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Operation Interstellar

<h2>CHAPTER 3</h2> Paul Grayson awoke the following morning to the tune of the telephone beside his bed. "This is Sergeant Hollowell," said the other man, "I've just called to apologize once more and to tell you that everything is OK. We'll even give you a guard if you want it." Paul stretched and said, sleepily: "Thanks, Sergeant. I guess everything will come out all right without a guard." "Okay. I'm glad for all concerned. For your information and not to be repeated, the character we got last night is—was—a petty crook with a record as long as your arm. A plain case of theft. Interrupted luckily. We call it closed." "Thanks again. And the ship?" "It's there as it was last night. So far as we and the BurAst guards know, no one but the crook was near it, and no one will be permitted to go near it until you come to take it up." Paul breathed easier. "Okay, see you later." "Your wallet, intact, will be delivered to your apartment within the hour. That closes that case, too." The policeman's voice sounded well pleased with himself and the night's work. Paul hung up and sprawled back in bed, thinking. There was no point in arousing the policeman's suspicions again. A howl of 'Why?' might delay Paul Grayson; might cause another technician to be sent to Proxima I to check the arrival of the radio beam. Paul had all the reason in the galaxy for wanting to be there himself, and an equally large quantity of reasons for not wanting someone else running his ship. But there was more to this than met the eye. Paul reached for a cigarette and laid back in bed blowing smoke at the ceiling. A smile touched his lips. Aside from the annoyance at being delayed for twenty four hours, it had been one large evening. Then his grin died and he reached out one quick arm and picked up the telephone again. He dialed a number and waited until the ringing was answered. "Stacey?" "This is Stacey's office." "Is he there?" "Who's calling, please?" "Tell him Paul Grayson—if he's up yet." "He's up," came the cheerfully amused voice at the other end. "But he's still grumpy." "I'll cheer him up," promised Paul. There was the click of a connection made and one quick burr from the ringing of the distant telephone. "Stacey," came the reply. "Paul Grayson." "Hell's Eternal—I thought you were on your way to Proxima." "Got delayed a day." Stacey was silent for a moment; Paul imagined that he could hear the clicking of the other man's mind as it started to analyze the situation. Then Stacey said: "What's on the technical mind, Paul? You didn't call me at this outrageous hour just to pass the time of day." "John, how much will it cost me to have a matter looked into?" "Normal charge is twenty-five a day and expenses. I think I owe you a few favors. Make it expenses if it isn't too involved." "It might be." "Then we'll make some arrangement as soon as we know how involved it is. But Migawd, Paul, what brings you to the employment of a detective?" "Someone tried to steal my spacecraft last night." "Nuts. Call the coppers." "Nope. There's more to this than meets the eye." "What, for instance?" "I'll be over to tell you about it." "Big?" "I don't know. Bothersome, anyway." "I'll wait. Make it quick." Paul hung up, and then went into a whirlwind of action. He dressed and shaved and gulped a glass of orange juice. He eschewed breakfast, promising his stomach that food would come in due time. He took his car from the garage where he had parked it for a month the evening before, and within a few minutes after hanging up the telephone, Paul Grayson was heading towards Stacey's office. It was a small office. Stacey's secretary knew Paul by sight if not by telephone voice, and she nodded him in to the inner office. Stacey's inner office was as small as the outer office because file cabinets lined the room. The detective sat with his chin in his hand, poring over some pages of writing. He looked up at once and greeted Paul with a smile. "So someone tried to swipe your ship?" he blurted. "And why isn't that a case for the cops?" "John, how would you go about stealing a ship?" "Get into the spaceport on some pretext, get into the ship by some means, and then take off like I had to make Messier 31 by mid-afternoon—or whatever place happened to be aligned at the time." "That's what I've been thinking." "So—?" "You wouldn't worry about the dispersion factor. You wouldn't worry about course. Your main interest would lie in getting the hell out of there before someone came along and decided that you were intent upon theft." "Naturally." Paul nodded. Then he explained as well as he knew, and as well as he could remember, everything that had taken place on the previous evening. He finished up with: "So I've met a gorgeous gal, kissed her by accident and found it fun; was clipped by a footpad and sort of nursed back to the conscious level by the same luscious dame; had two rides in a police patrol car; one trip to the hoosegow; cleared of all suspicion by an official courier arriving with officially sealed pouch of identification; was escorted home in style." "Go on. There's more to this than that." "Remember what Sergeant Hollowell said: That a stolen wallet and a witness were fine dovetails towards the establishment of a false identity?" "Yeah." "What better way to louse Paul Grayson up than to decoy him with a flagrantly beautiful woman; a dame possessed of self-assurance and poise, yet incredibly feminine enough to betray a warm, human passionate hunger for some one man. Natural male concupiscence would draw any man into the game of trying to divert her affection towards himself." "Speak for yourself, wolf." Paul grinned at Stacey. He stood up. "Maybe I'd better look into this thing myself. Set Stacey on the trail of a glam-amorous female and—" "Siddown. I'm a married man." "I was thinking of your poor, deluded wife and daughter." "Gloria knows all about your natural male concupiscence; and 'Ginny will know you as a doddering old man by the time she discovers that you can tell a man from a woman without looking at their clothing." Paul sat down again. He had not intended to leave anyway. "So," he said, "what better way to divert Paul Grayson than to bait him with a gorgeous dame?" Stacey grunted. "To divert you long enough to clip you, to steal your papers, to enter your ship—for what purpose?" "That's where the mystery comes in. The guy had plenty of time to fire up the drivers and grab an armful of sky. The galaxy makes a fine hiding place, John. They scoured the stellar systems of a hundred and more suns before they found that Neosol had a planet that was capable of harboring Terran life without difficulty. God knows, no man hunting for a place to live would wait and head for Proxima I. Yet that seems to be what the crook had tried to do." Stacey shook his head. "You are supposing that Nora Phillips was mingled in some sort of plot to steal a spacecraft. Granting that, Paul, explain me one thing. Just why would a person intent upon delaying you go so far towards helping you?" "Huh?" "She did sort of rub your skull, didn't she?" "And a fine job she did of it, too." "Professional?" "Seemed as if. If not professional, at least experienced." "So she brought you out of the unconscious, painful dark in time to intercept the criminal at his business?" "Uh—" "And Nora Phillips strode up and kissed you with warm, mad passion on the street, thus immobilizing your skull long enough for the enterprising sharpshooter to take a stance and perfect his backswing." "So you don't think so?" Stacey thought for a moment. "This does not smack of simple theft," he said at length. "Hell," growled Grayson, "That's what I've been trying to tell you." "Um. I see—" "So someone looks like me. He tried to swipe my ship, it would appear. But they didn't need a dame to distract me; I could have been pushed off by a gunman. Frankly, I am of the type that will gladly hand over my wallet, my shoes, and/or my worldly goods rather than to have a hole drilled through my dinner. So, John, here is Nora Phillips' address. You can get the name of the defunct crook from the police, I'm sure. See what connection they might have had." Stacey looked at Paul with a smile. "You're not making uranium out of broken pop bottles are you?" "Nope. I'm just a guy working for the Bureau of Astrogation." "Uh-huh. But with a secret under his hat large enough to keep him from yelping too loud." "You know the reason for that." "And how many others?" "Damned few. Less than six, I'd guess." Stacey shook his head again. "They don't clip screwballs for having a half-baked idea crammed in their simple skulls. So far as I can see it, you've got nothing to conceal, nothing to steal, and nothing much worth hiding." "If Haedaecker knew what I had—" Stacey grunted. "If Haedaecker wanted to stop you he would not have to hire a bunch of phony actors to do it," he said succinctly. "But what else?" "My life of crime," chuckled Stacey, "tells me that there are as many motives for crime as there are men with ambition, avarice, and ability. The trouble is that there are more motives for crime than there are varieties of crime. If there is a motive for this cockeyed affair—and I've yet to see a crime without a motive, however involved or simple—you must know it." "Aside from spacecraft stealing—" "That's ruled out." "Then I'll be eternally relegated to the nether regions if I know what it is." Stacey nodded. "Maybe you know it and don't recognize it." "Maybe I should visit my family psychiatrist?" "He might be able to ferret out the hidden secret. But I'd waste no time on it. Just proceed and see what happens." "Like another busted head?" "As I recall, it's hard enough." Paul laughed. One could hardly be sour in Stacey's presence. Nothing appeared serious to the detective; he managed to make everything sound quite cheerful and amusing, even the threat of further depredations. It was a trait disliked by many people, which was probably the main reason why Stacey was a small time operator instead of being the mainspring of a world-wide agency. It took a long acquaintanceship with Stacey before people realized that the light banter was only a false front used to keep Stacey's own spirits from bogging down in the world of trouble. A sympathetic sort himself, Stacey forced himself to treat every case as impersonally as he could because only a man uninvolved emotionally can make clear decisions based on fact and not feelings. Newcomers meeting Stacey resented the fact that the detective obviously treated their troubles as less than the most important thing in the world. But Paul Grayson knew Stacey well and he was willing to let the detective handle the case completely from this point, knowing that Stacey would do it honestly and quickly, friend or not. Paul waved good-bye at the door and drove towards home. He went in and sat down, ticking things off on the fingers of his hand. One, identification cleared Two, wallet returned Three, puzzle-solution started Four— Grayson went to the telephone and called the spaceport, was connected with the calculations department. "Grayson," he said. "How's for my course this evening?" "Sure you want to go?" came the dry retort. "Absolutely." "Want to bet?" "Look," grunted Grayson, no longer angry at the voice, "you've got a fine calculating gadget there. Why not have it figure out the betting possibilities and make book on me?" "We tried to make it pick horses for us once but the answer came back as 'Data incomplete, factors uncertain.' The elecalc does not like horses." "But I'm not a horse." "I hear there's a woman tied up in this thing. That's the predictably unpredictable factor, that men, the imbeciles, will get involved with women—even as you and I. Anyway, Grayson, we'll have you a course. It won't be as cold turkey as last night's, but it will serve in a way." "In what way?" asked Paul. "We can't set the spotter ship. Not enough time. You'll have to aim the ship visually. It'll make the dispersion-factor somewhat large." "I don't mind." "Good thing you don't," came the glum reply. Both of them knew that the job of aiming a stellar ship was accepted by the public as one of the things that had to be done; few of them knew what went into the job. All stars are but pinpoints in the sky, there is no quick way to tell a close-by star from a distant star by visual inspection. To the untrained, even the solar planets blend with the interstellar reaches. Only the trained eye can tell planets from the stars by the lack of twinkle. The true distances between the stars is too vast to be comprehended. Men speak of light years. Yet even the learned must indulge in quite a bit of cerebration to understand the length of a year, the velocity of light presents figures too extreme for comprehension. Light travels at 328 yards per millionth of a second, 328 yards can be grasped, as a distance of three-football fields, but a millionth of a second cannot be grasped readily; 186,000 miles per second offers only one factor capable of being understood. One can count "Ten-Hundred-One" and realize that a second has passed. But the mind is incapable of grasping the fact that during that time of counting, a beam of light traverses 186,000 miles. Proxima Centauri is four light years away. Using the longest base that the solar system provided, the beginning and the end of the aimed course was like trying to hit a match head at ten thousand yards with a snub-barrelled pistol. A misalignment too minute for the eye to see meant a probable target dispersion as broad as the outer orbits of the solar system. Aim a ship at a target four light years away across aiming points a couple of light hours apart. At a velocity within a couple of percent of precise, multiplied by a number of seconds mounting into five or six figures, you can establish the volume which will contain the spacecraft on its arrival. A volume of probabilities; far, far from the layman's idea of a precise science. Heading as he was for Proxima Centauri, that tiny star would be the focus of his aim. But Proxima is a tiny star, one of a trinary, and the other two magnificent stars overwhelmed the feeble light of Proxima. So the system of Alpha Centauri would lie on the cross-hairs of Paul's telescope. And the cross-hairs of the telescope would be displaced from the axis of drive by a small angle. It was this angle that required the use of the electronic calculator. Not only because Proxima lies a smidgin of space apart from the more brilliant pair, but because Alpha Centauri drifts along in the galactic swing, and Sol moves as well. The eye sees Alpha Centauri where it was four years ago. Any trip across space, lasting ten days, must bring the traveller down out of supervelocity and into the realm of visibility at the position where Alpha will be ten days after take-off—not where Alpha was four years ago. This was a problem not yet licked. Like the 'sighting-in' of a brand new pistol, each shot fired added to the knowledge of the correction factor that must be applied. For the same reasons of inward anxiety that makes a man who has missed a train on Monday turn up two hours early on Tuesday, Paul turned up at the spaceport early. The guard greeted him with a cynical smile but checked the identification carefully before waving him through the gate. Paul went to the Elecalc office to get his folder of course-data. The usual procedure was to have the course calculated as early as possible before the date of take-off, so that the busy department could sandwich course-data in between the longer range jobs. This was different, undoubtedly some long-range job had been stopped in mid-calc so that Paul's course could be run off. He was not too surprised to have the man at the desk smile and point a finger at the Superintendent's Office and say: "It's in there. Go on in, he's expecting you." Paul went to the door, opened it, and then swallowed a lump as large as his fist. The man sitting quietly behind the desk, huge hands folded in his lap, was Chadwick Haedaecker. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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