“For ten years, in the old Liberty III, which was given him by the great Krinsky on that man’s death, Fitz Mallory cruised space, plotting the way, mapping routes, inventing means. The ‘Conroy Diary’ is truth told with a flare. What man would have believed it as fact? Who believed in space travel? From ample evidence received on the ground, I am prepared to attest that the majority of adventures which befell the mythical Conroy actually happened to Fitz Mallory.
“It rocks your wits, I know, to understand that this man is no clown. He carried forward a complete plan to credit space travel to everyone. He returned here from his last voyage, resolved to counter the usual rebuff. He countered it with the diary. You have all read it I am sure. It is true, gentlemen. True as sunlight! And the ledger I see open there on the floor must be a true ledger. The third item I know for a fact. I am afraid, Mr. Collector, that you have the wrong man.”
The collector was sputtering now. He finally managed: “But this is no rebuttal of my charges! What do I care—”
“Indeed, I am afraid it is,” said Fitz Mallory with a big grin. “That money was made out in the stars. All of it. It is exterior income for I am no resident, being an international citizen. Excuse me, Sir,” he said rising, “but when I sent out Sven, I had a mission to perform. I have used you harshly, I fear.”
“But the affidavit!” cried the collector. “The affidavit!”
“I wrote it,” said Sven. “And Fitz mailed it to you as a report on himself. We are only interested in one thing—space travel.”
“There’s a charge for that,” said the collector. And then, suddenly looking at Fitz, “Say, wait—you mean those Conroy tales are all true? You mean a man can have adventures like that out in space?”
“I am afraid so,” said Fitz. “It’s a rough life but a merry one. I am leaving soon on my next voyage. I could use a man like you.”
“Could you?” said the collector, pleased. “I’ll go!”
The papers ran it as it was played. There was a raging hurricane of argument throughout the world in the next few days. Fitz Mallory was discussed in half a hundred languages.
The world was laughing at itself. And it was laughing with Fitz Mallory, the god of a dozen habitable worlds, the owner of stars, the Crown Prince of Space.
He never wrote another book. He did not have to. He went away soon after to plot more routes.
They brought back his body some thirty-two years later. He had landed on one too many planets as all spacemen did sooner or later. They built him a big tomb and a famous sculptor made a statue of him with the most imperishable materials at hand.
Fitz Mallory still stands in gray obsidian, surrounded by flowers and offerings even today. His head is thrown back in a huge laugh and the legend on the base states:
Fitz Mallory. God of a Hundred Worlds.
He opened the Universe to Mankind.
The Planet Makers
The Planet Makers
DOYLE shook an outraged finger under the engineer’s nose. “McGee, do I have to remind you that this entire job is to be finished in the next thirty days and you have barely started in four months?”
“Sleepy” McGee sat where he was, heels cocked up on an explosives box, his soles toward the construction hut stove. He had a visograph planted on another box with a cleared space before it, and in his hands he held a pack of cards. Sleepy McGee, of Planetary Engineering Construction Co., Inc., almost never got excited. He did not get excited now.
“My contract,” cried Doyle, “calls for a bonus of a million dollars to your company for every day short of the promised time! But let me remind you that a penalty of one million dollars is to be paid to me for every day this job exceeds the specified time. Unless you quit this . . . this idle, supine—”
Doyle was fat. He was easily excited. His color was red and his cheeks were bellowing in and out.
“Mr. Doyle,” said Sleepy, “have a drink.”
Doyle’s blood pressure would have broken a gauge. He turned and slammed into the air lock and was gone out into the methane-ammonia atmosphere of Alpha Jetabo’s Planet Six.
Sleepy dealt the cards. He dealt them in such a way that they were visible to the visograph, all except his hole card, for this was stud poker. There is nothing peculiar in the playing of stud poker, but this game was with Mart Lonegan who happened to be on an engineering job of his own ninety-three light-years away. They had not seen each other for five years, face to face, but Mart owed Sleepy McGee nineteen-thousand-odd dollars to date.
Mart grinned on the visograph. “Was that Colonial Enterprises?”
“Yep,” said Sleepy. “What you bet?”
“One white. Hold up my hole card again and don’t look at it, you pirate, or I’ll— Make that two whites.”
Sleepy called and dealt the next cards.
“You’re no closer than he says?” said Mart.
“Nope.”
“Wheeew! That’s a big planet, too.”
“Ten thousand kilometers diameter,” said Sleepy. “Your queen bets.”
Barteber, the huge black cook, stirred stew over the camp range and stole an occasional peek when Sleepy raised his hole card. Barteber had been with Sleepy for nine years, one planet or another.
Mart Lonegan never found out that Barteber’s silent whistles of surprise or glum looks—which Mart could see beyond Sleepy—meant absolutely nothing and were in reality a solid part of Sleepy’s poker. Barteber would have given his right arm before he would have cost Sleepy a pot by betrayal, but Mart, being a trusting soul, did not know that.
Sleepy yawned. He was about six feet six and he had little weight to go with it, no matter his huge appetite. He drew fifty thousand dollars a year as a field engineer for Planetary Engineering Construction Co., Inc., and he dressed something worse than any one of his cat men. It was said of him in certain unsavory places in the universe that he could drink more liquor, play better poker, shoot with less compunction and yawn wider than any spaceman alive. That was exaggeration. He had met a man on Pilos who could play poker just as good.
The air lock whistled and slammed shut and Tommer Kaltenborn came into the construction shack, tugging off his helmet. Tommer was excited. He was a very young engineer, Tommer. He had come up as junior assistant to Planet Six as a replacement for a man who had carelessly tried to smoke inside his helmet, and Tommer recognized that he was having his chance and recognized, too, that he had ample opportunity to make it good.
No single school practice which Tommer had been taught was being followed on Planet Six. This was upsetting. It made his black hair stand up bristly straight and made his spectacle-rimmed eyes squint with disdain. If Sleepy McGee was an example of Planetary men, Tommer knew that one Kaltenborn would go far, very far.
“Number Eighteen cat’s been sabotaged,” said Tommer. “That’s the fifth example of tampering since we got here. You’ve got to come out. The link pins are gone on the right tread. That leaves us just five cats. How we’re to smooth down whole mountain ranges with five cats—”
Sleepy didn’t have to look up. He knew what Tommer looked like. He knew what the construction hut looked like. He said, “Hello, Tommer. Glad you came in. This visograph reception is bad. Very bad.” He yawned. “We got any spiderwork steel left?”
“Sir, that cat—”
“How much we got?”
“About ninety kilos.”
Sleepy squinted unseeing at his cards. “Hmmm. Well, run me up a twenty-thousand-foot tower outside here and put an aerial on it. And while you’re about it, you might as well put one up on the opposite side of this chunk of mud. Put in a relay.
”
“Sir, Number Eighteen cat—”
“Run it in a hole and shovel dirt on it,” said Sleepy. “Tell Maloney I want the towers done by daylight. When Mart deals, I can’t tell a spade from a club.”
Tommer glared. Resolutely, he put on his helmet, looked his contempt for a moment, and turned back into the air lock.
Barteber sniggered and Sleepy called the poker hand. Mart was found to be trying to make two jacks look like three.
Reception was really bad now and Sleepy knocked off the game. He got up, poured himself a neat slug of Old Space Ranger, handed the bottle to Barteber who, truth told, liked vanilla extract better, and got himself into a suit.
“That Mister Tommer, he want your job purty bad,” said Barteber.
“He can have it,” said Sleepy.
“And that Mister Doyle, he just plain froths. I never hear such a bloodthirsty man. You look out, Mister Sleepy.”
“They aren’t so dangerous.”
“Well, just the same, I got a couple voodoo charms and a wax figger,” said Barteber, and made a vicious attack on the stew.
Sleepy went out into the twilight of Alpha Jetabo’s Planet Six. The place would be named New Eden when Colonial Enterprises took it over. They had it on lease from the Tronmane Confederacy. Sleepy looked at the distant mountain range, all rock and corners, and sighed. Certainly it was true that they had not made much progress in the four months they had been here. The one valley was about completed, which left a few billion square kilometers untended. It also left water and soil and air.
The planet was smaller than Earth but had a similar gravity. It would be a mono-season job, with an equatorial temperature of about ninety average. Its year was about one and a half Earth’s, and outside of the blue character of Jetabo’s Planet Six would not look too bad when it was finished.
They were burying the cat as ordered and an inertia ship was taking off with a cargo of spider steel to erect the opposite pole tower. Tommer was standing on a pile of new rock looking at a blueprint.
It was a pretty blueprint, being a Mercator with seas and rivers designated by flamboyant names. It was the prospectus blueprint of the Colonial Enterprises advertising division, and while it sold plenty of property it was not a very good guide for engineering.
However, that was nothing to Tommer. The job was contracted to be this way, and this way it would be. A contractor’s first duty was to his builder.
Sleepy looked at the blueprint. “Honeymoon Bay,” he said, pointing. This amused him. “Bide-a-wee Valley. They always get dopey ideas like this, kid. Don’t take it so much to heart.”
Tommer glared through lenses and helmet, and said, “We haven’t even begun to construct these things. If we had been more on the job we would have found the saboteur and we would still have what equipment we need. A thousand kilos of powder blown up, twenty million feet of cable ruined, and now most of our cats out of commission. We’ll never finish. This will bankrupt the company!”
“Well, kid,” said Sleepy, “if you go on worrying like that you’ll get ulcers. And when you have ulcers you can’t drink. And when you can’t drink you can’t stand places like Planet Six, and there goes your career. Come over here and get somebody to drill me some holes.”
They had the tower up, well pinned into the native rock, in about two hours. Sleepy looked admiringly up at this giddy spire into the methane clouds.
“I guess that’ll do it,” he said. “That reception was getting so darned bad that Mart won five pots today. When they get the other one—”
Maloney, straw boss of the dirt gangs, interrupted him. “You mean we been puttin’ this thing up just so you could play poker with that crazy Lonegan?”
Sleepy yawned and smiled. “Well, Maloney, when you get as old as I am—”
“I’m five times older than you and you know it! Somebody just hooked every fuse we’ve got. Unless you can invent one, we ain’t got a single detonator in camp. Who the devil is doin’ this? By golly, if I get my mitts—”
“Now, now,” said Sleepy. “We’ll invent something. It’d be two months before we could get a new order of anything up here.”
“Two months!” cried Doyle, who had toiled perspiringly toward them over the rubble which had been a mountain range. “Two months! I’ll have colonists here in thirty days! McGee, I insist we line up these men and interrogate them one by one. There’s somebody in this camp who doesn’t want this planet completed!”
“You interrogate one by one,” said Sleepy, “and they’ll quit two by two. These men are loyal. You’ll have to find something else. Maybe a methane-metabolism goon or a lost race. You let me do the worrying, Doyle.”
“But you aren’t worrying!” cried Doyle. “I have to think of my company’s reputation. Do you have any idea how much money is being tied up here?”
“Well,” said Sleepy, considering, “if you figure this planet at a billion arable acres and the acres at two dollars apiece, I got some idea.”
“But they’re not arable yet!” cried Doyle.
And he swept a despairing hand across the twilight vista. Truly, it was an ugly sight. In the shrinkings and contortings of a new-made world, vast escarpments had been heaved up. In the bluish, ghastly light, the raw, soilless, plantless valleys and mountains were nightmare stuff.
“You’ll never finish!” cried Doyle.
Sleepy shrugged. He turned around and went back into the construction shack and threw his helmet down.
Tommer went into the communications dome and sent a long, telltale message to Planetary Engineering Construction Co., Inc. Doyle, shortly afterward, poured a flood of grief into the ether on his own.
At eight-seventeen there was a loud flash and men poured from their quarters to find that the cable shed was a shambles with not one foot of their remaining cable in usable condition. They poked in the ruins and went to report to Sleepy. But he was snoring in his bunk and Barteber would not let him be disturbed.
In the morning, Sleepy McGee shoveled in twenty hot cakes, washed them down with a quart of milk, chased it with a brandy and was ready to face the day.
He found Maloney and Tommer sitting disconsolate on a pile of demolished scenery and pulled them into his wake. He found half a dozen welders and drew them some drawings on a piece of sheet metal and sent them on their business.
“I heard footsteps walking around last night,” said Doyle, coming up.
“Footsteps most always do,” said Sleepy.
“Are you trying to be nasty?”
Doyle, for all his fat, was a big man. Sleepy looked him over.
“Now that I come to think of it, yes,” Sleepy answered finally. “We’ve been having a lot of hard luck on this job. Some rival of yours, or ours, has slowed us down to a walk. You haven’t made things any easier.”
“I don’t sit around all day and play poker and drink liquor!” Doyle snapped.
“I’m not dumb and I don’t have dirty fingernails,” said Sleepy.
“Are you being insulting?”
“I never mix words,” said Sleepy. “I am being insulting. In a brief four-letter word—”
Doyle struck at him. It is very difficult to work or fight in a methane-ammonia suit, but the blow staggered Sleepy. He went down on one knee and stayed there, with the eye of every construction man upon him. Languidly he got to his feet.
Suddenly he grabbed Doyle, avoided a second blow, and pitched the Colonial man about ten feet. Doyle hit, and he started to get up, but Sleepy’s boot sent him down again. Doyle tried to rise a second time. Sleepy let him get all the way to his feet and then, with a short one to the midriff, knocked him gasping.
“I’ll get you for this!” Doyle wheezed. “I’ll report you!”
“Not on my visograph!”
“I’ll . . . I??
?ll return to your company! This will cost you millions, do you hear?”
And Doyle got up and ran to the Colonial Enterprises ship in the valley. Sleepy watched him go, watched the ship take off, watched the weird glow of the wake after it was gone.
“He’ll make a lot of trouble,” said Tommer.
“Kid, I was born out of Calamity by Trouble. Any engineer is. Maloney, put a strong seal on Mr. Doyle’s hut and don’t let anybody disturb it. We wouldn’t want to be accused of stealing his clothes.”
“He’ll be back here in a month,” said Tommer. “That ship isn’t any freighter. And he may bring in the Space Police for assault.” He looked at Sleepy. Brawling—it was uncouth, ungentlemanly.
“Be that as he will,” said Sleepy. “Let’s go to work.”
The mystified welders were putting hulls under the huts and it took them a long time to understand that Sleepy wasn’t entirely crazy. Every now and then one of them would come into the construction shack, see Sleepy playing poker, open his mouth to speak, remember Doyle and back out.
They passed two nights of double-shift construction, with guards posted against sabotage, and then Sleepy condescended to come out and inspect what Tommer had been overseeing.
Twelve huts were all on sledges, as though to be dragged away. The men, glad that the work was done, dragged themselves into their bunks and slept. Sleepy sent for the atomic electrician, a driller and a shooter.
They put a few tools into a thousand-mile-an-hour ground-scanner and disappeared in a cloud of country rock, leaving a worried Tommer to sit and twiddle his thumbs and wait for the message he thought would come from Planetary, relieving Sleepy.
For five days Sleepy and the three men were “whereabouts unknown,” and then they returned, tired, hungry and dirty, parked the scanner and turned in.
The following morning Sleepy got up around about eleven, yawning and stretching and making jokes with Barteber. Tommer was all disapproval.
“Where did you go?” said Tommer.