Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

Colbie yawned; and then Deverel’s rage apparently broke all bounds. He called Colbie every foul name under the Sun, reviled him with the unprintable verbal scum of innumerable space ports—and then stopped short.

“Hell, I didn’t mean that,” he muttered. He waved a hand. “Sorry—I mean it. It’s just that”—he summoned a grin—”there went the second Crucial Moment. Rather, the minute we drop down from the eleventh apex—there it goes. It’s about a minute away. We’re now, to all intents and purposes, a mean one hundred ten feet below the rim. Phew!”

“What are these crucial moments?” Colbie inquired in genuine bewilderment.

Deverel laughed in amused disgust. “There are several of them—I think. And the more of them we pass up, the more crucial the next one is. Get it? At last we come to the Final Crucial Moment! And after we pass that up—” Deverel shook his head. “After that, there’s no more hope. No more Crucial Moments.” After a while, he said listlessly, “I’ll tell you when they come around.”

They swept down and they swept up. Angles decreased and angles increased. The rim loomed up through the gloom of light, and dropped away. Constant acceleration, followed by just as constant deceleration. And light and still more light and nothing else but light.

Two men against the magical mirror!

Seventeen times the rim dropped away, and each time they approached it was farther away—ten feet higher than before. And then Deverel remarked wearily, “The third Crucial Moment—one hundred seventy feet below the rim.” He cocked an eye—a bleary eye—at Colbie, who was so exhausted and blinded by the incessant play of light from the mirror that he was apathetic. “What are you thinking about?”

“Just waiting,” Colbie returned tiredly, “for you to give the word!”

Deverel laughed harshly. “And I’ll never give it. Listen. In less than an hour comes the—”

“The fourth Crucial Moment,” put in Colbie acidly.

“Wrong. The final.” He waited for this to take effect, but it had none at all. Then he snarled, “You’re going to hold out—good Lord!” For a moment he was speechless, glaring at the other man. Then unaccountably, he laughed. “We’re two of a kind—two stubborn fools. I didn’t know you had it in you,” he remarked frankly. “I really believe you’re going to—” and he broke off.

“That I’m going to hold out past the time that really means something to us?” Colbie asked him quizzically. He nodded slowly.

Deverel sank back in disgust.

They topped the eighteenth, the nineteenth, the twentieth apex. Deverel was jumpy, irritated. “About half an hour,” he said nervously. “That’s all we’ve got. I mean it. When that time goes, then we kiss life good-bye. I wish you’d see reason, Colbie. Either we both die—or I go free, and you live, too, and we’re just as if we never came to this planet. Just think of that—life again!”

Deverel watched Colbie intently, but the IP man was absolutely unaffected. The outlaw had been hoping against hope that Colbie would, in the last vital moments, give in. He had determined to wait that long, just on the chance. Now that chance was definitely out, and Deverel had to play a card he had long ago decided to use if worse came to worse. It might win—and it might lose.

So in the next few moments—with the verve and ability of a natural actor (he had played Hamlet when he was a younger man)—he increased his nervousness, the desperation of his manner, the snarl in his voice.

“Twenty-five minutes, Colbie. Give us plenty of time.” Colbie was obdurate. They were on the twenty-second trip across. Deverel’s rasping voice went on later, “Twenty minutes. And here comes the rim.”

The rim came toward them, slowly. More and more slowly, and then gently started dropping away. The twenty-third trip.

“Fifteen minutes, Colbie.” Deverel’s voice had the rasp of a buzz saw in it. He was actually nervous now. The amount of time was pretty small. So that suddenly he said in a tone of voice that was deprived of every trace of moisture, “Colbie.”

Colbie met his eyes, and what he saw there made his own open wider.

“You guessed it, Colbie.” The outlaw’s tone was dull. He spread his hands. “I’m done. I’ve cracked. Good Lord!” he burst out. “You don’t give a damn! That’s what gets me—I can’t understand it. Listen—you may think I’m scared to die, that I’m not the kind of fellow I’ve painted myself to be—but I am. I’m careless with my life. I won’t care at all when my number’s due. What I can’t stand is the fact that it isn’t due! There’s a way out. And it’s only your stubborn refusal that’s blocking the way. But I guess when you come down to it, it’s me—”

“It’s I—” Colbie corrected mildly.

“It’s I that’s blocking the way. So I give up. You win. You’re the world-beater of this crowd. You’re the champion holder-outer, the prince of don’t-give-a-damners! Colbie, you’ve got me in tears. Honest, I feel like blubbering like a kid. I can’t understand you—sitting there—” he groped.

The IP man regarded Deverel steadily. “You’re funny,” he muttered. “I knew you’d give in, just because of that. You have dash—impulsiveness— a quick love of life. I’m just a stolid space-cop.”

And Deverel suddenly thrust out his jaw angrily. “I gave in, didn’t I? And don’t think I haven’t got half a notion to take it back. I’m capable of it.” His eyes challenged the other’s.

Colbie said slowly, “No. Don’t do it—forget it. We were fools—you decided not to be one. That’s all there is to it.” Once more he met the eyes of the other man, this time thoughtfully, then he nodded his head in slow determination. His head came up, and a sparkle entered his eyes.

“What do we do?” he demanded. “Spill it—let’s get out of this forsaken place. I don’t like the lighting arrangements! Come on!”

Deverel went into action.

“Wind yourself up on this rope,” his voice cracked out, full of the energy of real desperation now. “Closer—come on! All right.” He braced his feet against Colbie, and pushed. Colbie went whirling dizzily away, the rope uncoiling. He came to the end of the rope. Deverel then pulled in such a manner that he utilized to the fullest extent Colbie’s rotatory motion. Colbie came spinning back, winding up. Deverel lashed out with his feet. Colbie unwound again, this time in a new direction. Time after time he came back, whirled away again. Deverel manipulated Colbie in the same way a small boy does a certain toy called the jo-jo.

Swiftly, each was swinging around the other in an ellipse with a shifting axis.

“Get it?” panted Deverel. “We’ve got a circular motion started. It isn’t affecting our course in the slightest, though. We’re a closed system. For every action a reaction. I’m swinging around you, too. Now, you stop spinning—it isn’t necessary now.” Colbie flailed about with his arms and, in the course of two revolutions, swung around Deverel in a true circle. And all the while they were hurtling up the slope of the mirror, at a rate dictated by no other force than the retarding power of gravity.

Deverel was gasping. “Now—draw up on the rope. Pulls us nearer the center of the circle we’re making and we go faster—our angular velocity increases. Now we’re going.”

And they were. By dint of prodigious exertions, they worked their angular velocity up to such a point that the centrifugal force was putting a terrific strain on their laboring lungs.

And finally the outlaw gasped, “Enough! We’re going plenty fast. If we go any faster, we’ll split wide open. We’d keep on whirling like this until the slight bit of friction wore it down—that is, if we didn’t use it to escape this trap. And we’re going to use it, too! The rim should be along in —two minutes, seventeen seconds flat. Oh, yes, I figured that out to the hair’s breadth.”