Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

Her body slammed against his shoulders and her arms encircled his neck. Her fingers clawed at his eyes.

Wayne struggled, not to free himself, but only to get one hand loose, to reach the control board. When he did get a hand free, they had floated too far from the controls.

“Stop it, you stupid bitch!” Wayne snarled. “You’re going to kill us both!”

Wayne said, “Listen, there’s a guided missile from earth heading straight for this ship, and it has a hydrogen bomb warhead. It’ll get here any minute now and when it—”

His words were broken off by the tremendous roar and concussion of the hydrogen bomb.

Wayne’s last thought before oblivion swallowed him was that they wouldn’t have had time to escape, anyway.

But that wasn’t the end. Wayne woke up enough to refuse to believe he was alive, and O’Reilly was somewhere near, telling him:

“Cirissins full of grate your forts. Radio eggulant blan. Thankel normous. Rid of earth now. Blasted away. Givish good high dragon bump. Yukon gome now.”

Wayne groaned. The meaning of O’Reilly’s words was trying to get through to his brain, and he was trying desperately to keep the meaning out.

O’Reilly’s voice receded into a thick gray fog. “Keep shib. Shores. Presirent felpings. Gluck.”

Metal slammed against metal. Wayne slammed against something hard. And darkness closed in once again.

But this time it wasn’t so smothering and didn’t last nearly so long.

When he opened his eyes his head was clear. He wasn’t floating. He was lying on something hard—a floor surface of the Cirissin landing ship. He didn’t ache anywhere.

All in all he felt pretty good.

For the first few seconds.

Then he started remembering things, and he wished he hadn’t bothered to wake up.

Sheilah was standing by the control panel, her back to him. She blocked the view screen, but Wayne didn’t want to see it anyway. He wasn’t even curious.

Sheilah turned, saw him, smiled broadly.

She said, “Gee, mister, I guess you’re a hero. I dunno how you done it, but you made ’em go away, and you made ’em turn us loose.” Wayne could detect no mockery or bitterness in her voice.

“Aw, shut up,” he growled.

“You still mad at me cause of what I done? Well, gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t get whatcha were up to. I guess I still don’t, but… Oh, hell, let’s don’t fight about it. It don’t matter now, does it?”

Wayne shook his head wearily. “No,” he agreed. “It doesn’t matter now.”

Sheilah moved away from the control board and came toward him. In her filmy, transparent costume, she was the quintessence of womanly allure.

Wayne gasped and stared, but not at her.

The view screen had become visible when she’d moved.

It showed earth.

Or a curved, cloud-veiled slice of earth. Intact, serene and growing steadily larger.

“What the hell! Why, I thought…” Wayne jumped to his feet, brushed past Sheilah and peered more closely at the view plate. There was no mistaking it. Earth.

“What’s a matter with you, mister?” Sheilah asked.

Wayne felt dizzy. O’Reilly had said, “Earth blasted away,” hadn’t he? And the H-bomb hadn’t destroyed the Cirissin ship. Therefore… Well, therefore what?

In the first place what O’Reilly had actually said was, “Rid of earth now. Blasted away.” It wasn’t quite the same as…

O’Reilly had never said anything about destroying earth.

Quite a sizeable re-evaluation project was taking place in Wayne’s mind. It took several minutes for all the pieces to fall into their proper places. But once he was willing to realize that the Cirissins had known what they were doing, everything seemed obvious.

“Oh, good Gawd!” he muttered. “What utter idiots!”

“The Cirissins?” Sheilah asked.

“No, I mean us. Me. Good Lord, just because O’Reilly’s English wasn’t perfect! What did I expect for only three weeks? Hummm. The atomic structure of the entire ship must be uniformly charged to… Damn! High dragon bump!”

“I don’t getcha,” Sheilah said. “What’s with this high dragon bump business? I thought they wanted a hydrogen bomb to destroy earth, and I thought you’d agreed to help ’em, and so I thought…”

“Oh, never mind,” Wayne said. “I know what you thought, and you weren’t any more stupid than I was. We were both wrong.

“Look, the Cirissins must have been stalled—out of gas, sort of. Something had gone wrong with their nuclear drive units. They had some emergency fuel, but they didn’t want to use it. Like having a can of kerosene in the car when the tank runs dry, I suppose. It will work, but it messes up the engine. You understand so far?”

“Sure.”

“Okay then. They happened to be close to earth, so they went into an orbit around it and studied it for a while on radio and TV bands, and realized they might be able to get help without using their emergency fuel—uranium, incidentally, not kerosene.

“So they grabbed us. Me, I suppose because they’d seen my TV science program. They must have gotten the idea from some stupid spy show that scientists have to be seduced into revealing information. That’s why they picked up you.”

Sheilah interrupted, “But what did they want? I thought…”

Patiently, Wayne said, “Just what they said. A high dragon bump. A bump, not a bomb. A boost, a push. Not to blast away earth, but to blast away from earth. That’s all.”

Larson couldn’t possibly have known what was going on in the engine room, yet he acted….

“We moor in ten minutes,” I said.

We were flying at reduced speed because of the heavy fog we had run into at the outer fringe of Earth’s atmosphere. But I knew we were within forty or fifty miles of the Trans-Space base. I had counted the miles on this particular trip because of the load of radium we were carrying from the Venusian mines. I wouldn’t draw a completely relieved breath until we were down and the stuff was in the hands of the commerce agents.

I eased my position slightly to relieve the pressure on my broken flipper and grinned at the pilot, Lucky Larson, the screwiest, most unpredictable void trotter who had ever flown for dear old Trans-Space.

“You’ve been too good to be true this trip,” I said, “and it’s a good thing. The chief told me that if you so much as thought about clowning around or stunting he was going to clip your wings for good.”

Lucky grinned, an impish, devil-may-care grin that lightened up his freckled face and bunched the tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Then with characteristic abruptness he scowled.

“That grandmother,” he said disgustedly. “Who does he think I am, anyway? Some crazy irresponsible madman who hasn’t got enough brains to stay on a space beam?”

“That’s just what he does think,” I grinned, “and you’ve given him plenty of reason to think it. You can’t bring your crate in to the base without stunting around and showing off and risking your damn neck. That’s why he sent me along with you this trip. Just to see that you act like a pilot—instead of circus acrobat.”

“A lot of good you’d do,” Lucky mumbled. “You got a broken arm. The only reason he sent you is because he didn’t want to pay you while you was in the hospital so he cooks up this trip to get his money out of you. And say,” he turned to me belligerently, “when did I ever crack up a ship? When did I ever even dent one of the babies?”

“You haven’t,” I was forced to admit, “but that’s just because of that screwy luck of yours. But it won’t last forever and one of these days it’s going to run out just when you need it. So just remember—no stunting this trip or you’ll be out of the strata for the rest of your natural life.”