Equation of Doom

This story was published in Amazing Stories, February 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

[p 8]
They grounded Ramsey’s ship on a hostile planet hoping he would starve to death, so the first thing he did was give most of his money away and lose the rest gambling. Then he picked a fight with the Chief of Police and joined forces with a half-naked dream-chick who was seemingly bent on self-destruction. The stakes were big—a planet or two—but it all added up to an——

Equation

of Doom

By GERALD VANCE

“Your name ith Jathon Ramthey?” the Port Security Officer lisped politely.

Jason Ramsey, who wore the uniform of Interstellar Transfer Service and was the only Earthman in the Service here on Irwadi, smiled and said: “Take three guesses. You know darn well I’m Ramsey.” He was a big man even by Earth standards, which meant he towered over the Irwadian’s green, scaly head. He was fair of skin and had hair the color of copper. It was rumored on Irwadi and elsewhere that he couldn’t return to Earth because of some crime he had committed.

“Alwayth the chip on the shoulder,” the Port Security Officer said. “Won’t you Earthmen ever learn?” The splay-tongued reptile-humanoids of Irwadi always spoke Interstellar Coine with a pronounced lisp which Ramsey found annoying, especially since it went so well with the officious and underhanded behavior for which the Irwadians were famous the galaxy over.

“Get to the point,” Ramsey said harshly. “I have a ship to take through hyper-space.”

“No. You have no ship.”

“No? Then what’s this?” His irritation mounting, Ramsey pulled out the Interstellar Transfer Service authorization form and showed it to the Security Officer. “A tip-sheet for the weightless races at Fomalhaut VI?”

The Security Officer said: “Ha, ha, ha.” He could not laugh; he merely uttered the phonetic equivalent of [p 9] laughter. On harsh Irwadi, laughter would have been a cultural anomaly. “You make joketh. Well, nevertheleth, you have no ship.” He expanded his scaly green barrel chest and declaimed: “At 0400 hours thith morning, the government of Irwadi hath planetarithed the Irwadi Tranthfer Thervith.”

“Planetarized the Transfer Service!” gasped Ramsey in surprise. He knew the Irwadians had been contemplating the move in theory for many years, but he also knew that transferring a starship from normal space through hyper-space back to normal space again was a tremendously difficult and technical task. He doubted if half a dozen Irwadians had mastered it, yet the Irwadi branch of Interstellar Transfer Service was made up of seventy-five hyper-space pilots of divers planetalities.

“Ecthactly,” said the Security Officer, as amused as an Irwadian could be by the amazement in Ramsey’s frank green eyes. “Tho if you will kindly thurrender your permit?”

“Let’s see it in writing, huh?”

The Security Officer complied. Ramsey read the official document, scowled, and handed over his Irwadi pilot license. “What about the Polaris?” he wanted to know. The Polaris was a Centaurian ship he’d been scheduled to take through hyper-space on the run from Irwadi to Centauri III.

“Temporarily grounded, captain. Or should I thay, ecth-captain?”

“Temporarily my foot,” said Ramsey. “It’ll be months before you Irwadians can get even a fraction of the ships into hyper. You must be out of your minds.”

“Our problem, captain. Not yourth.”

That was true enough. Ramsey shrugged.

“Your problem,” the Security Officer went on blandly, “will be to find a meanth of thelf-thupport until you and all other ecthra-planetarieth can be removed from Irwadi. We owe you ecthra-planetarieth nothing. Ethpect no charity from uth.”

Ramsey shrugged. Like all extra-planetaries on a bleak, friendless world like Irwadi, he’d regularly gambled away and drank away his monthly paycheck in the interstellar settlement which the Irwadians had established in the Old Quarter of Irwadi City. But last month he’d managed [p 10] to come out even at the gaming tables, so he had a few hundred credits to his name. That would be enough, he told himself, to tide him over until Interstellar Transfer Service came to the rescue of its stranded pilots.

Ramsey went up the gangway and got his gear from the Polaris. When he returned down the gangway, the late afternoon wind was blowing across the spacefield tarmac, a wet, bone-chilling wind which only the reptile-humanoid Irwadians didn’t seem to mind.

Ramsey fastened the toggles of his cold-weather cape, put his head down and hunched his shoulders, and walked into the teeth of the wind. He did not look back at the Polaris, marooned indefinitely on Irwadi despite anything the Centaurian owners or anyone else for that matter could do about it.

The Irwadi Security Officer, whose name was Chind Ramar, walked up the gangway and ordered the ship’s Centaurian first officer to assemble his crew and passengers. Chind Ramar allowed himself the rare luxury of a fleeting smile. He could imagine this scene being duplicated on fifty ships here on his native planet today, fifty outworld ships which had no business at all on Irwadi. Of course, Irwadi was an important planet-of-call in the Galactic Federation because the vital metal titanium was found as abundantly in Irwadian soil as aluminum is found in the soil of an Earth-style planet. Titanium, in alloy with steel and manganese, was the only element which could withstand the tremendous heat generated in the drive-chambers of interstellar ships during transfer. In the future, Chind Ramar told himself with a kind of cold pride, only Irwadian pilots, piloting Irwadian ships through hyper-space, would bring titanium to the waiting galaxy. At Irwadi prices.

With great relish, Chind Ramar announced the facts of planetarization and told the Centaurians and their passengers that they would be stranded for an indefinite period on Irwadi. Amazement, anger, bluster, debate, and finally resignation—the reactions were the expected ones, in the expected order. It was easy, Chind Ramar thought, with all but the interstellar soldiers of fortune like Jason Ramsey. Ramsey, of course, would need watching. As for these others….

[p 11]
One of the others, an Earthgirl whose beauty was entirely missed by Chind Ramar, left the Polaris in a hurry. She either had no luggage or left her luggage aboard. Jason Ramsey, she thought. She had read Chind Ramar’s mind; a feat growing less rare although by no means common yet among the offspring of those who had spent a great deal of time bombarded by cosmic radiation between the stars. She hurried through the chilling wind toward the Old Quarter of Irwadi City. Panic, she thought. You’ve got to avoid panic. If you panic, you’re finished….

“So that’s about the size of it,” Ramsey finished.

Stu Englander nodded. Like Ramsey he was a hyper-space pilot, but although he had an Earth-style name and had been born of Earth parents, he was not an Earthman. He had been born on Capella VII, and had spent most of his life on that tropical planet. The result was not an uncommon one for outworlders who spent any amount of time on Irwadi: Stu Englander had a nagging bronchial condition which had kept him off the pilot-bridge for some months now.

Englander nodded again, dourly. He was a short, very slender man a few years older than Ramsey, who was thirty-one. He said: “That ties it. And I mean ties it, brother. You’re looking at the brokest Capellan-earthman who ever got himself stuck on an outworld.”

“You mean it?”

“Dead broke, Jase.”

“What about Sally and the kids?”

Englander had an Arcturan-earthian wife and twin boys four years old. “I don’t know what about Sally and the kids,” he told Ramsey glumly. “I guess I’ll go over to the New Quarter and try to get some kind of a job.”

“They wouldn’t hire an outworlder to shine their shoes with his own spit, Stu. They have got the planetarization bug, and they’ve got it bad.”

Sally Englander called from the kitchen of the small flat: “Will Jase be staying for supper?”

Englander stared at Ramsey, who shook his head. “Not today, Sally,” Englander said, looking at Ramsey gratefully.

“Listen,” Ramsey lied, “I’ve been lucky as all get out the last couple of months.”

“You old pro!” grinned Englander.

“So I’ve got a few hundred [p 12] credits just burning a hole in my pocket,” Ramsey went on. “How’s about taking them?”

“But I haven’t the slightest idea when I could pay back.”

“I didn’t say anything about paying me back.”

“I couldn’t accept charity, Jase.”

“O.K. Pay me back when you get a chance. There are plenty of hyper-space jobs waiting for us all over the galaxy, you know that.”

“Yeah, all we have to do is get off Irwadi and go after them. But the Irwadians are keeping us right here.”

“Sure, but it won’t last. Not when the folks back in Capella and Deneb and Sol System hear about it.”

“Six months,” said Englander bleakly. “It’ll take at least that long.”

“Six months I can wait. What d’you say?”

Englander coughed wrackingly, his eyes watering. He got off the bed and shook Ramsey’s hand solemnly. Ramsey gave him three hundred and seventy-five credits and said: “Just see you make that go a long way supporting Sally and the kids. I don’t want to see you dropping any of it at the gaming tables. I’ll knock your block off if I see you there.”

“I’ll knock my own block off if I see me there. Jase, I don’t know how to thank—”

“Don’t is right. Forget it.”

“Do you have enough—”

“Me? Plenty. Don’t worry about old Jase.” Ramsey went to the door. “Well, see you.”

Englander walked quickly to him and shook his hand again. On the way out, Ramsey played for a moment or two with the twins, who were rolling a couple of toy spaceships marked hyper-one and hyper-two across the floor and making anachronistic machine-gun noises with their lips. Sally Englander, a plump, young-home-maker type, beamed at Ramsey from the kitchen. Then he went out into the gathering dusk.

As usual on Irwadi, and particularly with the coming of night, it was bitterly cold. Sucker, Ramsey told himself. But he grinned. He felt good about what he’d done. With Stu sick, and with Sally and the kids, he’d done the only thing he could do. He still had almost twenty-five credits left. Maybe he really would have a lucky night at the tables. Maybe … heck, he’d been down-and-out before. A fugitive from Earth didn’t have much choice sometimes….

[p 13]
“Red sixteen,” the croupier said indifferently. He was a short, heavy-set Sirian with a shock of scarlet hair, albino skin, and red eyes.

Ramsey watched his money being raked across the table. It wasn’t his night, he told himself with a grim smile. He had only three credits left. If he risked them now, there wouldn’t even be the temporary physical relief and release of a bottle of Irwadian brandy before hitting the sack.

Which was another thing, Ramsey thought. Hitting the sack. Ah yes, you filthy outworlder capitalist, hitting the sack. You owe that fish-eyed, scale-skinned Irwadian landlady the rent money, so you’d better wait until later, until much later, before sneaking back to your room.

He watched the gambling for another hour or so without risking his few remaining credits. After a while a well-dressed Irwadian, drunk and obviously slumming here in the Old Quarter, made his way over to the table. His body scales were a glossy dark green and he wore glittering, be-jeweled straps across his chest and an equally glittering, be-jeweled weapons belt. Aside from these, in the approved Irwadian fashion, he was quite naked. An anthropologist friend had once told Ramsey that once the Irwadians had worn clothing, but since the coming in great number of the outworlders they had stripped down, as though to prove how tough they were in being able to withstand the freezing climate of their native world. Actually, the Irwadian body-scales were superb insulation, whether from heat or from cold.

“… Earthman watching me,” the Irwadian in the be-jeweled straps said arrogantly, placing a fat roll of credits on the table.

“I’m sorry,” Ramsey said. “Were you talking to me?”

“I thertainly wath,” lisped the Irwadian, his eyes blazing with drunken hatred. “I thaid I won’t have any Earthman thnooping over my thoulder while I gamble, not unleth he’th gambling too.”

“Better tell that to your Security Police,” Ramsey said coldly but not angrily. “I’m out of a job, so I don’t have money to throw around. Go ahead and tell me—” with a little smile—“you think it was my idea.”

The Irwadian looked up haughtily. Evidently he was looking for trouble, or could [p 14] not hold his liquor, or both. The frenzy of planetarization, Ramsey knew from bitter experience on other worlds, made irrational behavior like this typical. He studied the drunken Irwadian carefully. In all the time he’d spent on Irwadi, he’d never been able to tell a native’s age by his green, scale-skinned, fish-eyed poker-face. But the glossy green scales covering face and body told Ramsey, along with the sturdy muscles revealed by the lack of clothing, that the Irwadian was in his prime, shorter than Ramsey by far, but wider across the shoulders and thicker through the barrel chest.

“You outworlderth have been deprething the thandard of living on Irwadi ever thince you came here,” the Irwadian said. “All you ever brought wath poverty and your ditheath germth and more trouble than you could handle. I don’t want your thtink near me. I’m trying to enjoy mythelf. Get out of here.”

It was abruptly silent in the little gambling hall. Since the establishment catered to outworlders and was full of them, the silence, Ramsey thought, should have been both ominous and in his favor. He looked around. Outworlders, yes. But not another Earthman present. He wondered if he was in for a fight. He shrugged, hardly caring. Maybe a fight was just what he needed, the way he felt.

“Get out of here,” the Irwadian repeated. “You thtink.”

Just then a Vegan girl, blue-skinned and fantastically wasp-waisted like all her kind, drifted over to Ramsey. He’d seen her around. He thought he recognized her. Maybe he’d even danced with her in the unit-a-dance halls reserved for humanoid outworlders.

“Are you nuts?” she said, hissing the words through her teeth and grabbing Ramsey’s elbow. “Don’t you know who that guy is?”

“No. Who?”

“He’s Garr Symm, that’s who.”

Ramsey smiled at her without mirth. “Do I bow down in awe or run from here screaming? I never heard of Garr Symm.”

“Oh you fool!” she whispered furiously. “Garr Symm is the brand new number one man of the Irwadi Security Police. Don’t you read the ’casts?”

Before Ramsey could answer or adjust to his surprise, the Irwadian repeated:

[p 15]
“I’m telling you for the third time. Get out.”

Ostentatiously, Ramsey reached into his cloak-pocket for a single credit bill and tossed it on the table.

“The denomination is not sufficient, sir,” the albino Sirian croupier said indifferently. Ramsey had known it was not.

Garr Symm’s face turned a darker green. The Vegan girl retreated from Ramsey’s side in fright. Symm raised his hand and an Irwadian waiter brought over a drink in a purple stem glass with a filigree pattern of titanium, bowing obsequiously. Symm lurched with the glass toward Ramsey. “I’m telling you to go,” he said in a loud voice.

Ramsey picked up his credit note but stood there. With a little sigh of drunken contentment, Garr Symm sloshed the contents of his stem glass in Ramsey’s face.

The liquor stung Ramsey’s eyes. Many of the other outworlders, neither Irwadian nor Earthmen, laughed nervously.

Ramsey wiped his eyes but otherwise did not move. He was in a rough spot and he knew it. The fact that their new Security Chief went out drunk at night with a chip on his shoulder was the Irwadian government’s affair, not Ramsey’s. He’d been insulted before. An Earthman in the outworlds, particularly an Earthman fugitive who knew he dared not get into the kind of trouble that could bring the Earth consul to investigate, was used to insults. For Earth was the leading economic and military power of the galaxy, and the fact that Earth really tried to deal fairly with its galactic neighbors meant nothing. Earth, being top dog, was resented.

The thing which got Ramsey, though, was this Garr Symm. He had never heard of Garr Symm, and he thought he knew most of the big shots in the Irwadian Security Police by name. But there must have been a reason for his appointment. A government throwing off outworld influence had a reason for everything. So, why Garr Symm?

“You, Mith Vegan!” Garr Symm called suddenly. “You whithpered to the Earthman. What did you tell him?”

“Not to look for trouble,” the Vegan girl said in a frightened voice.

“But what elth?”

“Honest, that’s all.”

“Come here, pleath.”

Her blue skin all at once very pale, the Vegan girl [p 16] walked back toward Garr Symm. He leered at her quite drunkenly and took hold of her slender arm. “What did you tell him? For the latht time.”

The girl whimpered: “You are hurting my arm.”

Thoughts raced through Ramsey’s mind. As an administrator, as an Irwadian public servant in a touchy job, Garr Symm, a drunkard, was obviously grossly incompetent. What other qualifications did he have which gave him the top Irwadian Security job? Ramsey didn’t know. He sighed. The Vegan girl’s mouth formed a rictus of pain. Ramsey had a hunch he was going to find out.

He said curtly: “Let go of her, Symm. She told me nothing that would interest you.”

Garr Symm ignored him. The blue-skinned girl cried.

Ramsey grimaced and hit Garr Symm in the belly as hard as he could.

Symm thudded back against the table. It overturned with a crash and the Security Chief crashed down on top of it. There wasn’t a sound in the gambling hall except Ramsey’s sudden hard breathing, the Vegan girl’s sniffling, and Garr Symm’s noisy attempts to get air into his lungs. Then Garr Symm gagged and was sick. He writhed in pain, still unable to breathe. His hands fluttered near his weapons belt.

“Come on,” Ramsey told the Vegan girl. “We’d better get out of here.” He took her arm. Dumbly she went with him. None of the outworlders there tried to stop them. Ramsey looked back at Garr Symm. The Irwadian was shaking his fist. He had finally managed to draw his m.g. gun, but the crowd of outworlders closed between them and there was no chance he could hit Ramsey or the girl. Retching, he had dirtied the glossy green scales of his chest.

“I’ll get you,” he vowed. “I’ll get you.”

Ramsey took the girl outside. It was very cold. “I’m so afraid,” she said. “What will I do? What can I do?” She shook with fear.

“You got a place to sleep?”

“Y-yes, but I’m the only Vegan girl in Irwadi City. He’ll find me. He’ll find me when he’s ready.”

“O.K. Then come home with me.”

“I—”

“For crying out loud, I don’t look that lecherous, do I? We can’t just stand here.”

[p 17]
“I—I’m sorry. I’ll go with you of course.”

Ramsey took her hand again and they ran. The cold black Irwadian night swallowed them.

“So you live in the Old Quarter too,” the Vegan girl said.

“Heck yeah. Did you expect a palace?”

Ramsey had a room, rent one Irwadi month in arrears, in a cold-water tenement near the river which demarked the Old and the New Quarters. The faÇade of the old building was dark now. His landlady was probably asleep, although you never could tell with that old witch. Ramsey knew it wouldn’t be the first time she stayed up through half the night to await a delinquent tenant.

“I—I never went to a man’s room before,” the blue-skinned Vegan girl said. She was rather pretty in a slender, muscleless, big-eyed, female-helpless mode.

“You’re a dance-hall girl, aren’t you?”

“Still, I never spent the night in a man’s—”

“What’s the matter with you? You think we’re going to spend the night here? Somebody over at those gaming tables will be able to identify me. Garr Symm’ll be on his way before long.”

“Then what are we going to do?” The girl was shivering with cold.

“Hide,” Jason Ramsey said. “Somewhere. I just came back to get my things. There isn’t much, but there’s an old m.g. gun which we might need.”

“But they’ll find us, and—”

“You coming upstairs or will you wait out here and freeze to death in the cold?”

“I’m coming.”

They went upstairs together, on tip-toe. Ramsey’s room was on the third floor, with a besooted view of the industrial complex on the river by day. The narrow hall was dark and silent. Behind one of the closed doors an outworlder cried out in his sleep. Ramsey had to cup a hand over the Vegan girl’s mouth so she wouldn’t scream in empathic fear. He opened the door of his room, surprised that it was not locked. He thought he had left it locked.

At once he was wary. It was dark in the hall, just as dark in the room. He could see nothing. The door hinges squeaked.

“Come in, Captain Ramsey,” a voice said. “I thought you would never get here.”

He stood on the threshold, [p 18] uncertain. The voice had spoken not Interstellar Coine, but English. It had spoken English, without a foreign accent.

And it was a girl’s voice.

Still, it could have been an elaborate trick. It was unlikely, but not impossible, that Garr Symm had learned Ramsey’s identity already and had sent an operative here to await him. Ramsey and the Vegan girl had come on foot. It was a long walk.

“I’m armed,” Ramsey lied. “Come over here. Slowly. Don’t put any lights on.” He could feel the Vegan girl trembling next to him. Not able to understand English, she didn’t know what was going on.

“You’re armed,” the unseen girl’s voice said in crisp, amused English, “like I’m a six-legged Antarean spider-man. You have an m.g. gun, Ramsey. It’s in this room. I have it. That’s all you have. No, don’t try to lie to me. I’m a telepath. I can read you. Come in and put the light on and shut the door. You may bring the girl with you if you want. Brother, is she ever radiating fear! It’s practically drowning your own mind out.”

The unseen girl wasn’t kidding, Ramsey knew. She could read minds. She had proved it to him. Which left him this choice: he could grab the Vegan girl’s arm again and get the heck out of there, or do what the unseen Earth girl told him to do. He wanted that m.g. gun. He took the Vegan girl’s hand and advanced over the threshold and closed the door and switched on the light.

The girl was sitting on the bed. She was an Earthgirl, all right. She had come in a toggle-cloak of green Irwadian fur, which was folded neatly at her side on the bed. Under it she wore a daring net halter of the type then fashionable on Earth but which had not yet taken over the outworlds. It left her shoulders bare and exposed a great deal of smooth, tawny skin through the net. Her firm breasts were cupped in two solid cones of black growing out of the net. Her midriff was bare to an inch or two below the navel. Her loins were covered by an abrevitog which formed a triangle in front and, Ramsey knew, would form one in back. Her long, well-formed legs were bare down to the mid-calf boots she wore. She had a beautiful body and had dressed so Ramsey couldn’t miss [p 19] it. Her face was so provocatively beautiful that Ramsey just stood there staring at it—after he had taken in the rest of her. She wore her hair quite long. She seemed perfectly composed. In her right hand she held Ramsey’s m.g. gun, but she wasn’t pointing it at them.

She looked at the timid Vegan girl and smiled. “Oh, I am sorry, Captain Ramsey,” she said. “I couldn’t know, of course, you’d be coming home with—company.”

“It isn’t what you think it is,” Ramsey said, surprised to find himself on the defensive. “The girl’s in trouble. So’m I.”

The Earthgirl laughed. “Already? You looked the type, but I thought it would take a little time.”

“What do you want?” Ramsey said. They were speaking in English. The Vegan girl tugged at Ramsey’s arm. She wanted to get out of there and hoped Ramsey would go with her. Abruptly the Earthgirl burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Ramsey demanded.

“Your little Vegan friend. I read her mind, Ramsey. She thinks I’m your wife. She thinks I’m mad at you for bringing her home.”

“Then why don’t you talk in Coine,” Ramsey said in the interstellar language, “and make her feel better? She might as well know I never saw you before in my life.” He was annoyed.

The Vegan girl smiled timidly, taking hope.

“But you did,” the beautiful Earthgirl said. “I was on the Polaris today, Captain. You were to be the pilot, until Interstellar Transfer here on Irwadi was planetarized.”

“I didn’t see you. Dressed like that I wouldn’t have forgotten you.”

“I wasn’t dressed like this.” The girl smiled, very sure of herself. “I read your mind when you came in. The costume’s had the desired effect, I see. But you needn’t broadcast your animal desires so blatantly.”

“Nobody asked you to read my mind. Besides, you needn’t broadcast your physical assets so blatantly.”

“TouchÉ,” said the Earthgirl.

“Listen,” Ramsey began. “We’re in a jam. We’re in a hurry.”

“So you told me. I couldn’t have wished for more. It looks like I didn’t need this costume and its obvious inducements at all, if you’re really in a jam.”

[p 20]
“What the devil is that supposed to mean?”

“My name is Margot Dennison, Captain Ramsey. I have managed to buy an old starship, small and held together by spit and string and whatever the Irwadians use for prayer—”

“They’re atheists,” Ramsey said a little pointlessly. It was the girl. Darn her hide, she was beautiful! What did she expect? Looking at her, how could a man concentrate…. “Hey!” Ramsey blurted suddenly. “Did you say Margot Dennison? The tri-di star?”

Margot Dennison smiled. “That’s right,” she said. “Stranded five hundred light years from nowhere, Captain Ramsey. With a ship. With money. In need of a hyper-space pilot. That’s why I’m here, or didn’t you guess?”

“I’m listening.”

“Isn’t it clear? I’ll pay you to take me away from here.”

“Where to?”

“Through hyper-space to Earth. Well?”

“I’ve been grounded. If I take you through hyper-space, I lose my license.”

“You really don’t believe that, do you? After the Irwadians grounded all of you without warning, and grounded all ships until they can train a few more pilots. You don’t really think I.T.S. would take your license away if you took a ship up and through hyper, do you? Under the circumstances? Especially since you’re in a jam with a totalitarian government gone wild? Do you?”

Ramsey said abruptly: “I’m sorry. I can’t take you to Sol System.”

Margot Dennison smiled. It wasn’t the kind of smile designed to make a man roll over on his back and wave all fours in the breeze. Margot Dennison didn’t need that kind of smile.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I read your mind, you see. Very well, Captain. If you’re a fugitive from Earth—I assume Ramsey isn’t your real name, by the way—you may take me through hyper to Centauri. That will be quite satisfactory. I will make my way from Centauri. Well?”

“Give me the gun,” Ramsey said.

“My goodness, of course. I’m not trying to hold you up. Here.” She got up from the bed for the first time and walked toward them. She had firm, long legs, and used them well. She was utterly lovely and although part of it was probably her professional know-how, she made you [p 21] forget that. She was the most attractive girl, Earth or outworld, Ramsey had seen in years.

Ramsey took the gun. Their hands met. Ramsey leaned forward quickly and kissed her on the lips. He was still holding the Vegan girl’s slender arm, though. She tried to run away but couldn’t. Margot Dennison returned the kiss for an instant, to show Ramsey that when she really wanted to return it, if she ever really would, she would pack the same kind of libidinal vitality in her responses as she did in her appearance; then she stood coldly, no longer responsive, until Ramsey stepped back.

“Maybe I was asking for it,” she said. “I was prepared for that—and more. But it isn’t necessary now, is it? My gosh, Ramsey! Will you please close that mind of yours? You make a girl blush.”

“Then put on your cloak,” Ramsey said, and, really blushing this time, she did so.

She said: “I’m prepared to pay you one thousand credits; what do you say?”

“I say it must be a pretty important appointment you have on Centauri.”

“Earth, Captain Ramsey. I’m settling for Centauri. Well?”

“I’ll take you,” Ramsey said, “if this girl comes too.”

Margot Dennison looked at the frightened Vegan girl and smiled. “So it’s like that,” she said.

“It isn’t like anything.”

Ramsey packed a few things in an expanduffle and the three of them hurried through the doorway and down stairs. The cold dark night awaiting them with a fierce howling wind and the first flurries of snow from the north.

“Where to?” Ramsey hollered above the wind.

“My place,” Margot Dennison told him, and they ran.

Margot Dennison had a large apartment in Irwadi City’s New Quarter. This surprised Ramsey, for not many outworlders lived there. That night, though, he was too tired to think about it. He vaguely remembered a couch for himself, a separate room for the Vegan girl, another for Margot Dennison. He slept like a log without dreaming.

He awoke with anxious hands fluttering at his shoulder. Opening one sleepy eye, he saw the Vegan girl. He saw daylight through a window but said, “Gmph! Middle of the night.”

[p 22]
The Vegan girl said: “She’s gone.”

Ramsey came awake all at once, springing to his feet fully dressed and flinging aside his cloak, which he’d used as a blanket. “Margot!” he called.

“She’s gone,” the Vegan girl repeated. “When I awoke she wasn’t here. The door—”

Ramsey ran to the door. It was a heavy plastic irising door. It was locked and naturally would not respond to the whorl patterns of Ramsey’s thumb.

“So now we’re prisoners,” Ramsey said. “I don’t get it.”

“At least there’s food in the kitchen.”

“All right. Let’s eat.”

There were two windows in the room, but when Ramsey looked out he saw they were at least four stories up. They’d just have to wait for Margot Dennison.

It took the Vegan girl some time to prepare the unfamiliar Earth-style food with which Margot Dennison’s kitchen was stocked. Ramsey used the time to prowl around the apartment. It was furnished in Sirian-archaic, a mode of furniture too feminine to suit Ramsey’s tastes. But then, the uni-sexual Sirians, of course, often catered to their own feminine taste.

Ramsey found nothing in Margot Dennison’s apartment which indicated she had done any acting on Irwadi, and that surprised him, for he’d assumed she had plied her trade here as elsewhere. He felt a little guilty about his snooping, then changed his mind when he remembered that Margot had locked them in.

In one of the slide compartments of what passed for a bureau in Sirian-archaic, he found a letter. Since it was the only piece of correspondence in the apartment, it might be important to Margot Dennison, thought Ramsey. And if it were important to her….

Ramsey opened the letter and read it. Dated five Earth months before, it ran:

My darling Margot: By the time you read this I shall be dead. Ironical, isn’t it? Coming so close—with death in the form of an incurable cancer intervening.
As you know, Margot, I always wished for a son but never had one. You’ll have to play that role, I’m afraid, as you always have. Here is the information I told you I would write down. Naturally, if you [p 23] intend to do anything about it, you’ll guard it with your life.

Apparently the hyper-space pattern from Irwadi to Earth is the one I was looking for. The proto-men, if I may be bold enough to call them that, first left hyper-space at that point, perhaps a million, perhaps five million, Earth years ago. I don’t have to tell you what this means, my child. I’ve already indicated it to you previously. It suffices to remind you that, in what science has regarded as the most amazing coincidence in the history of the galaxy, humanoid types sprang up on some three thousand stellar worlds simultaneously between one and five million years ago. I say simultaneously although there is the possibility of a four million year lag: indications are, however, that one date would do quite well for all the worlds.
Proto-man was tremendously ahead of us in certain sciences, naturally. For example, each humanoid type admirably fits the evolutionary pattern on its particular planet. The important point, Margot, is the simultaneity of the events: it means that proto-man left hyper-space, his birth-place, and peopled the man-habitable worlds of the galaxy at a single absolute instance in time. This would clearly be impossible if the thousands of journeys involved any duration. Therefore, it can only be concluded that they were journeys which somehow negated the temporal dimension. In other words, instant travel across the length and breadth of the galaxy!
Whoever re-discovers proto-man’s secret, needless to say, will be the most influential, the most powerful, man in the galaxy. Margot, I thought that man would be me. It won’t be now.
But it can be you, Margot. It is my dying wish that you continue my work. Let nothing stop you. Nothing. Remember this, though: I cannot tell you what to expect when you reach the original home of proto-man. In all probability the whole race has perished, or we’d have heard of them since. But I can’t be sure of that. I can’t be sure of anything. Perhaps proto-man, like some deistic god, became disinterested in the Milky Way Galaxy for reasons we’ll never understand. Perhaps he still exists, in hyper-space.

[p 104]
Finally, Margot, remember this. If you presented this letter to the evolutionary scientists on any of the worlds, they’d laugh at you. It is as if unbelief of the proto-man legend were ingrained in all the planetary people, perhaps somehow fantastically carried from generation to generation in their genes because proto-man a million years ago decided that each stellar world must work out its own destiny independently of the others and independent of their common heritage. But in my own case, there are apparently two unique factors at work. In the first place, as you know, I deciphered—after discovering it quite by accident—what was probably a proto-man’s dying message to his children, left a million years ago in the ruins on Arcturus II. In the second place, isn’t it quite possible that my genes have changed, that I have mutated and therefore do not have as an essential part of my make-up the unbelief of the proto-man legend?
Good luck to you, Margot. I hope you’re willing to give up your career to carry out your dying father’s wish. If you do, and if you succeed, more power will be yours than a human being has ever before had in the galaxy. I won’t presume to tell you how to use it.
Oh, yes. One more thing. Since Earth and Alpha Centauri are on a direct line from Irwadi, Centauri will do quite well as your outbound destination if for some reason you can’t make Earth. Again, good luck, my child. With all my love, Dad.

Ramsey frowned at the letter. He did not know what to make of it. As far as he knew, there was no such thing as a proto-man myth in wide currency around the galaxy. He had never heard of proto-man. Unless, he thought suddenly, the dying man could have simply meant all the myths of human creation, hypothecating a first man who, somehow, had developed independently of the beasts of the field although he seemed to fit their evolutionary pattern….

But what the devil would hyper-space have to do with such a myth? Proto-man, whatever proto-man was, couldn’t have lived in hyper-space. Not in that bleak, ugly, faceless infinity….

Unless, Ramsey thought, more perplexed than ever, it was the very bleak, ugly, [p 105] faceless infinity which made proto-man leave.

“Breakfast!” the Vegan girl called. Ramsey joined her in the kitchen, and they ate without talking. When they were drinking their coffee, an Earth-style beverage which the Vegan girl admitted liking, the apartment door irised and Margot Dennison came in.

Ramsey, who had replaced the letter where he’d found it, said: “Just what the devil did you think you were doing, locking us in?”

“For your own protection, silly,” Margot told him smoothly. “I always lock my door when I go out, so I locked it today. Naturally, we won’t have a chance to apply for a new lock. Besides, why arouse suspicion?”

“Where’d you go?”

“I don’t see where that’s any of your business.”

“Believe it or not,” Ramsey said caustically, “I’ve seen a thousand credits before. I’ve turned down a thousand credits before, in jobs I didn’t like. As for being stranded here on Irwadi, it’s all the same to me whether I’m on Irwadi or elsewhere.”

“What does all that mean, Captain Ramsey?”

“It means keep us informed. It means don’t get uppity.”

Margot laughed and dropped a vidcast tape on the table in front of Ramsey. He read it and did not look up. There was a description of himself, a description of the Vegan girl, and a wanted bulletin issued on them. For assaulting the Chief of Irwadi Security, the bulletin said. For assaulting a drunken fool, Ramsey thought.

“Well?” Margot asked. This morning she wore a man-tailored jumper which, Ramsey observed, clashed with the Sirian-archaic furniture. She looked cool and completely poised and no less beautiful, if less provocatively dressed, than last night.

Ramsey returned question for question. “What about the ship?”