Poul Anderson: Poul Anderson - Sci-Fi Boxed Set

"But you can't! You'll carbon the tubes—be likely to crash—"

"I said now." Dyann propelled her captive ahead of her through the airlock and Urushkidan crawled after. The valves clanged shut after them.

"I hope you can fly vun of these thins," said Dyann, lashing the secret policeman to a recoil chair.

"I hope so too," said Urushkidan.

Dyann stood over her prisoner. "Vere is Ray Ballantyne?" she asked. "The Earthman who vas arrested off the liner a few days ago."

"I don't know," he gasped.

Dyann drew her knife, smiling nastily.

"Camp Muellenhoff, you savage! Outside the city, to the north. You'll never make it. You'll kill us all."

The cradle rumbled forward to the hangar airlock. Urushkidan took the pilot chair and strapped himself in and relit his pipe with nervous boneless fingers. Dyann whistled tunelessly between her teeth. It was dark in the airlock chamber as the pumps evacuated it.

"Why bother wit tis Ballantyne?" asked the Martian. "What claim has he on us? It will need all our luck and my genius for us to escape with our own lives."

"We need his luck too, maybe," said Dyann shortly.

* * * * *

The outer valve swung open and they trundled over the rails to the surface of Ganymede. Behind them, the dome covering the city rose against a background of saw-toothed mountains and dark, faintly star-lit sky. A dwarfed sun lit the spaceport field with pale cold luminance. There were not many vessels in sight, no liner or freighter was in and the military ports were elsewhere. One lean black patrol ship stood not far off.

"They vill be out after us soon," said Dyann. "Vat can you do about that boat there, huh?"

"We will see," said Urushkidan. He touched studs, levers, and buttons. The engines thuttered and the little vessel shook.

"Let's go!"

The rocket stood on her tail and climbed for the sky. Urushkidan brought her around, the gyros screaming at his clumsy management, and lowered her on her jets directly above the patrol ship. An atom-driven ion-blast is not good for a patrol ship.

"Now," said Dyann as they took off again, "you, my policeman friend, vill call this Camp Muellenhoff and tell them to release Ballantyne to us. If you do that, ve vill set you down somevere. If not—vell—" She tested the edge of her knife on his ear. "You may still be a police, but you vill not be very alive."

"You can't escape," said the Jovian with a certain hollow lack of conviction. "You'd better throw yourself on the Leader's mercy."

Dyann knocked a few teeth loose.

"You savage!" he gasped. "You cruel, murdering—"

"I tought you Jobians were always talking about te glories of war and te rutless superman," snickered Urushkidan. "Also destiny and tings. Better call te camp as she says."

A few minutes later the ship lowered into the walled enclosure of Camp Muellenhoff. It was a dreary place, metal barracks lying harsh under the guns of the watchtowers, spacesuited prisoners clumping to work through the thin chill air of Ganymede. A detail hurried up and shoved an unarmed, suited form into the airlock.

Their leader's voice rattled over his helmet radio of the ship's telereceiver, "Major, sir, are you sure they want this man in the city now? We just got an alert to look out for a couple of escaped desperadoes."

Dyann slammed the outer valve in his face by the remote-control lever and the little ship stood on her tail again and flamed skyward.

A somewhat battered Ray Ballantyne crawled out of his suit and blinked at them. It had been a rough two or three days, though they hadn't gone very far with him. The truth drugs must have satisfied them that he was not an intentional spy, and thereafter they had simply held him until orders for his execution should come. He swayed into Dyann's arms.

"Oh, my poor Ray," she murmured. "My poor, poor little Earthlin."

"Hey, wait a minute," he began weakly.

"Just lie still, I will take care of you."

"Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of. Lemme go!"

They sat down again on a remote mountaintop, gave the policeman a spacesuit, and kicked him out of the ship. He was still wailing about barbarous and inhuman treatment. He said something too about wild beasts.

"And now," said Dyann, "let us get back to Earth before the Yovians find us."

"This crate'll never make Earth," said Ray. "I've flown 'em—let me at those controls, Urushkidan."

They heard it as well, the ominous sizzling and knocking from the engine-room shields, and felt the ship tremble with it.

"Is tat te carboning te man was talking about?" asked the Martian innocently.

"I'm—afraid—so." Ray shook his head. "We'll have to land somewhere before the rockets quit altogether. Then it'll take a week for the radioactivity to get low enough so we can go back there and clean them out."

"And all the Yovian army, navy, police, and fire department out chasin us by now," said Dyann. Her clear brow wrinkled. "I fear that Ormun is offended because I left her amon the heathen back there. I am afraid our luck is runnin' low."

"And," said Ray bleakly, "how!"

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They used the last sputter of flame to sit down in the wildest and remotest valley they could find. Looking out the port, Ray wondered if they hadn't perhaps overdone it.

Beyond the little ship there was a stretch of seamed and gullied stone, a rough craggy waste sloping up toward the fang-peaked razorback ridge of the hills, weird flickering play of shadows between the looming boulders as the thin wind blew a veil of snow across the deep greenish-blue sky. Jupiter was an amber scimitar low on the northern horizon. They were near the south pole with a sprawling panorama of sharp stars around it fading out near the tiny sun. Snow lay heaped in drifts beyond the wind-scoured rocks, and the far green blink of glaciers reflected the pale heatless sunlight from the hills.

Snow—well, yes, thought Ray, it was snow of a sort. All the water on Ganymede was of course solid ice. So were the carbon dioxide and ammonia. But the temperature often dropped low enough to precipitate methane or nitrogen. The moon's atmosphere what there was of it, consisted mostly of argon, nitrogen, methane, and vapors of the frozen substances—not especially breathable.

The colonists used the standard green-plant air-renewal system, obtaining extra oxygen from its compounds and water from the ice-strata, and heated their dwellings from the central atomic-energy units. Ray hoped the ship's equipment was in working order.

There was native life out there, a few scrubby gray-leaved thickets, a frightened leaper bounding kangaroo-like into the hills. The biochemistry of Ganymede was a weird and wonderful thing which human scientists were still a long way from understanding, but it involved substances capable of absorbing heat energy directly and releasing it as needed. The carnivores lacked the secretions, obtaining them from their prey, and had given the colonists a lot of trouble because of their fondness for the generous supply of heat a human necessarily carried around with him.

"And now what do we do?" asked Ray.

Dyann's eyes lit with a hopeful gleam. "Hunt monsters?" she suggested.

"Bah!" Urushkidan snaked his way to the small desk bolted to the cabin floor and extracted paper and pencil from the drawers. "I shall debelop an interesting aspect of unified field teory. Do not disturb me."

Ray looked around the ship. Behind the forward cabin, which held bunks and a little cooking outfit as well as the controls, there was a larger space cluttered with assorted physical apparatus. Beyond that, he supposed, were the gyros, airplant, and misbehaving engines. "Is this a laboratory boat?" he inquired.

"Yes," said the Martian. "I chose it because tey are always kept ready to go out for gibing field tests to new apparatus. Get me a table of elliptic integrals, please."