Anderson, Poul - Three Worlds To Conquer

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This one is for Gordon Dickson

THREE WORLDS TO CONQUER

A PYRAMID BOOK

electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems

without permission in writing from the Publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote

brief passages in a review.

Pyramid edition published April 1964

Third printing, December 1974

ISBN 0-515-03541-6

Printed in the United States of America

Pyramid Books are published by Pyramid Communications, Inc.

Its trademarks, consisting of the word „Pyramid” and the portrayal of a pyramid, are

registered in the United States Patent Office.

Pyramid Communications, Inc., 919 Third Avenue,

New York, N.Y. 10022

Contents

One

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

One

The guide beam reached out in answer to his signal and locked onto him. Home again,

he thought. His hands moved across the pilot board, adjusting Vectors more delicately

than a pianist controls notes, until the moonship rode a true curve. The cabin throbbed

with energies.

Raising his eyes to the viewscreen, he saw Ganymede as half a globe ahead of him. It

was a cold sight, mountains like teeth, craters like fortress walls, their shadows long and

lengthening across blue-gray plains. Though already nighted, just east of the John Glenn

range, Berkeley Ice Field lay high enough to throw Jupiter light back at him, a sheening

amber reach that lost itself around the curve of the world. Southwestward thence,

slashing through the heights and a thousand miles over Mare Navium, the scar that was

Dante Chasm ran toward the Red Mountains. Not far north of it, almost on the sunset

line, Aurora’s visual beacon was now visible, a green star that flickered on and off, on

and off. But past the horizon, blackness was aswarm with other and older stars,

unblinking diamond sharpnesses.

Not for the first time, he thought, I’d like to know what’s out yonder. But he wouldn’t

live that long. And it didn’t matter. There was sufficient mystery in the Solar System for

a lot of human lifetimes yet-yes, and trouble and danger and hope, all scrambled together

in life’s careless fashion. Hope reborn on Earth just as hell was letting out for noon on

Jupiter-

The radio buzzed. „Aurora Space Traffic Control to Moonship 17, that’s one-seven.

Acknowledge,” said a familiar voice.

Startled, Fraser jerked in his seat, and laughed a bit at himself for doing so. „Shucks,

Bill, you needn’t get stuffy with me,” he said. „This is Mark in Good Ole Charlie.

Remember?”

„Well-„ Enderby sounded sheepish. „Ah, never mind. I was putting on company

manners. But if any of ‚em happen to be listening, let ‚em think we’re slobs. They’ll

probably be right.”

„Company? How’s that?”

„You haven’t heard? We told every outpost.”

„I wasn’t at Io Base. Went directly to the mine, and flitted directly back here when my

job was finished. So what’s happened?”

„A battleship, that’s what.”

„Huh?”

„USS Vega. Made groundfall fifteen hours ago.”

Briefly, Fraser’s heart stumbled, and he had a sense of the hair rising on his skin. He

shoved the tension down again, as far as he could, and managed to ask, „What news?” in

a level tone.

„Nothing much, from what I can gather. We’ve only seen a few of the personnel.

According to what Ad-HQ announced to us, she was on patrol near Venus when the

revolution broke, and was put to searching for an orbital base the Sam Halls were

believed to have somewhere in that sector. Didn’t find it. I don’t imagine she looked too

hard, if her commander had any sneaking sympathy for them. He seems to have had,

maybe to have been in cahoots with them all along, because the Vega wasn’t called

straight home when the fighting ended. Instead, the new government ordered her here, to

see if we needed anything and make sure of our allegiance.”

Still trying for calm-those had been harsh months while an intermittent radio beam

sent tatters of information about the civil war ripping across American soil, a war that

could at any minute have gone nuclear; and the beam was cut off when Earth slipped

behind the solar wind curtain, eight days after a still uncertain victory!-Fraser made

himself picture the battleship’s track. She must have taken a cometary to get here so fast:

plunging as near the sun as coolers and radiation screens allowed, letting it swing her

around, and then applying maximum blast. You gained considerable efficiency when you

added gravitational potential energy to your jets. The saving in reaction mass would let

you accelerate longer than usual, turn your eventual orbit into a still flatter and swifter

hyperbola.

As always, he found engineer thoughts soothing. Forces and matrices were so much

easier to deal with than people. „Our allegiance is okay and then some,” he said. „But I’d

better write Santa Claus a long list of wants. My department’s run low on Mark Four

Everything, what with the last supply ship not coming.” Well worth it, though, his mind

added. A temporary breakdown in logistics, and any amount of belt tightening is small

price for being free again.

Why . . . I could go back home now. . . as my own man!

His eyes returned to the bleakness in the viewscreen, and for a moment it was blotted

out by the memory of blue water and white foamcaps, a wind that tasted of salt, under

Earth’s lordly sky. But then his glance wandered, fell on Jupiter, and suddenly he was

unsure. He had lived a dozen years beneath that storm-blazoned shield, and if

Ganymede’s rock and ice were hard to strike roots in, they gripped those roots all the

more tightly.

„Well,” he said in haste, „what’s your call about, Bill?”

„Oh, that,” Enderby said. „With the battlewagon taking up so much room, we have to

put moonships in a bunch at the north end. There are already several parked. You’ll have

to descend on a very, very finicking line, and manually. Can do?”

„Look, I inspect and service this pilot board myself. I can put my boat down on the

price of a Congressman.”

„R-r-roger.” Enderby issued instructions. Fraser listened with care, but had time to feel

a little ashamed. The legislature and the courts ought to rate respect, now that the Army

of Liberation had booted out the dictatorship. Wasn’t that so?

Or was it? After this long a time at the far end of a four-hundred-million-mile

communications line, a trickle of censored radio, censored letters, censored publications,

how much truth could he know? Noble slogans were cheap, and the finest causes could

go awry. Even the dictatorship had started as a movement to restore to a beaten United

States her sovereignty and her pride. Then somehow one emergency after another

cropped up, and those who grumbled began to have problems with the cops. . ..

His thoughts were swallowed up in the busyness of planet-fall. Meant to land at

unpredictable points, the intersatellite carriers depended on their pilots as often as on

autopilots. Not every person could acquire the necessary skills. Something had to be born

into him.

When the last jet was cut off and the cabin had shivered to silence, Fraser

unharnessed. He was a tall man, rather on the gaunt side. Forty years had put lines in his

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ThisoneisforGordonDicksonTHREEWORLDSTOCONQUERAPYRAMIDBOOKCopyright©1964byPyramidPublications,Inc.Allrightsreserved.NopartofthisbookmaybereproducedinanyformorbyanyelectronicormechanicalmeansincludinginformationstorageandretrievalsystemswithoutpermissioninwritingfromthePublisher,exceptbyareviewerwhoma...

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