Destiny's Orbit Read online

  The girl frowned, shook her head angrily. "You are a most obstinate person, Ajax Calkins. Let me warn you officially to cease and desist in these efforts. You must be aware of the danger now looming from the newly contacted Saturnians. Those creatures represent trouble outside our frontiers, and we don't want anyone poking into their bailiwick."

  "I've no such plans, miss," said Ajax, crossing one knee over the other. "I seek only what is still available. It is unthinkable that there remain no new frontiers. Unthinkable!"

  "Then don't think it!" she snapped back. "Just stay here and enjoy your riches. You're lucky your grandfather had brains, anyway!"

  Ajax sat bolt upright, almost forgetting he'd crossed his knees and for a moment he tottered out of balance. He regained his control, while Emily sat back with the suggestion of a laugh on her face. Inflamed, Ajax burst out:

  "My grandfather was a pioneer in his own way! He knew that the spaceships needed to conserve shipping room, that space was at a premium in space, and he worked in new fields to invent the great Calhans process. He forced matter to eliminate the space between molecules until a square yard could be compressed into a square inch of space. The weight might be the same but the space saved infinitely benefits commerce between planets. I might say that your whole EMSA would be an impossibility without the practical use of Calkans for space shipments. And this was his way of finding new frontiers, of making his mark.

  "I expect nothing more than the same privilege in my own way!"

  "Piffle," said Emily. "Your grandfather was a scientist, and he surely never expected the fortune he made to end in the control of a young do-nothing like yourself. Your father's death in that storm was certainly a sad thing for the Calkins clan."

  Ajax jumped to his feet, loomed over the defiant girl. He waved a finger in her face. "Young ladyl I don't like your way of talking! I am not a child to be chided and I object to your insults. I am Ajax Calkins, a name that will some day make history, the father of my country—when I find it— and you can tell your confounded EMSA to go back to their customs offices and licensing commissions and mind their own business!"

  She drew back, grasped her handbag as if to throw it at him in self-defense.

  "And as for you, Miss Hackensmack, or whatever your name is," he continued, "when I get back from Mars I shall see to it that your superior knows of your threats. I think you will be sorry to threaten me!"

  She drew herself up. "Are you through with your dramatic gestures?" she asked with a supercilious smile. Then she got up. "I repeat my warning. This is official. Keep out of trouble. Forget your little passion to have a silly little flag of your own. The EMSA has its eye on you."

  She abruptly turned her back on him, and marched off down the aerocarpeted room, through the automatic door, head held high, and disappeared with a twitch of her tweedy skirt.

  Ajax stared after her, his face drawn in anger. He launched a kick at the chair she had been sitting in, knocking it across the room. The butler padded over, silently picked it up and stood it upright.

  "Did you hear what she said?" shouted Ajax. "She dared me to stop!"

  "Of course, sir, you are not going to," said the butler. "You are right in your course. She must be wrong."

  Ajax forgot at the moment that the butler was a robot with built-in agreement coils. He nodded. "It's good that someone has sense around here," he said more slowly.

  He turned, glanced out the window, looked at the clock on the wall. "There's no time to lose," he said. "Call the Destiny's launching complex. I want to take off for Mars as soon as possible."

  The butler padded away. Ajax turned, walked rapidly to a wall cabinet, opened it with a touch of his thumbprint. He took a long pole from it, and gently unrolled the flag attached to it. On duraloid dacron, in gorgeous purple, there was a crown over a crimson "A." Ajax waved it softly back and forth, admiring its swish through the air.

  "Soon," he murmured, eyes aglaze, "soon."

  The butler shuffled back. "The Destiny is being stocked now; the orbit is being registered; you may expect to take off at 2230. Five hours sir. May I suggest an early supper?"

  "Yes, yes," said Ajax, following the butler out. "Anything to take the taste of that crazy girl out of my mouth."

  In the distance, a small blue single-seater jet slid out of the private rack and whirling around over the waters of the Great Slave Lake, turned and raced back towards the headquarters of the North American sector of EMSA.

  There was a very determined young woman at its controls. This was her first assignment as an EMSA operative, and she'd be blasted if it wasn't going to be carried through to the bitter end.

  There was a peal of thunder as her jet broke the sound barrier on its fast acceleration. There ought to have been lightning as well

  CHAPTER THREE

  The private space yacht Destiny was one of the finest and most modern spaceships in non-commercial hands. Few were the individuals who could afford to own a space-going vehicle of their own, but Ajax Calkins was one of them; into the Destiny he had put everything his money could buy.

  For one thing it was fully automationed; there was no crew. The entire ship could be and was controlled from one point, and that point itself had only to have certain coordinates punched to set the entire vessel on its course. The figures themselves could be obtained by setting up specific destination requests on the automatic calculators with which the control room was amply equipped.

  So, though the Destiny was no tiny vessel—it could carry a dozen passengers with ease and in luxury—it was easily driven by a single person. Ajax, a lonely soul who liked to commune with the stars by himself the better to envision his glorious future, was in the habit of traveling alone.

  Promptly at the set hour, after a good evening meal, Ajax gave his robot butler specific instructions as to the conduct of his estate, reverently took the wrapped roll of his personally designed flag from its case, and strolled down to the outer terrace. There he stepped aboard his ground carpet, spoke the correct words, and allowed the skimming flat oblong of the airflow-platform to waft off gently, flow across the several acres of space, and down along the cleared area beside the lake. It deposited him softly at the door to his space yacht's hangar.

  The Destiny was trim, neatly streamlined, painted in gleaming purple trimmed with gold. Ajax went up the incline; the main lock opened for him, and he stepped through.

  He wasted no time getting ready. Once in his control

  room, reclining in a comfortable form-fitting seat, he punched out the configuration for a direct, highest speed flight to Mars. The machines clicked, growled a little, hissed steadily for a few minutes, and then the tapes came out.

  Feeding them into his main control panel, Ajax waited until the lights on his board lit their ready signals. He punched down the starter and leaned back.

  The Destiny slid gently upward, rose in the air as the hangar roof slid back, and then shot into the evening sky, heading low and fast for the North Pole.

  As it rose into the darkness of the upper stratosphere, another series of lights lit on the main board and the radio clicked on. "Calling Destiny. Calling private yacht Destiny," said a mechanical voice.

  Ajax sat up sharply, leaned forward.

  "Destiny here," he said. "Who calls?"

  This is the traffic control officer at Boothia takeoff center. We have a routine check to make of you. Please proceed to Earth Satellite Six, hold, and stand by for boarding."

  The voice snapped off. Ajax furrowed bis brow angrily. That wasn't normal procedure. His ship had perfect clearance, was A-l in condition. He decided not to argue with a machine; instead he depressed a lever, thereby clearing his automatic pilot, and then reset it for the new destination.

  Earth Satellite Six was a huge mile-wide platform rotating around the Earth in sequence with eight other similar platforms. They were regular clearing posts and loading stations for interplanetary commerce, and often used for observatories and space hospitals. />
  The Destiny came alongside in time, matching its speed with that of the huge flying disc, like a pancake-shaped world moving through the blackness of airless space. It locked into a magnetic holding crane and shut off its engines.

  Ajax was on the radio at once. "Explain the meaning of this outrage," he snapped. "What's holding me up? I have urgent business on Mars."

  "Sorry," said a voice. "An inspector is coming aboard right away."

  In a few minutes there was the click of magnetic clamps, and a small barge snapped alongside. With suction the airlock opened, and in a moment a man stepped inside. Ajax met him at the lock door.

  The man, a slender balding type with spectacles, wore the maroon coveralls of the Earth-Mars Space Administration work team. He was rather apologetic.

  "I'm awfully sorry for the delay, sir, but we have a holding call for you directly from the Ottawa office. The claim is made that your ship is infested with . . . uh, umm . . . titmice, the report said. And you must understand, sir, that the importation of rodents of any kind to Mars is strictly taboo. We must inspect the ship."

  "What!" Ajax screamed. "What in ,heaven's name are you talking about! How could this ship be infested? How, I ask you?"

  "Well, sir," said the official moving past him with a shrug. "I can't say, sir. The report said something about this vessel having been kept in wilderness conditions, without sealed garaging facilities. It will take some time to make the inspections."

  "Something's definitely fishy," grumbled Ajax. "There's no such report. Who could have made it? Who could say? My hangar area is absolutely clear and my ship is always in perfectly sterile condition." „

  "Yes, sir," said the official. "That may be right, sir, and so you have nothing to worry about but the delay of several days while we recheck it. We have to obey orders, you know. There was a charge. We must hold the ship for the next rodent inspection, and that may take a while."

  Ajax stood a minute, white with consternation, then shoved past the inspector in the passageway, hurried ahead of him to the control room. The official was about to clamp a lock on the controls, but Ajax brushed his hand down.

  "Now you just wait a minute until I can get to the bottom of this!" yelled Ajax. "Just wait until I call my lawyers!"

  "Well . . ." said the inspector, but Ajax pushed him into a seat, and sitting down at his own controls, shot in a call to the Calkans offices in Toronto.

  In a few minutes he was in touch with the director of the corporation's legal staff in his home territory. That person was equally puzzled, but announced he would get on the matter without delay.

  The next half hour was a period of tension and annoyance. The two men sat glaring at each other without saying anything. Ajax was angry, but it was hard to take his fury out on the other who was only a minor official obeying orders from elsewhere.

  Finally the call came in and the legal wizard was back on. He seemed puzzled now judging from the expression on his plump elderly features as they phased into the video mirror.

  "A charge was put in against the Destiny late this afternoon," he said. "It was made by an EMSA field operative, a party named Hackenschmidt. This inspector claimed to have seen nesting titmice in close proximity to the vessel and to have expressed the belief that in consequence the craft should be re-inspected. The order was okayed in view of the rodent prohibition law, which is one of the oldest in our relations with Mars.

  "I'm afraid that you will have to hold up your trip for the time it will take to have the extermination crew survey your vessel."

  Ajax sat back, fingering his mustache. "Hackenschmidt, eh? I see her game. Delay at all costs. That woman—she threatened to queer my game. Interfere with me, will she?" He was thinking aloud.

  The face of his legal adviser in Toronto was also frowning in thought. "I am rather surprised. I am sure your ship must be in order. This seems a most unusual sort of charge."

  The man from the Earth Satellite was also deep in thought. "Exactly what are titmice like—sir?" he asked. "It seems to me that someone is in error. I have a feeling there is-a confusion of definitions here."

  Ajax glanced at him and simultaneously the Toronto lawyer's face changed—both gave a start.

  "She goofed!" shouted Ajax. "The charge is invalid. Even if there are titmice aboard—and I know there are not—it is not legal to hold me. Titmice are not rodents; they're birds!"

  "Why, so they are!" said the inspector getting up and looking around. "And I'm sure there are no birds in evidence around here. Even if there were, there's nothing in the regulations about them."

  "Right!" shouted Ajax gleefully, "so clear off at once, and I shall be on my way."

  "Titmice?" said the inspector, heading for the airlock. "What a curious mistake . . ."

  "Titmice," replied the Toronto legalist smiling. "That Hackenschmidt must have garbled the report. Perhaps the complainant meant field mice . . ."

  "Hey, whose side are you on?" said Ajax. "Titmice she said, and that's where it stands. This ship is cleared." He snapped off the connection with the Canadian office.

  The outer lock snicked shut as the inspector left; the; magnetic clamps clicked loose, and the Destiny found itself adrift in orbit, alongside the huge platform satellite.

  Ajax leaped to his seat, recalculated the coordinates in accord with his time, direction, velocity, and position, reset his pilot. In a few minutes, the Destiny came under power, turned, and headed outward.

  Ajax leaned back, realizing he had lost only an hour.

  But that Hackenschmidt, he thought. That was a nasty trick she pulled, but thank heavens he'd seen the last of her. She could sit around and stew in her own home office, file all the complaints she wanted from here on in; he was out of her control.

  As the Destiny flashed past the moon's orbit, Ajax retired for his first sleep of the trip.

  But he dreamed uneasily of a black-haired girl with flashing blue eyes. What was it they said about a woman scorned?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sex days later Ajax was on Mars, a fast trip for an automatically directed, non-crew operated, privately owned space yacht. He went alone, for Ajax wasn't one to depend closely on others. It had always been a principle of his life, ever since he had read the romantic volumes in the Calkins library, which indicated that great men, mainly explorers, almost invariably had pioneered in the face of obstacles and the skepticism of others.

  So he preferred to travel alone. It was hard to trust other humans, who did not have the advantage of the wealth that was his by birth, or share his dreams. Most people kept on insisting that kings and crowns and private flags were out-of-date, childish symbols in a world that had gone long past them. Needless to say, Ajax did not agree. Space, to him, was infinite; and in an expanding space frontier, there would always be a fringe awaiting the hand of a powerful man.

  "History passes through phases," Ajax once explained to his complacent robot butler, "in which the old frontier is tamed and in which the new frontiers waiting beyond the new horizon are not yet assaulted. A period of assimilation, of digestion, apparently must ensue before the new borders are crossed. And today, we are in such a period. We have expanded up to the orbit of Jupiter. We are trying to organize and utilize what we have taken and so there is a period of consolidation, of conservatism in human growth.

  "Besides, we have now encountered evidence of the Saturnians' existence and behavior; and we are pausing to see what that means. But I say we must redouble our efforts to attack the frontiers just because of that. For if we do not, the Saturnians will!"

  The robot butler had agreed of course. In his student days, some of the tutors to whom young Calkins had first outlined his thesis, did not. They regarded the whole thing as romanticism—a word which Ajax had come to loathe.

  Ajax, on arriving, had gone to the headquarters of the Calkans company. Here he received the message waiting for his arrival, and found in strictest confidence the name and address of the place where Anton Smallways would
meet him. And then, after carefully confusing his trail >to prevent any from following him, Ajax boarded a local Martian omnibus in order to reach his destination. Earthlings practically never rode in these unusual Martian contrivances, and that, reasoned Ajax, would help to throw off any pursuit—not that he had seen any, but a world conqueror could not afford to take chances.

  The Martian idea of an omnibus was a huge and rather startling vehicle looking for all the world like a huge single wheel rolling along by itself. The thing, in fact, was a wheel, for the tread ran along the outside of the carrier, and the omnibus literally rolled along the spidery walkways that spanned the city. Gyroscopically stabilized, the passengers were jammed together in a large ball-like area in the hub of the wheel.

  Ajax clung to a trapeze-like set of bars, holding tight as the spherical carriage swayed and vibrated alarmingly in the manner of all those Martian vehicles. He tried hard to keep from being seasick, and it took all his attention to hang on to the bars swinging on their pivots. All around him clung the various citizens of Mars, the half dozen or so different types of non-vertebrates that made up the ruling races of the Fourth Planet.

  Brushing against him was the back of a large centipedelike creature, holding easily to the trapeze-seat and reading a book held in one of his hairy forearms. Just beneath him, rolled a lobsterback sort of thing with oystery undertones, which was conversing in sharp clicks with a similar creature on the next trapeze. An old eight-legged giant spider holding a cluster of five or six unhatched eggs on her back was knitting something just behind Calkins, and the ends of her needles occasionally poked into Ajax's spine.

  But he was willing to endure it all for the sake of his crown. Even the curious snail-like being, suctioned up against the bottom wall, did not disturb him, despite its rather penetrating odor. Martians themselves have no sense of smell; possibly this goes a long way to explain how these assorted beings managed to find unity in the first place.