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Title: Recoil
Author: George O. Smith
Release Date: May 6, 2022 [eBook #68006]
Language: English
Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECOIL ***
RecoilBy George O. Smith
Illustrated by Orban
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science-Fiction, November 1943.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Walter Franks sat in the director's office; his feet on the director's desk. He was smoking one of the director's cigarettes. He was drinking the director's liquor, filched shamelessly from the director's private filing cabinet where it reposed in the drawer marked "S." Drawer "B" would have given beer, but Walt preferred Scotch.
He leaned forward and tossed the director's cigarette into the director's wastebasket and then he pressed the button on the desk and looked up.
But it was not the director's secretary who entered. It was his own, but that did not disturb Franks. He knew that the director's secretary was off on Mars enjoying a honeymoon with the director.
Jeanne entered and smiled. "Must you call me in here to witness you wasting the company's time?" she asked in mock anger.
"Now look, Jeanne, this is what Channing does."
"No dice. You can't behave as Don Channing behaves. The reason is my husband."
"I didn't call to have you sit on my lap. I want to know if the mail is in."
"I thought so," she said. "And so I brought it in with me. Anything more?"
"Not until you get a divorce," laughed Franks.
"You should live so long," she said with a smile. She stuck her tongue out at him.
Walt thumbed his way through the mail, making notations on some, and setting others aside for closer reading. He came to one and tossed it across the desk at Jeanne. She took the message and read:
Dear Acting Director:
Having a wonderful honeymoon; glad you aren't here!
Don and Arden.
"Wonderful stuff, love," smiled Franks.
"It is," agreed Jeanne. A dreamy look came into her eyes.
"Scram, Jeanne. There are times when you can't work worth a darn. Usually when you're thinking of that husband of yours. What's he got that I haven't?"
"Me," said Jeanne slyly. She arose and started for the door. "Oh," she said, "I almost forgot. Warren phoned up and said that the turret is ready for a try-out."
"Fine," said Walt. "Swell." He unfolded himself from the chair with alacrity and almost beat the girl to the door.
"My," she laughed, "you can move after all."
"Sure," he grinned. "Now I have something for which to live."
"I hope it's worth it. You've sunk a lot of change into that bug-house."
"I know, but we can stand it. After all, since Don took over this affair, Interplanetary Communications is an up and running business. We're out of the Government subsidy class now, and are making money. If this works, we'll make more. It's worth a gamble."
"What are you trying to build?" asked Jeanne.
"Why, since this business of contacting ships-at-space has become so universally liked, we have a tough time keeping ships in the mobile beam. That's because they are always ducking out of the way of loose meteorites and stuff, and that screws up their course. We can't see 'em, and must take their position on the basis of their expected course. We never know whether we hit 'em until they land.
"Now I've been trying to devise a space gun that will blast meteors directly instead of avoiding them by coupling the meteor detector to the autopilot."
"Gonna shoot 'em out of existence?"
"Not exactly. Popping at them with any kind of a rifle would be like trying to hit a flying bird with a spitball. Look, Jeanne, top speed on the run from Mars to Terra at major opposition is up among the thousands of miles per second at the turnover. A meteor itself may be blatting along at fifty miles per second. Now a rifle, shooting a projectile at a few thousand feet per second would be useless. You'd have the meteor in your lap and out of the other side while the projectile is making up its mind to move forward and relieve the pressure that is building up behind it due to the exploding powder.
"I've designed an electron gun. It is a superpowered, oversized edition of the kind they used to use in kinescope tubes, oscilloscope tubes, and electron microscopes. Since the dingbat is to be used in space, we can leave the works of the gun open and project a healthy stream of electrons at the offending object without their being slowed and dispersed by an impending atmosphere."
"But that sounds like shooting battleships with a toy gun."
"Not so fast on the objections, gal," said Franks. "I've seen a simple oscilloscope tube with a hole in the business end. It was burned right through a quarter inch of glass because the fellows were taking pix and had the intensity turned up high. The sweep circuit blew a fuse and the beam stopped on one spot. That was enough to puncture the screen."
"I see. That was just a small affair?"
"A nine-inch tube. The electron gun in a nine-inch kinescope tube is only about four inches long and three quarters of an inch in diameter. Mine, out there in the turret, is six feet in diameter and thirty feet long. I can fire out quite a bundle of electrons from a tube of that size."
"It sounds as though you mean business."
"I do. This is the right place to do research of that kind. Out here on Venus Equilateral, we're in a natural medium for an electron gun, and we've the power requirements to run it. I can't think of any place in the System that offers better chances."
"When are you going to try it out?"
"As soon as a meteor comes over the pike, as long as Warren says we're ready."
Jeanne shook her head. "I wish Channing were here. Things are wild enough when you are both working on something screwball, but I could get scared something fierce at the thought of either one of you working without the other."
"Why?"
"You two sort of act as balance wheels to one another's craziness. Oh, don't take that word to heart. Everybody on the Relay Station thinks the world of you two, myself included. Craziness in this case means a sort of friendly description of the way your brains work. Both of you dash off on tangents now and then, and when either one of you get off the beam, the other one seems to swing the weight required to bring the lost one back to the fold."
"That's a real mess of mixed metaphors, Jeanne. But I am going to surprise Don hairless when he gets back here and finds that I've done what people claimed couldn't be done. I'm going to be the bird whose bust sits in the Hall of Fame in between Edison, Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, S. F. B. Morse, and—"
"Old Man River, Jack Frost, and Little Boy Blue," laughed Jeanne. "I hope it's not a bust, Walt."
"You mean I should have a whole statue?"
"I mean, I hope your dream is not a bust!"
Jeanne left, with Walt right behind her. Franks did not remain at the desk, however, but made his way from the office level to the outer skin of the Relay Station by way of a not-often-used stairway that permitted him to drop to the outer skin. Above his head were the first levels of apartmental cubicles occupied by the personnel of Venus Equilateral. Out here, Walt had but a scant thickness of steel between him and the void of space.
His pathway was strewn with pipe, cable, and storage tanks. He passed a long-forgotten project and paused to reminisce over the days when a meteor shower had caused them some concern by puncturing the skin twice. The installation of a sponge elastomer under compression in this space had been stopped when a brilliant astrophysicist proved to Channing—then a supervisor in the operations laboratory—that the chances of being dangerously punctured were practically nil, and that the actual puncturing had done nothing but make people uncomfortably leery.
Then Franks came to a room built from outer skin to inner skin and about fifty feet in diameter. He unlocked the door with a key on his watch chain, and entered. Jim Warren was waiting for him.
"Hi, ordnance expert. We're ready as soon as they are."
"How's she working?"
"I should know? We've been squirting ropes of electrons out to blank space for hours. She gets rid of them all right. But have we done any good? I dunno."
"Not a meteor in sight, I suppose."
"The detector hasn't blinked once. But when she does, your electron gun will follow the darned thing until it gets a half thousand miles out of sight, or will pick it up a thousand miles before it gets here."
"That sounds fine. It's a good thing that we don't have to swivel that mess of tube around a whole arc in actual use. It would take too long. But we'll put one in each upper quadrant of a spaceship and devise it so that its working arc will be small enough to make it work. Time enough to find that out after we know if it works."
"That's something that I've been wondering about," said Warren. "Why didn't we build a small one out here and evacuate the skin for a few hundred feet? We could set up a few chunks of iron and squirt electrons at 'em."
"And have the folks upstairs screaming? Nope. I've a hunch that when this beam hits something hard, it will create quite a ruckus. It would be fine to have a hunk blown right out of the skin, wouldn't it?"
"Guess you're right," admitted Warren.
The meteor alarm flashed, and a bell dinged once.
"Here's our chance," snapped Walt. "We've about fifteen seconds to work on this one."
He looked out of a tiny window, and saw that the big tube had lined up with the tiny model that was a monitor for the big tube. He sighted through the model, which in itself was a high-powered telescope, and he saw the jagged meteor rushing forward at an angle to the Station. It would miss by miles, but it would offer a good target.
"Cathode's hot," said Warren.
Walt Franks grasped the power switch and thrust it down part way. Meters leaped up their scales and from somewhere there came the protesting whine of tortured generators. Through the window, nothing very spectacular was happening. The cathode glowed slightly brighter due to the passage of current through its metal and out of the coated surface. But the electrostatic stresses that filled the gaps between the accelerator and focusing anodes was no more visible than the electricity that runs a toy motor. Its appearance had not changed a bit, but from the meters, Walt Franks knew that megawatts of electronic power, in the shape of high-velocity electrons, was being poured from the cathode; accelerated by the ring anodes; and focused to a narrow beam by the focusing anodes. And from the end of the framework that supported these anodes, a cylinder of high-velocity electrons poured forth, twelve inches in diameter.
Through the telescope, the meteor did not seem to be disturbed. It exploded not, neither did it melt. It came on inexorably, and if the inanimate nickel and iron of a meteor can be said to have such, it came on saucily and in utter disregard for the consequences.
Frantically, Walt cranked the power up higher and higher, and the lights all over the Station dimmed as the cathode gun drained the resources of the Station.
Still no effect.
Then in desperation, Walt slammed the power lever down to the bottom notch. The girders strained in the tube from the terrific electrostatic stresses, and for a second, Walt was not certain that the meteor was not finally feeling the effects of the electron bombardment.
He was not to be sure, for the experiment came to a sudden stop.
An insulator arced where it led the high-voltage lines that fed the anodes through the wall. Immediately it flashed over, and the room filled to the brim with the pungent odor of burning insulation. A medium-voltage anode shorted to one of the high-voltage anodes, and the stress increased in the tube. It broke from its moorings, this low-voltage anode, and it plunged backward, down the tube toward the cathode. It hit, and it was enough to jar the whole tube backward on its gimbals.
The shock warped the mounting of the tube, and it flexed slightly, but sufficiently to bring the farthermost and highest voltage anode into the electron stream. It glowed redly, and the secondary emission raved back through the series of electrodes, heating them and creating more warpage.
Then the pyrotechnic stopped. Great circuit breakers crashed open up in the power room hundreds of feet above them, high in the Station.
Walt Franks looked out through the window at the tangled mess that had been a finely machined piece of equipment. He saw the men looking quizzically at him as he turned away from the window, and with a smile that cost him an effort, he said: "All right, so Marconi didn't get WLW on his first try, either. Come on, fellows, and we'll clean up this mess."
With the utter disregard that inanimate objects show toward the inner feelings of the human being, the meteor alarm blinked again and the bell rang. The pilot tube swiveled quickly to one side, lining up with the spot in the celestial globe of the meteor detector. Out in the turret that housed the big tube, motors strived against welded commutators and the big tube tried to follow.
Walt looked at the pointing tube and said: "All right! Go ahead and point!"
Don Channing smiled at Arden. "Mrs. Channing," he said, "must you persist in keeping me from my first love?"
Arden smiled winningly. "Naturally. That's what I'm here for. I intend to replace your first love entirely and completely."
"Yeah," drawled Don, "and what would we live on?"
"I'll permit you to attend to your so-called first love during eight hours every day, providing that you remember to think of me every half-hour."
"That's fine. But you really aren't fair about it. We were on Terra for two weeks. I was just getting interested in a program outlined by one of the boys that works for Interplanet, and what happened? You hauled me off to Mars. We stayed for a week at the Terraland Hotel at Canalopsis and the first time that Keg Johnson came to see us with an idea and a sheaf of papers, you rushed me off to Lincoln Head. Now I'm scared to death that some guy will try to open a blueprint here; at which I'll be rushed off to the Palanortis Country until someone finds us there. Then it'll be the Solar Observatory on Mercury or the Big Glass on Luna."
Arden soothed Don's feelings by sitting on his lap and snuggling. "Dear," she said in a voice that positively dripped, "we're on a honeymoon, remember?"
Don stood up, dumping Arden to the floor. "Yeah," he said, "but this is the highest velocity honeymoon that I ever took!"
"And it's the first one I was ever on where the bridegroom took more time admiring beam installations than he took to whisper sweet nothings to his gal. What has a beam transmitter got that I haven't got?"
"One: Its actions can be predicted. Two: It can be controlled. Three: It never says anything original, but only repeats what it has been told. Four: It can be turned off."
Arden caught Don on the point of the chin with a pillow and effectively smothered him. She followed her slight advantage with a frontal attack that carried him backward across the bed, where she landed on top viciously and proceeded to lambaste him with the other pillow.
It was proceeding according to plan, this private, good-natured war, until a knock on the door caused a break in operations. Channing struggled out from beneath Arden and went to the door trying to comb his hair by running spread fingers through it. He went with a sense of failure caused by Arden's quiet laugh and the statement that he resembled a bantam rooster.
The man at the door apologized, and then said: "I'm Doug Thomas of the Triworld News."
"Come in," said Don, "and see if you can find a place to sit."
"Thanks."
"I didn't know that Triworld News was interested in the wedded life of the Channings. Why doesn't Triworld wait until we find out about it ourselves?"
"Triworld does not care to pry into the private life of the newly wed Channing family," laughed Doug. "We, and the rest of the System do not give a damn whether Mrs. Channing calls you Bunny-bit or Sugar-pie—"
"Sweetums," corrected Arden with a gleam in her eye.
"—we've got something big to handle. I can't get a thing out of the gang at Canalopsis, they're all too busy worrying."
"And so you came here? What do you expect to get out of us? We're not connected in any way with Canalopsis."
"I know," said Doug, "but you do know space. Look, Channing, the Solar Queen has been missing since yesterday morning!"
Don whistled.
"See what I mean? What I want to know is this: What is your opinion on the matter? You've lived in space for years, on the Relay Station, and you've had experience beyond anybody I can reach."
"Missing since yesterday morning," mused Channing. "That means trouble."
"That's what I thought. Now if you were running the spaceport at Canalopsis, what would your own private opinion be?"
"I don't know whether I should speak for publication," said Don.
"It won't be official. I'll corroborate anything you say before it is printed, and so on. But I want an unofficial opinion, too. If you want this withheld, say so, but I still want a technical deduction to base my investigation on. I don't understand the ramifications and the implications of a missing ship. It is enough to make Keg Johnson's hair turn gray overnight, though, and I'd like to know what is so bad before I start to turn stones."
"Well, keep it off the record until Canalopsis gives you the go-ahead. I can give you an opinion, but I don't want to sound official."
"O.K. Do you suppose she was hit by a meteor shower?"
"Doubt it like the devil. Meteor detectors are many and interconnected on a spaceship, as well as being alarmed and fused to the nth degree. Any trouble with them will bring a horde of ringing bells all through the ship which would bring the personnel a-running. They just don't go wrong for no reason at all."
"Suppose that so many meteors came from all directions that the factors presented to the autopilot—"
"No dice. The possibility of a concentration of meteors from all directions all about to pass through a certain spot in space is like betting on two Sundays in a row. Meteors don't just run in all directions, they have a general drift. And the meteor detecting equipment would have been able to pick up the centroid of any group of meteors soon enough to lift the ship around it. Why, there hasn't been a ship hit by a meteor in ten years."
"But—"
"And if it had been," continued Channing, "the chances are more than likely that the ship wouldn't have been hit badly enough to make it impossible to steer, or for the crew to shoot out message tubes which would have landed on Canalopsis."
"Suppose that the ship ducked a big shower and it went so far out of course that they missed Mars?"
"That's out, too," laughed Channing.
"Why?"
"A standard ship of space is capable of hitting it up at about 4-G all the way from Terra to Mars at major opposition and end up with enough power and spare cathodes to continue on to Venus in quadrature. Now the velocity of the planets in their orbits is a stinking matter of miles per second, while the top speed of a ship in even the shortest passage runs up into four figures per second. You'd be surprised at what velocity you can attain at 1-G for ten hours."
"Yes?"
"It runs to slightly less than two hundred and fifty miles per second, during which you've covered only four million miles. In the shortest average run from Venus to Terra at conjunction, a skimpy twenty-five million miles, your time of travel is a matter of twenty-five hours add, running at the standard 2-G. Your velocity at turnover—or the halfway point where the ship stops going up from Terra and starts to go down to Venus—is a cool five hundred miles per second. So under no condition would the ship miss its objective badly enough to cause its complete loss. Why, this business is run so quickly that were it not for the saving in time and money that amounts to a small percentage at the end of each flight, the pilot could head for his planet and approach the planet asymptotically."
"You know what you're doing, don't you?" asked the reporter.
"I think so."
"You're forcing my mind into accepting something that has never happened before, and something that has no basis for its—"
"You mean piracy? I wonder. We've all read tales about the Jolly Roger being painted on the side of a sleek ship of space while the pirate, who at heart is a fine fellow though uninhibited, hails down the cruiser carrying radium. He swipes the stuff and kisses all the women whilst menacing the men with a gun hand full of searing, coruscating, violently lethal ray pistol. But that sounds fine in stories. The trick is tougher than it sounds, Thomas. You've got to catch your rabbit first."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that finding a ship in space to prey upon is somewhat less difficult than juggling ten billiard balls whilst riding a horse blind-folded. Suppose you were to turn pirate. This is what would happen:
"You'd get the course of the treasure ship from the spaceport, fine and good, by resorting to spies and such. You'd lie in wait out there in the blackness of space, fixing your position by the stars and hoping that your error in fix was less than a couple of thousand miles. It's more likely to be a hundred thousand miles, though. The time comes. You look to your musket, sharpen your sword, and see to the priming of your Derringers that are thrust into the red sash at your waist. You are right on the course, due to your brilliant though lawless navigator who was tossed out of astrogator's school for filching the teacher's whiskey. Then the treasure ship zoops past at a healthy hundred miles per second and you decide that since she is hitting it up at 2-G, you'd have to start from scratch at a heck of a lot better to catch her within the next couple of light years.
"So you give up, join the Congregational Church and pass the collection plate every Sunday."
"But suppose you took the course as laid and applied the same acceleration? Suppose you followed on the heels of your quarry until you were both in space? You could do it then, couldn't you?"
"Gosh," said Channing, "I never thought of that. That's the only way a guy could pirate a ship—unless he planted his men aboard and they mutinied."
"Then it might be pirates?"
"It might be," admitted Channing. "It'd have to occur near beginning or end, of course, though. I can't think of anything safer than being shot at out of a gun of any kind while both crates are hitting it up at a couple of hundred miles per second and at a distance of a few miles apart. It would be all right if you were both running free, but at 2-G acceleration, you'd have to do quite a bit of ballistic gymnastics to score a hit."
"Or run in front of your quarry and sow a bouquet of mines."
"Except that the meteor detector would show the position of the pirate craft in the celestial globe and the interconnecting circuits would cause the treasure ship to veer off at a sharp angle. Shucks, Doug, this thing has got too many angles to it. I can't begin to run it off either way. No matter how difficult it may sound, there are still ways and means to do it. The one thing that stands out like a sore thumb is the fact that the Solar Queen has turned up missing. Since no inanimate agency could cause failure, piracy is the answer."
"You're sure of that?"
"Not positive. There are things that might cause the ship to founder. But what they are depend upon too many coincidences. It's like hitting a royal flush on the deal, or filling a full house from two pair."
"Well, thanks, Channing. I'm heading back to Canalopsis right now. Want to come along?"
Channing looked at Arden, who was coming from the dressing room carrying her coat and he nodded. "The gal says yes," he grinned. "Annoy her until I find my shoes, will you?"
Arden wrinkled her nose at Don. "I'll like that," she said to Doug.
The trip from Lincoln Head to Canalopsis was a fast one. Doug Thomas drove the little flier through the thin air of Mars at a breakneck speed and covered the twelve hundred miles in just shy of two hours. At the spaceport, Channing found that he was not denied the entrance as the reporter had been. He was ushered into the office of Keg Johnson in record time, and the manager of the Canalopsis Spaceport greeted Don with a worried expression on his face.
"Still gone," he said cryptically. "Like the job of locating her?"
Don shook his head with a sympathetic smile. "Like trying to find a grain of sand on a beach—a specified grain, I mean. Wouldn't know how to go about it."
Keg nodded. "I thought as much. That leaves her out of the picture. Well, up to now space travel has been about as safe as spending the evening in your easy-chair. Hello, Arden, how's married life?"
"Can't tell yet," she said with a twinkle. "I've got to find out whether I can break him of a dozen bad habits before I'll commit myself."
"I wish you luck, Arden, although from that statement, it's Don that needs the luck."
"We came to see if there was anything we could do about the Solar Queen," offered Channing.
"What can anybody do?" asked Keg with spread hands. "About all we can do is to put it down in our remembrances and turn to tomorrow. Life goes on, you know," said Keg in a resigned tone, "and either we keep up or we begin to live in the past. Are you going to stay here for a day or two?"
"Was thinking about it," said Don.
"Well, suppose you register at the Terraland and meet me back here for lunch. If anything occurs, I'll shoot you a quickie." Keg looked at his watch and whistled. "Lordy," he said ruefully. "I didn't know how late it was. Look, kids, I'll run you downtown myself, and we'll all have lunch at the Terraland. How's that?"
"Sounds better," admitted Channing. "My appetite, you know."
"I know," laughed Arden. "Come on, meat-eater, and we'll peel a calf."
It was during lunch that a messenger raced into the dining room and handed Keg a letter. Keg read, and then swore roundly. He tossed the letter across the table to Don and Arden.
To the Operators of all Spacelines:
It has come to my attention that your ships require protection. The absence of the Solar Queen is proof enough that your efforts are insufficient to insure the arrival of a spaceship at its destination.
I am capable of offering protection at the reasonable rate of one dollar solarian for every gross ton, with the return of ten dollars solarian if any ship fails to come through safely. I think that you may find it necessary to subscribe to my insurance, since without my protection I cannot be responsible for failures.
Allison (Hellion) Murdoch.
"Why the dirty racketeer," stormed Arden. "Who is he, anyway?"
"Hellion Murdoch is a man of considerable ability as a surgeon and a theoretical physicist," explained Don. "He was sentenced to the gas chamber ten years ago for trying some of his theories out on human beings without their consent. He escaped with the aid of fifteen or twenty of his cohorts who had stolen the Hippocrates right out of the private spaceport of the Solarian Medical Research Institute."
"And they headed for the unknown," offered Keg. "Wonder where they've been for the last ten years."
"I'll bet a hat that they've been in the Melapalan Jungle, using the machine shop of the Hippocrates to fashion guns. That machine shop was a dilly, if I remember correctly."
"It was. The whole ship was just made to be as self-sustaining as it could be. They used to run all over the System in it, you know, chasing bugs. But look, Don, if I were you, I'd begin worrying about Venus Equilateral. That's where he'll hit next."
"You're right. But what are you going to do?"
"Something that will drive him right out to the Relay Station," said Keg in a sorrowful tone. "Sorry, Don, but when I put an end to all space shipping for a period of six weeks, Hellion Murdoch will be sitting in your lap."
"He sure will," said Channing nervously. "Arden, are you willing to run a gantlet?"
"Sure," she answered quickly. "Are you sure that there will be danger?"
"Not too sure, or I wouldn't take you with me. Unless Murdoch has managed to build himself a couple of extra ships, we've got a chance in three that he'll be near one of the other two big spaceports. So we'll slide out of here unannounced and at a peculiar time of day. We'll load up with gravanol and take it all the way to the Station at 6-G."
"He may have two or three ships," said Keg. "A man could cover all the standard space shipping in three, and he might not have too bad a time with two, especially if he were only out looking for those which weren't paid for. But, look, I wouldn't check out of the Terraland if I were you. Keep this under cover. Your heap is all ready to take sky from Canalopsis Spaceport and you can leave directly."
"Hold off on your announcement as long as possible," Don asked Keg.
Johnson smiled and nodded. "I'll give you time to get there anyway. But I've no control over what will be done at Northern Landing or Mojave. They may kick over the traces."
"Arden, we're moving again," laughed Don. "Keg, ship us our duds as soon as this affair is cleared up." Channing scribbled a message on the back of Murdoch's letter. "Shoot this off to Walt Franks, will you? I won't wait for an answer, that'll take about fifty minutes, and by that time I'll have been in space for twenty."
They paused long enough to stop at the nurse's office at the spaceport for a heavy shot of gravanol and a thorough bracing with wide adhesive tape. Then they made their way to the storage space of the spaceport where they entered their small ship. Channing was about to send the power lever home when the figure of Keg Johnson waved him to stop.
Keg ran up to the space lock and handed in a paper.
"You're it," he said. "Good luck, Channings."
It was another message from Hellion Murdoch. It said, bluntly:
To Donald Channing,
Director of Communications:
Considerable difficulty has been experienced in transmitting messages to the interested parties. I desire a free hand in telling all who care, the particulars of my insurance.
Since your Relay Station is in a position to control all communications between the worlds, I am offering you the option of either surrendering the Station to me, or of fighting me for its possession. I am confident that you will see the intelligent course; an unarmed station in space is no match for a fully armed and excellently manned cruiser.
Your answer will be expected in five days.
Allison (Hellion) Murdoch.
Channing snarled and thrust the power lever down to the last notch. The little ship leaped upward under 5-1/2-G, and was gone from sight in less than a minute.
Arden shook her head. "What was that message you sent to Franks?" she asked.
"I told him that there was a wild-eyed pirate on the loose, and that he might make a stab at the Station. We are coming in as soon as we can get there and to be on the lookout for us on the landing communications radio, and also for anything untoward in the nature of space vessels."
"Then this is not exactly a shock," said Arden, waving the message from Murdoch.
"Not exactly," said Channing dryly. "Now look, Arden, you go to sleep. This'll take hours and hours, and gabbing about it will only lay you out cold."
"I feel fine," objected Arden.
"I know, but that's the gravanol, not you. The tape will keep you intact, and the gravanol will keep you awake without pain or nausea. But you can't get something for nothing, Arden, and when that gravanol wears off, you'll spend ten times as long with one tenth of the trouble you might have had. So make it easy for yourself now and later you'll be glad that you aren't worse."
The sky blackened, and Channing knew that they were free in space. Give them another fifteen minutes and the devil himself couldn't find them. With no flight plan scheduled and no course posted, they might as well have been in the seventeenth dimension. As they emerged from the thin atmosphere, there was a fleeting flash of fire from several miles to the East, but Channing did not pay particular attention to it. Arden looked through a telescope, and said that she thought that she saw a spaceship circling, but that she could not be sure.
Whatever it was, nothing came of it.
The trip out to the Station was a monotonous series of uneventful hours, proceeding along one after the other. They dozed and slept most of the time, eating sparingly and doing nothing that was not absolutely necessary.
Turnabout was accomplished and then the deceleration began, equally long and equally monotonous. It was equally inactive. Channing tried to plan, but it failed because he could not plan without talking and discussing the affair with his men; too much depended upon their co-operation. He fell into a morose, futile feeling that made itself evident in grousing; Arden tried to jolly him, but Don's usually bubbling spirit was doused too deep. Also, Arden herself was none too happy, and she failed to convince herself, which is necessary before one can convince anyone else of anything.
Then they sighted the Station, and Channing's ill spirit left. A man of action, what he hated most was the no-action business of just sitting in a little capsule of steel waiting for the Relay Station to come up out of the sky below. Once it was sighted, Channing could foresee action, and his grousing stopped.
Charcoal burning response something spicy,
Live on edge for infusion,
Deep chamber lives a tiny shape shifter,
Shun no leader needs new job,
Permit allowed, wizard designs,
Natural network gets bashed
Sweet natured sometimes exists,
Fractures of GP clobbered for not doing thier job,
Flower power people are disposable in today's society,
Corpse delight leads to upset,
You can not book creature on a crazy binge,
Duck able to be a sco
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