Title: The Old Way
Author: Marlowe, Stephen
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Old Way" ***


                              THE OLD WAY

                           By MILTON LESSER

               A man could walk around the tiny asteroid
            in the space of a few hours. But Jerry had only
            minutes, to find and use--an invisible weapon!

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
              Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
                             November 1951
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Like I expected, the fairgrounds were crowded with thousands of the
drifter-families waiting for the big blast-off tomorrow. They thronged
about uncertainly, in anxious little knots, chattering friendly,
meaningless things, making fast friends who would be forgotten in the
bustle and competition, after blast-off.

Gramps stood apart from all this, and when he saw me he came running
through the mob on spindly legs, waving his arms frantically so
that I wouldn't miss him. As if I would. If there was anything more
incongruous here on the Martian landscape, anything that seemed more
out of place than did old Gramps, I didn't see it. Two hundred years
ago in another homestead rush, maybe he would have fit. The only thing
I know about that is what I read in books, but I could picture Gramps
with his battered old corncob pipe and his wizened face, leading a team
of mules or oxen or whatever animals they used.

"Hey, Jerry," he called. "Hey, kid, I got it!"

I'm no kid. I'm twenty-seven, six feet two, and I probably weigh twice
as much as Gramps does, wringing wet. But that's the way he was.

"Where's Clair?" I asked him. I hadn't seen my wife in a month. She had
gone to the Martian Fair with Gramps to put in a bid for one of the old
derelict ships, and now I had come here to join them, with a dime, a
quarter and a crumpled dollar bill hardly filling the emptiness of my
jumper-pocket.

"That girl!" He whistled. "She's back at the ship now, cleaning and
polishing, putting everything together with spit and string so you
wouldn't know the old Karden Cruiser."

I felt something gnawing away, deep inside my stomach, and it wasn't
just that I was hungry. "The _what_?" I demanded.

       *       *       *       *       *

Gramps smiled, and right then I could have seen him rocking on a chair
on a little porch, with a garden full of rose bushes and crab grass. I
could have seen him anyplace but here with Clair and me, on the eve of
the great blast-off for the asteroid belt. "The _what_?" I said again.

"The old Karden Cruiser, Jerry. Neat little job. And cheap--they
almost gave it away. You shoulda seen those durned fools. No one else
bid for it, I had it all to myself, first bid."

I tried to be patient. "You didn't expect anyone else to bid for
_that_, did you?"

He had a hurt look on his face. "Why not? A good ship, kid. When I was
your age, younger, I went to Venus on one. I can remember--"

"That's it," I told him. "Fifty years ago the Karden might have been
a good ship, but not now. Not now, Gramps. It's as obsolete as a
pea-shooter. Will it run?"

"You're durned tootin' it'll run. What do you think I paid? Go ahead,
guess."

Something was still gnawing at my stomach. Gramps had had three hundred
dollars to purchase our ship and equipment. You could stretch three
hundred dollars a long way if you bought wisely these days. "You tell
me," I said.

"Hundred and fifty. 'Nother hundred and a quarter for supplies--"

There's some old saying about letting old dogs lie or not crying over
spilled milk or some such thing, but anyway, I reminded him, "For
another twenty-five or thirty dollars you could have got a Wilson '13,
maybe even a twelve-bank Carpenter."

"Couldn't," Gramps said. "Kid, let me tell you, I saw the nicest
_gui_-tar. One of them old Martian types with eight strings, you know.
Twenty-five bucks...."

I looked at him a long time without saying anything. When you're down
to just a few dollars in these depression years, everything counts,
every last penny. But my folks had died in the panic and riots of '24
and Gramps had reared me since almost before the time I could reach the
wart on his knee.

"Let's go look at our Karden," I said.

       *       *       *       *       *

Gramps was beaming proudly. "There she is," he told me. "Section G, Row
14, Ship 7. Beauty, eh?"

As far as you looked, you couldn't see anything but the old ships,
all lined up, row on row of them. Some glistening with new paint if
they had been bought as early as yesterday and sprayed today, others
still dull and cracked with caked jet-slag and the erosion of a dozen
atmospheres, all with people scurrying in and out of them, getting new
faces and new entrails for blast-off tomorrow.

The Karden squatted in row 14, a short, stubby grub-like boat whose
jet-slag completely hid the original paint job. But I didn't want to
say another thing about it. I just hoped the Karden could get us where
we were going, even if it burped and hiccupped like a drunken driver
all the way.

Clair opened the lock and I saw her red hair framed against the dark
interior of the ship, and I hardly remembered Gramps was there. We'd
been married two months, and separated for half that time, with me
getting my last month's paycheck in New York so I'd have money for the
liner-fare to Canal City.

Clair cried, "Welcome aboard ship. Captain Brooks, wel.... Umm-m,
Captain, that was nice.... Umm-m, again...."

Gramps coughed. "You two gonna stand there mooning over each other all
afternoon, or do we get some work done?"

"It's just about all finished," Clair told him. She snuggled up close
once more and then skipped out of my arms, leading us through the lock
and into the Karden.

It looked more like the inside of a packing crate than a spaceship.
Ideally, the old Kardens were two-man cruisers, at a time when you
strapped yourself into a bunk and just about remained there until you
hit atmosphere. Now Clair had readied three makeshift bunks, and our
supplies stood piled tight against the bulkheads and as high as the
ceiling in several places. I had to take Clair's word that the ship's
old hull was sealed and could be pressurized--there wasn't enough space
for me to see for myself.

The trip had left me a bit bleary, and Clair, who had worked all day,
yawned a little while she opened a can of beans and bacon for supper.
We sat around against the packing cases and we smoked. Then I checked
a few things which remained to be checked, and I suggested we turn in.
Clair nodded, but Gramps said no, he had a little unfinished business
yet.

I needed sleep, every bit of it I could get, for the grueling run
tomorrow. I leaned back and stretched out, with my feet sticking out a
good half a foot beyond the edge of the bunk, and then I heard Gramps'
unfinished business.

The nasal twang of the eight-stringed Martian guitar blended with the
dubious qualities of Gramps' voice:

    He'll hug and he'll kiss you
    And tell you more lies
    Than the cross ties on the railroad
    Or the stars in the sky....

       *       *       *       *       *

At an hour before sunrise we tuned in our radio and heard Governor
Eddington's voice cut through the static. "Ladies and gentlemen," he
said, "it is now exactly fifty-nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds
until blast-off. Let me review the rules for you, to avoid any
unpleasantness later.

"One. No ship is to leave before the signal. Any ship which does so is
automatically disqualified, and your claim will not be recognized.

"Two. Any asteroid is fair prey, but the government strongly recommends
that you consider two items. First, those asteroids which lie within
the belt itself and which do not have overly eccentric orbits are
preferable since the government supply ships will visit them much more
frequently. Second, you will benefit by selecting an asteroid with
one or more of the old abandoned mining domes, for two reasons. With
slight repairs you can live within the domes, and also their existence
assures you of profitable mineral material.

"Three. Vesta, the government base within the Belt, is not to be landed
upon.

"Four. Each ship is restricted to one asteroid, and once your selection
is made it must be a permanent one.

"Five. No more than one ship can claim a given asteroid, and the
automatic chronometer within each ship will radio the moment of landing
to Vesta, thus taking care of any priority claims.

"Six. Claim jumping will be considered by the Federal Worlds Government
as an act of piracy and will be punished accordingly.

"Seven. In the event that an asteroid is abandoned for any reason, a
new ship may claim it at once, and the departing ship can claim no
other asteroid.

"If you have any questions, relay them to your Section Official in the
fifty-five minutes which remain. Good luck to all of you...."

The rules were thorough, all right. This could turn out to be a two-way
proposition which would help both the Government and the families, and
the Government wanted it to be a rousing success. In the first place,
there were literally thousands of families, all waiting tensely for
blast-off. None of them had been earning sufficient income, thanks to
the depression following the final East-West war on Earth, and now it
was hoped that they could earn their keep by mining the asteroids.

Further, I knew that the Government had been forced to abandon its
mineral deposits on all the asteroids except Vesta, and now it could
use the extra wealth from the silent mines which waited on a thousand
little worlds in deep space between Mars and Jupiter.

       *       *       *       *       *

I sat smoking cigarette after cigarette, until Clair reminded me that
the supply wasn't infinite. She pored over our charts, studying the
three or four asteroids which had seemed most promising, looking up
with a smile now and then to watch Gramps strum his guitar and sing
about a fly with a blue tail.

The radio barked, "Three minutes to blast-off!"

Outside, I could hear the roar of a thousand rocket engines tuning up,
and a shroud of smoke and fire blanketed the field.

"Two minutes!"

"Hey, Gramps," I said. "Put down that banjo and strap yourself into a
bunk. We're set to go--"

"It's a guitar," he told me. "A _gui_-tar. Okay, kid, plenty of time."

I stood up and helped Clair into her bunk, kissing her lightly on the
lips. "I'm a little scared," she said.

"Don't be silly. Nothing to be afraid of, honey." I was glad she
couldn't feel me trembling.

Gramps was next, and I saw to it that his straps were fastened
properly, then I sat down again in the pilot-chair, buckling a heavy
leather belt across my thighs.

"Thirty seconds!"

I remember wondering vaguely if the Karden could get us to the Belt in
one piece, and not hours behind every other ship. Then a shrill whistle
outside was going "beep-beep-beep!" and I pulled the firing lever back
all the way.

       *       *       *       *       *

I grinned at Clair. "How do you like weighing exactly nothing?"

"You always told me I was a little too skinny, Captain Brooks, sir!"

Gramps scowled darkly. "Aw, you two kids are just making fun of the
Karden, that's all. So what if we ain't got any gravity to speak of?"

The Karden had been built before each ship had its own little gravity
unit, and no one had ever bothered to refit her. Clair had set up the
guide-ropes right after acceleration, and now we floated around the
crammed little cabin of the ship if we weren't careful. I had to admit
Gramps was right, however. A little inconvenience like this didn't
really matter, and the important thing was the fact that I could look
out the port and see all the little motes of the thousand other ships
gleaming in the sunlight like tiny space-born fireflies. The Karden was
definitely holding its own.

"She's built for speed," Gramps told us. "In the old days there was no
such thing as gravity-equalizers anyhow. This soft new generation...."

I winked at Clair and said, "Go on. Go play your fiddle, Gramps, and
leave astrogation to the soft new generation."

"It's a banjo," he said. "I mean a _gui_-tar!"

Through the fore-port there was a haze of milky white which in a few
hours would separate out into the thousands of little planetoids, each
a tiny mote following its predestined course around the sun. Actually,
some weren't so small. There was the big bulk of Ceres, with a diameter
close to five-hundred miles, Vesta, and some of the other big babies,
but for the most part the asteroids were tiny cosmic specks, less than
a mile across.

"Okay," Clair said, "which one?"

That was a good question. You had to consider several things. First,
some ships sped through space faster than our Karden, and they'd claim
the really first-rate asteroids before we even reached the Belt. Of the
second-raters, you had to consider what sort of mineral deposits they
had, which would be the simplest to mine, and so forth.

"How's about 4270?" I said.

She checked the charts. "Ummm-m. Diameter, half a mile. Eccentricity
of orbit, .17. Tilted to the ecliptic, .08. Two deserted mining domes,
excellent condition. High-grade copper ore, no power tools needed.
Sounds swell, Jerry."

Gramps stopped tuning his guitar. "Copper? Did I hear you say copper?"
He snorted. "In my day men went prospecting for diamonds and other
precious stones. Or for gold or pitchblend...."

"Ever find any?" I wanted to know.

"Well, no. But that doesn't mean I couldn't have. I was just too busy
with the women on the outworlds--"

       *       *       *       *       *

I looked at Clair and Clair looked at me. "4270," we said together, and
when Clair checked the charts again she found that its present orbital
position was just a few degrees off to the left.

"Two hours," I grunted. "Maybe three. If we're lucky, she'll be
deserted...."

Clair smiled. "Two domes there, Jerry. Hah--a winter home and a summer
home."

"Ain't no seasons on an asteroid," Gramps said very seriously. "Of
course, if you two kids want, you can have one dome and I can have the
other. Might be a good idea at that."

Clair told him not to be silly, that we couldn't get along without his
guitar playing anyway, and then I was busy turning us the few degrees
which would bring us into orbital conjunction with 4270. Ahead and all
around us the little sparks which were spaceships fanned out in all
directions, hurtling for their homesteads out here beyond Mars. It was
nice to know that in just a few hours--if luck held--we'd be setting up
home, living in our own place instead of the crowded barracks they set
up for transient workers back on Earth. Nice? Hell, that's all we'd
been thinking about since the announcement came through six months ago.

You really feel a small turn in an old Karden Cruiser rocketing
outward at top speed. I could feel the gravity slamming me back down
against the right-hand cushions of the pilot-chair, and I heard Gramps
muttering something under his breath. With Clair, he had remained out
of his bunk so that he could watch us blast in toward the asteroid, and
now I could picture each of them grasping stanchions for all they were
worth, peering out of the port.

I couldn't turn around to watch, of course. This landing on a tiny
asteroid is tricky business. You can't just come in and set her down
as easy as all that, floating in on the cushion of a five-hundred mile
atmosphere.

The Karden came in slowly, at right angles to the orbit, and I saw that
4270 was an amorphous hunk of greenish rock, craggy and mountainous, if
you call a ponderously turning rough-hewn slab of stone less than three
thousand feet across mountainous.

       *       *       *       *       *

I worked the studs slowly, feeling the breath go out of my lungs with
each one, and soon we had executed a turn of almost ninety degrees,
with 4270 tumbling along parallel to us now, just a few miles off in
the void. You could feel its weak gravity, tugging like a child's
fingers might tug at your overcoat as you ran in another direction.

I pulled up all the studs together, and I could breathe again. For a
moment it seemed that 4270 wouldn't be strong enough to grab us and
hold us, to reel us in slowly like a fisherman with a whopper at the
end of his line. But her distance didn't increase, either--and we went
spinning along through the void with her like a lopsided dumbbell, the
tiny planetoid and the smaller Karden.

Soon 4270 grew in the fore-port, and quite suddenly she wasn't
alongside us any longer, but down below. Every time you come in
for planet-fall you get that sensation, but it never ceases to be
strange--one moment you're heading toward something which is in front
of you, the next you're hurtling down upon it headfirst.

Only with 4270's light gravity, we didn't exactly hurtle. It was more
like floating, slowly at first and then faster, and then I decided I'd
better give one short blast from our forerockets to brake the fall.
I pressed the stud and waited. There was nothing. Momentarily, the
fore-tubes had jammed. Of all the times....

I heard Clair calling my name, "Jerry, Jerry!" and then 4270's jagged
tumbling surface expanded up all around us and the planetoid didn't
look so small any more. It looked huge, it could have been Jupiter.
There came a grinding bump, and I thought I could hear my safety strap
snapping. The black-light dials of the instrument panel zoomed up at
me from someplace far beyond 4270, it seemed, and I met them head first
with a hundred rocket tubes snorting inside my skull.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Good morning," Clair said cheerfully.

"Good _what_?" I answered, not so cheerful.

"You slept for twelve hours, so now it's morning."

"And durn you," Gramps chimed in. "You made one hell of a mess out of
that instrument board. Why don't you be a mite careful...."

"Hey!" I sat up suddenly, and the pinwheels began to go around in my
head like at the Martian Fair. Only bigger. Brighter. "After that
crash, did the chronometer radio our landing here to Vesta?"

Clair nodded. "I thought of that. I radioed Vesta for confirmation, and
it came. But right after that the radio went blooie, so now any music
we hear will have to come from Gramps."

"I can oblige," Gramps said, running for his guitar, but I shook my
head.

"Hold it! We've got a lot of work to do."

"Yeah, sure," said Gramps. "Only what did you think we was doing while
you slept peaceful like a baby? We wasn't playing or singing, I'll tell
you that."

Clair explained, "We were exploring, Jerry, after we made sure you were
all right. We're less than a hundred yards from one of the domes here,
and it looks darned good. Of course, I don't know yet if it can be
pressurized or if there'll be any leaks, but I think we can answer yes
to the first question and no to the second."

"What about the second dome?"

"Just about like this one, half a mile around the planet. Living
quarters in both, plenty of abandoned equipment. You also can do open
pit mining until you burrow clean through the planet. Rich lode, too,
I'd say."

"Good," I told her, and I stood up a bit shakily and took her in my
arms. I kissed her soundly.

"Jerry. Come on, stop. How can we get any work done this way, Jerry?...
Ooo, Jerry...."

A few moments later, we all donned our spacesuits.

       *       *       *       *       *

Effortlessly, we carried great stacks of supplies across 4270's
crumbled, broken surface. The light gravity seemed hardly to exist
at all, and I think I could have lifted the Karden Cruiser bodily
if I desired. We made exactly two trips from the ship to the dome's
airlock, our grav-plates clomping up and down soundlessly under the
space-boots--ordinarily it'd have taken us a whole day to unload the
Karden.

The horizon was a crazy distorted thing no more than three hundred feet
away, where the planetoid's surface bent away almost at right angles,
and right on the crest against the blackness of the sky rested our
Karden. It looked pretty good on a place which Gramps told me Clair
had called ghastly when they first stepped outside to explore, but the
dome looked even better.

We stood within the lock now, and with a little squeal of delight which
I picked up over our suit intercoms, Clair ran for one of the dull
metal structures.

"Look in here," she called back over her shoulder, and I entered
through the doorway just in time to see her unscrewing her helmet.

I yelled something loud over the intercom, I don't remember what, and
then I flicked off the grav-plate button in the glove of my left hand
and dove at Clair.

I caught her just above the mid-section and we went down in a heap. I
switched on my grav-plates again.

"Just to show me how strong you are," she pouted, "you don't have to
come flying through the air and landing on my belly. Lucky you weigh
less than a pound without the grav-plates. Only quit trying to be
funny."

"Who's trying to be funny? There's only two things wrong with taking
your helmet off now. First, we haven't warmed this place, and you'd
have frozen your pretty little head off in half a minute. Second,
there's less air here than in a vacuum tube, and even after we turn on
the air generators I want to examine the dome for possible leaks before
you go around taking off your helmet. See?"

"Y-yes." She suddenly looked frightened. "It's just that the place
looks so warm and homey, Jerry."

It did. We were standing in a foyer and I could see a couple of
bedrooms off on the left, comfortable, all metal and metal fibre
construction. Further down the hall there was a pantry and when Clair
opened the door we found it to be full of canned goods, all glued to
the shelf lightly against the tricks which could be played by the
negligible gravity. Beyond that, we found a first-class, compact
kitchen unit, and you should have seen Clair's eyes light up. If
there's anything that makes a girl sparkle all over, it's the first
sight of a good kitchen over which she's to have domain. You can be
anywhere--New York or here on 4270 or out on Pluto, it wouldn't matter.
She hardly heard a word I said for the next ten minutes, as I patiently
lined up the things we must do first. Three things, primarily. We had
to start the heating units within the dome, do the same for the air
generators, and check the dome itself for any leakage.

       *       *       *       *       *

Gramps took care of items one and two, and I felt an urge to take off
my helmet without checking further. But that was silly. We had played
the game right thus far, and it would be pointless to get into serious
trouble over a thing like that.

So for the next fifteen minutes, Clair and I just knocked off our
grav-plates and swarmed all over the inside of the dome like a couple
of trained houseflies. From this height I could see almost half way
around my side of the little planet, and Clair's line of vision
probably came close to meeting mine someplace around the equator. And
after a time I was satisfied that my side of the dome couldn't lose as
much as a molecule of air.

"Tight as a thermos bottle," I called over the intercom. "How's yours,
Clair?"

Her answer was a scream. It jarred me from my precarious hold on the
under surface of the dome, and I went floating to the ground as light
as a feather.

Clair still clung up on top yelling so loud that the intercom only
reproduced the sound as garbled noise and static. And I couldn't do
anything but float down slowly, with Gramps motioning me down with his
arms, as if I could do anything to hurry.

Clair scrambled down her side of the dome and waited there next to
Gramps, hands on hips, looking up at me like a vexed mistress might
look at her lap dog when he didn't come to her call soon enough. But
she looked more composed now, and she took off her helmet. The air
situation, then, was all right, and I unscrewed my own fishbowl and let
it float down beside me.

The air was a bit musty, but otherwise good, and I judged the
temperature to be about fifty degrees now. Ever strip in mid air? I
peeled off my spacesuit and watched it float down too, agonizingly
slow, and finally I alighted in my leather jumper.

Clair said, "It's a--"

       *       *       *       *       *

She never finished the sentence. Something jarred the ground under me
like a miniature earthquake, and I sat down hard.

"A ship," Gramps said. "Clair saw a ship coming in on the other side!"

"Now it's landed," Clair told us. It wasn't necessary. That jar could
only have been produced by a ship or a man-sized meteor.

"So what?" I wanted to know. "So someone made a mistake and landed
here. Our claim's already in. When their claim goes through, Vesta'll
tell them."

"Sure," Gramps brightened.

Clair smiled too, as if to say, you're right, so what are we worrying
about?

Only my enthusiasm didn't last long. My reasoning was tilted. It was
warped. Crazy. "Uh-uh," I shook my head. "It isn't as simple as that.
First place, Vesta was supposed to beam a broadcast all over the Belt,
telling who landed where."

"Hmm-m," Gramps mumbled.

"Maybe," Clair said. "Maybe. And that ship, Jerry, it was too big. Much
too big to be one of the family ships. One of those long, tapering,
narrow-finned cruisers, brand new."

I was trying to digest this latest bit of information, when Clair
popped her helmet back on her head and ran for the airlock. I called
to her, but she couldn't hear me--she was going to see just who our
visitors were.

"Fiery young thing!" Gramps snorted, but I hardly heard him. I
zipped myself inside my suit as fast as I could and started to run
for the lock. Only I didn't. I flew. I had forgotten to snap on the
grav-plates, and once again I had that agonizing sensation of floating
groundward.

I made it, cursing, then I tore through the lock, in record time. When
I reached the Karden, Clair came darting around its other side and ran
toward me, out of breath, half stumbling. We got back inside the dome,
and I said:

"Well?"

"Oh, Jerry. Jerry!"

"What is it, hon?" Clair got excited easily, but not this way.

"Some men were out of the ship and I hailed them. Someone shot at me--"

"_What?_"

"Yes! He didn't say a word. He just lifted an ugly-looking gun and
fired. A big column of rock disappeared right next to me, Jerry.
Just like this." She snapped her fingers. "He shot at me with a
disintegrator. A _disintegrator_, Jerry...."

I gulped. How would you feel being trapped on a rock less than half a
mile across, without any weapons, with your radio shot to hell, without
enough fuel in your ship to get you half way to any other asteroid,
when you knew that around on the night side were maybe a dozen armed
men, claim jumpers, ready to kill you on sight?

I gulped again.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Take it easy," Gramps advised us. "Now, just you both relax. There has
to be a way outa this, only we ain't found it yet."

The only part of his statement I could agree with was the very last,
only I had to admit he had a point there. Just wasn't any use, as
Gramps would say, for Clair and me to go running around like a couple
of chickens without their heads, the way we'd been doing for the past
few hours.

"Okay," I said. "Let's look at this thing. Let's see exactly where we
stand."

"More like it," Gramps nodded his head.

Clair said, "Whoever they are, they landed here illegally. And they
want our copper...."

I brightened, but only for a moment. "No. I think you're off the beam,
honey. If it's our claim alone they're after, why just this stinking
little asteroid? There are lots bigger and lots richer, yet they chose
this one. They want something else. But what?"

Clair said we'd come back to that later. "First," she said, "just what
can we expect them to do? I mean now, or in the immediate future."

I considered. "Well, temporarily at least, they probably won't do a
thing. Or will they?"

"You're durned right they won't," Gramps said. "They won't bust this
dome up right away to get at us, nossir. First they'll see if they can
get us without doing that."

It made good sense. Whatever their purpose, both domes could be a
valuable asset, and maybe they'd play with us, cat and mouse, before
they applied the disintegrators to our dome.

"Sure," said Gramps. "Just like the old days of the East-West war when
it spread out to the planets. An army can't be everyplace at once,
'specially not all over the System. Right?"

"Right," Clair said, and I nodded.

"Hey," Gramps suggested, "you don't suppose they are Ruskies, do you?"

"No," I said, smiling. I reminded him that the war had been over before
I was born.

"Hmm-m, yes. Did I ever tell you the time I was fighting near Gossena
on Ganymede? I was a foot-soldier, y'know."

       *       *       *       *       *

He had told us many times and I said so, but he didn't bat an eyelash.
"Anyway," he said, "it was a war of nerves. We tried to scare them, and
they tried to scare us, one way or another, and the side that did the
most scaring won. Us."

Clair wanted to know what all that had to do with this.

"Easy, kid. Just hold your horses. These guys on the other side of 4270
will be using a war of nerves with us, a real simple one. They know
it'll be maybe a month before the government ship comes--"

"What about the radio?" I said. "Won't they think we called for help?"

"Nossirree. Not if they're smart. If we did call for help they could
hightail it out of here, pronto. The way Clair describes that ship,
they could beat anything the Government has in the Belt, anything short
of a battle-cruiser, and there ain't none out beyond Mars. No, if
they're smart they'll have to figure that something went wrong with our
radio, or we'd a called for help right away. It's an easy gamble for
them to take--they can always zoom away."

Everything Gramps had said was beginning to make a lot of good sense,
and I motioned him to continue.

"Sooo, their war of nerves is easy. They just wait for us to make
the first wrong move, and then they get us. Blop! Real simple with a
disintegrator."

He wasn't kidding. All you had to do was disintegrate a person, his
ship, his belongings, and you'd have committed a pretty air-tight
murder. Of course, the old legality about a corpse had been chucked out
the window years ago when the first disintegrators were developed, but
in a case like this, the only thing the government would have to go on
was the fact that our landing here on 4270 had been recorded. Not much.
Pitifully inadequate. And I told them that now.

"Swell," Clair said. "Only please, Jerry, cut it out. You sound like
you're crying at your own funeral. I'm scared...."

"Sure," said Gramps, "we ain't licked. We'll just have to figure out
a war of nerves just a bit better than theirs. War of nerves, that's
it. I can remember, outside Gossena.... The Ruskies employed Martian
mercenaries, y'know...."

"That won't be easy," Clair reminded him. "Especially since we don't
even know why that ship came here. We can't even find out."

I grinned. "Who says we can't?" I picked up my fishbowl helmet and
plopped it ungently over my head.

"What the heck are you doing?" Clair asked me.

My voice must have sounded muffled from under the helmet as I said:
"Simple. Our intercom can pick up theirs. As soon as some of them pop
outside their dome and start talking, we'll know."

That much was true. The intercom could pick up any similar conversation
on the entire tiny planet. It could do that, but it wasn't directional.
In other words, you'd hear voices, all right, only you wouldn't know
where they were coming from. One trouble, however, marred the idea: you
couldn't tell how long it would be before some of our visitors decided
to lift themselves up and venture outside the dome. Might be any time
now, or it might not be for days, or it might be just once, and then
briefly, for as long as it would take them to stroll to our dome,
disintegrate the lock, march through, and turn us into three specks of
molecular dust.

I sat grimly with the helmet over my head, waiting. All I got was
static.

       *       *       *       *       *

We took turns, and our hopes for a happy home life out here on 4270
were shot to hell. One of us would sit listening, head buried in his
helmet, another would bustle about, keeping the functions of the dome
in order, and the third would sleep.

It was my turn to sleep, and I can remember the beginning of what would
have been a corker of a dream. The visitors in the other spaceship
weren't men at all, but hideous monsters from some nameless extra-Solar
place, trying to decide where in the Solar System they'd like to live.
They seemed ornery enough to decide on crowded Earth.

I never knew for sure. One of them was breathing down my neck, then
poking me, and I sat up fast. It was Gramps, and he was scowling at me
frantically inside his fishbowl helmet.

I didn't have to be told. My own helmet sat securely on my shoulders in
a matter of seconds, and I listened. You could hardly tell the voices
apart, but from the conversation you knew that there were two of them.

"... all over this planetoid. Aw, what's the use? The boss just had a
wrong notion, that's all."

"I dunno. Can't be sure. This is a small place, yeah: but there's
enough wrinkles and folds to keep you looking for months. We ain't
covered nothing yet. Also, how's about inside the other dome. It
could be there, eh?"

"Well, it better not be. If those guys in there find it before us...."
I didn't know what "it" was but I liked this voice better. It was
pessimistic, and the more pessimistic our visitors were, the better I'd
like it.

"No, it ain't in the other dome." The rat, I thought. "It wouldn't be
in either dome, stupid, or the miners here before the depression woulda
found it. I was wrong--it's outside somewhere, all right."

Clair sat with us now, hunched over elbows on knees, listening through
her own helmet.

"So we just march around this lousy rock until we find it."

"Yeah. But take it easy, stupid. It'll be worth it. A weapon like that,
what power...."

"I don't know. We better find it soon. The wife's in Chawka City on Io,
and there's a damn saloon-keeper there--"

"Haw, haw, haw! A family man, a regular family man, that's what we
got with us. But don't worry, we'll find it. The Ruskies left that
thing here someplace, and don't worry, we'll get it. The boss ain't no
dodo...."

"Well, I'd feel a lot better if we got rid of those guys in the other
dome. It'd be a lot safer."

"Just shut up. When the boss tells us to do something, we'll do it.
Otherwise, stop yammering."

So our pessimistic friend wanted us dead too? I hoped that his wife
would commit the unpardonable crime with every man-jack in Chawka City.
It would serve the rat right.

Then there was a lot of garbled static and no more talking. Evidently
the two men had entered their dome again and had removed their helmets.
No more talking, exactly as if they had ceased to exist. And after the
one way contact had been established, it was almost eerie.

       *       *       *       *       *

Gramps was jubilant. "There y'are, kids. Simple as that."

"As what?" I said.

"Kid, don't you read your history?"

"He goes in for lurid novels," Clair said.

"Waal, it's like this. Right at the end of the war it was rumored the
Ruskies developed a super-duper weapon. Something really hot, that
would make the atom-bomb look like a kid's squirt gun. They didn't have
a chance to use it, and when the war was over they hid it out here in
the Belt somewheres, thinking maybe they'd get another chance. So them
guys think this is the place. Hmm-m, maybe they're right, and if we
could find that weapon before them.... Oh boy!"

I shook my head. It was a pretty little story, with one major flaw.
"There's no such weapon," I said. "I remember the history part of
it, all right. But I also remember what followed. Government sent
out hundreds of ships, in ten years they combed the Belt. No secret
asteroid. No Ruskie cache. No weapon. No nothing."

"Well, these guys are looking--"

I told him, "On Earth, people still look for Captain Kid's treasure,
and for sea serpents, too. They just won't find either. There aren't
any. Nope, Gramps--there's just a lot of copper on this asteroid,
that's all. If we could convince our visitors of that, they'd get out
quick."

"Well, we can't," Clair said. "You heard those two guys. Their boss is
as sure of finding that weapon here as he's sure of anything."

I began to smile, and I think I even laughed a little, because they
both looked at me queerly. "That's it," I said.

"That's what?" Evidently, my enthusiasm had not carried to Clair.

"The way we'll do it. We'll use Gramps' idea, the war of nerves...."

"Hot dog!" Gramps purred like an impossibly ancient kitten.

"We'll agree with them. Okay, there's a weapon here, a pretty awful
thing. We'll talk over our intercom and let them know we know it too."

"Uh-uh," said Clair, definitely interested. "They'll probably be
listening, just like us. Go on, Jerry, let's hear more."

"Sure. And we'll go a step further."

       *       *       *       *       *

"I got you!" Gramps cried. "We'll really find the weapon." There just
was no convincing a die-hard romantic who had fought in the last war.

"Yes and no," I said. "There is no weapon, none here and none anyplace
else in the Belt. _Only we'll make believe that we find one._ A war of
nerves, Gramps. Maybe we can scare them the hell off this planet."

"Hmm-m," said Gramps. "I knew you'd come around to my way of thinking."

Because we all liked the idea, we continued to speak of it for hours,
and this is the way things boiled down.

Item. It had to be an awful weapon, something that would frighten a
man and make the little hackles stand up on the back of his neck, and
something which apparently could be applied most readily here on 4270.
They were convinced that a weapon did exist, good: they'd believe
almost anything we could concoct.

Item. This one I didn't like. Since our two talkative friends had
intimated that their boss knew the weapon couldn't be within our dome,
we'd have to go outside for the weapon and let them catch a glimpse or
two of us prowling about. That could be dangerous, because they could
pop us off with their disintegrators any time they got the urge. Which
would probably be as soon as they saw something tangible at which to
fire. We'd have to flit about like shadows. Less than shadows.

Item. We'd start "broadcasting" to them, and we'd pretend we didn't
know we were doing it. The bigger the lie the better it would sound,
and we'd have to start almost at once. This could be fun.

Item. We had nothing concretely in mind beyond that. But the important
thing, as Gramps put it, was this: we'd be in the driver's seat,
conducting the war exactly how we wanted, and they'd have to sit around
guessing.

Gramps was chipper enough to strum a few notes on his guitar.

       *       *       *       *       *

For three Earth days by the clock in our living quarters, we managed to
stay out of trouble. And I think we were getting somewhere, too. Gramps
would go outside with Clair, poking around amid the rubble, talking
about how close they were coming. Then they'd let themselves be seen,
just for the briefest moment, and they'd scoot back inside our dome,
fast.

Probably, it was pretty safe at that. We could tell from what they said
via intercom that our visitors were interested. And, if they thought we
knew something, they'd be in no hurry to kill us. At the most, they'd
want to take us alive and see what they could learn.

Gramps and Clair were outside, talking, and as I listened, I got
an idea. If I went outside, too, our enemy would be confused into
believing there were more of us. I could invent a few new voices and
a few names and they might be led to believe we had a whole army here
with us. So what if our ship was small? This could have been the last
of several trips....

"Confuse 'em," Gramps had said once. "Get 'em on the ground and tramp
all over 'em with a war of nerves. Bury 'em under a pack of terrible
lies, that's what." I'd do it.

I stood atop a pinnacle of rock and made myself look busy. If they had
any lookouts perched high within their dome, they wouldn't miss seeing
me, and I was gambling everything on the fact that they wouldn't shoot
because they wanted to learn something from us.

Then I popped behind my pinnacle of rock, out of their range of vision,
and I hauled myself up the other side. I did this a few times, and
they probably thought half a dozen of us swarmed all over the rock,
exploring.

I said, "If this ain't the place, I'll eat my hat."

"Can't tell, George," I said in a higher voice. "Might be. Might not.
But we're getting close, that's for sure. Good thing we found those old
Ruskie charts."

Oh, I was having a glorious time. I said, for George, "We could blast
those other guys out of their dome any time we want. So why are we
waiting?"

I was getting cocky, and I used a deep bass this time. "You know the
chief wants to have some fun with that weapon. 'No place better to try
it,' he told me, 'than on our friends over there.' Just wait."

       *       *       *       *       *

An inspiration hit me, all at once. I had our weapon. "Yeah," this
was my George voice again, "but what an awful way to die. I wonder if
those charts are really true; you press a button, and anyone around who
happens to be in contact with iron or steel just gets broiled alive."

I poured it on in my middle-sized voice. "That's it, okay. The charts
wouldn't lie. Can you imagine what those Ruskies could have done with
that in the War?"

"Uh-huh. That woulda hit everyone. You carry a blaster, it's steel.
Disintegrator, too. Wear a spacesuit, you also get broiled. Go near a
radio, same thing. Man, it scares you: hope the chief knows what he's
doing."

"He knows," my good new friend George said, and because I figured
they had heard enough for now of my terribly selective yet horribly
universal weapon, I marched off my pinnacle and made my way back over
the rubble toward our dome. I chuckled softly to myself. Clair and
Gramps had doubtlessly heard of my new weapon via their intercoms, and
I thought they'd be mightily pleased. It had infinite possibilities in
this war of nerves.

They were waiting for me outside the dome-lock, and I thought that was
funny because I had expected to find them within the dome.

And then I ran. One, two, three figures stood within the dome, staring
out solemnly at Gramps and Clair. I reached them and I tried the lock.
I didn't have to--I don't think I could have entered with a blow torch.

I looked at Clair and Clair looked at me, and then we both looked at
Gramps. He shrugged eloquently enough, and after taking one last angry
look at the three men within our dome, we turned and walked away. The
angry looks made them smile, as we left one of them even thumbed his
nose at us. That gesture, too, was eloquent. It said, _suckers!_

We retreated to the base of my pinnacle of rock, where we couldn't be
seen from either dome. What had happened was simple. In my enthusiasm
I had left our dome deserted, and apparently our trio of friends back
there had found it that way. The dome-locks, of course, are manipulated
from within, and there's no way to secure them from the outside. So the
trio had walked in, closed the lock behind them, and we were stuck out
on the cold, dark, airless surface of 4270.

I tried to scratch my head and nearly succeeded in cracking my helmet
with a leatheroid glove. Gramps and Clair had gone out before me: they
had perhaps an hour's air supply left. Maybe I had three, with luck.

The Karden didn't have enough air within its old hulk now to satisfy a
lungfish in suspended animation, and by the time we could get its old
generators working again, we'd be three asphyxiated corpses.

So, we could do two things. We could wait out in the open like sitting
ducks and wait for the unknown enemy to take us, or we could just sit
here near our pinnacle of rock and suffocate.

I cursed myself soundly, but I stopped and tried to comfort her when I
saw that Clair was crying. It isn't easy, not through a spacesuit and
not when you think you'll be dead in not much more than minutes.

Gramps felt the fear too, he was muttering to himself. Clair murmured.
"Jerry.... Oh, Jerry ... I don't want to die!"

       *       *       *       *       *

I had to think fast. I had to think faster than I ever thought in my
life, and generally I like to explore my way around a problem, looking
at it from all angles. But the air left for Gramps and Clair could be
measured in minutes now, and mine wasn't much more.

I said, "What are you worrying about? George and Harry and the other
boys will have that thing rigged up in a couple of hours, sure. We'll
give those guys in both domes a little bit of hell. Won't be a one left
alive." I tried to make the butterflies remain in my stomach, to have
them go anyplace but in my voice. It almost didn't work.

Clair and Gramps looked at me like I might be crazy or something, and I
raised a gloved finger up and tried to line it up in front of my mouth
to tell them to shut up.

Gramps said, "George and Harry?"

"Of course. They found it half an hour ago, and now they're setting it
up. Just a matter of time, so relax."

I squatted down on my hands and knees, making the gesture for silence
again. I found a jagged little rock and started to trace lines in the
powdery pumice. It was messy, but they could understand it. I wrote:

    GO TO THEIR OLD DOME AND GIVE UP. YOUR AIR WONT LAST. THEY WON'T
    KILL. SCARED. QUESTION YOU ABOUT WEAPON. REMEMBER WHAT GEORGE &
    HARRY SAID ABOUT WEAPON BEFORE, BUT PLAY A LITTLE DUMB. LEAVE
    REST TO ME.

I waited while I saw them reading it, then I rubbed it out. Clair shook
her head. Her eyes told me plainly enough that she didn't want to die,
but that she'd rather die out here with me than otherwise.

Gramps looked like he would rather be sitting someplace comfortable
with his guitar, but he was trying to smile a little.

I crouched and wrote again, just three words:

    PLEASE GO. NOW.

I erased the line with my boots and I waited, then I turned around
for a long time and didn't look back at them. When I did, they were
two tiny figures on the twisted, broken landscape, walking toward the
second dome.

       *       *       *       *       *

For a while I waited, and then I swarmed all over my pinnacle again,
like George and Harry and anyone else who might have been around. They
could come and get me, of course, but I figured they wouldn't. Then
they might never find the weapon. That was their dilemma, not mine.
Mine was to do something along the lines of Gramps' war of nerves, and
do something good, before my air ran out.

I said, "Watch it, George. Take it easy. Don't you think the chief
ought to be around before you try anything?"

I climbed off the pinnacle so no one could see me. "Naw," I made George
say. "I know what I'm doing. F'r gosh sakes, what could happen? I got
the charts right here. I wanta hurry and get back to the wife in Canal
City. Some damn bus driver...." I'd make it sound like their own story,
and maybe they'd believe.

"Well, okay," my Harry said dubiously.

George sighed. "There. That does it. Now--watch."

Silence. I watched thirty seconds tick off on my suit clock, then I
made Harry scream:

"George! Good God, George.... Arrgh!"

I hoped the scream was a good one. Honest, it almost scared me. Poor
George and Harry: I had killed them off quick enough. Now I had to
invent new characters. For a brief moment I wondered what had happened
to Clair and Gramps, but then I pushed them out of my mind. I couldn't
afford to think of that now.

I let six minutes pass. It was agonizing, but I did it. Then I did my
best to invent two new voices.

"So, here's the spot, Mike. Funny, I don't see them."

Mike had a high, squeaky voice. "Hah-hah, don't worry, chief. They'll
be around."

"I don't find your humor amusing. So--Mike. Mike! Look...."

I let my voice trail off. If this wasn't so damned serious, it could
have been amusing. I was really living the part.

Mike said: "God, chief, both of 'em. Shrivelled up like that, burned to
a crisp. Chief--"

"What can you do? I told them not to play games with it until I came,
and they just didn't know how to work the damper. Fools, they could
have killed us all. Well, suppose we take care of those people in the
domes."

"You mean like this, chief?"

"Certainly, like this. No one asked them to butt in here."

       *       *       *       *       *

I didn't say anything else for a while. I could feel myself sweating
under the helmet, and momentarily, at least, I had run out of things to
say.

Someone else came to my rescue. For the first time, one of the other
party attempted direct intercom communication.

"Hey you out there," a voice said. "This is Reardon, in charge of this
outfit." He sounded afraid. "Lay off or we'll blast these two prisoners
I got...."

"You're telling me to lay off?" I demanded, trying to think of
something to say. "You're telling me to lay off? That's rich."

"What do you mean?" The voice was still frightened, and I began to feel
a little better. They had fallen for this so far all the way.

"What do I care what you do to those two? They're a couple of
homesteaders who happened to barge in here, an old man and a girl. Go
ahead, kill 'em. What's the difference, you'll follow in a couple of
minutes."

That got him. "Wait," he said. "Hold it, please."

I yawned, loud enough for the intercom to pick it up. I hoped I
wasn't overdoing it. "Mike," I drawled, "set that thing up so we can
finish the job and get out of here, eh? Now, be careful. Connect that
dampening rig like that, that's it. Careful. Just make sure the pole
fits into that hole real snug. There you are. You did it...."

"You _sure_ you wanta use this thing on them, chief?" I had Mike say.

"Why in hell not? Come on. Now!"

The voice over the intercom was almost a shriek. "Stop! For the love
of heaven please stop! Cut it out, please. Don't roast us. We give up!
We--"

I said, "Who cares if you give up or not? I just want to try out my
weapon. No one asked you to poke your nose in here like this. You hear
him, Mike? He gives up. That's funny."

Mike said, "It ain't so funny. If they give up, I say let 'em go. Hell,
they won't give you any more trouble, chief."

The frightened voice was pleading now. "Listen to him, friend. Go
ahead, listen. We give up, see? We're harmless. We'll go away.
Anything. The weapon's all yours...."

"Well--"

"Go ahead, chief," Mike said.

"Umm-m. Well, okay. Hey you guys! All of you get into one dome, fast,
and throw every gun you have outside. Your spacesuits, too. You'd
better, because I don't exactly trust you. I'm going to give you five
minutes and then I'm going to turn this thing on. Anyone has an ounce
of iron or steel on him, he'll be broiled."

       *       *       *       *       *

I waited, atop my pinnacle. I saw three figures running from the
direction of our original dome, heading for the other one. In a moment,
they disappeared over the close, jagged horizon. I said:

"That's about enough time, Mike. Turn it on."

I swaggered across the rubble-strewn asteroid. As I approached the
dome I began to feel nervous, but I didn't stop my swaggering. Outside
was a great pile of disintegrators, blasters, and heaters, plus a
dozen spacesuits, assorted knives, pens, pencils, coins, pots, pans,
flashlights, all sorts of tools--even a heap of leatheroid jumpers,
because someone must have realized the stitching was of steelite fibre,
which it was.

I picked up a couple of the heaters and tried the outer airlock door.
It swung in easily.

I stood inside the dome with my two heaters and the reaction set in.
I started to laugh. A dozen big strong men sat about, half naked and
afraid in their underwear, and over in a corner stood Gramps and Clair,
also down to their scanties.

The biggest of the twelve men said, "I'm Reardon. Thank you. Thank you,
sir...."

"Shut up," I told him. I waved my heater and he shut up.

"We've had to do it, too," Clair said, running into my arms, pulling
off my helmet and kissing me. I threw one of the heaters to Gramps,
and Clair was speaking again, "I almost laughed and spoiled the whole
thing, but Gramps and I took off our jumpers, too, to make it look
good. In fact, Gramps gave them the idea."

Good old Gramps....

       *       *       *       *       *

Gramps donned his spacesuit and so did Clair, and Reardon, still not
comprehending, mumbled his thanks. I explored the inside of the dome
thoroughly, making sure there were no hidden weapons. Then I stepped
through the lock with Clair and Gramps, and I closed the outer door. I
notched my heater to low intensity and fused the door and the dome into
one piece. They'd need a heater or a disintegrator to get out, and
they didn't have either.

Clair was smiling happily, now. But Gramps had a frown on his face.

"So what do we do with 'em?"

"Simple," I replied. "We wait for the government ship. It'll be here in
a few weeks. They're not going anywhere in the meantime."

Gramps continued to frown. "You think we oughta report what they was
lookin' for? The Ruskie weapon, I mean...."

I laughed. "That won't be necessary, Gramps. We'll do even better than
that. We'll tell them what the weapon is."

Clair looked at me dumbfounded and I found myself grinning at both her
and Gramps.

"Jerry! You can't be serious--we didn't really find the weapon!"

"We not only found it, we used it, hon," I told her. "I did some fast
thinking while I was up on the rocks before. In a way I was in the
same boat the Ruskies were when we beat them. I had to use desperate
means--anything I could, and mainly something that would start fear, a
panic...."

"But I don't see--" Clair was confused.

"The Ruskies had a powerful weapon, all right," I replied. "The only
trouble was they used it too late. Fortunately for us we still had
time--and our opponents weren't too bright mentally anyway. If they
had been it might not have worked. Matter of fact, that's the big
thing that licked the Ruskies. We were a bit too shrewd for them. Our
military leaders saw right through their weapon."

Gramps stamped his foot angrily. "Now look here, Jerry! Stop ramblin'
around like that! Just what weapon you talkin' about?"

"Propaganda, Gramps. Propaganda, the greatest weapon in the
universe--if used right. Now what do you say we get down to work and
mine some copper?"

We were all laughing as we made our way to the other dome.



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Old Way" ***

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