C Kornbluth - His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

"The Elms"

Wednesday Dear Miss Stolp,

Pray forgive my failure to attend the last meeting of the Society to read my paper. I was writing the last words when —I can tell you no more.

Young Dr. Scantt has been in constant attendance at my bedside, and my temperature has not fallen below 99.8 degrees in the past 48 hours.

I have been, I am, a sick and suffering man. I abjectly hope that you and everybody in Eleusis will bear this in mind if certain facts should come to your attention.

I cannot close without a warning against that rascal, "Dr." Caspar Mord.

A pledge prevents me from entering into details, but I urge you, should he dare to rear his head in Eleusis again, to hound him out of town as he was hounded out of Peoria in 1929. Verbum sapientibus satifc.

King Cole of Pluto

1 Leigh Salvage, Incorporated

Sunlight gleamed on the squat, stubby spaceship. Its rocket exhaust flared once; then paled into nothing. It was drifting through the meteor zone though not the undirected object it seemed to be. Captain Jerry Leigh had his scow under control; the control of a man who was born in the space-lanes, and knew them like his own face.

Captain Jerry was in the cramped cabin of the ship, scribbling at endless computations. "Allowing for Black's constant," he muttered,

"plus drift, plus impetus, less inertia …" He turned to a calculator, stabbed at its keys, and read the result. He yanked a bell pull and a clangor sounded through the ship. Men filed in—a full crew meeting.

Jerry rose.

"As I estimate it," he said, "the Argol lies in quadrant III of the meteor belt. Its coordinates are alpha—point oh oh four; beta—seven point three oh two; gamma—zero!" There was a shocked pause, and a big man stepped out of the crew. "Will we go through with it, Captain?

Gamma—zero is a small margin of profit, to say nothing of safety." He spoke slowly and precisely; the flat "a" of his English indicated that his tongue had once been more used to the Scandinavian languages.

Jerry smiled: "Sven, caution is caution, and maybe the salvage money isn't worth the risk." His face hardened. "But I'm not working for money alone, and I hope that none of you others are."

A voice spoke from the floor, "Glory's glory, but space-bloat is a damned nasty way to die!"

Jerry frowned. There were troublemakers everywhere and all the time.

"Wylie," he said, "if you've ever seen a wrecked liner you'll know what we're here for, and what our job is. We salvage and tow the ships wrecked by meteors or mechanical flaws, and we get paid for it. But—

and it's a big but—if we didn't do our job, those ships would run wild.

With no crew, tearing through space at the whim of the governor, plowing through the shipping lanes, never twice in the same place, and finally coming to rest as permanent menaces to trade and life—that's our job! They carry water condensers to Mars; they carry radium to Earth. Para-morphium from Venus, and iridium from Neptune. Without us salvagers there would be no shipping; without shipping the structure of the interplanetary union would topple and fall. This isn't a job or even a career—it's a sacred duty that we do for each and all of the nine worlds of the solar system!

"Coordinates, I said, are alpha—point oh oh four; beta—seven point three oh two; gamma—zero. Carry on; full speed ahead."

The exhausts flamed; the stubby, rusted prow turned once more—into the meteor zone!

Jerry droned figures to the helmsman with his eyes glued at the vision plate of pure fused quartz. "Meteor in our third quadrant—distance about five hundred kilos. Deflect into first …back on course.

"Cloud of aerolites ahead. Carry through." Ahead loomed a blotch of darkness. "Unknown particle in second quadrant. Our coordinates, helmsman."

Sven, at the tiller, read off, "Alpha—point oh oh four; beta—seven point four oh oh; gamma—point oh oh two."

"Hulk Argol ahead. Carry through into gamma—zero." The big man wet his lips and deflected the steering bar. "Carried through, sir," he said.

Jerry, his eyes never leaving the plate, whispered tensely, "Cut steering to master's board." Sven snapped a switch. "Cut, sir." Delicately Jerry fingered the firing switch. A blocky black mass boomed down on the ship from the east; violently the little scow looped over and down, clearing the path of the particle. This was just one of the reasons that men were prejudiced against gamma—zero. Too much loose junk zipping around for comfort.

The Argol was squarely on the cross-hairs of the vision plate. Captain Jerry studied the battered piece of wreckage. It had been a supertransport once—loaded to the observation blister with para-morphium from Venus to Earth. She had encountered an unexpected cloud of meteorites, probably too big to run away from, and so had been riddled and gone under. From then on her career had been a terrible one of shooting wildly through space on almost full fuel tanks; demolishing a refueling station a million kilos off Mars; smashing into a squadron of police rockets and shattering them into bits—and finding rest at last in the meteor zone to upset orbits and hurl cosmic rubbish into the trade lanes. He examined this corpse of a ship, estimating its size and Martian weight. He thought he could handle it. Through the annunciator he said, "Make fast with magnet plates." And to Sven,

"Take the master's board for emergencies. I'm going over to supervise."

Jerry crawled into his spacesuit, a terrible cumbersome thing of steel alloy and artificial membrane, and dropped lightly down the shaft of the ship to the big space lock that characterizes the salvage vessel.

"Wylie," he ordered, "take Martin and Dooley with a cutting torch to open their sides and then look at their fuel tanks. If they have any left we can use it. I don't believe they're empty, from the lie of her.

"Macy, take Collins and Pearl. Secure grapples, and allow as much slack for towage as you can get. If you allow too little, you'll never know it, by the way—we'd be smashed like an eggshell on the first turn bigger than thirty degrees.

"Dehring and Hiller, come with me. You need supervision. Take cameras and film."

The boarding parry bolted their helmets on and swung open the space lock. Wylie, unrecognizable in his swathing overall, braced the cutting torch against his middle and turned on the juice. The powerful arc bit through the wall of the Argol as if it had been cheese, and the men filed through. They had cut one of the cargo rooms, piled high with metal cylinders of para-morphium, the priceless Venerian drug of sleep and healing. A few of the containers were sprung open and the contents spoiled; still, seventy percent of the remaining cargo went to the salvager, and eighty percent of the hulk.

Jerry took his crew of two to the steering blister that bulged from the top of the ship, picking his way between damaged bodies. In the blister he found the captain, staring permanently at a hole in the observation plate where a meteorite—one of many—had pierced the armor of his vessel. With a crowbar Jerry pried off the top of the recorder and photographed the tracing needles on the graph that charted the course of the ship with all its crazy tacks and swerves through space.

"Dehring," he ordered, "take up that corpse. We're going to stack them and see that they get decent burial when we reach a planet." And with the callousness of years of space travel and the coldness that the hard life of the salvager instills, the man obeyed.

Jerry wandered at random through the ship. It had carried some passengers. One of the cabin doors was open, and the figure of an old woman, face mercifully down, was sprawled over the threshold. She had heard the alarm in her little room as the air drained out of the ship; unthinkingly she had flung open her door—gasped for breath when there was nothing to breathe—and fallen as she was.