Raiders From the Rings Page 6

  4

  THE BLACK BELT

  SWIFT AS IT was in elapsed hours, the journey to Mars was the longest journey across space that Ben Trefon had ever experienced.

  With the little scout ship’s nuclear engine providing fuel for a high-energy orbit outward, and with the null-gavity units working to make high accelerations tolerable to those inside the ship’s cabin, hardly more than eighteen hours passed before the great rusty red planet with its gleaming polar caps was looming large in the ship’s view screens. But to Ben every hour seemed like ten, and a thousand phantoms rose in his mind as he thought of the house he had left behind on the Martian desert, defenseless unless warning came in time.

  Worst of all was the simple fact that Ben Trefon could not comprehend the idea of a full-scale war between Earthmen and Spacers, no matter how hard he tried. His mind balked at the thought; there was nothing in his experience, nor in his knowledge of Spacer history, that could account for such a thing being possible. As a result, he had the continuing feeling that it wasn’t really true at all, that it was merely a bad dream from which he would awaken at any moment. And the more he considered the idea the more incredible it became.

  Of course he knew of the long centuries of animosity that had existed between the people who lived on the surface of the mother planet and the wandering band of outcasts who made their homes in space, on the outer planets or in the Asteroid Belt. He also knew that this animosity had flared into violence from time to time, ever since the beginning of the Spacers’ long exile from Earth. The periodic raids on the mother planet, so critical to the Spacers’ survival, never failed to whip the Earthmen into heights of frustrated rage, all the more intense because their efforts to fight off the raiders proved so feeble. This rage was reflected in the viciousness and cruelty Earthmen displayed on the rare occasions when they attempted to send out retaliatory missions against their tormentors. Space ships had been destroyed, men killed and maukis taken back to Earth in chains during those skirmishes, but to the Spacers the occasional Earth pirates had been nothing more than one of the unpleasant facts of their life in space, just another adverse condition that the Spacer clan had had to put up with in order to survive in their nomadic life.

  But the Spacers’ long familiarity with space, their skill in navigation and their knowledge of interplanetary spaceways were also facts of life — facts that had given them unquestioned superiority beyond the limits of Earth’s gravitational field. Another fact of life was the horror with which Earthmen had always viewed contact with space, the dread of space travel that had always filled their minds. Space had always been the Spacers’ province; if they could not return to Earth, they had always felt themselves impregnable beyond her surface, and that impregnability had been demonstrated time and again when Earth ships had ventured out. It had been argued that nothing short of mass insanity would ever drive Earthmen to try to dislodge them from Space by force.

  And now, with the fact of such a war staring them in the face, they were caught without warning. Of course, if it were true, there could be no question about the outcome of such a war, Ben Trefon thought. No ships from Earth, manned by Earthmen, could really hope to press an invasion of the Spacers’ domain successfully. But cruel and treacherous as Earthmen were, they might certainly wreak havoc before they were driven back to quarters.

  Ben turned over these thoughts as he continued plotting the finer details of the ship’s course toward Mars. In a way, it was comforting to believe that Spacers were impregnable, but something in the idea caught in his mind and left him vaguely uneasy. If Earthmen had gone mad in their hatred of Spacers, there was no sign of it in his two Earth captives. Nor did they seem particularly formidable, or even evil, now that they were convinced he meant them no immediate harm. If anything, he reflected, these two seemed more stunned than treacherous, more terrified than cruel.

  Yet as far as he could tell, there was nothing about Tom and Joyce Barron that made them different from other Earthmen. As brother and sister who could hardly be more than a year apart in age, they seemed very close; try as he would, Ben could not even imagine what it might be like to have a sister, but it seemed to be a very comfortable relationship. Until they had contacted the command ship they had been talking together quietly just as brothers might talk, and half the time they each seemed to know what the other was thinking.

  On questioning them, Ben learned that their father was a colonel in the Earth civil defense garrison, commander of the guard units protecting the southern part of the metropolis of Chicago. Even Tom and Joyce did not know what part he might have in the launching of the Earth armada, although they seemed sure that he had known about it. Although they made no attempt to conceal their anger and frustration at being caught aboard a Spacer ship, neither could they conceal their curiosity when Ben pulled away from the command ship, set the ship moving, and began plotting orbit with the aid of the ship’s computer.

  “What are you planning to do?” Tom Barron wanted to know. “What’s going to happen to us?”

  “You heard what the man said,” Ben said bluntly. “We’re at war. Your ships are moving out to attack our space outposts. So that makes you enemy aliens aboard this ship, and I’m responsible for you until I can get you interned somewhere.”

  “You mean we just have to stay aboard this ship forever?” Joyce Barron asked.

  “Believe me, I don’t like it any better than you do,” Ben said. “But for the time being we’re stuck with it whether we like it or not.”

  “Well, are you going to lock us up somewhere?”

  Ben looked at the girl. “That’s up to you,” he said. “We have to count on this ship to keep us alive and get us where we want to go. But I can’t operate the ship if I have to be watching you two for tricks all the time.”

  Tom Barron shrugged. “It seems to me that we don’t have much choice about it,” he said. “You won’t be operating this ship very long anyway, with our fleet in the sky. So we won’t interfere with you.”

  Ben studied Tom Barron’s face. “I’ve heard that an Earthman’s word isn’t worth much,” he said.

  “It’ll stand up to a Spacer’s word any time,” Joyce said hotly.

  “Well, it doesn’t really matter. You wouldn’t get far trying to operate this ship, and even if you could you’d be blown out of space before you could land it on Earth. There’s no place out here for you to go without knowing where and how, so I guess I can trust you for the moment.”

  Joyce Barron’s face flushed. “Maybe you want a written treaty,” she said.

  “No, but I want some things understood,” Ben said. “Call them rules of the ship, if you wish.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “First, you keep your hands off the controls. You could kill us all in about ten seconds flat if you happened to pull the wrong switch. Second, you keep away from the radio. This is a Spacer ship, and from what I’ve heard any of your Earth ships we run into are likely to shoot first and ask questions later. So we won’t break radio silence unless we have to. Third, you do what you’re told to do and don’t argue. I’ve got to know where you are and what you’re doing all the time, in case anything were to go wrong with the ship. Okay?”

  The Barrons looked at each other, and then nodded. “Okay,” Tom said. “But you might tell us a couple of things. We don’t even know your name.”

  “You can call me Ben Trefon,” Ben said.

  “And you were — born in space?”

  “Of course,” Ben said, puzzled.

  “There, I told you,” Tom said to his sister.

  “Yes, but you still can’t be sure,” she said. Then she shook her head and whispered something in her brother’s ear.

  “Well, there’s one way to find out,” Tom said.

  “No, no, not now — ”

  “Yes, now,” Tom told her. “We might as well know now as later.”

  “Whatever are you talking about?” Ben asked.

  “Let me feel your hand,” Tom challenged.
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  “My hand?”

  “Hold it out — if you’re not afraid to.”

  Ben held out his hand. To his amazement, the Earthman closed his eyes tight, reached out and touched the outstretched hand, felt the fingers and wrist, and patted his arm from wrist to elbow. Then with eyes still closed he reached up and touched Ben’s face. Finally he opened his eyes with a sigh of relief. “It’s just as I told you,” he said to Joyce. “It’s all right.”

  The girl looked crestfallen. “And you’re the only one here?” she asked Ben. “I mean, you don’t have any other — crew — aboard?”

  “Well, what do you expect? A hold full of monsters?” Ben turned away in disgust. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I for one am getting hungry, and I have course corrections to make. Why don’t you break out some food?”

  Following his directions, Joyce found the cupboard panel that opened out into a tiny galley. After experimenting with the heat-pump stove that worked from the ship’s heating system, she got to work heating up some canned stew and some biscuits as Tom followed Ben back to the control panel. A few moments later their mutual uneasiness was momentarily forgotten as they munched hungrily, and Ben began the complex task of plotting the final course adjustments for the run to Mars.

  Tom watched him curiously as he took the plotting cards out of the computer slot, made his calculations on the backs of them, taped the new data back into the computer and waited for the revised cards to be returned. Finally curiosity won. “What are you doing with that machine?” Tom asked.

  “Correcting our course,” Ben said. “The basic orbit was easy, just a matter of matching fuel against time and pointing the ship in the right direction. But we have to have the fine adjustments before we go into high gear. Once we’re on nuclear drive and really accelerating, even a minor course change might burn out the null-gravs and then we’d really be in the soup.”

  “I see,” said Tom, who didn’t see at all. “But don’t you have to have starting co-ordinates before you can plot an orbit?”

  “Of course. You can’t hope to make connection with any point in space unless you know where you’re starting from.”

  Tom glanced up at the view screen. They were far beyond the range of the Earth ground-to-air barrage now, and all that was visible was a vast expanse of blackness peppered with stars. “So how can you ever tell where you are?”

  The question seemed a little foolish to Ben. “We’re in the cabin of a ship, naturally.”

  “But where’s the ship?”

  “Relative to what?” Ben said. “Relative to Earth? If that’s what you mean, I don’t know and couldn’t care less. The computer could tell me, of course, if I had to find out. The important thing is where the ship is, relative to where we’re going right now. I had to establish that before I could even start this orbit. I also had to decide whether I wanted a long, low-energy orbit or a fast, high-energy course. Now I’ve got time to pin down the details and see just how fast we can afford to travel to intersect Mars’s orbit in the shortest possible elapsed time.”

  “You mean you can pick your travel time?” Tom asked incredulously.

  “Within the ship’s energy limits, yes. We have so much energy potential in the reactors. If we picked the highest-energy orbit to Mars that our fuel supply would allow, we could probably be landing within forty minutes including acceleration and deceleration — except that the acceleration we’d have to undertake would burn out the null-grav units in ten seconds and we’d be smashed into a pulp ten seconds later.”

  Tom Barron frowned. “But I thought your antigravity generators were only good for landing and taking off from planetary surfaces.”

  “Why? Why should they be limited to that? You measure acceleration in gravities, don’t you? And a human being without protection in a space ship can only tolerate a few gravities for a few minutes. Without null-G this trip would take us months, and even then we’d have to tolerate weighing four hundred pounds apiece for about half the time. Null-G takes the weight off us and puts it on the ship’s generators, which cut into the total fuel supply but still give us speed. So we balance fuel available against the maximum acceleration gravities the null-G units can handle, and that gives us the highest-energy orbit the ship is capable of and tells us our travel time. See what I mean?”

  “I guess so,” Tom said dubiously. “But I still don’t see how you can ever locate yourself definitely relative to anything when you move around the way you do.”

  “Well, obviously I have to have a baseline somewhere. We use our central dispatching station at Asteroid Central as a baseline. Otherwise we just plain couldn’t navigate in space. The computer at Central keeps running tabs on every known chunk of orbiting land mass in the solar system, relative to itself in its own orbit around the sun. So at any given instant the main computer can tell where each of the planets is in its orbit, how fast it is moving at the time, how rapidly it’s accelerating or decelerating in its orbit at the moment, and where Asteroid Central is in relation to it. That way any ship that leaves Asteroid Central can blank its own computer and file in its baseline co-ordinates at that particular point in time and space. It just lifts that chunk of information from the main computer. And then, to get a fix later the pilot just has to calculate back. Of course, every movement the ship makes after leaving Central is automatically filed into its own computer.”

  Tom peered at the shiny bank of dials on the control panel. “That must be quite some little computer,” he said.

  “It has to be. Its capacity is pretty amazing, but the pilot still has to do some of the work. On Asteroid Central the main computer does it all.” Ben scribbled once more on a card, punched the feeder tape running down into the computer, waited a few moments until the return card dropped down in the slot, and finally began setting the ship’s controls. Then he rechecked the figures, and shook his head. “It’s going to be slow,” he said. “We’re already fifteen degrees out of opposition with Mars, and losing ground all the time. We can do it in another seventeen hours if we accelerate for fourteen of them, and if the null-gravs don’t burn out when we try to slow down in three. But that’s the best we can do.” He made some final adjustments in the dials. “That should do it. Now here we go.”

  He threw the drive switches, and sank back in the control chair with a sigh. There was a low-pitched rumble from somewhere in the rear of the ship, and a slight vibration beneath their feet; otherwise, nothing seemed to have happened. For a moment or two the star pattern in the view screen shifted slowly, then fixed again. The ship seemed to be standing still in the blackness.

  Joyce joined them at the control panel as Ben was setting the dials. Now she said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Not a thing,” Ben Trefon said.

  “But nothing’s happening, we’re just standing still.”

  Ben grinned. “You think so, eh?” He braced his feet, hooked his arm around a shock bar on the control panel, and then turned the null-gravity dial a fraction of a degree. Abruptly he felt the acceleration tugging at his arm; Tom and Joyce Barron began staggering back across the cabin as though drawn by a giant vacuum cleaner. Ben snapped the dial back sharply, and his prisoners jerked forward again, fighting to keep their balance.

  “We’re moving, all right,” Ben assured them. “If the null-G’s weren’t working now, our acceleration would be quietly squeezing you through the rear bulkhead into the engine room, so you’d better just pray that nothing goes wrong with our generators.”

  Visibly impressed, Joyce Barron stared out the view screen. “So we’re going to Mars.” She hesitated. “Are there any laboratories there?”

  “Just some observation labs, and the Botanical Experiment Station. But we’re not going there. We’re going to my home.”

  Joyce looked startled. “You mean you live on Mars?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “But I thought you people lived in space ships!”

  “We do — sometimes. But you can’t gr
ow food on a space ship. You can’t raise children there, either, or forge tools, or manufacture ships. Spacers have homes all over the solar system. It so happens that the House of Trefon has always been on Mars.”

  “Trefon,” the girl said thoughtfully. “I never heard a name like that before.”

  Ben laughed. “Maybe that’s because there isn’t any. I mean, officially. That’s just my short name. On the records I’m Benjamin Ivanovitch Trefonovsky, but that’s too clumsy to use. Ben Trefon works much better.”

  The girl was looking at him with distaste. “Then you must be descended from the Russian traitors,” she said contemptuously.

  “From the Russian space garrison, yes. From traitors, no. The Trefons have never been traitors.”

  “They betrayed their government during the Great War, didn’t they?” Joyce Barron said indignantly. “Everybody knows that. They conspired with the American and British traitors and sold out their countries when they were needed the most.”

  “They refused to burn their home planet to a cinder, that’s true,” Ben said slowly. “Maybe that’s your idea of treachery. But if it hadn’t been for the peace in space, there’d be nothing left on Earth at all, nothing. You wouldn’t be alive and neither would anybody else. But I don’t suppose you’d believe that, with all the lies your government tells you.”

  “You can’t deny historical fact,” the girl exclaimed.

  “I can, if it’s written by liars,” Ben retorted angrily. “I’ve heard about the lies they teach you on Earth. Well, that’s your concern. You can go ahead and believe them if you want, but don’t try to tell them to me.”

  He turned away with a strange feeling of weariness and disgust. It was the old, old argument he had heard so many times before, and it was just as false and evil now as it ever was. Lies, officially presented as history and drummed into their heads from childhood on until they accepted them blindly and wouldn’t even consider that they might not be the truth. It must be true, Ben thought, what he had heard about the vicious propaganda that all Earthmen had thrown at them constantly; here were two in his own ship spouting it back at him. It was no wonder that there was no end to the bitterness between Earthmen and Spacers.