CHAPTER IV
Free For All
"Pluto," said Al Weston drily. He'd come through the entrance dome of one of the sealed cities and was standing atop the Corps Administration building, looking out over the sprawling city. Since Pluto was utterly cold, the sealed cities were the only habitable places on the planet and even they were too chilly for comfort.
He had no Pluto-garb, but he did have his spaceman's suit, which was internally heated. He, like most of the Corpsmen there, wore the spaceman's suit with the fishbowl swung back across his shoulderblades.
Some of them had had the helmets removed entirely, though this was troublesome around the entrance-locks because none of the men who were without their fishbowl headgear could work outside of the inner lock.
But—this was Pluto, and from here, as soon as he could leave, Al Weston was heading, just plain out!
In accordance with regulations he reported to the port commandant's office. This time he had no intention of forcing entry to the Inner Sanctum. His ears were still red from his last abortive effort. All he intended to do was to report to the office aide and, if the Big Brass wanted to see him, he'd eventually call.
Inside of the office was the usual scrawl—Yes, Jordan Green has been even here!
It was authentic and Weston said so aloud. The office aide looked up. "You're Senior Captain Weston?"
"I'm known?" asked he, slightly surprised.
"By reputation," grinned the clerk. "It's said that you can tell an authentic Jordan Green by seeing it through a visiscope."
"Not quite," said Weston.
"Have you uncovered anything yet, sir?" asked the aide.
"Are you interested?"
"Everyone is interested," said the clerk. "It will make a darned amusing yarn when you get all done."
"Uh-huh," grunted Weston. Amusing, he thought. Was his value to the Space Corps only an amusement value?
"See here," he said to the clerk, "I'd like to try a directive power drive."
"You were on the first directive power expedition against Mars, weren't you?" mused the clerk. "According to custom and regulations, you are entitled to any experimental equipment that you used during the war. Seems to me, too, that you are probably using more power for space flight than about ninety-eight percent of the corps at the present time. We have a directive power unit here."
"Then I can have it immediately?"
The clerk nodded. "I'm merely ruminating," he said to Weston. "I'd prefer several good reasons why you took it other than your fancy to try it out. It'll make the Old Man less fratchy.
"It's slightly haywire, of course, since it came right from the Power Laboratory with a boatload of long-hairs on a test mission. They left it here and we've been tinkering with it off and on. We can get a new one in a month or so, but you can have the haywire model if you'd prefer not to wait."
"I'll take it."
"Okay. I'll issue orders for the engine gang to swap power in your crate."
"Thanks," said Weston.
"Oh, and sir, I almost forgot. It's just an unfounded rumor and I've been unable to check the truth of it, but they claim there's a Jordan Green scrawl on Nergal, too."
"Nergal?" said Weston explosively. His mind envisioned a minute hunk of cosmic dust not much more than a hundred miles in diameter—Pluto's only claim to a satellite. It was better than thirteen million miles from Pluto and its rotation was necessarily slow due to its tiny mass and great distance.
It had been and would continue to be for some years, the solar object most distant from Sol.
It was uninhabited, airless, cold, forbidding, and completely useless.
There was not even a station on it. Science found the airless outer surface of Pluto more to their liking. On Pluto, at least, there was gravity to hold them down. The escape velocity of Nergal was not really known, but it must have been minute.
"Might be sheer fancy," said the clerk apologetically.
"Better check on it," said Weston. This was an opportunity. When he left it would be recorded that he went to Nergal. He even wished that he'd started to write his own name under the countless Jordan Green scrawls he'd visited. Then they could find one out there, and know he'd been there and from there...?
In relaxation uniform, Weston sat in a small, out of the way restaurant and finished his dinner. He was the only uniformed man in the place, and so when the unlovely pair behind him made mention of the Corps, he knew they were talking about him.
He did not know them by name, but after a glimpse of them immediately labeled one of them as 'Dirty' and the other one as 'Ratty'. It was Ratty's voice that caught his attention. He missed the statement, but caught Dirty's answer.
"By the time all the Fancy Brass gets them, maybe we can have a couple too."
"The war's over," Ratty snarled. "Why does the Corps need directive drives?"
"How should I know? Ask Pretty, up there."
"He wouldn't know," snapped Ratty. "He's just taking orders."
"Must be nice to roam all over space with your feed and power free."
"Yeah, but he'd go broke if he had to live on what he's worth."
"That's why most guys get in the Corps anyway."
"That guy is spending about thirty thousand bucks just to track down a myth."
"Maybe his myth has a sister for me?" guffawed Dirty. "Wonder where he was hiding when the shooting was going on."
"He wouldn't say," grunted Ratty. "Mosta the dirty work was done by draftees."
"Well, now the schemozzle is over, he'll come out beating his chest and telling how he won the war. I'll bet he piloted a office desk and got that wound ribbon from pinching his finger in a desk drawer."
"Yeah, the Corps is rotten with slinkers."
"He's tooken months to track down this myth. Bet he makes it another year. Then they'll hang a medal on him for it."
"Any good spaceman could run Jordan Green down in a week," grunted Ratty.
"But it wouldn't be profitable to do it quick," answered Dirty with a leer in his voice.
Weston got up and went to their table.
"Sit down!" he snarled. "You, too!" he snapped at Dirty, taking the man by the jacket front and ramming him back in his chair with a crash. Heads looked up, and men faded back out of the way, clearing the area.
"One," said Weston. "I was in the hospital for seven months, unconscious from a fracas off Mars with the first directive power attack. Remember? I was doing a job so that stinkers like you could roam space unbothered by Martie pirates. Where were you? Hiding in a mine somewhere?
"At the present time if I spend five years rambling all over space looking for Jordan Green, you'll still owe me plenty. I wasn't making money while I was fighting. How much did you make? If it hadn't been for the Corps you'd be dead."
Weston cuffed Dirty across the face with the back of his hand and spat into Ratty's face.
They rose with a roar and Ratty hurled table and chairs out of the way. They rushed Weston heavily.
Weston grinned.
He drove his fist into Ratty's stomach and sliced Dirty's throat with the edge of his hand.
Here was something tangible for Weston to fight! For almost a year, he had been railing at the wind, storming at an invisible hand of fate that had clipped him hard. The men before him were the embodiment of all his ill luck and he drove into them with a burning hatred to maim and destroy.
It was a dirty fight. The space rats had no qualms about sportsmanship and Weston had been tumble-trained on Terra to accept battle only when it was inevitable, at which point nothing was barred.
Dirty came in, hammering at his abdomen, and got a knee in the face. Ratty pulled a knife and rushed in with a slicing swing. Weston faded back, hit the bar, felt its edge crease his back as the rats moved after him.
He lashed out with a foot and drove Ratty and his knife back, turned to roll with a roundhouse swing from Dirty and his right arm knocked over a beer bottle. His right hand closed on the neck of the bottle, and he rapped it sharply against the edge of the bar, knocking off the base.
He kneed Dirty and closed with Ratty. He caught the knife-wielder in the face with the jagged bottle and thrust him back with a twisting punch of the bottle. There was a wordless scream.
Weston caught Dirty in the ribs with a hard fist and then cracked the man's head with what was left of the bottle. It shattered completely as Dirty staggered back and Weston dropped the useless end. They closed again, and wrestled viciously across the floor, tripped over a table and went down with a crash in a tight lock.
Dirty swung his elbow free and Weston missed catching it in the throat by a mite. Weston let go of Dirty's wrist and grabbed Dirty by the collar. Up he lifted and down he slammed.
Dirty's head made a thudding crack against the floor.
"Rye," gasped Weston and swallowed it neat.
Then he walked out, paused at the door and said:
"Call the cops and tell 'em to pick up—"
He left with a quizzical smile. He didn't even know their names.
He didn't stop to clean up, but entered his ship immediately. The directive power drive had been installed and he made radio contact with the control center that opened the locks in the sealed city.
He went out with a rush and hit the high trail for Nergal.
They'd give him a stupid job, would they? Well, he'd frittered enough on it. Now he was going to polish this off in a hurry and go back and hurl his commission in the teeth of Big Brass and stamp out snarling. A big strong man hunting a myth...!
Nergal appeared within minutes under the directive drive. He landed and slapped the magnets on to keep him down. If there were anything to this rumor Jordan Green would have needed a wall or something to write his name on.
In the scanner Weston searched every square yard of his horizon and then moved. Four times he moved, each time searching his very limited line of sight circle. The fifth time he came upon a sheet of metal, fixed to a metal post, emanating out of a box.
He looped the ship into the air, caught box and post with a tractor and pulled it into the airlock.
Drifting free, he inspected the slab of metal.
Jordan Green has been here, it said in bold letters.
And below, on the top of the box, there was a pointer in gimbals. A surveyor's telescope. Gyro-stabilized it was and it pointed off slightly below the plane of the ecliptic. Weston took it to the observation dome and applied his eye to it as it stood. In the narrow field he saw the stars, and the crosshairs centered on a small one. Around the circumference of the reticule, tiny letters shone:
Jordan Green has been there too!
The star was Proxima Centauri.
"Oh, yeah?" growled Weston angrily. "That I have to see!"
Feeling challenged and outraged, Al Weston shoved in the Directive Power Drive all the way and headed across interstellar space for Proxima Centauri.
"Jordan Green!" he growled as the ship passed above the velocity of light. "That Jordan Green!"
He forgot the incongruity of Al Weston, the first man to penetrate interstellar space—seeking a phantom that claimed to have been on Alpha Centauri or, more practically, on one of the star's planets. All that Weston knew was that Jordan Green had been having fun at the expense of the Space Corps, just as Ratty and Dirty had in riding him.
It was a private fight. He might hate the High Command's brass but let no craven civilian criticize so much as the polish on the buttons of the third-assistant lubrication technician's uniform!
Jordan Green indeed! Well, Senior Captain Alfred Weston would bring this Jordan Green in by the ears.
And then they'd let Jordan Green explain his pranks.