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In: Science-Fiction & Fantasy·Novels
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #68331.
The opening · free to read
Tossed into the trackless Cosmos by his mortal enemy, shipwrecked on an unfriendly star, he determined to defy the dangers of numberless nights, and, hunted turned hunter, keep a tryst with Hate....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
There was bright, pitiless light in the prison corridor of the Stallifer. There was the hum of the air-renewal system. Once in every so often there was a cushioned thud as some item of the space ship's machinery operated some relay somewhere. But it was very tedious to be in a confinement cell. Stan Buckley--Lieutenant, J.G., Space Guard, under charges and under restraint--found it rather more than tedious.
He should have been upheld, perhaps, by the fact that he was innocent of the charges made against him by Rob Torren, formerly his immediate superior officer. But the feeling of innocence did not help. He sat in his cell, holding himself still with a grim resolution. But a deep, a savage, a corrosive anger grew and grew and grew within him. It had been growing in just this manner for weeks.
The Stallifer bored on through space. From her ports the cosmos was not that hostile, immobile curtain of unwinking stars the early interstellar travelers knew. At twelve hundred light-speeds, with the Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times per second for velocity control, the stars moved visibly. Forty glimpses of the galaxy about the ship in every second made it seem that the universe was always in view.
And the stars moved. The nearer ones moved swiftly and the farther ones more slowly, but all moved. And habit made motion give the feeling of perspective, so that the stars appeared to be distributed in three dimensions and from the ship seemed very small, like fireflies. All the cosmos seemed small and almost cosy. The Rim itself appeared no more than a few miles away. But the Stallifer headed for Earth from Rhesi II, and she had been days upon her journey, and she had come a distance which it would stagger the imagination to compute.
In his cell, though, Stan Buckley could see only four walls. There was no variation of light; no sign of morning or night or afternoon. At intervals, a guard brought him food. That was all--except that his deep and fierce and terrible anger grew until it seemed that he would go mad with it.
He had no idea of the hour or the day when, quite suddenly, the pitiless light in the corridor dimmed. Then the door he had not seen since his entrance into the prison corridor clanked open. Footsteps came toward his cell. It was not the guard who fed him. He knew that much. It was a variation of routine which should not have varied until his arrival on Earth.
He sat still, his hands clenched. A figure loomed outside the cell door. He looked up coldly. Then fury so great as almost to be frenzy filled him. Rob Torren looked in at him.
There was silence. Stan Buckley's muscles tensed until it seemed that the bones of his body creaked. Then Rob Torren said caustically:
"It's lucky there are bars, or there'd be no chance to talk! Either you'd kill me and be beamed for murder, or I'd kill you and Esther would think me a murderer. I've come to get you out of this if you'll accept my terms."
Stan Buckley made an inarticulate, growling noise.
"Oh, surely!" said Rob Torren. "I denounce you, and I'm the witness against you. At your trial, I'll be believed and you won't. You'll be broken and disgraced. Even Esther wouldn't marry you under such circumstances. Or maybe," he added sardonically, "maybe you wouldn't let her!"
Stan Buckley licked his lips. He longed so terribly to get his hands about his enemy's throat that he could hardly hear his words.
"The trouble is," said Rob Torren, "that she probably wouldn't marry me either, if you were disgraced by my means. So I offer a bargain. I'll help you to escape--I've got it all arranged--on your word of honor to fight me. A duel. To the death." His eyes were hard. His tone was hard. His manner was almost contemptuous. Stan Buckley said hoarsely:
"I'll fight you anywhere, under any conditions!"
"The conditions," Rob Torren told him icily, "are that I will help you to escape. You will then write a letter to Esther, saying that I did so and outlining the conditions of the duel as we agree upon them. I will, in turn, write a letter to the Space Guard brass, withdrawing my charges against you. We will fight. The survivor will destroy his own letter and make use of the other. Do you agree to that?"
"I'll agree to anything," said Stan Buckley fiercely, "that will get my hands about your throat!"
Rob Torren shrugged.
"I've turned off the guard photocells," he said calmly. "I've a key for your cell. I'm going to let you out. I can't afford to kill you except under the conditions I named, or I'll have no chance to win Esther. If you kill me under any other conditions, you'll simply be beamed as a murderer." He paused, and then added, "And I have to come and fight you because a letter from you admitting that I've behaved honorably is the only possible thing that would satisfy Esther. You give your word to wait until you've escaped and I come for you before you try to kill me?"
Stan Buckley hesitated a long, long time. Then he said in a thick voice, "I give my word."
Without hesitation, Rob Torren put a key in the cell door and turned it. He stood aside. Stan Buckley walked out, his hands clenched. Torren closed the door and re-locked it. He turned his back and walked down the corridor. He opened the door at its end. Again he stood aside. Stan Buckley went through. Torren closed the door, took a bit of cloth from his pocket, wiped off the key, hung it up again on a tiny hook, with the same bit of cloth threw a switch, and put the cloth back in his pocket.
"The photocells are back on," he said in a dry voice. "They say you're still in your cell. When the guard contradicts them, you'll seem to have vanished into thin air."
"I'm doing this," said Stan hoarsely, "to get a chance to kill you. Of course I've no real chance to escape!"
That was obvious. The Stallifer was deep in the void of interstellar space. She traveled at twelve hundred times the speed of light. Escape from the ship was impossible. And concealment past discovery when the ship docked was preposterous.
"That remains to be seen," said Torren coldly. "Come this way."
Torren went down a hallway. He slipped into a narrow doorway, unnoticeable unless one was looking for it. Stan followed. He found himself in that narrow, compartmented space between the ship's inner and outer skins. A door; another compartment; another door. Then a tiny air-lock--used for the egress of a single man to inspect or repair such exterior apparatus as the scanners for the ship's vision screens. There was a heap of assorted apparatus beside the air-lock door.
"I prepared for this," said Torren curtly. "There's a space suit. Put it on. Here's a meteor miner's space skid. There are supplies. I brought this stuff as luggage, in water-tight cases. I'll fill the cases with my bath water and get off the ship with the same weight of luggage I had when I came on. That's my cover-up."
"And I?" asked Stan harshly.
"You'll take this chrono. It's synchronized with the ship's navigating clock. At two-two even you push off from the outside of the ship. The drive field fluctuates. When it collapses, you'll be outside it. When it expands--"
Stan Buckley raised his eyebrows. This was clever! The Bowdoin-Hall field, which permits of faster-than-light travel, is like a pulsating bubble, expanding and contracting at rates ranging from hundreds of thousands of times per second to the forty-per-second of deep-space speed. When the field is expanding, and bars of an artificial allotrope of carbon are acted upon by electrostatic forces in a certain scientific fashion, a ship and all its contents accelerate at a rate so great that it simply has no meaning. As the field contracts, a ship decelerates again. That is the theory, at any rate. There is no proof in sensation or instrument readings that such is the case. But velocity is inversely proportional to the speed of the field's pulsations, and only in deep space does a ship dare slow the pulsations too greatly, for fear of complications.
However, a man in a space suit could detach himself from a space ship traveling by the Bowdoin-Hall field. He could float free at the instant of the field's collapse, and be left behind when it expanded again. But he would be left alone in illimitable emptiness.
"You'll straddle the space skid," said Torren shortly. "It's full powered--good for some millions of miles. At two-two exactly the Stallifer will be as close to Khor Alpha as it will go. Khor Alpha's a dwarf white star that's used as a course marker. It has one planet that the directories say has a breathable atmosphere, and list as a possible landing refuge, but which they also say is unexamined. You'll make for that planet and land. You'll wait for me. I'll come!"
Stan Buckley said in soft ferocity, "I hope so!"
Torren's rage flared.
"Do you think I'm not as anxious to kill you as you are to kill me?"
For an instant the two tensed, as if for a struggle to the death there between the two skins of the space ship. Then Torren turned away.
"Get in your suit," he said curtly. "I'll get a private flyer and come after you as soon as the hearing about your disappearance is over. Push off at two-two even. Make it exact!"
He went angrily away, and Stan Buckley stared after him, hating him, and then grimly turned to the apparatus that lay in an untidy heap beside the air-lock door.
Five minutes later he opened the outer door of the lock. He was clad in space armor and carried with him a small pack of supplies--the standard abandon-ship kit--and the little space-drive unit. The unit was one of those space skids used by meteor miners--merely a shaft which contained the drive and power unit, a seat, and a cross-shaft by which it was steered. It was absurdly like a hobby-horse for a man in a space suit, and it was totally unsuitable for interplanetary work because it consumed too much power when fighting gravity. For Stan, though, starting in mid-space and with only one landing to make, it should be adequate.
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