Kennith Bulmer - The Star Venturers
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2024-12-23
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For once Bill Jarrett was minding his own business.
He had just sold a quantity of diamonds he had picked up on a Pluto-cold
world to a jowly Terran atom-master and he felt in good spirits. He felt
great. He was actually whistling as he strolled down the sidewalks of a New
York that hummed and bustled in many levels about him.
The sun shone, throwing patterned shadows, warm. That sun up there
was Old Sol, the real honest-to-goodness Number One Sun.
Jarrett, whistling, feeling the thick roll of notes in his pocket, felt
legitimately on top of the galaxy.
He turned into a pedway fifty stories above the ground where bright
murals beckoned. He strode along eagerly. What should it be? A frosted
flagon of red wine—Dragon's Blood? Or a hot cup of java?
The opportunity to make a choice pleased him.
The café appeared nice and pleasant, quiet and respectable. These were
qualities long unfamiliar to him, near-forgotten and strange, lost, he had
thought, in a dozen years of rollicking on the toughest spots in the galaxy.
He had seen a lot of space and a lot of stars since he had last been on Earth.
Jarrett's wide shoulders brushed a pot plant on a shelf as he sat down and
his long legs kicked into the chair opposite.
The girl laughed at him.
"Do you always," Jarrett said, making it soft and genteel for the moment,
"do you, young lady, always giggle at perfect strangers?"
"How do you know you're perfect?" she countered.
Big Bill Jarrett had to chuckle at that one, especially in the mood he was
in. He didn't stop to think. He just rushed in, all big beaming smile and
dancing eyes and wide-open teddy-bear lovableness.
"Could be I'd be amenable to some polishing."
Her eyes flirted at him. She was a tall, statuesque girl, with smooth
blonde hair plaited and swung low over her breasts. Her features, full and
florid, promised a coarse emotive understanding. She wore a short emerald
green dress that glittered as she moved and her thighs showed firm and
strong. Lacking other female company, Bill Jarrett found her attractive, as he
found some orchids attractive.
She said now, her eyes measuring him, "You might be amenable to
anything; I wouldn't know."
Along about now Jarrett, in normal circumstances, would have registered
the exact pitch on his internal social radar mind-screens. He'd handled
enough Harpies on enough strange planets. But here he was on Earth—on
Earth—the hearthstone of the galaxy. Crudities did not exist on good old
Solterra, did they?
The robot waiter chirruped for attention and, making up his mind with
reckless abandon, Jarrett ordered champagne. The girl smirked. The robot
brought the bottle and popped the cork and poured. Jarrett lifted his glass,
not bothering over formality, anxious only to be seen as a bon vivant.
The champagne was reasonable. He drank two glasses and as he was
reaching for the bottle to pour the third for the girl he felt an amazingly
acute pain in the back of his head, a stabbing agony over his eyes and a sick
queasiness in his stomach.
He rolled over and sat up.
The metal floor quivered.
The metal walls shook.
A single glow-light in the overhead showed him the familiar outlines of a
spaceship's brig.
"What the—!" he said thickly.
No answer.
He put a hand to his wallet—gone. The thick roll of notes—gone.
He groaned. His head threatened to come off.
"Not at my age," he said. "I'm a grown boy. Say it isn't so."
But it was so—indubitably.
It mattered not if the atom-master had instigated the rolling of him to
regain his money, or if he had fallen into the hands of freelancers. His cash
was gone. His wallet and thus his proof of who he was was gone.
And he was aboard a rustbucket en route for God knew where.
He lay on the metal floor and pondered. His thoughts made his face take
on the semblance of a gargoyle's, all hooked nose and thinned lips and
jutting jaw. He didn't waste energy railing against fate—rather, he knew
with a savage, morose lack of self-pity that the mug had been him; it was all
his fault, and he and he alone had dropped himself in it this time around.
Bill Jarrett had stature enough to recognize that life itelf is good; but he
was not a sentimental fool who thought that the goodness of life could be
had free, without some pain. Hitherto, for all his adventures, he had fought
cleanly; now he wondered how he would react if confronted with that
blonde-haired temptress in the little mural café perched on a pedway fifty
stories up in Earth's New York.
When some of the headache had gone he propped himself against the
metal wall and shoved himself fully upright. He was a tall man. His head
brushed the overhead. He straightened up his rumpled jacket and trousers
and then took off one of his real leather spaceboots with the plastic
reinforced sole.
He thumped the door with it. He banged that door with all his frustration
and anger.
The small polarized window set halfway up flushed pink and cleared and
a face peered through.
"Shaddap!"
"Come in here and say that!" blasted back Jarrett.
"Don't give me any trouble, sonny. I'm bigger and rougher than you are."
The door swung open silently. The speaker stepped through the opening.
Jarrett—Big Bill Jarrett—stepped back a pace.
The man was big. He wasn't just tall, he was big all over. After his first
quick shock, Jarrett studied him more critically and noticed the swell of
stomach and mentally filed that away as a possible weak spot. The man's
huge hands enfolded a large-size solid-projectile weapon, the type of gun
normally operated from a mounting.
"You may be bigger," Jarrett said coolly—he had at once reverted to his
usual professional poise—"but rougher… you can't prove that with a gun in
your fist."
He began to work his boot back on.
The giant laughed, gap-toothed, his lips folded in thick creases. He wore a
drab uniform with a brilliant red cummerbund. His face and his body
repelled Jarrett.
"I'm proving I'm tougher than you, sonny, because I don't care if I use
this squirter on you or not."
At that, the cretin had a point, Jarrett conceded.
They went along the corridor to a comfortable wardroom.
Sitting at the table were two men, men of a certain stamp, hard-bitten
spacemen who plied the lonely reaches between the stars for just one
motive—profit.
"Here he is, Cap'n," grunted the giant. "He just woke up."
The older of the two officers, the one with rather more gold braid and
wrinkles and a stronger leer of evil in his eyes, said, "He don't look like
much to me."
The other one, the straight man, said, "Give him a chance. He might be
quite—ah—adequate."
"All right, Noggin," said the captain briskly. "Put him to work. And I
don't want any trouble."
"You won't get any, sir, not from this bum." And Noggin prodded Jarrett
with the gun so that he stumbled out of the wardroom.
He heard the two officers laughing.
Jarrett liked a good laugh, himself.
He was put to work on routine cleaning and maintenance tasks aboard
the ship, which proved to be a sizable freighter with a central open
compartment for space-refrigerated cargoes. No novice aboard spaceships,
Jarrett quickly contrived a simple routine that satisfied Noggin, the bosun,
and left him plenty of time for himself. After a couple of ship-days of that he
went back to making the work last full-time. He had never been one for
sitting and brooding.
He figured out that he had not been shanghaied merely to work aboard
the ship—automatics took care of almost everything. Noggin had to find
work for him to do in double and triple cleaning and polishing. He must
have been rolled by that tricky atom-master and, when the rich pig had
stolen his money back, been shipped out to avoid the unpleasant
consequences such a rough and tough specimen from the outer marches of
the galaxy would inevitably arouse.
Even so—even so, there was the destination and the complaint he would
make then.
Didn't the officers of the ship (she was the Crepuscid Federation's Dnipro
Line's Jacqueline—an unsavory shipping line at best) didn't they realize he'd
report at once to the authorities on planetfall?
They might try to prevent him from landing although he doubted that,
for common sense told him he was costing them more in food and
necessities than he could possibly earn cleaning ship. If they did try to stop
him he would, regrettably, have to get rough.
So there was another reason.
As Jacqueline plunged on through space to a destination not revealed to
him, Bill Jarrett tried to figure it out.
He saw little of the other members of the crew for they kept to
themselves. At watch-changing he glimpsed them striding purposefully to
their work and understood they were all of a pattern with the captain and
Noggin. A hard ship, the Jacqueline.
He'd traveled and worked aboard hard ships before, in his time, had Big
Bill Jarrett.
As the tally of ship-days mounted up and the ship still plunged through
space at her light-year consuming gallop, Jarrett understood also that their
destination lay at a considerable distance from Solterra. As the galaxy had
been explored and colonized and opened up, many pockets of stellar
clusters and conglomerations had been settled and abandoned, for a variety
of reasons. Homo sapiens spread erratically throughout the outer portions of
the home spiral arm. Inevitably much communication suffered. Stars and
planets became cut off and isolated from other solarian settlements.
Local groupings sprang up, petty empires and commonwealths and
federations of suns. Old Earth looked on and maintained a watchful
motherhood. If any grouping looked too powerful, then she would arrange a
balancing group or federation, so that nothing unpleasantly violent should
break out among the stars.
As you looked out into space and saw the chips of light eternally burning,
saw the long swirls of darkness and the whorls of more distant galaxies, you
knew that around many of those tiny specks of light orbited planets
whereon men—men like yourself—lived and loved and died.
Also, you knew, around other chips of light orbited planets whereon lived
other beings, who may have loved, and who probably died; but so far
Homo sapiens knew so little about them that only guesses could suffice for
answers.
When the orders came through from Noggin that planetfall was coming
up Jarrett was polishing for the hundredth time the bright metal stanchions
leading into the open area. He put down the rag and gaped back at the big
bosun, as though the journey had grown to be a natural portion of life and
any cessation of it was out of the normal, strange.
"Planetfall?"
"That's right, sonny. Place called Merton. Heard of it?"
"No."
Noggin guffawed.
"Oh, you will, sonny, you will."
He was obviously enjoying a huge joke at Jarrett's expense.
Jarrett glared furiously at him, feeling the impotence of the ignorant.
When the ship at last touched down and the locks opened Noggin and
two other crewmen appeared before Jarrett, who was now dressed in a plain
gray coverall, patched and stained, and jerked impatient guns at him.
"Move along, sonny. If you try to run—powee!"
Jarrett's fists gripped into knots.
There was no hope of running. Preceding the guards, he marched down
the ramp.
He took in this planet called Merton. A blue sky, wispy white clouds,
pleasant air and gravity. The spacefield showed a few dissimilarities from
those Jarrett knew, scattered over many worlds of this spiral arm of the
galaxy.
For instance, although there were only four ships on the field and the area
itself appeared able to handle only about eight in all, as the gantries and
loading and fueling facilities showed, all along two sides of the field long,
wide and immense buildings had been built.
As warehouses they were grossly oversized for such a spacefield setup.
The captain waited at the foot of the ramp. A hovercar rested on the
ground nearby and a woman's face showed at the window. Jarrett only had
time for a glimpse—a glimpse that showed him a wide white brow, dark
coiled hair, and a full and ripely-red mouth—before Noggin prodded him
on.
The captain bent to the hovercar window. He was speaking to the
woman. Jarrett walked stiff-legged across the concrete, then the asphalt, and
so into the lowering door of the nearest warehouse. The huge door rolled
shut after him with a resonant clang.
He blinked in the sudden darkness.
Noggin's gun herded him on and he went, unwillingly, forward into the
dimness.
He was not fool enough to chance a break and a run for it in here. The
infrared detector on Noggin's gun would seek him and trigger the gun in a
destructive burst long before he could escape. And outside? He had seen no
city to which this strange spacefield could serve as port.
Following Noggin's directions—harshly barked commands to "Turn left!
Right! Straight on!"—Jarrett fumbled into the darkness. He guessed the
bosun was using a radar-guidance map-orientation device to program him
through the stacked bales and boxes that covered the warehouse floor.
Their feet hissed on shiny plastic. Echoes bounced jarringly from the piles
of boxes. Sweat began to collect on Jarrett's brow.
Light blazed ahead, actinic, blinding. Jarrett blinked. They came into an
open area, glassed in; they entered through a glass doorway that hissed shut
after them.
"Like a blasted specimen on a microscope slide," Jarrett said. His voice
squeaked and was lost.
"Shaddap," growled Noggin.
The bosun waited, his gun pointed at Jarrett's back, the other two men
with him as uneasy as Jarrett himself.
Presently a red light glowed high up and a rectangular section of the floor,
six feet square, vanished. Jarrett could see the metal lining to the shaft
revealed.
The very coldness, the impersonal consequence, of this experience began
to get to him. He was a hot-blooded man. He had accepted the situation
aboard the spaceship only because there was nothing else to do. The fact
that he had maintained a discreet calmness about it did not mean his blood
had not sung with anger and resentment.
Now, here in this glassed-in place, with offstage mechanics taking place, a
gun in his back, the harsh actinic light blazing down, he felt more than ever
as though he had been summoned for some celestial observation.
The floor segment returned to place with the suggestion of a hiss of
compressed air.
On the floor now stood a chair. In the chair, composed, alert, compact, sat
a woman—the woman, Jarrett immediately guessed, he had last seen in the
hovercar outside.
She was dressed in a long shimmery gown of indigo and silver,
constantly moving as transparent but light glinting material slithered over
the deeper cloth beneath. On her head a tiara of diamonds blazed with a fire
that told Jarrett, who knew about these things, that they were genuine.
"Just like a blasted princess," he said softly, to himself, conscious of
Noggin's gun.
The woman opened those richly red lips and said:
"Do you wish to die?"
Jarrett decided on a certain course of action, and remained silent.
Noggin prodded him with the gun.
"Hey, sonny! The princess is talking to you."
Jarrett, through lips he forced to remain supple and capable of speech,
said, "What princess? Talking to me? Why didn't she say so then?"
He ducked.
Noggin's enraged blow whistled over his head.
Before the bosun could swing again, the girl snapped out a quick, glittery
command.
"Stop! I do not want the subject killed—you stupid grilt."
Noggin winced.
"Yes, my lady."
Jarrett cautiously straightened up.
He eyed the girl with a trifle more respect.
She could handle Noggin, that was clear.
Now she leaned forward and he saw her eyes, unemphasized, were a
clear green flecked with black. She put a hand to her chin. "I asked you if
you wanted to die."
"So you were talking to me. How nice."
She frowned and Jarrett caught the distinct impression of thunder and
lightning playing around her magnificent head. She tapped a
silver-slippered foot against the metal-glass floor.
"I ask you for the last time. Then you will die, willy-nilly. Do you wish to
die?"
"No."
Noggin, lifting his gun to bash at Jarrett, growled, "Say my lady, sonny!"
She frowned at Noggin, who lowered the gun, shrinking.
"I am a princess; but that means nothing to filth like you. If you do not
wish to die, then I can offer you employment. If you wish to die, Noggin,
here, will oblige you with some pleasure."
Jarrett, aware how near to death he stood, said, "What do you wish me to
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