CHAPTER III
The Cold Trail
Weston strode from the party in an angry frame of mind that left him only as he entered his own ship. His anger simmered down to resentment and a bulldog determination to show them all. So they had sent a man to do a boy's work! Well, he would apply himself and ship them the answer complete down to the last decimal place!
If he had to catalogue every Jordan Green mark as to place and location in a long list and show proof of just which joking officer had scrawled it there, by heaven he'd do it. And if it made every man in the Corps a joker, that was too bad. But he would dig out the writer of each and every scrawl in the Solar System if it took the rest of his life.
He faced the piles of data and set to work with determination born of burning resentment. Morning came, and he was still sorting, filing, deciding. The card-sorter clicked regularly, dropping the tiny cards into piles that were cross-indexed and tabulated on a master card. Reports in lengthy form, mere cards of terse data, incomplete reports—all of them he went after and scanned carefully to make some sort of mad pattern if he could.
He found himself weak from lack of sleep and fought it off with hot coffee and benzedrine until he had succeeded in unraveling the now-dusty pile of data. It was full of erroneous information and false data. If Jordan Green existed he was well-covered by the scrawlings of men who wanted to perpetuate the joke. But, finished, he sat back in amazement.
Of thirty thousand such scrawlings, twenty-seven thousand were written in the same manner!
Top it—they were written with the same chalk!
Top that—they were unmistakably in the same handwriting!
"Now where in Hades did any one man get so much time?" Al Weston asked himself.
He pored over a globe of Terra, stuck pins in it to show the location, then studied it to see if any pattern could be made of the grand scramble. There was apparently none, so he took a Mercator and did the same, standing off in a dim light to see if the pin-points caused any 'lining' of the vision into some recognizable pattern.
He got a chart of Mars and studied it. He tried to make the spatter-pattern of Mars line up to agree with the pin-pattern of Terra. He turned it this way and that to see. He photographed both and laid them on top of one another, and finally gave up. There was no significance.
He went to bed and, the next morning, dropped his ship at Marsport.
"I've a four-mark commission," he said sharply to the office aide at Marsquarters.
"I'll request an audience for you," said the office aide. He should, by all rights, be slightly cowed by the senior captain's rank and the free commission, but he was aide to the High Brass of conquered Mars and larger brass than this had come and gone—unsatisfied.
"See here, I'm on a roving commission and I want aid."
"Yes sir, I'll request you an audience—"
"Blast!" snarled Weston angrily. "I'm not fooling."
"No one fools here," returned the aide.
"Are you being insolent?"
"Not if I can avoid it, sir. But you understand that I am responsible only to Admiral Callahan. I am doing his bidding and those are his wishes."
"You've not spoken to him about them."
"I need not—which is why I'm his aide. You see, sir, I'm not trying to tell you your business, but there is a lot of important work going on here."
"Will you contact him?"
"No, sir."
"I order you."
"I'd think twice, sir. I am not being personally obstinate nor am I ignorant of your rank, Senior Captain Weston. But I know Admiral Callahan's temperament."
"My order stands," said Weston, "I will be received."
"Yes sir. I'm sorry, sir." The aide turned and entered the office. He emerged, shortly afterwards and motioned for Al to enter. Weston cast a down-his-nose glance at the aide, then shut the door behind him. Against the wall beside the door was a scrawled legend.
"Jordan Green has been here, too!"
The style was unmistakable—as unmistakable as the wrath that greeted him.
"Explain, Senior Captain Weston!"
"I am on a roving commission, rank four-mark, I—"
"I'm aware of your rank, your mission and your commission. Come to the point. I want to know why you think you are more important than anybody else!"
"I—have not that opinion, sir."
"You must have it, or you'd not have behaved as you did! Come on, speak."
"Well, sir, I've uncovered a rather startling bit—"
"So what? So you demand my time to discuss a space gag with me? So they're all the same handwriting. Any idiot at Intelligence could have told you that. They covered that phase when Jordan Green first appeared. They were suspicious. Here!"
Admiral Callahan strode to a file cabinet and took out a thick file. He hurled it at Al Weston.
"Read it and learn some sense, young man. Now get out of here and don't bother coming back."
Weston took the file and left. His ears were burning and his mind was a tangle of cross-purposes and emotions. That was a rotten way to treat a man who'd been shot down on the first directive expedition.
He'd like to clip the so-and-so admiral's wings a bit. He'd—take it—he guessed, sourly, hearing a slight snicker behind him. He turned angrily but there was no one near.
That snicker? Was it real, or merely a breath of wind against the Venetian blind?
He entered the first bar he found. "Pulga and water," he said.
The bartender winced. "Does the Terran Captain forget that this is Mars?"
Weston had, but this was no time to admit a mistake.
"Not at all," he said.
"May I ask the Terran Captain to change his order?"
"I want it as I said it," snapped Weston.
"Does the Terran Captain understand that water is not plentiful? We on Mars have not the—the—plumbing as on Terra, where you cannot live without your water. We use but little personally and that mostly for washing. In washing, we absorb sufficient for our own metabolism."
"I'm aware of that."
"Then the Terran Captain may also be aware of the fact that our water is not—well—suited for internal consumption?"
"You have no bottled water?" demanded Weston angrily.
"That will be found only on the Terran Post. Please, be not angry. All newcomers forget."
"Forget it," snapped Weston and walked out.
Even the lowly bartenders of a conquered race made a fool of him. He entered another bar down the street and asked for pulga and vin, a completely native Martian potable. It was served without argument and went down right.
He had another and was halfway through it when he turned to see friends entering.
"Al!" they called. "How's it, man?"
With a weak smile he set down his drink and held out a welcoming hand.
"Hi, fellows. Haven't seen you in a year, Jack. Nor you, Bill. What's new?"
"Nothing much. Golly, we thought you were a real goner when they hit you that fatal day."
"I don't remember," said Weston.
"I'll bet you don't," said Bill with a smile. "You dropped back out of formation in a flaming instant and were gone. The rest of us were all right and won through. We hit Mars about o-three-hundred the next afternoon and, brother, did we hit 'em.
"We hurled the directive beam right down in the middle of Kanthanappois and laid the city flat! Then we headed North to Montharrin and singed 'em gently around the edges. You have no idea, Al boy, what a fierce thing you can toss out of a one-seater scooter when you've got directive power in it.
"They've never got the Fresno Beams down to a size practical for anything smaller than an eight-man job, you know. Well, directives make it possible to handle a four-turret from a one-man job. And a super-craft can carry enough stuff to move Mars."
"I missed it."
"We know, and we're sorry about that. Well, we can't all win."
"Don't be patronizing," snapped Al Weston.
"Sorry. We knew you'd have given most anything to have joined in the ruckus. Well—say, Al, I hear you've got a snap job now?"
"Well," said Al, disagreeing that it was a snap, and at the same time trying to justify its importance, "I'm trying to dig out the truth of this Jordan Green thing."
"You mean like over there?" grinned Jack, pointing to the legend on the wall.
"Uh—yeah, excuse me a moment," said Weston, going over and looking at it carefully.
"Getting to be an authority, hey, Al?" laughed Bill. "Gosh, that's a laugh of a job. Bet you have your fun."
"I think it is slightly stupid," said Weston harshly.
"Could be. It's no more stupid than a lot of jobs in this man's space navy, though. They sent a space admiral out once to measure the major diameter of all spacecraft to the maximum thousandth of an inch and didn't tell him for weeks that it had a deep purpose.
"He fumed and fretted until he discovered that it took a space admiral to hold enough rank to be permitted to measure that stuff under the security regulations. Later they made all external space gear universal so that replacement quantities could be reduced. It saved about seven billion bucks—enough to pay the admiral's salary for a couple of millennia."
Jack laughed. "It's usually some lucky bird that gets these cockeyed commissions and has a swell time loafing all over the solar system on the government's dough."
"I don't consider myself lucky."
"We do," chimed one of the men. "We're stuck here along with seven million other high-brass policemen who'd rather play marbles," said Bill. "So what does it matter what you're doing, actually, so long as you're paying your way?"
"Well, I'd prefer something a bit more in my line."
"Who wouldn't?" responded Jack. "But what the heck? Remember the lines from Gilbert & Sullivan—The Private Buffoon? 'They won't blame you so long as you're funny'!"
"Very amusing," said Weston.
"Well, shucks, anytime you want to swap jobs—"
"I wouldn't mind," said Weston wistfully.
"Look, chum, take it easy. You wouldn't like sitting on your unretractable landing gear eight hours a day listening to a bunch of dirty Marties trying to talk you into slipping them a bit of a lush. Make you damned sick.
"But it's a job we've got to do and so long as we're hung with it, we're hung, and we'll give it our best. We know we can do most anything, so why should we worry?"
Bill grinned and nodded. "I'll bet even the bartender wouldn't like our job. Hey Soupy!"
"Would the Terran officers desire something?"
"Can you be honest?"
"Can anyone?" returned the barkeep. Like all barkeeps, he was about to start walking a fence between customers.
"How would you like to have my job?"
The barkeep looked at Bill. "You want an answer?"
Bill nodded.
The barkeep shook his head. "Too much trouble. I am happy as I am. I, Terran officers, can mix the best veliqua on Mars, and no one on Terra can mix one at all. So I cannot drive a spacer, nor build a long range communicator. But I mix the best veliqua—observe?"
They observed as the barkeep made rapid motions with several bottles, whirled them overhead and came in on a tangent landing with three glasses, brimful to a bulging meniscus, without spilling a drop.
"Personally," grinned Bill, "I think we've just been hydraulic-pressured into buying a drink."
"Smart lad, he."
"I'd not put up with that. We didn't ask for it," objected Weston.
"No? Well, so what," grinned Bill, lifting the glass.
"It's okay," said Jack "But look, Al. You still sound as though you were enjoying life—or should be."
"I'm not."
"Well, Al, if you aren't, it's your fault."
"It wasn't my fault that I got clipped?"
"Hardly. No one is putting any blame on you for getting hung on the wrong end of a beam. Despite popular rumor, they don't hand out them things for cutting your hand on a can-opener," said Bill, nodding toward the purple ribbon on Weston's breast. It was beside another colored bit, awarded for his efforts in the initial directive attack.
"That one," said Weston, catching Bill's eye, "was a consolation prize. I didn't earn it."
"My friend, you must learn to tell the difference between humility and the job of fishing for compliments. Well, chum, you've had a rough time and we gotta go back and play traffic cop. Let us know if there's anything we can do."
Weston nodded. They left. They left him alone. Far back in his mind something mentioned the fact that they were on duty, but he thought they could have stayed around a bit longer.
He drank too much that long Martian afternoon and was definitely hung over most of the next day.
Al Weston gave up at that point. Never again would he try to prove his sorry plight to any one of his former friends. They all insisted upon looking at the brighter side of his life and ignored his trouble as though it did not exist.
They were glad enough to see him alive, it seemed, when he'd have preferred death to this lack-luster existence. He wondered whether any of them would worry about him if he disappeared. Perhaps if they thought he were dead—
Well, he had a four-mark commission, which entitled him among other things to commandeer anything now in the experimental field. He'd make a show of commandeering a directive power drive and then drop out of sight.
They'd suspect both his untimely end, and suspect the advisability of the directive drive. Then he'd show up and prove both worthy. That would give him his prestige again.
He'd do it at Pluto and, on the way, he'd stop at every way-station long enough to leave a wide trail. He'd enter a post, discuss Jordan Green at length. He'd take pictures, make tests and then head outward—to disappear for about a year. That would fix them all.