Ferry Rocket

by Edmund Cooper

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Space Opera

Synopsis

Philip Shane, journalist for the London Sunday Sentinel and undercover agent for the British Government, sets out, at the Prime Minister's request, to investigate the death of key scientists on the moon. His fellow travellers are Claire Scott, daughter of Sir Fabian Scott, pioneer of Lunar City; Professor Denis Quarles, a one-man Investigating Commission; Gaff Midley, a psychiatrist; the Ferry Rocket Commander and crew. At Woomera, firing base for the Ferry Rockets in the year AD 2050, Shane is drugged and sabotage occurs. On the Commonwealth Space Station, 1079 miles above the Earth the Ferry Rocket Commander is killed. Who is responsible, and why?

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 113

Sample

THE space-taxi took them from Commonwealth Space Station to Rocket Thirteen, which had been circling the earth at nearly sixteen thousand miles an hour, twelve times a day, ever since the space-travellers left for the moon. There it stood, maintaining the same attitude and the same position amid all the scattered debris of the two-hour orbit. Far below, the sunny, cloudy face of India was slowly turning to the dark side of the world.

From the astrodome of Commonwealth Space Station the new director waved good-bye to his temporary guests. Of the original party, only Claire Scott, Gaff Midley and Philip Shane were returning to Woomera, to a world where one could breathe without oxygen cylinders, where the sky was blue, and where even in the deserts life flourished and fulfilled its destiny.

As they passed the moonship in which they had recently returned to the orbit, the three passengers in the space-taxi signalled to a group of engineers busy manipulating bales of supplies through the open entry-port. Rocky Wilson and his crew were preparing for yet another two hundred and forty thousand-mile voyage.

At last they reached Rocket Thirteen, where the new ferry pilot was already waiting for them. He had programmed the rocket, checked that the “runway” was clear, and had radioed acceptance of the scheduled firing-point both to Commonwealth and to Woomera.

The passengers settled back on their contour-berths and relaxed. On the downward trip, the slow spiral back to earth, the G force would be far less formidable. Presently, the ferry pilot came in and checked the safety straps, and then went to his own berth in the forward compartment. With a slight hiss, the door of the rocket’s entry-port closed.

“Two minutes to firing-point!” said the auto-announcer.

Gaff Midley, who was occupying the berth that had once been used by Quarles, spoke to Claire: “It won’t be long before you are back in Cambridge, my dear. And then I want you to forget all about it for a while—but only for a while … Until you can look back at the whole voyage without bitterness or pain.”

“Thank you, Gaff,” said Claire. “What a waste it is that such a man should die … You know, I don’t seem to be able to think of him as my father now—only as Sir Fabian Scott, the man who reached $$$ the moon.”

“That’s true,” said Shane, quietly, gazing across at Claire, “he did that. He reached for the moon … Promise me you’re going to put this tragedy right behind you, Claire … Some day we’ll talk about it when it doesn’t hurt any more.”

“I’ll try,” she said, with a smile. “You and Gaff have been very kind … Probably I haven’t taken it so badly as I’ve appeared to … You see, I began to feel that I ought to live up to him. And I seemed to draw courage from his courage, and the fact that he was a truly great man.”

Philip Shane gazed deeply into her eyes. “Yes,” he said, slowly, “Sir Fabian was a great man.”

“One minute to firing-point!” boomed the auto-announcer. “Fort-five seconds … thirty seconds … fifteen … ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one—zero!”

THE END

THE helicopter swung to the north, beginning the last leg of the journey. Astern, the Adelaide airfield receded into the hazy distance. Below and all ahead lay the hot desolate sea of the Australian bush, an expanse of baked soil mottled with a scant green carpet of spinifex, saltbush and nardoo. Here and there, a warped and stunted tree crouched like a scarred survivor under the burning whip of the sun.

The pilot, tunelessly humming the latest song hit, fed a small coil of steel tape into the helicopter’s electronic brain, then settled back to read his newspaper. To him, the desert was what it always was, and there was nothing new to look at. Being on shuttle service between Adelaide and Woomera City, he often made the trip three or four times a week. He knew the country like the back of his own hand, only more intimately; and had the electronic brain rebelled—as electronic brains sometimes do—he would have been able to complete the trip safely while simultaneously concentrating on the Adelaide Guardian crossword.

The front page of that newspaper lay across his knees. It was dated January 1st, 2050. Black headlines flung out their telegramatic message: Seven Aussies for New Year’s Honours; Caroline to come Down Under; Atom Pile goes up in Brazil.

It was the central item that attracted his attention. Nowadays, Aussies were always getting knighted, and berserk atom piles had about as much news value in the twenty-first century as a train smash had in the quaint old days of the twentieth.

But the monarchy was timeless, and young Queen Caroline the First belonged to the hearts of all her scattered peoples. Besides, didn’t her old dad, King Charles, marry an Australian girl? So why should the British have first claim on her. By rights, she ought to spend six months out of every year with her fifty million subjects in Australia. The pilot brightened at the prospect of Queen Caroline’s visit. It was quite a time since the old country had gone gay.

The thoughts of his two passengers were, however, in quite a different vein. One of them—the man—was filled with an unreasonable mounting excitement as the helicopter made its way across the desert to rocket country, to Woomera City. Philip Shane tried to tell himself that there was no solid reason why he should get up steam, that this was just another job and that, as far as excitement went, it certainly couldn’t touch his last assignment. During last year’s “silly season” the London newspapers had, as usual, thought up a lot of the old gags to amuse their readers. So Shane had been assigned to the old Atlantis ballyhoo. For almost a month, he had lived in a marine tractor unit, crawling about the bed of the ocean, looking for the legendary city. They hadn’t found Atlantis—but they had found the wreck of an old Spanish galleon off the Azores: a treasure ship, laden with gold from the Indies and silver from Peru. It had lain there nearly six centuries, untouched … Boy, that was news! Shane had scooped the whole story, and pushed up the circulation of the London Sunday Sentinel by a quarter of a million. He had also helped bring back five million pounds of treasure-trove. Compared with that, what was a mere trip to the moon? Nevertheless, Shane was excited. It was good to be alive in a world that was just wakening up. If and when he ever considered the world as it was before the end of the twentieth century, he felt depressingly sorry for the men who had lived before science had picked the fascinating lock of the atom.

Radiating his good spirits, Philip Shane glanced sociably at his companion, seated opposite, gazing somewhat moodily through the large porthole on the other side of the cabin. The face, thought Shane, was decidedly familiar. He had first noticed her on the strato-rocket when they were ten minutes out of London. At the touch-down in Colombo, when passengers went to the airfield restaurant, he had tried a few conversational gambits; but the girl, without interest or resentment, had simply stone-walled. She seemed just as preoccupied now as she had been during the whole of the trip to Adelaide. It was a pity, thought Shane flippantly, that one so attractive should be so damnably serious.

The girl was entirely oblivious of Shane’s attentions. She was too busy resenting the fact that she had just given up a thoroughly satisfying job at the Cambridge Children’s Clinic in order to go to the moon. She was busy resenting her father’s curt radiogram: “Need you at Lunar City stop Ferry Thirteen stop Berth arranged stop Scheduled leave Woomera January Third three hundred hours stop Greetings Fabian.”

Claire Scott was not only full of resentment, she was thoroughly annoyed. It was characteristic of her father that he would never give a thought to the necessity for explanations when requiring his daughter—or anyone else, for that matter—to make a two hundred and forty thousand mile journey. Sir Fabian Scott, director of Lunar City and its projected solar power station, was a man who demanded unquestioning loyalty from all who worked with him. What is more, he got it. The team of scientists under his control referred to him familiarly as the Great Dictator. But Scott’s dynamic personality, together with his intellectual brilliance and personal courage, commanded their unqualified respect. If he wanted them to work eighteen hours a day, they cursed him—and worked twenty. If a problem was apparently insoluble, and Sir Fabian needed the answer, his team would grind at it night and day until “the G.D.” got what he wanted. But if Scott drove his men hard, he drove himself harder. “Failure,” he once said, “is excusable—sometimes. But the inability to succeed is unforgivable—always.” He set high standards, but he lived up to them. And in his own life-time, he was already a legend. Two thousand million people had heard of Fabian Scott. They knew him as the scientist responsible for the Commonwealth Space Station. They knew him as the man who first set foot on the moon.

“Yes,” thought Claire Scott, as she gazed down at the Australian desert, “I might as well be angry with him now and get it over. Otherwise, I wouldn’t put it beyond the G.D. to spank me for having tantrums. He understands just about everything, except men and women … Well, this is what comes of having a great man for a father … But what on earth—or on the moon—does he want me to do? She smiled faintly, realising that her fear of the approaching journey to the moon was overshadowed by the fear that she might not be able to fulfil satisfactorily whatever role in his plans Sir Fabian had allotted to her.

Philip Shane noticed her slight smile and chose to interpret it as a sign of encouragement. “Happy New Year!” he said. “The same that I wished you over Egypt and in Colombo. But that was a few thousand miles ago; and now I’ve picked up the bits and I’m trying all over again.”

This time she really did smile. “I’m sorry I’ve been so unsociable. May I return the compliment, Mr.——?”

“Shane, Philip Shane. A normally gregarious example of the sub-species journalist. I have taken a correspondence course in good manners, and have learned that a good newshound never bites attractive young ladies … Well, hardly ever.”

The smile deepened and amusement appeared in her hitherto serious eyes. “I wouldn’t for one moment disbelieve you … How far away is Woomera City, do you think?”

“About forty-five minutes. Look, I’ve got a hunch! Want to make a bet, Miss Enigma?”

“What kind of a bet?”

“Well, we’ve shared the same strato-rocket from London; we’ve shared the same helicopter from Adelaide; and I’ll lay even money that we’ve got the same destination.”

“I have a healthy respect for coincidence,” she remarked. “But I’ll risk ten shillings. Now what?”

Shane said: “Ferry Rocket Thirteen! Correct?”

She took a ten-shilling note from her handbag. Then she said: “Wait a minute! That’s only the transport. What’s the destination?”

“Commonwealth Satellite—then all change for Lunar City.”

“You win. But it was easy money.”

“Not at all,” protested Philip. “A, they don’t usually let journalists loose on the moon. B, women, I’m told, are even more of a rarity in Lunar City. For all I knew, you might just as well have been some rocket man’s wife coming out to the desert to catch up on a bit of lost marriage.”

“The observant journalist would see that I haven’t got a ring.”

“Which, in itself,” remarked Philip blandly, “is somewhat promising. Tell you what, I’ll swop the ten bob you just lost for your name.”

“Do you think it’s worth ten shillings?” she asked innocently.

“I’ll be rash and take the risk. After all, it’s really your money.”

“My name is Scott.”

Philip gasped. “Clair de Lune! Don’t tell me you’re Sir Fabian’s daughter!”

“So I understand, on fairly good authority,” replied Claire dryly. However, she was not altogether displeased by the mild sensation her identity seemed to have caused.

“This,” said Philip, after a moment or two, “is little short of miraculous. This trip to the moon is going to be rather more interesting than I thought.”

“Have you ever met my father?” enquired Claire.

“No.”

“He doesn’t like journalists,” she said, with an air of innocent candour. “In fact, he simply loathes your tribe altogether. That, too, may prove interesting … By the way, I’m not being rude, but who gave you pe. . .