Next of Kin

TWO

He picked up the escort in the Sirian sector, the first encounter being made when he was fast asleep. Activated by a challenging signal on a pre-set frequency, the alarm sounded just above his ear and caused him to dive out of the bunk while no more than half awake. For a moment he gazed stupidly around while the ship vibrated and the autopilot went tick-tick.

“Zern kaid-whit?” rasped the loudspeaker. “Zern kaid-whit?”

That was code and meant; “identify yourself-friend or foe?”

Taking the pilot’s seat, he turned a key that caused his transmitter to squirt forth a short and ultra-rapid series of numbers. Then he rubbed his eyes and looked into the forward starfield. Apart from the majestic haze of suns shining in the dark there was nothing to be seen with the naked eye. So he switched on his thermosensitive detector screens and was rewarded with a line of brilliant dots paralleling his course to starboard while a second group, in arrow formation, was about to cut across far ahead of his nose. He was not seeing the ships, of course, but only the visible evidence of their white-hot propulsion tubes and flaming tails.

“Keefa” said the loudspeaker, meaning, “All correct!”

Crawling back into the bunk, Leeming hauled a blanket over his face, closed his eyes and left the autopilot to carry on. After ten minutes his mind began to drift into a pleasant, soothing dream about sleeping in free space with nobody to bother him.

Dropping its code-talk, the loudspeaker yelped in plain language, “Cut speed before we lose you.”

He sat up as if stung, stared blearily across the cabin. Some-body had spoken; somebody with a parade-ground voice. Or had he imagined it? He waited a bit but nothing happened and so he lay down again.

The loudspeaker bawled impatiently, “You deaf? Cut speed before we lose you!”

Leeming clambered irefully from the bunk, sat at the controls, adjusted them slowly. A thin braking-jet in the bow let go a double plume of vapour that swept back on either side as the ship overtook and passed by. The stern-tubes meanwhile decreased their thrust. He watched his meters until he thought their needles had dropped far enough to make the others happy. Then he returned to bed and hid himself under the blanket.

It seemed to him that he was swinging in a celestial hammock and enjoying a wonderful idleness when the loudspeaker roared, “Cut more! Cut more!”

He shot out from under the blanket, scrambled to the controls and cut more. Then he switched on his transmitter and made a speech distinguished by its passion. It was partly a seditious outburst and partly a lecture upon the basic functions of the human body. From all he knew the astonished listeners might include two rear-admirals and a dozen commodores. If so, he was educating them.

In return he received no heated retorts, no angry voice of authority. If he had broadcast the same words from a heavily manned battleship they’d have plastered him with forty charges and set the date for his court-martial. But it was space-navy convention that a lone scout’s job created an unavoidable craziness among all those who performed it and that ninety percent of them were overdue for psychiatric treatment. A scout on active service could and often did say things that nobody else in the space-navy dared utter. It is a wonderful thing to be recognised as dotty.

For three weeks they accompanied him in the glum silence with which a family takes around an imbecile relation. He chafed impatiently during this period because their top speed was far, far below his maximum velocity and the need to keep pace with them gave him the feeling of an urgent motorist trapped behind a funeral procession.

The Sirian battleship Wassoon was the chief culprit, a great clumsy contraption that wallowed along like a bloated hippopotamus while a shoal of faster cruisers and destroyers were compelled to amble with it. He did not know its name but he did know that it was a battleship because on his detector screens it resembled a glowing pea amid an array of fiery pinheads. Every time he looked at the pea he cursed it something awful. He was, again venting his ire upon it when the loudspeaker chipped in and spoke for the first time in many days.

“Ponk!”

Ponk? What the devil was ponk? The word meant something mighty important, he could remember that much. Hastily he scrabbled through his codebook and found it: Enemy in sight.

No sign of the foe was visible on his screens. Evidently they were beyond detector range and had been spotted only by the escort’s advance guard of four destroyers running far ahead.

“Dial F,” ordered the loudspeaker.

So they were changing frequency in readiness for battle. Leeming touched the dial of his multiband receiver from T back to F. Laconic interfleet messages came through the speaker in a steady stream.

“Offside group port twenty, rising inclination twelve.”

“Check!”

“Break off.”

“Check!”

On the screens five glowing dots swiftly angled away from the main body of the escort: Four were mere pinheads, the fifth and middle one about half the size of the pea. A cruiser and four destroyers were escaping the combat area for the time-honoured purpose of getting between the enemy and his nearest base.

In a three-dimensional medium where speeds were tremendous and space was vast this tactic never worked. It did not stop both sides from trying to make it work whenever the opportunity came along. This could be viewed as eternal optimism or persistent stupidity, according to the state of one’s liver.

The small group of would-be ambushers scooted as fast as they could make it, hoping to become lost within the confusing welter of starlights before the enemy came near enough to detect the move. Meanwhile the Wasoon and its attendant cohort plugged steadily onward. Ahead, almost at the limit of the fleet’s detector range, the four destroyers continued to advance without attempting to disperse or change course.

“Two groups of ten converging from forty-five degrees rightward, descending inclination fifteen;” reported the forward destroyers.

“Classification?” demanded the Wassoon.

“Not possible yet.”

Silence for six hours, then, “Two groups still maintaining same course; each appears to consist of two heavy cruisers and eight monitors.”

That was sheer guesswork based upon the theory that the greater the detectable heat the bigger the ship. Leeming watched his screens knowing full well that the enemy’s vessels might prove to be warships as the observers supposed or might equally well turn out to be escorted convoys of merchantmen. Since the spatial war first broke out many a lumbering tramp had been mistaken for a monitor.

Slowly, ever so slowly twenty faintly discernible dots bloomed into his screens. This was the time when he and his escort should be discovered by the enemy’s detection devices. The foe must have spotted the leading destroyers hours ago; either they weren’t worried about a mere four ships or, more likely, had taken it for granted that they were friendly. It would be interesting to watch their reaction when they found the strong force farther behind.

He did not get the chance to observe this pleasing phenomenon. The loudspeaker let go a squawk of, “Ware zenith! ” and automatically his gaze perked upward to the screens above his head. They were poxed with a host of rapidly enlarging dots He estimated that sixty to eighty ships were diving in fast at ninety degrees to the plane of the escort; but he didn’t stop to count them. One glance was sufficient to tell him that he was in a definite hot-spot.

Forthwith he lifted his slender vessel’s nose and switched to full boost. The result pinned him in his seat while his intestines tried to wrap themselves around his spine: It was easy to imagine the effect upon the enemy’s screens; they would see one mysterious, unidentifiable ship break loose from the target area and swoop around them at a speed previously thought impossible.

With luck, they might assume that what one ship could do all the others could do likewise. If there is anything a spaceship captain detests it is to have another and faster ship sneaking up on his tail. The fiery end of a spaceship is its weak spot for there can be no effective armament in an area filled with propulsors.

Stubbornly Leeming stuck to the upward curve which, if maintained long enough, would take him well to one side of the approaching attackers and around to the back of them. He kept full attention upon his screens. The oncomers held course in a tight, vengeful knot for four hours, by which time they were almost within shooting distance of the escort. At that point their nerve failed. The fact that the escort still kept impassive formation while one ship headed like a shooting star for their rear made them suspect a trap. One thing the Combine never lacked was suspicion of the Allies’ motives and unshakable faith in their cunning.

So they curved out at right-angles and spread in all directions like the petals of a blown flower, their detectors probing for another and bigger fleet that might be lurking just beyond visibility.

Belting along at top pace, one Lathian light cruiser realized that its new course would bring it within range of the missiles with which Leeming’s strange, superfast ship presumably was armed. It tried to play safe by changing course again and thereby delivered itself into the hands of the Wassoon’s electronic predictors. The Wassoon fired, its missiles met the cruiser at the precise point where it came within range. Cruiser and missiles tried to occupy the same space at the same time. The result was, a soundless explosion of great magnitude and a flare of heat that temporarily obliterated every detector screen within range.

Another blast shone briefly high in the starfield and far beyond reach of the escort’s armaments. A few minutes later a thin, reedy voice, distorted by static, reported that a straggling enemy destroyer had fallen foul of the distant ambushing party. This sudden loss, right outside the scene of action, seemed to confirm the enemy’s belief that the Wassoon and its attendant fleet might be mere bait in a trap loaded with something formidable. They continued to radiate fast from their common centre in an effort to locate the hidden menace and, at the same time, avoid being caught in a bunch.

Seeing them thus darting away like a shoal of frightened fish, Leeming muttered. steadily to himself. A dispersed fleet should be easy prey to a superfast ship capable of overhauling and dealing with its units one by one. He had to face the fact that his vessel could do nothing more than scare them individually while he lavished futile curses upon them. Without a single effective weapon he was impotent to take advantage of an opportunity that might never occur again. For the moment he had quite forgotten his role, not to mention his strict orders to avoid a space-fight at all costs.

The Wassoon soon reminded him with a sharp call of, “Scout pilot, where the hell d’you think you’re going?”

“Up and around,” replied Leeming sourly.

“You’re more of a liability than an asset,” retorted the Wassoon, unappreciative of his efforts. “Get out while the going is good.”

Leeming yelled into the microphone, “I know when I’m not wanted, see? Spitting on parade is a punishable offence, see? Remember, man, you must always salute a commodore. Stand properly to attention when you speak to me! We’re being sabotaged by defective zippers. Come on, lift those feet, Dopey-one, two, three, hup!”

As before, the listeners took no notice whatsoever. Leeming turned his ship on to a new course with plane parallel to that of the escort and high above them. They now became visible on his underbelly screens and showed themselves in the same. unbroken formation by sweeping in a wide circle to get on the reverse course. That meant they were leaving him and heading homeward. The enemy, still scattered beyond shooting range, must have viewed this move as wicked temptation for although in superior strength they continued to refrain from direct attack.

Quickly the escort’s array of shining dots slid off the screens as Leeming’s vessel shot away from them. Ahead and well to starboard the detectors showed the two enemy groups that had first appeared. They had not dispersed in the same manner that their main force had done but their course showed that they were fleeing the area at the best pace they could muster. This fact suggested that they really were two convoys of merchantmen hugging close to their protecting cruisers. With deep regret Leeming watched them go. Given the weapons he could have swooped upon the bloated parade and slaughtered a couple of heavily-laden ships before the cruisers had time to wake up.

At full pelt he dived into the Combine’s front and headed toward the unknown back areas. Just before his detectors lost range his tailward screen flared up twice in quick succession. Far behind him two ships had ceased to exist and there was no way of telling whether these losses had been suffered by the escort or the enemy.

He tried to find out by calling on the interfleet frequency, “What goes? What goes?”

No answer.

A third flash covered the screen: It was weak with distance and swiftly fading sensitivity.

Keying the transmitter to give his identifying code-number, he called again.

No reply.

If the battle had joined far to his rear they’d be much too busy to bother with his queries. He’d have given a lot to turn back and see for himself what was happening, to join the hooley and help litter the cosmos with wreckage. But without a major or minor weapon he was precisely what the Wassoon had declared him to be, namely, an unmitigated nuisance.

Chewing his bottom lip with annoyance, he squatted four square in the pilot’s seat and scowled straight ahead while the ship arrowed toward a dark gap in the hostile starfield. In due time he got beyond the full limit of Allied warships’ non-stop range. At that point he also got beyond help.

The first world was easy meat. Believing it impossible for any Allied ship to penetrate this far without refuelling and changing tubes, the enemy assumed that any ship detected in local space must be friendly or, at least, neutral. Therefore when picked up by their detectors they did not bother to radio a challenge and identify him as hostile by his inability to give a correct reply. They let him zoom around unhampered by official nosiness.

So he found the first occupied world by the simple process of shadowing a small convoy heading inward from the spatial front, allowing them long enough to make an accurate plot of their course. Then, because he could not afford to waste days and weeks crawling along at their relatively slow pace, he arced over them and raced ahead until he reached the inhabited planet for which they were bound.

Checking the planet was equally easy. He went twice around its equator at altitude sufficiently low to permit swift visual observation. Complete coverage of she sphere was not necessary to gain a shrewd idea of its status, development and potentialities. What he could see in a narrow strip around its belly was enough of a sampling for the purposes of the Terran Intelligence Service.

In short time he spotted three spaceports, two empty, the third holding eight merchant ships of unknown origin and three Combine war vessels. Other evidence showed the world to be heavily populated and well-advanced. He could safely mark it as a pro-Combine planet of considerable military value.

Shooting back into free space, he dialled X, the special long-range frequency, and beamed this information together with the planet’s approximate diameter, mass and spatial co-ordinates.

“I dived in and circumnavigated the dump,” he said, and let go a snigger. He couldn’t help if because he was recalling his careless response to a similar situation set as a test-piece in his first examination.

He had written, “I made cautious approach to the strange planet and then quickly circumcised it.”

The paper had come back marked; “Why?”

He’d replied, “I could get around better by taking short cuts.”

It had cost him ten marks and the dead-pan comment, “This information lacks either accuracy or wit.” But he had passed all the same.

There was no reply to his signal and he did not expect one. He could beam signals outward with impunity but they could not beam back into enemy territory without awakening hostile listening-posts to the fact that someone must be operating in their back areas. Beamed signals were highly directional and the enemy was always on the alert to pick up and decipher anything emanating from the Allied front while ignoring all broadcasts from the rear.

The next twelve worlds were found in substantially the same manner as the first one: by plotting interplanetary and interstellar shipping routes and following them to their termini. He signalled details of each one and each time was rewarded with silence. By this time he found himself deploring the necessary lack of response because he had been going long enough to yearn for the sound of a human voice.

After weeks that stretched to months, enclosed in a thundering metal bottle, he was becoming afflicted with an appalling loneliness. Amid this vast stretch of stars, with seemingly endless planets an which lived not a soul to call him Joe, he could have really enjoyed the arrival from far away or an irate human voice bawling him out good and proper for some error, real or fancied. He’d have sat there and bathed his mind in the stream of abuse. Constant, never-ending silence was the worst of all, the hardest to bear.

Occasionally he tried to break the hex by singing at the top of his voice or by holding heated arguments with himself while the ship howled onward. It was a poor and ineffectual substitute because he was less musical than a tumescent tom-cat a nd he couldn’t win an argument without also losing it.

His sleeps were lousy, too. Sometimes he dreamed that the autopilot had gone haywire and that the ship was heading full-tilt into a blazing sun. Then he’d wake up with his belly jumping and make quick, anxious check of the apparatus before returning to slumber. Other times he awoke heavy-eyed and dry-mouthed feeling that he’d had no sleep at all, but had been lying supine through hours of constant trembling and a long, sustained roar.

Several times he had pursuit dreams in which he was being chased through dark, metallic corridors that bellowed and quivered all around while close behind him sounded the rapid, vengeful tread of feet that were not feet. Invariably he woke up just as he was about to be grabbed by hands that were not hands.

In theory there was no need for him to suffer the wear and tear of long-range reconnaissance. A case full of wonder-drugs had been provided to cope with every conceivable condition of mind or body. The trouble was that they were effective or they were not. If ineffective, the taking of them proved sheer waste of time. If effective, they tended to shove things to the opposite extreme.

Before one sleep-period he had experimented by taking a so-called normalising capsule positively guaranteed to get rid of nightmares and ensure happy, interesting dreams. The result had been ten completely uninhibited hours in a harem. They had been hours so utterly interesting that they’d left him flat out. He never took another capsule.

It was while he was nosing after a merchant convoy, in expectation of tracing a thirteenth planet, that he got some vocal sounds that at least broke the monotony. He was following far behind and high above the group of ships and the, feeling secure in their own backyard, were keeping no detector watch and were unaware of his presence. Fiddling idly with the controls of his receiver, he suddenly hit upon an enemy interfleet frequency and picked up a conversation between ships.

The unknown lifeform manning the vessels had loud, somewhat bellicose voices but spoke a language with sound-forms curiously akin to Terran speech. To Leeming’s ears it came as a stream of cross-talk that his mind instinctively framed in Terran words. It went like this:

First voice: “Mayor Snorkum will lay the cake.”

Second voice: “What for the cake be laid by Snorkum?”

First voice: “He will starch his moustache.”

Second voice: “That is night-gab. How can he starch a tepid mouse?”

They spent the next ten minutes in what sounded like an acrimonious argument about what one repeatedly called a tepid mouse while the other insisted that it was a torpid moose. Leeming found that trying to follow the point and counterpoint of this debate put quite a strain upon the cerebellum. He suffered it until something snapped.

Tuning his transmitter to the same frequency, he bawled, “Mouse or moose, make up your goddam minds!”

This produced a moment of dumbfounded silence before the first voice harshed, “Gnof, can you lap a pie-chain?”

“No, he can’t,” shouted Leeming, giving the unfortunate Gnof no chance to brag of his ability as a pie-chain lapper.

There came another pause, then Gnof resentfully told all and sundry, “I shall lambast my mother.”

“Dirty dog!” said Leeming. “Shame on you!”

The other voice informed, mysteriously, “Mine is a fat one.”

“I can imagine,” Leeming agreed.

“Clam-shack?” demanded Gnof in tones clearly, translatable as, “Who is that?”

“Mayor Snorkum,” Leeming told him.

For some weird reason known only to alien minds this information caused the argument to start all over again. They commenced by debating Mayor Snorkum’s antecedents and future prospects (or so it sounded) and gradually and enthusiastically worked their way along to the tepid mouse (or torpid moose).

There were moments when they became mutually about something or other, possibly Snorkum’s habit of keeping his moose on a pie-chain. Finally they dropped the subject by common consent and switched to the abstruse question of how to paddle a puddle (according to one) or how to peddle a poodle (according to the other).

“Holy cow!” said Leeming fervently.

It must have borne close resemblance to something pretty potent in the hearers’ language because they broke off and again Gnof challenged, “Clam-shack?”

“Go jump, Buster!” Leeming invited.

“Bosta? My ham-plank is Bosta, enk?” His tones suggested considerable passion about the matter as he repeated, “Bosta, enk?”

“Yeah,” confirmed Leeming. “Enk!”

Apparently this was regarded as the last straw for their voices went off and even the faint hum of the carrier-wave disappeared. It looked as though he had managed to utter something extremely vulgar without having the vaguest notion of what he had said.

Soon afterwards the carrier wave came on and another and different voioe called in guttural but fluent Cosmoglotta “What ship? What ship?”

Leeming did not answer.

A long wait before again the voice demanded, “What ship?”

Still Leeming took no notice. The mere fact that they had not broadcast a challenge in war-code showed that they did not believe it possible for a hostile vessel to be in the vicinity. Indeed, this was suggested by the stolid way in which the convoy continued to plug along without changing course or showing visible sign of alarm.

It was highly likely that they could not so much as see his ship, not being equipped with sufficiently sensitive detectors. The call of “What ship?” had been nothing more than a random feel in the dark, an effort to check up before seeking a practical joker somewhere within the convoy itself.

Having obtained adequate data on the enemy’s course, Leeming bulleted ahead of them and in due time came across the thirteenth planet. He beamed the information homeward, went in search of the next. It was found quickly, being in an adjacent solar system.

Time rolled by as his probes took him across a broad stretch of Combine-controlled space and measured its precise depth. After discovering the fiftieth planet he was tempted to return to base for overhaul and further orders. One can have a surfeit of exploration, and he was sorely in need of a taste of Terra, its fresh air, green fields and human companionship.

What kept him going were the facts that the ship was running well, his fuel supply was only a quarter expended and he could not resist the notion that the more thoroughly he did this job the greater the triumph upon his return and the better the prospect of quick promotion.

So on he went and piled up the total to seventy-two planets before he reached a preselected point where he was deep in the enemy hinterland at a part facing the Allied outposts around Rigel. From here he was expected to send a coded signal to which they would respond, this being the only message they’d risk sending him.

He beamed the one word, “Awa!” repeated at intervals for a couple of hours. It meant, “Able to proceed-awaiting instructions.” To that they should give a reply too brief for enemy interceptors to catch either the word, “Reeter!” meaning “We have sufficient information—return at once,” or else the word, “Buzz” meaning “We need more information—continue your reconnaissance.”

What he did get back was a short-short squirt of sound that he recognised as an ultra-rapid series of numbers. They came in so fast that it was impossible to note them aurally. Perforce he taped them as they were repeated, then reached for his code-book as he played them off slowly.

The result was, “47926 Scout Pilot John Leeming promoted Lieutenant as from date of receipt.”

He stared at this a long time before he resumed sending, “Awa! Awa!” For his pains he got back the word “Foit!” He tried again and once more was rewarded with, “Foit!” It looked vaguely blasphemous to him, like the favourite curse of some rubbery creature that had no palate.

Irritated by this piece of nonsense, he stewed it over in his mind, decided that some intervening Combine station was playing his own game by chipping in with confusing comments. In theory the enemy shouldn’t be able to do it because he was using a frequency far higher than those favoured by the Lathians and others, while both his and the Allied messages were scrambled. All the same, somebody was doing it.

To the faraway listeners near Rigel he beamed the interesting biological statement that Mayor Snorkum would lay the moose and left them to sort it out for themselves. Maybe it would teach some nuthead that he was now dealing with a full lieutenant and not a mere scout-pilot. Or, if the enemy intercepted it, they could drop their war effort while they argued their way around to a final and satisfactory peddling of the poodle.

Concluding that no recall meant the same thing as not being recalled, he resumed his search far hostile planets. It was four days later that he happened to be looking idly through his code-book and found the word “Foit” defined as “Use your a own judgement.”

He thought it over, decided that to go home with a record of seventy-two planets discovered and identified would be a wonderful thing, but to be credited with a nice, round, imposing number such as one hundred would be wonderful enough to verge upon the miraculous. They’d make him a Space Admiral at least. He’d be able to tell Colonel Farmer to get a haircut and order Commodore Keen to polish his buttons. He could strut around clanking with medals and be a saint to all the privates and space-cadets, a swine to all the brasshats.

This absurd picture was so appealing that he at once settled for a score of one hundred planets as his target-figure before returning to base. As if to give him the flavour of coming glory, four enemy-held worlds were found close together in the nest solar system and these boosted his total to seventy-six.

He shoved the score up to eighty. Then to eighty-one.

The first hint of impending disaster showed itself as he approached number eighty-two.