Synthetic Men Read online

  Side by side, they went down the hall. Down on the main deck, they could see Lionel busily supervising the ambulance corps, his glance fearfully straying upward from time to time. Clanking sounds on the shell of the craft told of First Mate Haverill’s change of heart.

  They had hardly reached the bridge to check on possible damage there, when Jared Nathan rushed in, awkward and breathless in a bulky space suit. In his agitation he made a great job of opening the faceplate. Finally the glass door was flung back and his words came streaming out.

  “Captain! he panted. “Haverill says if we’ve got acetylene torches, we can have the rocket tubes in working order inside of three days! Will you come up and check on it?”

  Patrick was stunned. Sparks recovered his voice first.

  “Holy Jupiter! If that big blow-hard is only right for once!”

  Ian Patrick whirled to the locker and dragged out space suits and helmets. He and Sparks climbed into them, while Nathan anxiously stood on one foot and then the other. Watching him out of the corner of his eye, Patrick could not believe his excitement was feigned. Whatever his past, Jared Nathan seemed to have thrown his lot wholeheartedly in with Vickers’ enemies now.

  In forty-five seconds, the three of them were piling out the airlock and tramping across the silvery surface of the space craft. At the fishtail stern, they found Haverill and several others working with crowbars and sledges on the starboard rocket tube.

  Haverill kept his battered features turned away from Patrick’s view, but his voice crackled through the earphones.

  “They bungled the job for sure! Look at this—they cut a wedge out of the tube about six feet back, so all the power would go out the side when it was blasted. They melted the barrel of the funnel, and tore off the landing fins. But we can patch the things up if we’ve got torches and enough acetylene!” Patrick took it all in with narrowed eyes. He’d served his apprenticeship in spacecraft factories, and still felt more at home driving rivets than punching control buttons.

  “I think we can do it,” he decided at last. “There are a dozen torches in the tool closet, and we’ll use rocket fuel if we run out of acetylene.”

  He straightened slowly, looking off into the void that had swallowed Vickers.

  “They all make one error. Missing our emergency food and botching the tubes was Vickers’ mistake. The first battle in the war to annihilate him will be fought right here on this ship!”

  Chapter IV

  Rain—in Space!

  Night and day, torches drove their incandescent tongues into the tough hide of the Oracle, cutting away ragged edges, welding into place new pieces salvaged from floor and cabin walls. Ian Patrick headed the crew working on the central stern rocket. At twelve o’clock, two days after the tragedy, he saw the last plate fitted in, the final rivet buffed smooth.

  Excitement spread through the ship. Patrick kindled that eagerness to white heat by announcing that they would be on their way within the hour—on one rocket!

  His plan was simple—and dangerous. Limp along on that one tube and work on the others as they went! It might mean fatal accidents to workmen clinging to the outside of the shell, but the men were ready for anything—anything that would get them home.

  While the crew went to work on the starboard stern rocket, Patrick called a conference in the chart room. He included Charles Lionel and Page Theron in the five-man roll call. As navigators, they were useless; but the other men seemed to look to them for advice, and it was Patrick’s idea to fill them with enthusiasm and thus keep the cooperation of the others. He was under no illusion that the job was over.

  Haverill had taken the reckonings. They showed that the Oracle’s drift had carried her to a point about a day closer to Ganymede than Mars. There was a navigation station on Ganymede, if Vickers hadn’t gutted it; but doubt as to whether or not he had done so raised a question. Patrick put it up to them: Should they risk trying Ganymede, or head straight for Mars despite the loss of a precious day?

  “I say Mars,” Sparks suggested. “If we find Ganymede deserted, it’ll be too late to do anything at all.”

  Lionel scrubbed at his unshaven red jowls.

  “On the other hand, that extra day may defeat us in itself!”

  The discussion was on, with Lionel and Haverill holding out for Ganymede, and Sparks and Patrick for Mars, and Theron waiting to be convinced. In the middle of the argument there was the sound of a lock rasping, and Jared Nathan stood in the doorway.

  “Er—gentlemen!” he interrupted. “You aren’t really intending to go to either of those stations, are you?”

  “We didn’t ask for your advice,” Don Haverill snapped.

  Nathan’s eyes flashed sparks, but he held his temper down.

  “If I may make a suggestion,” he went on coolly, “it will be too late to stop Vickers whichever way we go. The only way to stop him is to follow him!”

  “Follow him!” Charles Lionel began to laugh. “As if we haven’t had enough of him already!”

  Patrick jerked an impatient thumb at the intruder.

  “You’re out of order, Nathan. Beat it.”

  They turned their backs on him and were on the point of resuming the discussion when Jared Nathan cleared his throat.

  “Er—one other thing. Among some odds and ends in the captain’s stateroom, I found this. Now, don’t you think you’d better do as I say?”

  As one man, they whirled to face him. Nathan had a big pistol gripped in his hand and he was smiling coldly.

  * * *

  With a choked cry, Ian Patrick started for him. Nathan pivoted the weapon.

  “Don’t try it, Captain!” he warned. “I’m not afraid to use this if it comes to that. If I have to shoot every man on board, I’m going to make you see reason!”

  There was silence; then oaths, shouts, threats. When the atmosphere cleared a little, Jared Nathan gestured at the door.

  “I’ll ask you gentlemen to leave, all except Mr. Patrick. Don’t waste your time looking for guns; this is the only one on board.”

  “But—good Lord, man!” Lionel burbled. “What do you intend to do?”

  “Stop Vickers!” Nathan snapped the words. “It means the fall of our civilization if we don’t. Once he gets the Kuhlons installed on a few of his ships, the show’s over. I’ll stop him if it costs every life on this ship!”

  He took no more argument from them. From a weak, vacillating sot, he had overnight become a determined fanatic. At gun point, he forced the four of them out of the cabin.

  “Now, then!” He sat down at the desk, laid the gun beside him, grabbed pencil and paper. “I may need you to help me with this course, Mr. Patrick. Been a long time since I plotted one—”

  Patrick scowled. “You aren’t serious about following the Vengeance?”

  “Absolutely. For you and your friends, I am sorry. But it is all humanity against our twenty-five unimportant lives. This is the only way!”

  Patrick tossed his hands. “But if there were the slightest chance of success! You know yourself that there isn’t. Look at it sanely, man. We don’t know where he’s hiding, in the first place. In the second, if we did find him, he’d have five or six ships to our one. Besides, this is an unarmed passenger ship and his are fighters.”

  * * *

  Nathan tapped the shiny table top with his pencil.

  “I’ll take up your points in order. First, I think I can find him without trouble. Second, one good pilot can out-maneuver a dozen—and I flatter myself that I’m a good one. Third, I intend to install a gun immediately.”

  “Vickers took them all,” countered Patrick.

  “We’ve got fore-rockets, haven’t we?” Nathan spoke crisply, exhibiting impatience with Patrick’s stubbornness. “I’m going to convert one of our forward tubes into a cannon. Crude, perhaps; but I fancy a half ton of scrap iron hitting the Vengeance amidships will stop her as effectively as a modern ray gun. Do I answer your questions?”

  “No. Gra
nted that you can construct some sort of a gun. But how are we going to find that devil by rushing around in space like maniacs?”

  “I have a theory about that hideout of his.” Jared Nathan cocked an eye out the port. “Do you remember the Luna, that radioed for help just before she crashed into a strange asteroid somewhere near Jupiter? Navigators plotted the Luna’s location, and there was no asteroid within a million miles of that spot. We’re going to find the asteroid into which the Luna crashed, and when we find it—we’ll find Karl Vickers.”

  “But you just said there was no such body!” Patrick protested.

  “You’re jumping to conclusions. I merely said none had been found. Why not? Because the asteroid is invisible! Don’t smile—” Nathan pointed the pencil squarely at Patrick’s nose.

  “I’ve suspected the existence of invisible stars and planets for years,” he emphasized. “The erratic behavior of certain stars can only be explained by the fact that they have invisible companions—binaries, which throw them off their normal courses. Light rays have been bent in the laboratory. Why not in space?

  “A gaseous envelope around an asteroid might bend the light rays so that the asteroid would be completely invisible! That, Mr. Patrick, is what I expect to find is the case here. We’re going to seek out Vickers, and when we find him—we’ll destroy him for good!” Ian Patrick stared at him, shoving back his cap to scratch his head. Then, suddenly, he was sticking out his hand to Nathan, a sheepish grin on his face.

  “I’ll be damned if you haven’t got it figured out from A to Z!” he chuckled. “You may have released that brother of yours once, but I’ll take my oath on it that you’re out for blood now. I’m with you, Nathan!”

  Jared Nathan took his hand. He tried to say something, but his voice wouldn’t come. Finally he turned away, moisture brimming in his eyes.

  “I’ll meet you on the bridge in five minutes, Captain. Time’s wasting!”

  * * *

  The Oracle limped away on schedule. Work proceeded steadily while they churned through the sky toward Jupiter. It was ten hours later that the second stern rocket was brought into action. Then Nathan put them to work on the forward rockets and his improvised cannon.

  Ian Patrick only partly succeeded in convincing the others of the old man’s sincerity. The foremost thing in their minds was that they were rushing toward almost certain doom. But they worked, under constant threat of Nathan’s gun and Sparks’ and Patrick’s fists.

  Nathan spoke once of his relationship with Karl Vickers, his brother. Until they were ten years old, they had been brought up together in Europe. Then the father and mother separated, the mother taking Nathan with her to America, where they became citizens. From that time on the two brothers’ paths followed widely diverging trails.

  Jared became a high air fleet official, while Karl gained fame as a radical. Since their mother had taken up her maiden name again—Nathan—their kinship was never disclosed. It had been her plea, Jared Nathan said, that caused him to release his brother against his own good judgment after the two-year war. And even then, it was only Karl Vickers’ promise to find a new home on some far-off world.

  Patrick, watching the emotion in Nathan’s face as he spoke, was inclined to believe him, even if he could not condone his action.

  Three days passed. The cannon was completed and a number of crude projectiles fashioned. Jared Nathan kept the men so busy, they had no time to grumble and organize resistance. Night period and day period they sweated over their tasks, polishing chromium when there was nothing else to do. The exhausted men limited their speech to monosyllabic grunts, too utterly done in to talk.

  Bearded, hollow-cheeked, stumbling with fatigue, they kept going like automatons. But such a man-killing course could not go on long. The men were near the breaking point when Nathan announced, the fourth day out, that they could look for the asteroid any time now!

  Terror mingled with hope as they rushed to the ports and stared ahead. A sort of savage eagerness to meet Karl Vickers again broke out. They already considered themselves as good as dead. If they could take the dictator with them, so much the better! But the void was empty in all directions.

  Hours went by, and suspense dwindled. In the gun room, Sparks and his crew nodded half asleep on their racks of crude shells. A dull ache throbbed in Patrick’s eyes as he continued to search the sky. In all the Oracle, only Nathan continued to hope.

  Another hour, and even Nathan was losing his enthusiasm. His voice came dully from where he hunched over his charts.

  “Anything ahead—even a—a speck of cloud vapor?” he asked wearily.

  Patrick lifted his head out of a doze. The glass in front of him was streaky, and for a moment he could not understand why the vision was so poor. Then he realized that great drops of rain had begun to spatter against the windshield.

  “Hard to tell,” he muttered tonelessly. “Raining now. Can’t see much!”

  “Raining!” Jared Nathan shouted as he leaped from his chair. “Good Lord, man, have you lost your mind? Don’t you know what that means? We’re in some asteroid’s atmosphere!”

  Chapter V

  The Final Blow

  Patrick heaved himself erect. Jared Nathan pounced on him and forced him out of the pilot’s chair. He gave both forward rockets full blast and stared anxiously ahead.

  Rain indeed! Buckets of it, rivers of it, driving in sheets against the glass, pattering like a thousand tiny bullets. Best of all, betokening the invisible planetoid ahead of them!

  The Oracle groaned in every bulkhead. Her mad forward rush was broken. Down below, they could hear dishes crashing and men yelling as they were pitched to the floor. Nathan stabbed at the alarm buttons. His skinny body stiffened and he pointed ahead.

  “There she is!” he yelled. “Clouds—mountains—”

  Out of nothingness filtered a dark precipitate. A precipitate that rapidly resolved itself into mountains and valleys. The planet was small; they could see the horizon curving down out of sight on all sides. Nathan had to keep every rocket belching to prevent them from crashing. The Oracle almost brushed a peak as it tilted upward.

  Nathan leveled it off over a broad, rain-soaked valley. His voice carried a ring of steel as he relaxed from the controls.

  “Nothing to do now but find him. That won’t be hard on a planet of this size. He’ll be out after us as soon as he hears our rockets.”

  A queer huskiness lay over Patrick’s words.

  “He’s already found us, Nathan. Look below—in that little pocket in the hills. Six ships on a landing field!”

  Nathan’s bright eyes dropped to the floor port. Then he saw them. An array of disk-like ships arranged in a circle, like plates on a dinner table. Men, looking like ants, scurried around them. Some of them stood with feet widespread, staring upward.

  Nathan snapped on the general alarm, drew the microphone to him.

  “Places!” he yelled. “Snap on safety belts. You in the gun room, fire at my signal.”

  His thin hand drew at the accelerator, tilted the Oracle over in a vertical dive.

  Sheer, down-rushing speed snapped Ian Patrick against the back of his seat. There was no need for safety belts yet. Raw fuel gushed into blazing rockets and sent them blasting downward at unbelievable speed. One second the landing field was a faraway penny against the green of wild hills; the next, a barrel-head; and now it was a flat circle of terrain on which space-suited figures rushed into their pursuit ships for a lightning take-off.

  Patrick knew that this first unheralded attack carried all their hopes. Against those six ships, armed with the deadly Kuhlon guns, they would be powerless. Their first shot must destroy the Vengeance, or the race through space had indeed been a madman’s dream.

  Down… down… down! Every second, Patrick expected the command to fire. When it seemed that they could never come out of the dive, Jared Nathan screeched the order to Sparks.

  Simultaneously, Nathan cut the stern rockets and ign
ited the forward tubes with a deafening roar of titanic power. In that ear-crushing volley of sound, the higher crack of the cannon was almost lost. Patrick stared downward, watching for the effect of the shot.

  A split second later, one of the ships leaped and fell back with its turret torn away. But it was not the Vengeance. The Oracle had ventured—and lost.

  Ian Patrick could not know the terrible bitterness that filled Nathan’s heart. All he knew was that the Oracle was out of its dive and zooming back into the sky. His nose was bleeding from the terrible pressure; every bone felt as though it must crack.

  Then, through the squeal of straining braces Patrick heard Nathan shout into the microphone:

  “Reload!”

  Bitterly, he raised his head and stared at the old fighters. Nathan hadn’t given up yet; wouldn’t give up, he knew, until the Oracle was a mass of molten girders.

  * * *

  The Vengeance and her four sisters were after them now. Ruby-colored rays crisscrossed above and below them. Constant explosions tossed the fleeing craft like a feather in a wind. The power of the Kuhlons was unbelievable. Where the scorching rays whipped the air, the very atmosphere cracked wide open.

  Nathan, realizing Vickers would have their range in another moment, put the liner into a spiraling climb. The platter-like ships soared after them. In the relatively heavy atmosphere, they had breathtaking climbing and maneuvering power. Nathan saw that he must try another plan, so badly were they outclassed. While his fingers darted over the controls, the Oracle began a series of contortions that had its passengers dizzy and sick in a few seconds.

  But the effort was futile. The Plutonians kept right behind, constantly closing the gap. Jared Nathan groaned and started climbing again. Kuhlon rays darted about them incessantly, sometimes almost touching the craft.

  It was Patrick who first noticed the difference in the force of the rays.