The Man Without a Planet Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  The Man Without a Planet (also published as Siege Perilous) is copyright © 1969 by Lester del Rey. All rights reserved. Cover art copyright © Argus / Fotolia.

  * * * *

  Published by arrangement with the Estate of Lester del Rey. For more information, contact Wildside Press LLC.

  CHAPTER 1

  A thousand miles below, Earth swam in the vast bathtub of space, like a monstrous child’s water toy left until all the colors had run.

  The sun was shining on the whole of the visible hemisphere down there, saturating the greens and browns of its surface, glaring off the cotton insulation of the cloud formations and haloing the edges of the atmosphere.

  It was a gaudy, improbable world.

  But still Fred Hunter longed for it, yearned for its green hills and gleaming cities, but knowing them as places he would never see again except as they blended into the pastel whole of Earth’s visible side.

  This, because Fred Hunter was a man who could not go home. The space station, the ungainly orbiting doughnut, from which he gazed toward Earth and imagined the smell of wet May woods and the sound of trees bending in October winds, had been his home for ten years and would remain so until he died, or until medical science worked a miracle that did not appear to be in the offing.

  Standing alone in the outer end of one of the station’s spokes, he allowed the longing and yearning to reflect in his face. For a man of his age, it was a firmly contoured, youthful face. But that was a result of a phenomenon of space. It dealt kindly with living flesh. Out in the reaches, human bodies healed quickly when injured and maintained the glow of youth. But sadly, this was not necessarily true of the subtler elements— mentalities and emotions.

  Proof that space gnawed at men’s minds lay, for instance, in the Paulson tragedy. And its eroding effects were recognized in the brief tours of duty assigned to spacemen.

  So it was a tribute to Fred Hunter’s fiber that he had survived ten years in space and still showed no signs of cracking.

  But the cost to him in suffering had not been missed by those close to him. And he had earned the respect of the others; those who came and left. Hunter? Oh, certainly! A real man. Guts by the yard. No doubt about it.

  Commander Masters was one of these. Otherwise, he would probably have slipped off to Earth that day without a word to Hunter. Dealing with a weaker man, a goodbye and good luck might have been considered rubbing it in.

  But Masters knew a wordless departure would have hurt Hunter’s strong, proud spirit.

  Still, when the signal came over the intercom from Masters—“Hunter. A word with you?”—the station’s permanent resident reacted. His shoulders slumped and something of the eagle look vanished. An older eagle now perhaps—a hermit bird, brooding in a lonesome eyrie, its clipped wings hanging dejectedly.

  But then the moment was over and Hunter turned to answer the summons with head high, shoulders back, and the weary look gone.

  The door to the commander’s suite was partly opened and, as Hunter paused, Masters looked up from packing his last bag.

  “Come in, Fred.” Then he glowered around the cabin. “Hell of a time to leave! Hell of a time!”

  “They refused the request for postponement, then?”

  “Flat denial. Those bastards down there go by the written form. Reports on a piece of paper. Twenty replacements have arrived. They’re all alive and breathing. Sufficient!”

  Hunter’s smile was tight. He sympathized with Masters, but the pigheadedness of the Earthside brass was not news to him. He listened in silence as Masters went on.

  “All twenty of them under barbiturates from the strain of the trip, but what difference does that make? The roster is technically filled. It looked right on the books, so it is right. Damn their Maginot Line type of thinking!”

  Hunter nodded. Men didn’t change as fast as technology, and that was the plain truth of it. Masters’ reference had been to a stupidity that was now history. Decades earlier, prior to one of their wars down there, France had built an “impregnable” line of defenses called the Maginot and had immediately stopped thinking in terms of any potential peril. Safe and snug behind their beautiful bastion, they’d been swiftly taken by quick flanking movements, but no lesson had been learned from the defeat. Now that the space station had been built, the same type of thinking was prevalent under the American brass hats: the doughnut’s mere presence in the sky was sufficient guarantee of safety below.

  The cost of creating it had been in the neighborhood of five billion, but now every cent for maintenance seemed to arouse resentment. It was cheaper to take back the retiring shift on the same ship that brought up replacements, so no overlapping duty was permitted. When the annual appropriations hearing came up, the commander and half the staff had to go down and haggle for funds.

  That was Masters’ job of the moment. The fact that his departure would leave Lieutenant Jeffroe, a man of proven incompetency, in charge during the readjustment period made no difference.

  Nor did Masters dare imply such a thing. As one Senator—the one who coincidentally happened to be Jeffroe’s uncle—had once thundered from the rostrum: “There are no incompetent men in Space Service.”

  And even the Paulson case could not be used in rebuttal because it was top top secret. Hush-hush because if word of Paulson’s madness had gotten out, the taxpayers might have grown uneasy and started regarding the doughnut as a bomb rather than an umbrella.

  Down on Earth, the Paulson file had been locked deep in a vault. And on the space station, only Masters, then second in command, Hunter, to whom Paulson had shown his cards, and a good man named Callaghan had been aware of what had come close to happening—global destruction.

  Of course, Hunter realized that thinking of Paulson at this moment was unfair to Jeffroe. The lieutenant was not a madman. He was merely weak and incompetent, which made him highly desirable by comparison.

  As Masters slammed his suitcase shut, Hunter said, “You’d think the sticky peace between us and the Eurasian Combine would worry the brass hats—”

  “Oh, they worry! But only about our accountings!” Masters glanced around the cabin, making a final check, and then his face softened as he turned his eyes on Hunter.

  “What about your boy, Fred?”

  “Doing fine,” Hunter answered quickly. But a slight frown wrinkled his forehead and he unconsciously took a letter from his jacket pocket. “This came with the replacements.”

  Masters’ perceptions were as keen as his vision, and he did not miss the frown. Also, he considered Hunter a close friend, close enough so that he could extend a hand and ask, “Mind if I read it?”

  He went through the letter quickly. “Hmmm. Doesn’t say much, does he?”

  “Then you get the same impression I do?”

  “That he’s covering up something? Or at least evading? Yes.”

  Hunter’s smile was quick and rueful. “That’s the trouble with honest kids. Or adults, too, for that matter. They evade so honestly that they do it poorly.”

  Masters’ direct reply was characteristic. As he handed the letter back, he said, “I’ll find out what the young man’s up to. Depend on me. I’ll be in touch.”

  His frown came back, and he turned toward a switch and reached for the wall mike. He flipped the scanner switch. The viewplate darkened to a picture and Spaceman 1st Class Callaghan’s flat, good-natured—but now unhappy—face appeared on the screen.

  “Callaghan, any sign of that object we spotted last time around?”

  “No, sir. Either it’s out of range or in one of the topside blind spots. Want me to try copping the big doghouse scope?”

  “See what you can do. It’s probably only a meteorite, but I don’t like anything that size in our territory. And tell the pilot I’m on my way out.”

  “He’s already screaming his head off, sir. Take-off’s in nine minutes.”

  “Tell him to keep his pants dry,” Masters growled, and turned and thrust his hand out at Hunter. “Good luck, Fred. See you after I’ve convinced the brass we’re still worthy of our pay checks.”

  “Good luck, and don’t forget fringe benefits,” Hunter grinned. Then Masters was gone.

  Alone, the grin faded from Hunter’s face. He frowned, and while the workings of his mind were vague at the moment, he was to recall them later as danger signals, the stirrings of instinct.

  A UFO off the space station. Masters’ inquiry of Callaghan had been no cause for excitement. It had merely demonstrated the Commander’s conditioning: to function as a commander even in small routine matters right up to the moment of his departure.

  An oversized meteorite winging in too close. Nothing more. And with competent men and instruments giving it attention.

  But an uneasiness had roiled in Hunter as Masters asked the question; a routine query on a routine day, on a space station that had been built to function in a routine manner.

  Hunter was aware of all this even though he was neither in Space Service nor of Assigned Technical Personnel. He
had been ATP at one time, but those days were long gone. Now he was nothing more than the only recipient of a unique status. He was a PRTSAC. This translated into a Permanent Resident Through a Special Act of Congress.

  This had come about as a result of the accident he still sometimes dreamed about—relived in nightmares—the accident that had occurred two days after the moment of high triumph that had crowned his professional life. When he sent the message back down: Project Monitor completed. Space station functioning.

  It had been a moment of triumph although Fred Hunter would never have admitted it, even to Callaghan or Masters. He’d assured them more than once that it had been just another job, building that doughnut. That he’d never had stars in his eyes or space dust in his blood. If a span between two Andean peaks or a tunnel under the Baltic had paid more, he’d have kept both feet planted on Earth. That was what he had told them.

  Of course they hadn’t believed him.

  But a triumph or merely a job well done hadn’t really mattered. The accident had made all that academic. The accident that had marooned him permanently in space and had made him famous by its very novelty as a Man Without a Planet.

  All that had occurred ten years ago, and his now having been forgotten touched him with bitterness even though he realized he had no right to be bitter. They’d been more than decent about the whole thing. They, as he, had done their best with what was available. Clare’s health had prohibited her coming to him even if he would have allowed her to share his exile, which he would not. Even visits were impossible. And sending a child up was out of the question. So Fred Jr. and Clare stayed Earthside, and when his mother died, the boy no doubt got better care than Hunter could have given him if he’d continued to function professionally—knocking around the world—going places he could never have taken Fred Jr.

  No, he had no complaint; only the burden of his own existence, and the sometimes shattering thought that the son he remembered as a boy was now a man—a twenty-three-year-old medical student. A young man, incidentally, whose letters had become quite evasive lately.

  Those were his memories and this was his life and perhaps his uneasiness was more simply explained than it appeared. His instincts were no doubt capable of subtle response because, in a sense, he was the space station—a living, breathing part of it. He knew its every cabin and passage, its every bolt and coupling, its every response and reaction to an unstable environment.

  But it was also logical that he brushed away his nervousness of the moment as the petty inner grumblings of a man who had been too long in one place. A man bored and trying to create interest from stuff of no substance.

  But the feeling came back; an inner itch that he couldn’t scratch.

  Something was wrong….

  CHAPTER 2

  Sandra (Sandy) Rothman was Assigned Technical Personnel because she needed a vacuum to work in and there was no better place to achieve total emptiness than in space.

  Sandy was also a female, a redhead, and not bad-looking. Or perhaps she was merely not bad-looking from Hunter’s carefully conditioned viewpoint. He’d thought the matter over carefully after she arrived on the doughnut and decided that classifying her as attractive would not be psychologically sound, all things considered. When you saw a girl as attractive you were tempted into a progression of thinking that could ultimately threaten the emotions and that, in his situation, could be bad.

  At times, maintaining this aplomb was difficult for Hunter. Not that Sandy employed any siren-like tactics. In fact, she was thoroughly and totally engrossed in her work. But those enthusiasms made her gorgeous blue eyes sparkle nonetheless.

  They sparkled now as she intercepted Hunter in one of the corridors that led through a spoke to the outer rim of the station. She held something up in triumph.

  “Eureka!” she cried, her smile dazzling. “At least—I think so.”

  She appeared to be merely holding up two fists, and Hunter squinted into the light from the quartz port at the far end of the corridor and saw a faint glint.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “A piece of my wire—what else?”

  “Well I’ll be—! So it is!”

  Hunter was well aware of Sandy’s project, research into tensile strength potentials with the idea of coming up with something beneficial to mankind.

  “Looks like a cobweb.”

  “It’s five time the thickness of a cobweb,” Sandy replied, “and five million dollars more difficult to create.”

  “Then you think you’ve got it?”

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

  Hunter was only vaguely aware of the technology involved. He knew that the experiments had to do with the crystal formation of metals. Crystals processed under the atmospheric conditions of Earth had never achieved the potentials indicated by available formulae. They developed faults and impurities that translated as weaknesses and discontinuities. Sandy had been working on the theory that under perfect vacuumatic conditions, the crystal formations of metal could be developed and made to behave so that their increased strength could be comparatively unlimited.

  “Would you say that wire might hold up two spiders?—three?—maybe four?”

  Sandy’s eyes sparkled so much Hunter felt like suggesting dark glasses. She said, “Mr. Smartypants, you bring me an average-sized bulldozer and an anchor point to lift it and I’ll swing it like a pendulum at the end of this little old piece of spider web.”

  “Congratulations. Now I suppose you’ll be going Earthside for your just reward.”

  Hunter spoke lightly, or thought he did. And if any bitterness crept in, Sandy either missed it or ignored it.

  “Not yet a while. I want to make a few more tests. And besides, I like it up here. I appreciate the scientific climate.”

  Hunter knew this was meant as a compliment to his own scientific “dabblings,” as he’d called them. But in truth, they were far from that. Furnished with all the equipment he’d requested, and ample time, he perhaps started out as an amateur, but his delving into biochemistry—no doubt motivated by a wistful hope of facilitating his own return to Earth—had reached no mean proportions. He’d spent a great deal of time watching cells change growth patterns under low-gravity conditions, trying to discover why certain life forms—starfish, lizards, and such—are able to regrow complete parts of their original structures.

  There had been times when he’d felt himself to be close to great secrets. But they had always faded away like irritating whispers.

  Thus, his admiration of Sandy was that of a fellow scientist and was in no way qualified. The importance and value of what she’d achieved was of staggering value to mankind.

  “Careful,” Sandy said as his hand moved toward the wire. “You’ll cut yourself.”

  Hunter touched the miracle strand lightly. “It will be great for razor blades,” he smiled.

  “And holding up bridges,” Sandy reached into her pocket. “I have a spool of it here in case you ever want me to sew on a button for you.”

  “I’ll remember that. Have you seen Callaghan?”

  “No, I haven’t. I stopped off to give Lieutenant Jeffroe my condolences.”

  “Condolences for what?”

  “Why, his uncle, the Senator, died of a stroke. Haven’t you heard?”

  “No. I suppose I was in my lab when the news came. He must be badly racked up, the news coming at a time like this.”

  “What do you mean?” Sandy asked.

  “While he’s taking over command of the station for Masters.”

  Sandy’s glance was a shade keener than usual. “You don’t have much confidence in Jeffroe as an officer, do you?”

  From anyone but Sandy, Hunter would have considered that a hostile statement. At least a defense of Jeffroe. But Sandy had an open, honest nature and wasted no energy on antagonisms. Thus, Hunter knew she was not chiding him nor defending Jeffroe and he answered honestly.

  “Such things are comparative, of course. But I think there are more reliable men.”

  “Are you sure you don’t resent the fact that his uncle’s influence got him the assignment?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But possibly I resent that influence’s being necessary.”

  Sandy smiled. “Neatly put.”

  “How did he take the news?”