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Ebook has 72 lines and 8139 words, and 2 pages

Blind Play

He still had a chance to hide--but before he could propel himself to the other end of the lifeboat, out of sight, Arne Birkerod appeared at the other side of the open airlock.

Birkerod smiled. Pappas stood still, gripping the pilot's seat in front of him.

"Hello, Arne," said Pappas. "I was just checking over the--"

"Good morning, Nick--or good evening, if you like. Let's go up to the control cabin and see Garcia."

"After you," said Birkerod, much more politely than usual.

Pappas smiled uncertainly. He planted both feet against the side of the airlock opening, then jumped off. He floated down the ship's corridor to where it took a sharp bend; there he grabbed a rung of a ladder bolted to the corridor wall.

Birkerod had pushed off harder than Pappas had; he arrived at the ladder at the same time. "After you," he said again.

Pappas saw, at the end of the long corridor ahead, the open door to the control cabin. He pushed off in that direction.

Yusuf Garcia was in the ship's pilot's seat. Garcia was half Brazilian and half Malagasy. His eyes had a strong green tint which looked strange against the deep brown-black of his face. Pappas had always been a little afraid of him and the present situation didn't help that any; there was a gun in Garcia's hand.

Birkerod followed Pappas in, taking a seat facing Garcia. "What did you find, Yusuf?" he asked casually.

"Well, Arne, I haven't finished checking up on our little conjecture; the calculator over there is still working on it. But while I was waiting I looked through our friend Pappas's locker. You may already have noticed what I found." He waved the gun. "Where did you find our friend, by the way?"

Birkerod smiled. "First place I looked."

"The lifeboat?"

"Yeah."

"What was he doing?"

"Nothing. I think I know how our little conjecture's going to turn out, though." He turned to Pappas, who had followed the exchange tensely. "You know, Nick, my father was a fellow-countryman of yours back on Earth."

"Countryman?"

"That's right. He lived just north of Winnipeg. My mother was a Canadian, too. Both of them were in the second batch of colonists that left for Callisto. But it doesn't mean much to call you a Canadian any more, does it? Garcia and you and I, we're all Callistans now."

"Sure," said Pappas, wondering.

Callisto: A cold world. A small new world, and a cold world, and incredibly distant from the planet that had evolved its settlers.

In the thirty years since the exploration of Jupiter's satellites had begun, Callisto had had a very different history from the rest. On Ganymede, a hundred or so engineers had been working all that time on the tremendous task of raising the satellite's mean temperature to the point where an atmosphere could be provided and open-air cities and farms built in which Earthmen could live. The smaller satellites had been largely ignored. But it had been found that Callisto had large deposits of ore of such quality that, in spite of the tremendously long haul required to carry anything from there to the inner planets, it was worth while beginning mining operations. Up went the insulated, airtight domes, out came the colonists, down went the mine shafts.

It was a hard life. Crystalline rock was cut by machines at the mine-faces, and by the time other machines had brought it up the shafts to the surface-level in the domes, it had become amorphous and powdery, its crystalline structure destroyed by being heated to twenty degrees below zero Centigrade. When you repaired machinery below the surface, you wore sixty kilograms of spacesuit , and a failure of any item of equipment or a fumble by any member of your crew might mean sudden death. The walls of the dome shut you in from the sky, for the vacuum out there was death too; when you did get up to the observatory to see the sky, you saw Jupiter, weirdly streaked with brilliant color--if your dome was on the side of Callisto toward Jupiter. Otherwise, you looked across twenty million kilometers of vacuum to the nearest star.

It was a hard life, and no life for a lone wolf. There were no homestead farms to be settled by lonely pioneer families. Callisto was a sterile place, and to keep life going there at all men had to work together. Cooperation was a lesson Earth civilization had learned only after thousands of years of oppression and war; a lesson that had to be learned before men could cross space; and a lesson that was very difficult to forget on Callisto. At least for most people.

Rita and Cliff Belden had control of the trade between Callisto and the inner planets. It didn't start as control, though; the way it began was this: Once the colony had been well established, its operation was left completely up to the Callistans, who shipped as much of their goods to Earth as they could manage, and requisitioned as much food and supplies from Earth as they needed--which was really the best way. The inner planets could not very well take part in the planning of Callisto's activities, since there was no radio contact and the trip took over two months by freighter even when the relative positions of the planets in their orbits was most favorable. One freighter shuttled back and forth between No. 2 Dome on Callisto at one end and any of several inner-planet ports at the other. Rita and Cliff Belden were the two Callistans whose job it was to run that freighter.

The little colony was absolutely dependent on the supplies they brought. This fact was obvious to everybody, but the Beldens made a deduction from it which was unprecedented on Callisto: they could threaten to withhold the supplies and thereby force the rest of the colonists to agree to whatever they asked--provided they could make the threat stick. They made the attempt. On one of their trips back from Earth, they put the ship into an orbit around Callisto instead of landing, and announced they would not land until their henchmen on Callisto were in control.

And the henchmen did a thorough job of taking control. All the details were taken care of: They quickly seized the radio transmitters that maintained contact with Ganymede, they confiscated all the reserves of spaceship fuel they could find, they clamped down as tightly as they could on communication between the domes; then they started keeping a close check on every tool that could be used as a weapon. There was just one place they slipped up. Their search for fuel wasn't good enough.

The people of No. 4 Dome pooled the fuel they had hidden from the Beldens; they seized from the Beldens' guards the Dome's tiny spaceship, which had been assembled on Callisto and which had never been intended to leave the Jupiter system; and they sent the ship off for Venus, with Garcia and Birkerod aboard. Venus was the only possible destination, with the planets' positions in their orbits as they were then: to reach Earth or Mars would have taken either more fuel than they had, or much more time than they could spare.

As it was, the trip took eight months.

"We're all Callistans now," Birkerod repeated. "I wonder, Nick. How did you happen to leave Callisto in the first place? Just felt like visiting good old Saskatchewan? I doubt it. Let's see--you left before that business started with the Beldens, didn't you?"

Pappas licked his lips nervously. Garcia answered for him: "Yes, about ten months before, according to what they told us on Venus."

"Yeah," Birkerod mused. "You know the Beldens, of course."

"Yes," said Pappas, "of course. I came to Earth on their freighter."

Birkerod smiled and went on, "It's interesting, Mr. Pappas, that you left Callisto about the time the Beldens' plans must have been taking shape. I wonder why you did?"

Pappas ignored the question. A moment before, the red signal light had flashed on above the calculator set in the opposite bulkhead. The computations had been finished on Garcia and Birkerod's "little conjecture."

Garcia, who was closest to the machine, filled in the silence. "Let's find out what the calculator has to say. It may clear things up a little."

There was a row of spring-clamps set in the bulkhead next to him for holding objects stationary while the ship was in free fall. Garcia put his gun in one of these, slipped out of the "safety belt" that had held him in the pilot's seat in spite of the lack of gravity, and turned to the calculator.

Pappas sprang. Not toward Garcia--but toward the side of the cabin that would have been the ceiling if there had been an "up." He snatched his gun from his jacket.

Something crashed into Pappas, spun him around. Birkerod had jumped too, hitting him hard in midair.

The cabin whirled about them. He felt Birkerod's powerful grip around the hand which held the gun. Simultaneously they reached the ceiling; Pappas's head hit metal with a crack. The gun fell free. Weightless, the two of them wrestled desperately.

Suddenly Birkerod pulled loose and jumped away. Pappas found himself alone in the middle of the cabin, drifting slowly from the pilot's seat.

In the pilot's seat Garcia was again sitting calmly, his gun leveled. Birkerod had the other gun. There was silence while Pappas reached the bulkhead, pushed back to his seat, and belted himself in.

"No, listen," Pappas protested feebly. "I didn't calculate a collision orbit. I--"

Birkerod smiled. "I like the suggestion you made when we discussed it before."

"I was just joking!"

"No, I think it's the best idea." He turned to Pappas, who flinched in spite of himself. "Look, Nick, the Beldens have no chance of winning on Callisto. No chance. Men had to learn to cooperate before they could get to the planets at all, and by this time they've learned good and thoroughly. The individual who's out for himself is an anachronism. You and the Beldens--a hundred years ago you'd have felt right at home. Then everybody was 'out for a fast buck,' as they used to say. In this century everybody works together, and darn near everybody likes it that way.

"But, Nick, the Beldens are still dangerous. They can't win; but they can hold up the development of Callisto for years, and make the Callistans plenty miserable in the process. The inner planets won't interfere. Their policy for years has been this: Callisto is so far away that it's their concern how they run things; we'll send them supplies, they'll send us minerals, and that's that.

"Therefore," Garcia put in, "we can't afford to have you around."

"What are you going to do?" Pappas murmured.

"To you?" said Birkerod. "Well, we can't take you with us; we don't want to kill you if we can help it; we can't turn you loose in the lifeboat, even if we keep most of the fuel, because we may need the lifeboat on Callisto. There's one thing left.

"If it's all right with Yusuf, we're going to put you altogether, completely on your own. You're not going to be working for anybody else, not even for stinkers like the Beldens. You're going to be all by yourself, and you're going to have to do a good job of looking out for yourself. Not for anyone else, just for Nick Pappas--'Number One,' as people used to say. We're not going to give you a word of advice, either. If we did, you wouldn't be independent enough. How does it sound, Yusuf? Appropriate?"

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