A Question of Salvage E-Book

Malcolm Jameson

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 78

Beschreibung

The salvage fleets had no place for a man with a conscience—but sometimes one showed up, and sometimes they left "junk" behind, when the ether storms were strong...

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

A QUESTION OF SALVAGE, by Malcolm Jameson

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

A QUESTION OF SALVAGE,by Malcolm Jameson

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2022 by Wildside Press LLC.

Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1939.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

INTRODUCTION

Malcolm Jameson (1891–1945) was an American science fiction author who based much of his work on his background as an officer in the U.S. Navy. Jameson’s first published fiction appeared in Astounding in 1938. He was active in American pulp magazines for only 7 years, but he helped set the standard for quality during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He wrote not just for John W. Campbell’s magazines, Astounding Science Fiction and Unknown Worlds, but also for magazines like Startling Stories and Weird Tales. His writing career began when complications from throat cancer limited his activity.

His stories of Solar System exploration about “Bullard of the Space Patrol” were posthumously collected in 1951 as a fixup novel and won the Boys Clubs of America Award. Reviewing that collection, critics Boucher and McComas praised Bullard as “the most successfully drawn series character in modern science fiction.” P. Schuyler Miller wrote that Jameson drew on his own naval experience to give the stories “a warm atmosphere of reality.”

Jameson’s story “Doubled and Redoubled” may be the earliest work of fiction to feature a time loop. And his story “Blind Alley” from Unknown was filmed as an episode of The Twilight Zone (retitled “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville”).

Alfred Bester described meeting Jameson in about 1939 this way: “Mort Weisinger introduced me to the informal luncheon gatherings of the working science fiction authors of the late thirties... Malcolm Jameson, author of navy-oriented space stories, was there, tall, gaunt, prematurely grey, speaking in slow, heavy tones. Now and then he brought along his pretty daughter, who turned everybody’s head.”

Had he lived another 20 years, the shape of the science fiction field might have been significantly different, with Jameson’s name up there with Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and van Vogt.

—John Betancourt

Cabin John, Maryland

CHAPTER 1

Sam Truman, mate and acting captain of the Kwasind, leaned back against the guard rail of the two-hundred-foot stage of the firing rack which cradled the ugly sphere of his powerful salvage tug. He was staring moodily at two of his black gang, clinging like flies to a pair of bulbous towing bitts sticking out of the hull above him. They had finished burnishing the rugged knobs and were now testing the connections of their heater units. Lower down, two monstrous electric cables led into the tug, through which the squat storm craft was sucking the huge stores of reserve energy she would be needing any moment. From beneath, far down where the nadirward nozzle of the main rocket tube threatened the seared and pitted slag of the dockyard, wisps of acrid smoke trailed. The tube was hot, white-hot. On ten seconds’ notice the Kwasind could soar into the void.

The shoosh of nearby spacecraft caused him to wheel. Ah, a hygiocopter. And another, and another—three of the red-banded ambulances of the ether taking off. There must be trouble in the space lanes already. Then, out of the clear Martian sky he saw the halting descent of a shiny superliner, saw the raw flare of its check rockets mushrooming, watched it settle unevenly onto the public skyport a mile away. The outward bound hygiocopters checked their swift rise, wheeled like circling gulls, and came back to follow the crippled liner to the plain.

“Sizzlin’ Syzygies!” came a voice from behind. “She’s all stove in. Must be dusty out to crinkle a packet like the Kop.”

Dumpy little Ben Tiggleman, engineer of the Kwasind, had come out of the bowels of the salvage tug and was gazing open-mouthed at the newly landed Copernicus. A de luxe job like that, with a dozen of the top-hattedest bigwigs of the System and no knowing how valuable a cargo, did not turn back after ten hours out of port for small reasons.

But the two salvage men could guess the reason. Last night the stars had trembled and danced. Refraction bad, the “seeing” not good, they would have said centuries before, but nowadays men knew better. That was why the Kwasind and her five husky sisters were being warmed up, standing by. Sam Truman raised his binoculars and studied the grounded liner.

Her crumpled nose and those sagging plates between each pair of frames spelled but one thing—terrific pressure. She must have banged into an etheric typhoon and hit close to the eye of it. Nothing else could have flattened down her screens and dished her in like that. And if the powerfully compensated “Pride of the Skies” had suffered so, it would be but a matter of hours until the ether would be flooded with SOS’s. Inter-Planetary Salvage’s tugs would all be out, combing the cosmic flotsam for prizes. The first vessel to slam a glimmering green hawser-beam on wreck or derelict walked away with half her value.

“Wonder why she didn’t squawk?” queried Ben. “We coulda gone—hours ago.”

“And have it go out over the Omnivox?” replied Sam with a hard laugh. “That would be bad for the passenger trade, scare off the cash customers. As far as landsmen go, this is still a hush-hush business. Weather in the void? Silly! You have to have an atmosphere for that. Remember what they taught you in school?”

A couple of IPS yard hands, loitering nearby, overheard and laughed.

“Well,” said Ben Tiggleman, his gaze wistfully lingering on fifty millions of potential salvage, “I hope we snag a good one before it’s over.”

Sam Truman knew what was in his mind. Four hours earlier Mrs. Ben had been rushed to the maternity ward of Herapolis General Hospital, leaving a flock of little Bens behind her in the hovel they called home. Like most salvage men in minor jobs, Ben was always broke. Worse, he was in the clutches of a loan shark. But he shook his head and grinned and started to duck back into the whirring recesses of his engine compartment.

“How are my sky hooks coming along?” Truman called after him.

“Oh! Four are loaded and on ice; and one is on the fire, soaking up the ergs. Boy! You’re sure packing power into those babies. I hope they work like you think, because it ain’t going to be any fun if one of ’em backfires.”

Sam Truman watched his engineer go, then returned to his moody contemplation of the Kwasind’s hull. She was ready to rise, all right, but he couldn’t take any joy in the thought. It was too much like the soaring of a buzzard in search of fresh carrion. He remembered the last big storm too well—crushed and helpless ships swirling in the maelstrom of turbulent ether, while these tugs cruised comfortably among them, picking and choosing only those that promised fat salvage fees. “We are not in business for charity,” was one of the mottoes of IPS. “Leave sentiment to the Space Guards—they get paid for it.”

Another man in his job would have been atingle with what was before him. The work was exciting, and on occasion could be very, very profitable. Yet to his mind, there was something ghoulish about it. Now that he was familiar with the policies of the company, he hated the salvage business with all his soul. For the dozenth time he was on the verge of stalking into the manager’s office and hurling his resignation into his fat, greedy face. Only, he reminded himself, today was not the day for it. He simply could not—it would look yellow. Moreover, it was futile. His quitting would not save a single one of the white-faced, praying passengers going to their doom because parsimonious ship owners refused to guarantee the minimum fee. A cargo of uranium ore was as good as cash in the salvager’s hand, but what could you get out of two score rescued humans, with any assurance, but gratitude?

After this blow, perhaps, he would quit. Then—But that “then” was the tough part of it. That was the real deterrent. What could a man—a kick-out from the Space Guard and blacklisted by the Ecliptic Line—what could he do next if he did?

If he chucked the job, there was nothing left—nothing. For to a young man steeped in the traditions of skycraft, a planet-bound job was no job at all. It wasn’t even living. He just couldn’t think of life without the joy and lift that comes of plunging into space with the controls of a thousand thunders under the fingertips. What surface job offered the thrill of hand-jetting across ten miles of bucking emptiness to make fast a line to an inert wreck? What about the grim satisfaction of licking a “low” with a cumbersome tow behind, surging and tearing at the hawser beam? No, he told himself dismally, he would have to hang on. And like it. At least until he could make a killing and buy a ship of his own.