The Space Opera Novella Read online

  “Bentley,” the big man said, “and two of my assistants. Interplanetary Bureau of Investigation. The Earth office wants to know what connection there might be between your open war with Titus Conway and this kidnapping by one of your employees. I’m afraid you three are under arrest.”

  CHAPTER IX

  Fugitive Flight

  Shannon’s breath exploded noisely. For a fleeting instant he saw again the white, strained face of Tubby Martin, the crawling madness in his eyes. Madness he, Lane Shannon, had helped nourish.

  “Wait!” Shannon pleaded desperately. “You don’t understand. Here, let me show you—”

  He took a step forward. His hand thrust out, caught the blast pistol, twisted it aside.

  “Pile in, gang!” he shouted.

  Even as his right hand balled up and exploded against the big I.B.I. man’s square jaw, Spaine and Killmer sprang into action. Like a couple of football men, they charged across the room to tackle the other two officers.

  As the I.B.I. leader reeled back from Shannon’s unexpected blow, to sag to the floor, one of his aides, who had drawn his own blast pistol, threatened to break up the proceedings. In that desperate moment, Mike Killmer caught him about the legs. The two went down in a fighting, smashing heap, as the gun flew from the I.B.I. man’s hand. Killmer swore roundly, grabbed the ‘officer by the throat and bounced his head against the floor. The man’s helmet was not enough to protect him. His eyes rolled back dazedly, and Killmer put him to sleep with a hard left jab.

  The second officer had meanwhile sidestepped Allen Spaine’s lunge. He too tried for his blast pistol. But Spaine spun to face him and grabbed him tightly about the middle. He squeezed, hard, so that the aide’s arms were pinioned to his sides, the air whistling harshly from his lungs.

  Lane Shannon finished the fight with a looping right uppercut. He caught the man’s body as it sagged forward and lowered it to the floor.

  “Hold these fellows!” he said, panting, as Spaine and Killmer glanced at their handiwork uncertainly. “Keep them quiet until I’ve cleared the cradle. If an alarm gets out now, I’ll shoot my way clear. And listen to me! I’m going after Tubby.

  “If I fail to stop him, I won’t be back and Venus Freight Line will be yours—yours and Marla’s and the others.”

  “Well,” Mike Killmer roared at him, “what are you hanging around here gabbing for?”

  “Twenty minutes,” Shannon snapped. “I’ve got to have twenty minutes to blast clear. You call Service about the ship.”

  He ran out the door, forced himself down to a brisk walk when he reached the street corridor. It would never do to draw attention by running. The street might be crowded with I.B.I. men. There might already be guards on their ship to prevent escape.

  At a corner, Shannon snatched out coins, fed them into a humming news machine and grabbed at the latest tape. He read it without slowing, catching the items with anxious eyes. Tubby Martin had vanished. The G-l had been unguarded. No one remembered that Venus Freight Line kept it, fueled for emergency use. As a consequence, Martin got it away before other ships could blast off. Once beyond atmosphere, blasting free of the beam, he had the whole vast emptiness of space in which to elude discovery.

  Once upon a time, Shannon thought wildly, another poor devil as much of a fool as himself got into a mess like this. A guy named Frankenstein, who built a monster he couldn’t control.

  A guy named Frankenstein—

  Shannon knew that he had to be right. There was only one place for Tubby Martin to go, only one vengeance that would satisfy his mad hatred. Back to Venus, to cloud-filled, wind-battered Morgreb Pass, and towering Nason Peak in the Moulin Range, where Mack Drummond had lost his life but saved his payload. A rocket splitting the wind, roaring down under full blast. A peal of mad, triumphant laughter above the thunder.

  Then the end. The crash on Nason Peak, where Mack Drummond had crashed. Tubby Martin, Titus Conway, his daughter, the future of Venus Freight Line and of Lane Shannon, crashing in the clouds of Venus.

  Shannon shook his head to clear the dread vision.

  A miracle came to pass. The G-3 lay in her cradle, fueled and ready, with cradle-crew tense at the controls to send her up to blast-off level. A miracle did it. A miracle named Mike Killmer.

  “Up! Fast!” Shannon roared and plunged into the hold.

  The port lock slammed and he dogged it shut, leaped for the empty bucket seat as the cradle tilted and rumbled underneath. Shannon’s hands were shaking until they touched the controls, found the old steadiness he had lost with his license, three years ago.

  They were snapping him up. The red light flashed and almost instantly cut to green. Good men on the Moon cradles. Fuel. Ignition. Kick the booster, shove the Bolton home. Ride the thunder to Venus.

  It was a blast-off that would have killed a pilot on Earth. Here, under the Moon’s lesser pull, it only blacked out Shannon’s senses and beat his body with a thousand mighty hammers.

  * * * *

  When he came to, the beam carrier receiver was spluttering. He snapped it on.

  “Shannon! Lane Shannon, come back here and submit to arrest. You’re only making things tougher for yourself and your men by fleeing. You can’t dodge the Space Patrol—”

  The receiver continued to whine, warning Shannon of his peril. He snapped it off. Back toward the dark bubble of the Moon, streaks of thin crimson were darting upward—patrol ships, seeking him. Faster ships than the G-3, these patrol vessels, armed and equipped with detectors, authorized by law to blast him out of the sky if he failed to heed a stop order.

  He had to shake off pursuit, keep out of detector range. Tubby Martin had done it, somehow. Shannon sent the G-3 hurtling off at an angle, away from the Earth-Moon routes, completely away from the Venus track. Then he began to throw it into a systematic, dizzy zigzag course that was the more bewildering because it took full advantage of three-dimensional space.

  The detectors might catch him at times by accident, but they’d have to be good to hold him long enough for the Space Patrol to get a line.

  Presently the receiver stopped whining and the crimson splinters were no longer visible from the ports. Shannon adjusted his controls for robot operation, set a course for Venus. Then he slumped back into the bucket seat, laid his head against the padded rest and slept for the first time in forty-eight hours.

  He awoke with an aching body but a mind clearer and reasonably refreshed. It was a shock to realize that he had slept through nearly seven hours of unguarded flight. A dozen perils might have menaced him during the period, but apparently none had. Earth was just another planet in the blackness behind.

  Shannon moved around to limber cramped muscles, snapped on the private televisor on the bare chance Al Spaine or Mike Killmer might get a chance to call on the Venus transmitter. Marquard would be down by this time and probably in custody, as surely would Ohrbeck back on Earth. The stark slenderness of his hope, the desperation of his mad gamble swept down on Shannon then with a strangling fear.

  To fight off the grim doubts, he set about getting his location and speed: This necessitated digging clear back into his student-pilot days, dredging up rusty bits of astrogation he had all but forgot in the longer experience of flying under beam control. He shot fixed stars from the port windows and worked out his position. Then, to make sure, he shot again and reworked the figures.

  There was a hopeless divergence in his two results. Shannon groaned, gritted his teeth and went through the racking task once more. This time he got an agreement with the second figure, found the error that had thrown his first calculation off. With time and location and a knowledge of his speed under full blast, he could calculate a probable arrival at Venus in about eighteen hours.

  Then came the calculation he dreaded to make—his established speed against Tubby Martin’s possible time. Even with the two ships flashin
g along similar courses, pointing a narrowing trajectory at the same eventual focus, there was not one chance in millions of actually sighting the G-l in space. His only hope of success lay in beating Martin to Morgreb Pass, somehow intercepting and stopping him there. A futile, well, nigh impossible hope.

  Shannon finished his calculations and sat gnawing at his fists. He should be able to beat the G-l by a slender margin—if he had correctly guessed how much time Tubby Martin lost shaking off pursuit before he set his direct course. That was the blind factor, the unknown “X” in the formula. The slender margin between life and death.

  When the televisor screen suddenly hummed and flickered with a clearing image, Shannon’s heart nearly pounded itself out of his chest. The screen was set on Venus Freight Line’s own private wave. A signal there meant either the I.B.I. was cutting in to deliver a threat—or one of the Venus men had been free and able to reach a transmitter.

  The image flickered and cleared. Shannon’s pulses raced, then slowed to icy calm. This is it, he thought. Success or failure.

  Tubby Martin’s face was on the screen, glassy eyes staring out at Lane Shannon, flicking away, returning to stare again. Sight of the puffy, mottled face, the mad eyes, the twitching lips with raw marks of worrying teeth, tore at Shannon’s heart.

  This is your handiwork, Shannon thought. Look at it. The bugs of madness might have been there before. But you set them crawling, nourished them on your own warped hatred.

  “You,” Tubby Martin said at last, hoarsely. “You’re not at the office. Where are you?”

  Careful, Shannon’s mind shrieked at him. Everything depends on your answers now. Words are your only weapon. Words and the tone of your voice.

  This was why he had dared punishment to fly again, in the face of his revoked license. This was why he had left Al Spaine and Mike Killmer and the I.B.I. man behind. Because the only hope of success lay with Shannon alone. Because no one but Lane Shannon could hope to make the madman believe the lie he had to tell. The lie that might save lives.

  “Not at the office, Tubby,” he said gently, carefully. “I’m out in space, flying again, close enough to you right now to reach out and touch you.”

  “You can’t stop me! You can’t stop me!” Martin’s face screwed up craftily. “You know what I’m going to do?”

  “Of course. It’s the only thing to do, Tubby. Poetic justice. Take him up there where Mack Drummond is waiting and wipe the slate clean.”

  “You’re not going to stop me, Lane. You can’t stop me.”

  “Of course not, Tubby. I’m going along. Mack was my friend, too. Remember that morning I blasted off with the Turtle? How he risked his job to give me that drink that drove out the chills and fever? Mack’s waiting for me too, Tubby.”

  Tears welled grotesquely out of the other’s glazed eyes.

  “But you said you weren’t interested in squaring things for Mack any more. You said it was freight you were fighting for.”

  “You saw through that, didn’t you?” Shannon asked. “They were trying to make me stop fighting altogether. I had to fool them so I could keep on, trick them into helping me.”

  He hesitated, watching the expressions swirl across Tubby Martin’s face. At last he asked the question that had been beating at his brain.

  “You haven’t—haven’t done anything to them yet, have you?”

  “Oh, no. Only telling them about Mack and me and how we’re going to meet Him soon. Wait, I’ll show you.”

  Martin’s hands came toward the screen, blurred out of focus as he fumbled with the scanner setting. The scene began to slide across the receiver plate, to reveal a corner of the ancient, rusty cabin. The image paused, tilted, focused at last on the two bound figures lying on the floor plates.

  Lane Shannon could see old Titus Conway’s face, still cold and hard. Only his eyes showed the fear that must be a living agony inside him. He looked up at Shannon on the screen and hope came into his face.

  Shannon knew Tubby Martin was watching him, probing his every facial expression. He dared not give any sign of assurance.

  He looked beyond Conway at the girl, his daughter. Suddenly the cabin, the screen, the flickering image, all were reeling and blurring before his eyes. He blinked desperately, looked again. It was mad, impossible, but—

  Dear heaven, the girl was Marla Wylie!

  “Tubby! Listen to me. You’ve made a ghastly mistake. That—that’s Marla, Tubby. Marla Wylie!”

  Tubby Martin laughed and the grating cacophony clawed at Shannon’s nerves.

  “Sure it is, Lane. Didn’t you know? Marla Wylie is Titus Conway’s daughter. You didn’t know that, eh? Al Spaine and Mike Killmer didn’t know it, either. But I knew it, Lane. I followed her to his office and heard the whole thing. That’s why she’s going with us—going to join Mack up there on Nason Peak.”

  CHAPTER X

  The Crucial Hour

  Shannon fought to control his nerves, fought until he felt empty and sick, until cold perspiration soaked his clothing and ran into his eyes. He fought, and somewhere found the strength to keep his face blank and his voice level.

  “I didn’t know that, Tubby. You’re certain?”

  “Dead certain. She admits it, in fact. They both admit it. You liked her a lot, didn’t you, Lane? I could see it in your eyes. She’d have made you stop fighting after a while…”

  “Shannon, listen to me!” Titus Conway was straining against his bonds, hurling his parched voice at the screen pickup. “I’ve never crawled to any man before in my life, but I’ll crawl now if crawling will save my girl. Not for myself, but for her. She ran away from me, changed her name, went to work for one of my competitors because she couldn’t see my way of fighting, for what I wanted. She hates my insides, but—”

  “Dad, I don’t!” Marla’s choked cry of protest clawed at Shannon’s heart. “I simply couldn’t stay and watch you trample on other men’s lives and dreams to fatten your purse. I told you that. But even when you almost had Billy Anderson murdered, I couldn’t hate—”

  “What?” Titus Conway bawled. “I didn’t order his tubes smashed. Don’t you read the newstapes? I ordered his ignition fixed so it would cut out and leave him drifting a few days, time enough for me to snap up all the available payloads.

  “But I didn’t order that. If I had any killing to do, I’d do it myself. The man who took it on himself to smash those steering and brake tubes is in jail right now—where I put him and where I’ll keep him!”

  “I—I’m glad,” Marla breathed softly. “I should have known, Dad.”

  Shannon barely heard the words. He was fighting to control his facial expressions, to keep them cold and unrelenting. If he let any warmth creep into his eyes, let Tubby Martin guess how he really felt, the madman would guess the trap that was being laid. Shannon deliberately looked away from both Conway and Marla.

  Out of sight of the scanner he fumbled at the controls, easing in the steering throttles, keeping their rumble below the thunder of the stern tubes.

  They were light blasts, but under their drive the G-3 was veering, turning, swinging slowly in a great spiral. Shannon’s eyes were glued to the image on the screen, his ears strained for every variation in the pitch and volume of Tubby Martin’s voice.

  Unknown to the madman, Shannon was making the G-3 a directional antenna, swinging it until variations in sound and image gave him a point on the other ship. It took an unbearably long time but eventually he got it. There was a minute but unmistakable maximum, that told him the G-3 was pointing its nose straight at the G-l.

  Shannon’s breath hissed out and some of the knots went out of his nerves. As near as he could estimate without an accurate bearing, Tubby Martin’s ship was behind the G-3 by a slight margin. He swung off, back to a Venus course, to conserve that slender lead and prevent possible collision.

  “We
’re getting close to Venus, Tubby,” Shannon said then. “Let’s stop talking for awhile and concentrate on the controls. I’ll meet you at the north edge of Morgreb Gap on the old Trans-Venus beam route.”

  “You’re going to crash with us, Lane?”

  Shannon chewed at the inside of his cheek.

  “Of course I am, Tubby.”

  * * * *

  The rolling clouds were reaching up hungrily now. Shannon was decelerating dangerously, rocking the ship with terrible, shuddering brake blasts that strained the plates and pounded him with the furies of all agony. He drove down, biting his lips, praying that Martin’s old G-l would take the brake blasts without falling apart, praying that the madness had not robbed Martin’s hands of their skill at the controls.

  They were flying close together now, on parallel paths, with the G-3 still leading. Shortly they thundered over Venus City, buried in the fog blanket two miles below. Shannon could tell by the zone of quiet, then resumption of the guide-beam signals on a different note.

  “Follow the beam, Tubby.”

  “I’m following it, Lane.”

  Shannon began to sweat again. This was it. Whatever was going to happen would happen within the next twenty minutes at the most.

  He knew what he had to do. Had to do. Steady your nerves, calm your voice, Shannon. Marla and those other two will live or die by what you say now and how you say it.

  “Tubby!”

  “Yes, Lane.”

  “Allen Spaine and Mike Killmer and the rest—they’re our friends, yours and mine.”

  “I know.”

  “Tubby, that old G-One you’re flying—it doesn’t mean anything to them. It’s an old discarded crate. They’ll never miss it. I’d ordered it sold for junk, anyhow.”

  Tubby Martin laughed hoarsely.

  “It’ll be junk, Lane!”

  “But Tubby, this G-Three I’m flying is a good ship. They need it to carry on. Without it, those boys will be hurt. Maybe lose the company, find themselves ruined. That would be selfish of me.”