Space Service Read online

  When at last Ramsay stumbled into his sleeping quarters, having seen the native officials off to their ship and called a pair of communications operators on night watch to carry Hane and Marie out, he was too exhausted to bother checking either the time or the contract.

  It seemed only a few minutes before the persistent chime of the intercom visor beside his bed bullied him into wakefulness. He answered groggily, to discover that it was another day and someone wanted to know what to do with three shiploads of Vozaalian telescreens and one of scarlet dye from Fegash.

  “Any of my interplanetary ships here?” he croaked.

  “Five, Mr. Ramsay, including the Sprite that you came in.”

  “Load them all for Delthig III, and when they come back up, have them stand by in case the Delthigans bring cargo for IV. And keep a good record; I’m going to bill the B.S.T. for every bit of this!”

  He cut off, then called the building guard with orders to wake Marie and Hane.

  “If Ramsay can’t sleep,” he muttered, weaving toward his shower, “nobody sleeps! Ugh, my throat! I better gargle again.”

  At length, dressed in shirt and slacks, the latter tucked into high spaceman’s boots, he went to his office. Hane and Marie, the latter still in slacks, appeared presently. The girl proved herself the efficient secretary when the breakfast she had ordered arrived a few minutes later.

  “The first thing I want to check,” said Ramsay, brushing toast crumbs from the handwritten agreement he had copied down the night before, “is where we wound up. I seem to remember something about scrap metal for the Delthig IV plants.”

  “Paug Tukhi offered to exchange old weapons for the Bormekian projectors,” Hane recalled, “along with other scrap. That was just before his little speech about how such avaricious bargaining as yours would never be tolerated in his society.”

  “I was hoping he’d get mad and leave,” said Ramsay.

  It appeared that the Delthigans had even accepted Fuller’s useless telescreens. They were to distribute all twenty million—if they could—and act as brokers for the Terrans.

  Guess they didn’t like that, Ramsay reflected, but it was better than having inferior aliens on their sacred planet!

  The Delthigans had also contracted for the building of several hundred spaceships which, as Hane put it, might be delivered to them. In partial return for these, the thousands of Bormekian weapons ordered, and certain other items, they were to supply scrap metal and drafts of workers for Terran projects on II, IV, and Chika.

  “I’m not sure I like that,” said Ramsay. “They’ll repossess both if they ever clip us; and I don’t see how we’ll get the cash balance out of them.”

  A few luxury articles such as dyestuffs and automatic household gadgets had been ordered. Ramsay shrewdly estimated that the amount of these would perhaps be sufficient to supply the upper crust of the Delthigan regime—certainly no more.

  But the main thing was the projectors.

  “They didn’t really fight against the other junk,” Ramsay commented. “That worries me. What in the world would they do with those telescreens? They just took them to get the weapons.”

  “If I know them at all,” retorted Hane, “they will distribute the sets as evidence to their people of progress toward the better life most of them despair of ever seeing.”

  “And simply promise telecasts in the future,” Marie put in. “They won’t be responsible if it’s the very far future.”

  “Exactly,” agreed the old man, smiling at her. “And, if you’ll pardoning my mentioning it, Ramsay, that is how they will pay us for the sets—in the far, far future.”

  Ramsay nodded.

  “Well,” he sighed, “I’d better send off a message to be filmed for Fuller if he still isn’t back, and tell him about the agreement and their lack of telecasting. He might enter that on the books as an ‘out’ against the day they default. I hate to say so, but he’s going to need some excuse this time.”

  Within a few days—reckoned by Tenan standards because the satellite rotated once in its three-week journey around its planet—he began to suspect that his customers were leaning over backward to stay in the right. Ship after ship, Terran and Delthigan, arrived to discharge scrap metal and shuttle other goods down to Delthig III as fast as the big interstellar ships could be unloaded. One Delthigan official delivered a statement showing a staggering balance in dels banked under Ramsay’s name, it being illegal for such a sum to be taken beyond the Planetary State’s control.

  “Things go so fast around here,” Ramsay said to Hane, “that I wonder if they’re just breaking up the telescreens and shooting them back as scrap.”

  “That was a fair theory,” admitted the older man, “up to yesterday when those boys unloading found live shells to fit one of the junked cannon. Did you see where they were taking potshots at the hill out there?”

  Ramsay snorted.

  “The squids don’t seem to care what they send. Have we got barracks up for the Delthigan labor gangs that arrived?”

  “Yes,” Hane chuckled. “I faced them with the alternative of sleeping out, so to speak, and they fell to with a will.”

  “Let’s keep them here,” suggested the spaceman.

  He eyed the fast-growing settlement in his charge. It required a lot of labor to keep the spaceport unclogged.

  “They were supposed to go to the mines on II,” Hane reminded him, “as soon as they built barracks for more transients.”

  “I’d just as soon avoid that as long as we can. I can picture a horde of so-called ‘laborers’ running amuck when a Delthigan fleet approaches that planet. But here, they’d be some use.”

  “They’ll work hard,” Hane agreed. “They look well broken-in for that.”

  Slaves, thought Ramsay. That’s what they amount to. Wish I had nothing to do with handling them!

  He could see the mottled, brownish face of Delthig III above the low hills of the moon. He wondered if a telescope would show the fires and lights of hard-driven factories on the night side. He caught himself imagining that malevolent, brooding eyes watched him from those shadows.

  What’s it like to live there? he wondered.

  He tried to picture the hopeless drudgery of building a Planetary State on inadequate rations under the monotonous bludgeoning of propaganda designed to dull the senses to the lack of food, or clothing, or freedom, or pleasure, or the slightest respite from the slavery.

  No wonder they work so hard on the new domes, he thought. They must be happy to be even this far away from the surface.

  “Have them put up more shelters,” he said to Hane, “and quarter incoming gangs in them to take over the stevedoring. I can’t ask our own men to go on short-handed any longer.”

  That noon, he tried to catch a nap in his room, but found himself too restless. Putting on a spacesuit, he made a tour of inspection out to the end of the expanding port, where a Delthigan ship was unloading more scrap.

  “I wish I knew why they keep sending the stuff,” he said to Marie in the office upon his return.

  “I guess they call the guns obsolete now. Isn’t that what they do when somebody builds a bigger one?”

  “Bigger what?”

  “Bigger anything. That horrid thing from Bormek made their guns obsolete.”

  “Yeah,” he said, sitting down slowly, “but they usually don’t throw away the old till they have twice as many of the new. And Fuller hasn’t—thank goodness!—sent us any more of what Puag Tukhi calls ‘powder-makers.’ ”

  “Well, be that as it may,” said his secretary, “I found out for you about the ship that parked here last night. You’ll never guess!”

  Ramsay ran the fingers of his left hand through his close-clipped black hair and looked up at her with an expression of forced patience.

  “Oh, all right, then!” exclaimed Marie, tossing her head slightly. “I’ll tell you before you start demanding again why somebody doesn’t at least try to help you keep track of what goe
s on around here.”

  “Please do!” said Ramsay succinctly.

  “It’s a television station!”

  He drummed his fingers on the desk.

  “Very funny. Do I have to go find out for myself?”

  “You could; I told them it would be all right to have some Delthigans extend a plastic tube out to the ship. And it’s just what I said!”

  “A television station?”

  “Well, a ship sent direct from Bormek by Mr. Fuller that’s outfitted to telecast programs. The man in charge, Mr. Neuberg, explained how they can send almost as far as your spaceport communicator, but entertainment, too.”

  Ramsay dropped both hands to the desk and slumped back in his chair. He shook his head slowly, resignedly.

  “That’s what I get,” he murmured, “for telling him about unloading his telescreens when I griped about the projectors.”

  “I think it was awfully clever of Mr. Fuller to manage it so soon,” said his secretary. “They’ve already made a local film to telecast to Delthig III. I’m in it!”

  “When they don’t get those projectors, they’ll come up here and blow my head off,” said Ramsay gloomily. “And he sends me a telecasting station! All wrapped up in a spaceship so it can skip out fast when the shooting starts!”

  “They took pictures of me setting up an automatic stove and putting something in it to cook,” said Marie. “Mr. Neuberg wanted to show things actually being sent to the Delthigans.”

  “I’d like to see it sometime,” said Ramsay, when she waited expectantly for comment.

  Marie brightened. She ran out to her desk and returned in a moment with a small telescreen.

  “Where did you get that cracker box?” demanded Ramsay. Marie smiled reminiscently and pushed back her dark hair after turning the set on.

  “That’s what we’re sending to Delthig. One of the boys snitched one for me out of the last cargo.”

  “You leave ‘the boys’ alone!” ordered Ramsay severely.

  “I couldn’t have the boss stealing telescreens, could I? What would Mr. Hane say? Oh, look! There I am now. Mr. Neuberg said he’s going to repeat it with his other films until every Delthigan has seen it.”

  “That means almost fifteen million already,” said Ramsay, glancing at a crude chart of the spaceport’s traffic.

  “Mr. Neuberg says more than that. This thing only receives on one channel, but it will still be a great novelty on Delthig III. He says there ought to be up to two hundred watchers to each set, maybe more.”

  Ramsay decided not to bother estimating mentally the percentage of the Delthigan population being titillated by Marie’s conquest of an apple pie. He noticed that she wasted a lot of material, and hoped Neuberg’s food locker held more apples.

  “Mr. Neuberg said,” she defended herself, “that I should set the machine to remove thick cores. It made a better picture, and he could demonstrate the garbage disposal attachment.”

  “I don’t suppose you brought a piece of the pie back with you?” asked Ramsay hopefully. “Oh . . . they ate it all, huh?”

  He watched the program give place to another film, a description of Terran home life. The film family’s chief problem in life seemed to be whether to travel to Mars or Venus for Papa’s vacation.

  Here I sit, half-starved on rations brought from the mining domes, thought Ramsay, and she doesn’t even bring me a slice of the pie!

  The door to his office was thrown open. Old Hane hustled in at an unprecedented pace. His scanty white hair was disheveled.

  “Puag Tukhi is coming in for a landing!”

  “What’s the matter?” asked the spaceman.

  “He didn’t say, but he sounded disturbed over the radio. Do you think it might be, in a nutshell—the projectors?”

  “Very likely,” said Ramsay, groping for a good excuse.

  They went outside the building to watch through the plastic side of the dome as the Delthigan ship landed. A pressurized truck trundled out to pick up the official, and trundled back to the dome with maddening deliberation. It halted to discharge its passenger at the entrance to the inner building.

  Puag Tukhi restrained himself with obvious difficulty until they had gone inside. In Ramsay’s office, rapid denunciation in hissing Delthigan began.

  The others looked at each other helplessly.

  Puag Tukhi stuttered into Terran.

  “I stronger orderss haf to make protests!” he declaimed.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Ramsay innocently.

  “Wronk! Will show what iss wronk!”

  He bounded across the office on his four stringy-muscled legs to the telescreen. He switched it on.

  “Thiss you gif us. But not ssay to haf picturess on! What trouble you make!”

  The current program, Ramsay saw, was another in home economics starring his brunette secretary. This time, it featured an automatic vacuum cleaner that all but thought for itself.

  “What’s wrong with that?” he asked.

  Puag Tukhi pulled himself together and wiped perspiration from around his chinless mouth. His three eyes glared and the greenish tone of his gray skin became more pronounced.

  “Iss not to matter why iss wronk with it! I haf now my superiorss enough trouble to worry apout. Musst also explain to you? Instrumentss were dissplay, not for use!”

  Ramsay relaxed slightly. This was something he thought he could handle. It might even be useful in keeping the Delthigans’ minds off other matters, such as nondelivery of Bormekian projectors, or holding laborers on Chika.

  I’ll push this as far as it will go, he decided. Now, how would Fuller do it?

  “I do not recall any part of our agreement dealing with telecasting,” he said smoothly.

  Puag Tukhi stared straight at him, then turned his round head from side to side to examine the Terran through his other eyes. He opened his mouth twice, displaying numerous pointed teeth, before he succeeded in voicing an answer.

  “That iss what I ssay!” he complained. “Therefore, you musst not do thiss! Makes for me trouble. Serious trouble!”

  “You admit you did accept our telescreens,” asked Ramsay.

  “Yess.”

  “And, as our agents, distributed them among your people?”

  “Yess, yess! We musst, understand, gif them some sign of progress. They work . . . very hard.”

  “But television is communication,” Ramsay pursued coolly. “That implies two parties, televiewer and telecaster. The receiver is useless without a telecast to receive. Correct?”

  “Yess, but—”

  “Therefore, your acceptance of our telescreens implied admitting our right to telecast to them! You see?”

  Puag Tukhi hesitated. He gripped two of his three-fingered hands into a tight knot and ran a third raspingly over the thickened hide of his vestigial crest.

  “Of course, if you like,” said Ramsay jauntily, “we can stop the whole business. Keep the telescreens and I’ll cancel the other shipments!”

  That’ll fix him! he thought. He noticed Marie looking at him admiringly, and wished he had a mustache like Fuller’s to stroke.

  Then Puag Tukhi said something that shocked him out of his smugness.

  “But why you do thiss to me? I haf made all things as agreet. For telescreens, millionss of dels paid. For fancy thingss to official class, I haf sent to Chika herdss of wronk-thinkink prisonerss to work—you not need count what you send back! And for Bormek powder-makerss, haf sent loadss of scrap gunss. You . . . you . . . they will put me in the mines! Maybe with no teeth and one eye left! Why you make for me such trouble?”

  Ramsay wondered if he sagged visibly.

  They’re getting them! he thought, licking suddenly dry lips.

  “I . . . uh . . . I don’t want to make . . . trouble for you—”

  He groped his way around a corner of his desk and sat down.

  That Fuller! He’s been sending them the things direct from Bormek. It can’t be anything else. That’s
why they’re shipping discarded guns for scrap; otherwise they’d keep them. And ME he sends a telecaster. Does he want to get me killed?

  “As I . . . uh, was saying,” he stumbled on, “I’d be glad to hear of a way to take the heat off . . . off you, Puag Tukhi, that is. There must be a way to . . . ah, protect your interests.”

  Puag Tukhi sighed gustily, blowing out a little spray of moisture. Ramsay looked to Hane for help, but that gentleman gazed steadfastly out the window.

  “Maybe—” Marie began in a subdued voice.

  “Go on!” urged her employer.

  “Well, back on Terra, they have that custom of giving equal time to both sides of a question. You know, like election speeches, and that sort of thing.”

  “That’s it!” cried Ramsay. “You, Puag Tukhi, go back and tell your government that if they send us their own films up to Chika, we’ll telecast them along with ours. Fair enough?”

  The Delthigan regained some of his composure, and permitted Hane to escort him to the truck.

  Ramsay immediately pounced upon the intercom. By good fortune, he learned, a line had been laid to the mobile television station. He asked for Neuberg.

  “I’m Ramsay, in charge here,” he introduced himself to a balding man with dark, expressive eyes set in a pudgy face.

  “Ah, yes,” the other beamed. “Don’t worry about a thing, Mr. Ramsay. We’re plastering that planet with pix twenty-four hours a day. Got films to last a month.”

  “Yeah . . . well, I’m going to get a few more for you.”

  Long before he finished explaining, Neuberg began to shake his head disapprovingly. Ramsay paused when the man’s jowls reached the quivering stage. Mr. Neuberg pointed out that he had a definite schedule to fill.

  “But this is necessary!” shouted the spaceman.

  “I sympathize with you, Mr. Ramsay, but I have strict orders from Mr. Fuller. He relies upon me to carry them out.”

  “But . . . oh, all right! I’ll get him to O.K. what I want. Will that satisfy you?”

  “Entirely,” answered Mr. Neuberg primly.

  Ramsay flipped the switch and rubbed one hand across his face.