Chapter II

For that matter, Betty Day inspired a lot of my ideas, ever since my first opening day at Space Tech. The first task they put us to on the opening day was to sit through a welcoming address from the President of the Institute. Maybe it was a good speech if you happened to be a kid fresh out of school, like most of the class, with your head full of the ideas of romance and glory that the tridim space operas pump into the cash customers, but when he began to talk about our "mission" and being "pioneers of the new frontier" it got a little too thick for me.

I hadn't come to the Institute of Space Technology to look for glory. I had come for the excellent if commonplace purpose of qualifying for a well-paid job. My father's happy-go-lucky space-ratting was not for me. I intended to do my planeteering with the resources of a nice fat soulless corporation behind me. Four years in the Girdle of Venus--which name, in case you are wondering, is a neat little piece of irony--had left me very sane and practical and disenchanted about the whole matter.

I let the President gabble on and began to glance around the auditorium.

I didn't glance far. As I turned my face toward the girl sitting at my left, she turned hers, and our eyes met. I managed a smile and cocked an eyebrow toward the speaker's stand. She smiled back with her eyes and crinkled her nose. It was a smooth straight nose, and the eyes on each side of it were a clear cool gray, set well apart under level brows. That was Betty--level and straight, and cool, too, for that matter. I didn't realize all this at once, of course. Just now I only knew that she was calmly and compellingly beautiful, and that I didn't feel sane and practical any more, and certainly not disenchanted.

There was a spatter of mildly enthusiastic applause, and I noticed the lecture hall again and saw that the President had finished and a youngish instructor was taking the stand to give out information about programs and class assignments. I got down enough to keep from getting lost. I heard him say the sections would be arranged alphabetically. That scared me--suppose this girl was named Wigglesworth or Zilch or some such and I would never see her again! I drew a circle around my name on the class roster they had given each of us at the beginning of the festivities and handed it to her. She smiled again and drew a circle around the name right next to it. Betty Day. So that was all right.

* * * * *

There is no time for social life at Space Tech. You go there for the training and you get your money's worth. Not that I cared--the work was hard, but it was exciting, and you could see the purpose of it as you went along. I would have worked even harder and not minded, because Betty Day was alongside in every class I had. After a few days we were eating lunch together every day in the campus slop shop, which arrangement I liked. It took my mind off the sort of food they served there.

Every two or three weeks we found or took time to see a tridim together, since there is not much else in the way of extracurricular diversion at Tech. It was a very slight intimacy, but it meant a good deal to me, and I believed that it did to Betty too. She was always pleased to have me around, and she crinkled her nose at my jokes in a special way that she did for no one else's, and my jokes were not much better than the average, either.

It was a long time before I tried to tell her about the way I felt. It was not until the three years at Tech were over and the Institute was letting down its hair to the extent of sealing our brow with the traditional farewell party for graduates known as the Blastoff.

By the time I got there the revelry had already started. I made a couple of passes at the punch bowl and looked around for Betty. She was out on the floor; I pried her loose from the Joe who was trying to dance with her, and we made one eccentric ellipse around the hall and headed for the terrace. It was cool out there, the unostentatious coolness of an early summer evening that has not quite forgotten the heat of the day, and there was a bright wash of moonlight on the bay beyond the lights of the town. There was a lot of stardust around.

Betty must have seen it too. She turned toward me, and the solemn look on her face and the way her shoulders glowed in the moonlight and the moonlight gleamed in her hair was enough to make your breath come short. My breath, at least. It came right up in my throat and stuck there, and I reached out and we sort of melted together. It was the first time that had happened. That's how hard they work you at Tech.

After a little while we separated and I opened my eyes and they still worked well enough for me to see a bench not far away and we walked over and sat down.

Betty sighed and leaned toward me and I moved my arm out of the way to make room. The skin of her shoulder was smooth to my hand, and cool the way the evening air was cool.

"It's been fun, Tom, hasn't it?" I knew she meant the last three years and not just the last three minutes.

"Lots of work and lots of fun," I agreed. "That's why space work gets in your blood, I think. It's fun even when it's hardest. My hitch in the Girdle even seems like fun now that it's over."

"I can see how planet work must be a thrill, even if I haven't ever been beyond the moon. I will be though--I'm going out with my uncle's Vesta expedition in a couple of weeks, you know."

* * * * *

I hadn't known. I knew she had been talking about it, but I had hoped Ed Day would have sense enough to say no. I wasn't altogether selfish about it. I did want her closer in, nearer where I would be, but a big part of the reason was that the asteroid belt was the Edge, and the Edge has always been a rough place for women, even when it was at the moon.

I started to tell her this, but she interrupted. "How did you make out with Translunar? The man must have had a lot to say to keep you this long."

"I get the money all right. And a job."

"A good one?"

"Six thousand."

"Yes, but what and where?"

"Luna City. I'll be port engineer."

"Oh, Tom!" I didn't think she had to put so much disappointment in her voice. It was practically disdain. "I should think Translunar could do better than that. It's practically landlocked. You aren't going to take it, are you?"

"Why not? Six thousand is a nice sackful of cash, and besides, I get a piece of the company. Not a very big one, but it will grow."

"Oh, Tom!" It was pure disdain this time. "It isn't the money! You should have a ship. You should be out doing things. They can't make you into a glorified slug monkey on the moon!" She pulled away from my arm and looked at me again. The solemn expression on her face was somber now, or maybe sullen; anyway I didn't like it.

"For six thousand they can do worse than that," I said. "It's more than the captain of a liner gets. And, anyway, Translunar's ships are all staffed. There wouldn't be a place for me even if I wanted one, and I'm not sure I want one. Maybe there's more glamour in being a deep-space man, but you can't call the job the engineers do trivial. The idea of being a slug monkey doesn't bother me at all at that pay. It's better than being a swamp hog on Venus."

"But it's such a waste, Tom! Anyone can be an engineer. You should be in research or exploration, and you know it. It's a crime to waste your talent in a dock job. You belong out on the Edge."

"Look, Betty--there are three sorts of Edge jobs: in the Patrol, on some sort of an expedition, or as a space-rat. The first two don't pay and, as for the third, even if I liked the idea of prospecting the planets, it takes money to outfit for it, and it took all I had to finish Tech."

"But you have the Aspera, and the Translunar prize would be enough to get her into shape again and buy supplies."

"I was given to understand this afternoon that it would be considered very unconventional to take the money and not take the job. And anyway, what would I do then--hunt for thorium in the asteroids? No thanks. I'll take the slug monkey job and the salary. And I think you ought to do the same. You could get a job closer in that would pay a lot more than going off to the Belt on a wild goose chase. When you graduate first in your class at Tech you can take your pick."

"Wild goose chase!" She sniffed. "We are going out to get data on the Warp at close range. We might even find out the way to get around it and open up the outer planets to exploration."

* * * * *

The Warp was supposed to be a sort of fourth-dimensional wrinkle in space somewhere beyond the asteroids that swallowed ships and accounted for the fact that out of three expeditions that had tried to reach Jupiter, three had not returned. I knew better.

"There isn't any Warp," I told her. "My father proved that eight years ago when he made the swing around Jupiter."

"But he never published any proof, Tom."

"No, all the proof he had was in his log book, and that went with him on his last trip. But I read the log. He sighted the pirate camp on Callisto, and would have had pictures to prove it if all his film hadn't been raystruck. Maybe he could have got somebody to listen to him anyway if he had tried a little harder, but he wanted to make a research job of it. He sold out all his claims and built the Astra and loaded it up with equipment to bring back all the proof that even the Patrol could ask for. Then he blasted off and no one ever heard of him again."

"But the idea of pirates doesn't make sense, Tom. There are no cargoes worth stealing beyond the Belt. On the Venus run, yes--but why should there be pirates out where there are no ships?"

"Okay, no pirates, then. What they really are is Hassley and all those hangers-on of his that were never accounted for after the Polar War. One of the moons of Jupiter would make a fine hideout for them. Air, water, and a livable climate. When any one comes snooping around, they see to it that they never get back. We blame it on the Warp and stay away and leave them alone."

"They would never get there in the first place. The Warp isn't just somebody's wild guess, you know. It follows from Heuvelstad's work. He derived Bode's law from quantum theory, and showed that a warp in space is the only explanation for the family of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter where there should be a single planet. No one can doubt it."

"I can. No one used to doubt that the earth was flat, or to bring it a little more up to date, that the craters of the moon were volcanoes, or that the red shift in the nebular spectra meant that the universe is expanding. A theory is good only as long as it explains all the facts, and Heuvelstad overlooked the fact that my father circled Jupiter and came back. He will just have to revise his mathematics."

"Maybe we'll know more about that after the Vesta expedition comes back." She sighed and looked out over the glittering bay.

I sighed too, and took my arm away from the back of the seat. I didn't quite know how the conversation had wandered so far from the point. I had felt quite set up about everything when I came to the party. I thought Betty would be glad about the Translunar offer, and maybe remark that six thousand credits was a remarkable salary for a fresh graduate, and I would suggest that it was enough to get married on. And here we were arguing.

She turned and looked at me again. "Tom," she said softly; maybe I was going to have my chance after all.

"Yes?" I answered.

"Are you really going to take that engineer job? Couldn't you talk Translunar out of something that would give you the chance to do the things a Denby ought to be doing?"

"Maybe I could. But look--I've sweated out the last seven years just for the chance I've got right now, and I mean to take it. My father spent all his life chasing a dream, and what did it get him? The one great discovery he did make no one will even believe."

"I never met Lance Denby, but I know he was a great spaceman, Tom, even if you do seem to have forgotten it. I never thought a son of his would ever turn out to be a company man. Let's go inside."

We went inside, and I went home. The punch bowl was empty by now so I didn't even stop.

* * * * *

It was probably a mistake, but I flew down to Mojave Outport the day the Vesta Expedition blasted off. Betty was very friendly when we said goodbye, and her hand in mine was small and firm, and the fingers were quite cold. I don't remember what I said. It couldn't have been much. There was a stiff feeling around my lips that it was hard to push any words through.

Betty was last on board. She turned and looked back for a few seconds before they closed the hatch, and it seemed to me that there was the same solemn expression on her face that I had seen that night on the terrace. I was too far away to be sure.

My interview with the Western manager of Translunar was scheduled for the next day. I'm afraid I made a poor impression from the very start. I wasn't feeling very sharp; instead of sleeping I had spent a good part of the night wondering about that look in Betty's eyes. That and a few other things.

Elkins, the manager, was the sort of man who wears a nice sharp crease in his pants and his hair brushed carefully over his bald spot and calls everyone heartily by his first name.

"Well, Tom," he said expansively, after the formalities of introduction and exchange of cigarettes were out of the way, "let's get to business. First of all, this, ah--token."

He held out a check. The four figures on it were even prettier than the pretty-colored ink they were printed in. That was for me. Legally, by the terms of their prize offer. I had checked on that.

"Thank you," I said.

"And now, as concerns your place with the Translunar organization--"

I interrupted. "I'm sorry, Mr. Elkins. Personal plans make it impossible for me to accept the position you have so generously offered me."

That rocked him. Why not--it rocked me. He still smiled with his lips, out of habit, but his eyes weren't smiling. He pulled an ash tray to him and crushed out his cigarette--the one I had given him.

"But--! You realize this is most irregular, Mr. Denby! And unexpected."

"I do. I didn't know it myself until a little while ago."

"Is this decision final, Mr. Denby?"

"I'm afraid it is."

"Very well. I'm sorry to hear it." His tone meant that I would be sorry too. "In that case there is nothing further to say."

He pushed a button and a flunky came in to sweep me out. As I left I could as good as see him writing down my name on a sheet marked Blacklist in 72 point caps.