Operation: Outer Space by Murray Leinster (best short novels of all time TXT) 📖

Put down that gun! You nearly shot Holden! You might still kill somebody. Put it down!"

He walked grimly toward Johnny Simms. Johnny was near the open airlock door. The outer door was open, too. He could not retreat. He edged sidewise. Cochrane changed the direction of his advance. There are people like Johnny Simms everywhere. As a rule they are not classed as unable to tell right from wrong unless they are rich enough to hire a psychiatrist. Yet a variable but always-present percentage of the human race ignores rules of conduct at all times. They are the handicap, the burden, the main hindrance to the maintenance or the progress of civilization. They are not consciously evil. They simply do not bother to act otherwise than as rational animals. The rest of humanity has to defend itself with police, with laws, and sometimes with revolts, though those like Johnny Simms have no motive beyond the indulgence of immediate inclinations. But for that indulgence Johnny would risk any injury to anybody else.

He edged further aside. Cochrane was white with disgusted fury. Johnny Simms went into panic. He raised his weapon, aiming at Cochrane.

"Keep back!" he cried ferociously. "I don't care if I kill you!"

And he did not. It was the stark senselessness which makes juvenile delinquents and Hitlers, and causes thugs and hoodlums and snide lawyers and tricky business men.[Pg 130] It was the pure perversity which makes sane men frustrate. It was an example of that infinite stupidity which is crime, but is also only stupidity.

Cochrane saw Babs pulling competently at one of the chairs at one of the tables nearby. He stopped, and Johnny Simms took courage. Cochrane said icily:

"Just what the hell do you think we're here for, anyhow?"

Johnny Simms' eyes were wide and blank, like the eyes of a small boy in a frenzy of destruction, when he has forgotten what he started out to do and has become obsessed with what damage he is doing.

"I'm not going to be pushed around!" cried Johnny Simms, more ferociously still. "From now on I'm going to tell you what to do—"

Babs swung the chair she had slid from its fastenings. It came down with a satisfying "thunk" on Johnny Simms' head. His gun went off. The bullet missed Cochrane by fractions of an inch. He plunged ahead.

Some indefinite time later, Babs was pulling desperately at him. He had Johnny Simms on the floor and was throttling him. Johnny Simms strangled and tore at his fingers.

Sanity came back to Cochrane with the effect of something snapping. He got up. He nodded to Babs and she picked up the gun Johnny Simms had used.

"I think," said Cochrane, breathing hard, "that you're a good sample of everything I dislike. The worst thing you do is make me act like you! If you touch a gun again on this ship, I'll probably kill you. If you get arrogant again, I will beat the living daylights out of you! Get up!"

Johnny Simms got up. He looked thoroughly scared. Then, amazingly, he beamed at Cochrane. He said amiably:

"I forgot. I'm that way. Alicia'll tell you. I don't blame you for getting mad. I'm sorry. But I'm that way!"

He brushed himself off, beaming at Alicia and Jamison and Babs and Cochrane. Cochrane ground his teeth. He went to the airlock and looked down outside.

Holden was bent over the creature Johnny Simms had killed. He straightened up and came back toward the ship. He went faster when the ground grew hot under his feet. He fairly leaped into the landing-sling and started it up.

"Not human," he reported to Cochrane when he slipped from the sling in the airlock. "There's no question about it when you are close. It's more nearly a bird than anything[Pg 131] else. It was warm-blooded. It has a beak. There are penguins on Earth that have been mistaken for men.

"I did a show once," said Cochrane coldly, "that had clips of old films of cockfighting in it. There was a kind of gamecock called Cornish Game that was fairly manshaped. If it had been big enough—Pull in the sling and close the lock. We're moving."

He turned away. Babs stood by Alicia, offering a handkerchief for Alicia to put to her cheek. Jamison listened unhappily as Johnny Simms explained brightly that he had always been that way. When he got excited he didn't realize what he was doing. He said almost with pride that he hadn't ever been any other way than that. He didn't really mean to kill anybody, but when he got excited—.

"What happened?" demanded Holden.

"Our little psychopath," said Cochrane in a grating voice, "put on an act. He threatened me with a rifle. He hit Alicia first. Jamison, trace that bullet-hole. See if it got through to the skin of the ship."

He started for the stairs again. Then he was startled by the frozen immobility of Holden. Holden's face was deadly. His hands were clenched. Johnny Simms said with a fine boyish frankness:

"I'm sorry, Cochrane! No hard feelings?"

"Yes," Cochrane snapped. "Hard feelings! I've got them!"

He took Holden's arm. He steered him up the steps. Holden resisted for the fraction of a second, and Cochrane gripped his arm tighter. He got him up to the deck above.

"If I'd been here," said Holden, unsteadily, "I'd have killed him—if he hit Alicia! Psychopath or no psychopath—"

"Shut up," said Cochrane firmly. "He shot at me! And in my small way I'm a psychopath too, Bill. My psychosis is that I don't like his kind of psychosis. I am psychotically devoted to sense and my possibly quaint idea of decency. I am abnormally concerned with the real world—and you'd better come back to it! Look here! I'm pathologically in revolt against such imbecilities as an overcrowded Earth and people being afraid of their jobs and people going crackpot from despair. You don't want me to get cured of that, do you? Then get hold of yourself!"

Bill Holden swallowed. He was still white. But he managed to grimace.[Pg 132]

"You're right. Lucky I was outside. You're not a bad psychologist yourself, Jed."

"I'm better," said Cochrane cynically, "at putting on shows with scrap film-tape and dream-stuff. So I'm going to look at the films Bell took as we landed on this planet, and work out some ideas for broadcasts."

He went up another flight, and Holden went with him in a sort of stilly, unnatural calm. Cochrane ran the film-tape through the reversed camera for examination.

Outside, there waved long green tresses of extraordinarily elongated leaves. The patches of reed-like stuff stirred in the breeze. Jamison appeared in the control-room. He began to question Holden hopefully about the ground-cover outside. It was not grass. It was broad-leaved. There would be, Jamison decided happily, an infinitude of under-leaf forms of life. They would most likely be insects, and there would be carnivorous other insects to prey upon them. Some species would find it advantageous to be burrowing insects. There must be other kinds of birds than the giant specimens that looked like men at a distance, too. On the glacier planet there had been few birds but many furry creatures. Possibly the situation was reversed here, though of course it need not be ...

"Hm," said Cochrane when the films were all run through. "Ice-caps and land and seas. Plenty of green vegetation, so presumably the air is normal for humans. Since you're alive, Holden, we can assume it isn't instantly fatal, can't we? The gravity's tolerable—a little on the light side, maybe, compared to the glacier planet."

He was silent, staring at the blank wall of the control-room. He frowned. Suddenly he said:

"Does anybody back on Earth know that Babs and I were castaways?"

"No," said Holden, still very quiet indeed. "Alicia ran the control-board. She told everybody you were too busy to be called to the communicator. It was queer with you away! Jamison and Bell tied themselves in chairs and spliced tape. Johnny, of course"—his voice was very carefully toneless—"wouldn't do anything useful. I was space-sick a lot of the time. But I did help Alicia figure out what to say on the communicator. There must be hundreds of calls backed up for you to take."

"Good!" said Cochrane. "I'll go take some of them. Jones, could we make a flit to somewhere else on this planet?"[Pg 133]

Jones said negligently,

"I told you we've got fuel to reach the Milky Way. Where do you want to go?"

"Anywhere," said Cochrane. "The scenery isn't dramatic enough here for a new broadcast. We've got to have some lurid stuff for our next show. Things are shaping up except for the need of just the right scenery to send back to Earth."

"What kind of scenery do you want?"

"Animals preferred," said Cochrane. "Dinosaurs would do. Or buffalo or a reasonable facsimile. What I'd actually like more than anything else would really be a herd of buffalo."

Jamison gasped.

"Buffalo?"

"Meat," said Cochrane in an explanatory tone. "On the hoof. The public-relations job all this has turned into, demands a careful stimulation of all the basic urges. So I want people to think of steaks and chops and roasts. If I could get herds of animals from one horizon to another—."

"Meat-herds coming up," said Jones negligently. "I'll call you."

Cochrane did not believe him. He went down to the communicator again. He prepared to take the calls from Earth that had been backed up behind the emergency demand for an immediate broadcast-show that he'd met while the ship came to its landing. There was an enormous amount of business piled up. And it was slow work handling it. His voice took six seconds to pass through something over two hundred light-years of space in the Dabney field, and then two seconds in normal space from the relay in Lunar City. It was twelve seconds between the time he finished saying something before the first word of the reply reached him. It was very slow communication. He reflected annoyedly that he'd have to ask Jones to make a special Dabney field communication field as strong as was necessary to take care of the situation.

The rockets growled and roared outside. The ship lifted. Johnny Simms came storming up from below.

"My trophy!" he cried indignantly. "I want my trophy!"

Cochrane looked up impatiently from the screen.

"What trophy?"

"The thing I shot!" cried Johnny Simms fiercely. "I want to have it mounted! Nobody else ever killed anything like that! I want it!"[Pg 134]

The ship surged upward more strongly. Cochrane said coldly:

"It's too late now. Get out. I'm busy."

He returned his eyes to the screen. Johnny Simms raced for the stairs. A little later Cochrane heard shoutings in the control-room. But he was too busy to inquire.

The ship drifted—with all the queasy sensation of no-weight—and lifted again, and then there was a fairly long period of weightlessness. At such times Holden would be greenish and sick and tormented by space-sickness. Which might be good for him at this particular time. For a long time, it seemed, there were alternating periods of lift and free fall, which in themselves were disturbing. Once the free fall lasted until Cochrane began to feel uneasy. But then the rockets roared once more and boomed loudly as if the ship were leaving the planet altogether.

But Cochrane was talking business. In part he bluffed. In part, quite automatically, he demanded much more than he expected to get, simply because it is the custom in business not to be frank about anything. Whatever he asked, the other man would offer less. So he asked too much, and the other man offered too little, each knowing in advance very nearly on what terms they would finally settle. Considering the cost of beam-phone time to Lunar City, not to mention the extension to the stars, it was absurd, but it was the way business is done.

Presently Cochrane called Babs and Alicia and had them witness a tentative agreement, which had to be ratified by a board of directors of a corporation back on Earth. That board would jump at it, but the stipulation for possible cancellation had to be made. It was mumbo-jumbo. Cochrane felt satisfyingly competent at handling it.

While the formalities were in progress, the ship surged and fell and swayed and surged again. Cochrane said ruefully:

"I hate to ask you to work under conditions like this, Babs."

Babs grinned. He flushed a little.

"I know! When you were working for me I wasn't considerate."

"Who am I working for now?"

"Us," said Cochrane. Then he looked guiltily at Alicia. He felt embarrassment at having said anything in the least sentimental before her. Considering Johnny Simms, it was not too tactful. Her cheek, where it had been red, now[Pg 135] showed a distinct bruise. He said: "Sorry, Alicia—about Johnny."

"I got into it myself," said Alicia. "I loved him. He isn't really bad. If you want to know, I think he simply decided years ago that he wouldn't grow up past the age of six. He was a rich man's spoiled little boy. It was fun. So he made