.

  There it was again. Something darted across the bottom of the hold. Darted wasn't quite the word to describe the motion—it was more like a waddle, although very quick. And whatever made it was green. Intrigued, Kelly climbed over the railing and slid down a support strut to the bottom. He peered forward through the cylindrical chamber. Something was moving away from him on four feet. It seemed to be about the size of a small dog. Kelly approached the critter cautiously; for all he knew, the thing might be dangerous. Sensing his presence behind it, the creature turned and stood on its hind legs, forelegs dangling barely reaching its round belly. Its fiat face had a tiny mouth and an oversized, onion-shaped nose. The head was framed by two furry ears, giving the thing the look of someone wearing a poke bonnet. It had round button eyes, widely spaced. A more harmless-looking creature Kelly had never seen.