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

He picked up her tiny frame, and carried it to the stern of the ship. He wondered who she was why she was returning to Earth from Venus at her age. Perhaps she had wanted to pass her last years among the green and brown fields and again see a mountain. Perhaps—he thought he knew how she felt, for he, too, had once been homesick.

Mars—red hell of sand and cloudless sky. Home of "wanted" men and women, where the uncautious were burned in the flaming bonfires of the Martian underworld. Haven of every swindler and cutthroat in the system, it was but a dull gem in Sol's diadem. Some day they would clean it up—raid the sickening warrens that snaked through and under its cities; fill them in with dynamite. That day would be a good one …

Gently he deposited the body among others; brushed away his random thoughts and called, "Macy! Grapples fixed?" Macy's thin voice trickled through his earphones, "Yes, sir. I gave them twelve hundred meters."

"OK" he snapped. "Return to the ship, all except Wylie. You'll stay aboard, Kurt, to stow displaced cargo."

"Yes, sir," said Wylie, in a growl. "And shall I comb the corpses' hair, sir?"

Jerry grinned. "Why not? And see that it's done or I'll fire you and bust your rating on every scow out of Mars." Discipline, after all, was the thing.

Jerry resumed his place at the firing board. "Stations all," he called sharply over the annunciator. "Brace for seven Mars gravities in seventeen seconds. One—"

His hands flew over the board, setting up the combinations of rocket discharges that would be able to stir the huge Argol out of its inertia and snap it after the scow of Leigh Salvage, Incorporated, like a stone on a string, at the end of a ponderous osmiridium cable.

"Nine!" The men were strapping themselves into hammocks.

"Eleven …

"Fourteen!" He tensed himself, sucking in his stomach muscles against the terrible drag. "Sixteen!

"Fire!"

And the ship roared sharply up and out of the asteroid belt, its powerful rocket engines—designed to move twenty times the weight of the scow alone—straining to drag the ponderous cargo hulk behind it. Soon the initial speed lessened, and they were roaring along at an easy thousand K.P.S. The captain rose and set the automatics; tried to shake some of the blood from his legs into his head. He could rest now.

Assembled, Jerry and the men drank a toast to the trade in ethyl alcohol—"To salvaging: the greatest game of all!" They drained their cups. The big Sven rose, some of his Norse reticence vanished in the universal solvent. "My brothers in labor," he began. "We have gone far on this trip, and there is no one here who will not agree with me when I say that we could not have done it without Captain Jerry. I give you our boss and the best of them all, Jerry Leigh, of Leigh Salvage, Incorporated!"

The flask went the rounds, and when it was emptied there was another and yet another. In just a few hours Jerry was standing alone in the middle of the room, looking owlishly about him at the collapsed forms of the crew. There was a cup in his hands—a full cup. He spurned a nearby body with his foot.

"S-s-sissies!" he said derisively, and drained his drink. Slowly he deflated onto the floor.

An alarm bell smashed the silence into bits; men dragged themselves to their feet. "Mars," said one, absently.

"Don't land easy, Captain," another urged Jerry. "Smear us all over the field. It's about the only thing that'll do this head of mine any good."

Jerry winced. "That's the way I feel, but I'd like to get that hulk in before I die. Landing stations, all men."

Their ship and its huge running mate hovered over the red planet.

Irritably Jerry dove it near the atmosphere and blearily searched its surface for the landing field. "Damn!" he muttered. "I'm in the wrong hemisphere."

The ship roared over the face of Mars, and slowed above the Kalonin desert. Jerry found Salvage Field beneath him, and cut the rockets sharply to one side, swinging the Argol like the lash of a whip. They swooped down, and Jerry, drunk or sober, shifted his salvage neatly above the ponderous pneumatic cargo-table and cut it loose. It fell the thousand feet with a terrible crash, landing comparatively easy. At any rate he had not missed it. "So much for Wylie," he muttered.

The exhaust sputtered and died; the ship dove to within a hundred feet of the surface. On rockets! And down she drifted, landing without a jar.

Jerry held his head and groaned.

2 An Unexpected Rival

The owner, manager and founder of Leigh Salvage, Incorporated, was only human. In turn he visited the offices of the other salvage companies and said, in effect, "Ya-a-ah!" Or that was the plan.

Burke was first on his list: a sullen, red-headed man with a grudge against everybody. He threw Jerry out of his office before half the "Ya-a-ah" was out. The captain was too happy at the moment to start or finish a fight, so he brushed himself off for a call on Rusty Adams, of the Bluebell Salvage Company.

He entered their office and what appeared to be a secretary or receptionist or something said to him, "Can I help you?"

"Yes," he said absently, looking for Adams. "What are you doing tonight?" She scowled prettily. He noticed her hair, blonde. He noticed her eyes, blue-grey. He noticed, moreover, her face and figure, very neat—but this was business. "Is the proprietor of this ramshackle space-tuggery in?"

"Yes," she said, "the proprietor is in."

"Then drag the old dog out; I would have words with him."

"I," she said, "am the proprietor."

Jerry smiled gently. "Enough of this," he said. "I refer to the illustrious Francis X. Adams, alias the Rusty Nut, alias the Creaking Screw—"

He paused. Her eyes were full of tears. She looked up. "He was my father," she said, "You're Leigh, aren't you? They told me of your ways.

Father died while you were in space. I've come from Earth to take care of his business." She blew her nose on a silly little handkerchief, and said, "If there's anything I can do for you—"

Jerry felt lower than a snake's belly. He stammered an apology of some sort and went on, "As a matter of fact I did have a deal to talk over. I want to buy out your concern." As a matter of fact he had wanted to do nothing of the sort, but he thought it out quickly. The expense would cripple him for a while, but he'd be able to dispose of the Bluebell at a loss and get some operating capital, and one more job like that Argol and he'd be right back where he was now with only a little time wasted and she did have blue-grey eyes and what did a woman know about salvage anyway—

"Not for sale, Mr. Leigh," she said coolly.

That shocked him—he had thought that he was doing her a favor. He decided to be a big brother. "Miss Adams, I think you ought to accept.

Not for my sake, but for yours. You have had no experience at the work; you'll be at the mercy of your employees, and salvage men are the toughest mob in space. Your father could handle the company, but—"

She set her pretty jaw. "Just that," she said. "My father could handle them and so can I."

What was a man to do in the face of such madness? Perhaps—"What about a shipmaster, Miss Adams? Your profits will all run into his salary."

"No, Mr. Leigh—my father did it and I can do it. I'm going to pilot my own ship."

With that he exploded—no woman had ever piloted a rocket ship, he said; and also he said that no woman ever would pilot a rocket ship, and that if she thought she was going to learn to pilot a ship she was just plain crazy to try and learn on a salvage scow; and further he said that the salvage scow is notorious throughout all space as the crankiest, most perverted, perverse and persnickety brand of vessel that flies; that to run a scow you had to be born in the space-lanes and weaned on rocket-juice-