"Pohl, Frederick - The High Test" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)Fredrik Pohl Version 1.0
Of all the science-fiction writers who inspired and delighted my youth, the one who most completely saturated the pleasure centers of my brain was the late
Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D. I wasn't the only one who
felt that. Doc Smith invented the "space opera, the
high-tech deep-space adventuring that set the style for
everything from John Campbell's first stories to Star
Wars and beyond. It's a crying shame that Doc's The
Skylark of Space has never been made into a movie;
it's as thrilling and colorful as the best of them, and a
lot more intelligently imagined. One of the joys of growing up to be an editor was that I was able to get Doc
to write new stories for me ("Skylark DuQuesne was
the most important of them), so that I could carry on
into middle age the joys of my youth. When Doc died,
I mourned deeply. His daughter and son-in-law, Verna
and Albert Trestrail, are long-term and well-loved friends
and when, a summer or two ago, I stayed for a few
days at their comfortable home in central Indiana, I was
enchanted to find that Verna still owned Doc's own
personal typewriter, a four-square old Woodstock as
76
big as a breadbasket. Could I write a story on it? I
begged. Of course, Verna answered, and kindly kept
my coffee cup filled and fresh ashtrays within reach as,
over two long days, I wrote the first draft of "The High
Test. The former cabin boy had grown to command
the Q.E. 2! Of course, "The High Test is not exactly a
Doe Smith story. But it's not exactly a typical Fred Pohl
story, either, and I expect the reason is that I was
thinking of Doc all the time I was writing it.
2213 12 22 1900UGT
Dear Mom:
I know you'll say that's not much of a career for a
twenty-six-year-old man with a doctorate, but it pays the
rent. Also it's a lot better than I'd have if I'd stayed on
Earth. Is it true that the unemployment rate in Chicago
is up to eighty percent? Wow! As soon as I get a few
megabucks ahead I'm going to invite you all to come out
here and visit me in the sticks so you can see how we
live here-you may not want to go back!
Now, I don't want you to worry when I tell you that
I get hazardous duty pay. That's just a technicality. We
driving instructors have it in our contracts, but we don't
really earn it. At least, usually we don't-although there
are times like yesterday. The first student I had was this
young girl, right from Earth. Spoiled rotten! You know
the kind. rich, and I guess you'd say beautiful, and really
used to having her own way. Her name's Tonda Aguilar-
you've heard of the Evanston Aguilars? In the recombinant
foodstuff business? They're really rich, I guess. This
one had her own speedster, and she was really sulked
that she couldn't drive it on an Earth license. See, they
have this suppressor field; as soon as any vehicle comes
into the system, zap, it's off, and it just floats until some
licensed pilot comes out to fly it in. So I took her up, and
right away she started giving me ablation: "Not so much
takeoff boost! You'll burn out the tubes! and "Don't ride
the reverter in hyperdrive! and "Get out of low orbit-
you want to rack us up?
Well, I can take just so much of that. An instructor is
almost like the captain of a ship, you know. He's the
boss! So I explained to her that my name wasn't "Chowderhead
or "Dullwit! but James Paul Madigan, and it
was the instructors who were supposed to yell at the
students, not the other way around. Well, it was her own
speedster, and a really neat one at that. Maybe I couldn't
blame her for being nervous about somebody else driving
it. So I decided to give her a real easy lesson. Practicing
parking orbits-if you can't do that, you don't deserve
a license! And she was really rotten at it. It looks easy,
but there's an art to cutting the hyperdrive with just the
right residual velocity, so that you slide right into your
assigned coordinates. The more she tried, the farther off
she got. Finally she demanded that I take her back to the
spaceport. She said I was making her nervous. She said
she'd get a different instructor for tomorrow or she'd just
move on to some other system where they didn't have
benefacted chimpanzees giving driving lessons.
I just let her rave. Then the next student I had was a
Fomalhautian. You know that species, they've got two
heads and scales and forked tails, and they're always
making a nuisance of themselves in the United Systems?
If you believe what they say on the vidcom, they're bad
news-in fact, the reason Cassiopeia installed the
suppressor field was because they had a suspicion the
Fomalhautians were thinking about invading and taking over
43-G. But this one was nice as pie! Followed every
instruction. Never gave me any argument. Apologized when
he made a mistake and got us too close to one of the mini-
black holes near the primary. He said that was because
he was unfamiliar with the school ship, and said he'd
prefer to use his own space yacht for the next lesson. He
made the whole day better, after that silly, spoiled rich
brat!
I was glad to have a little cheering up, to tell you the
truth. I was feeling a little lonesome and depressed.
Probably it's because it's so close to the holidays. It's hard to
believe that back in Chicago it's only three days until
Christmas, and all the store windows will he full of
holodecorations and there'll be that big tree in Grant Park and
I bet it's snowing. . . and here on Cassiopeia 43-G it's sort
of like a steam bath with interludes of Niagara Falls.
I do wish you a merry Christmas, Mom! Hope my gifts
got there all right.
Love,
Jim Paul
2213 12 2~ LATE
Dear Mom:
Well, Christmas Day is just about over. Not that it's
any different from any other day here on 43-G, where the
human colonists were mostly Buddhist or Moslem and
the others were-well! You've seen the types that hang
around the United Systems building in Palatine-smelled
them, too, right? Especially those Arcturans. I don't know
whether those people have any religious holidays or not,
and I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.
Considering that I had to work all day, it hasn't been
such a bad Christmas at that. When I mentioned to
Torklemiggen-he's the Fomalhautian I told you about-that
today was a big holiday for us, he sort of laughed and
said that mammals had really quaint customs. And when
he found out that part of the custom was to exchange
gifts, he thought for a minute. (The way Fomalhautians
think to themselves is that their heads whisper in each
other's ear-really grotesque!) Then he said that he had
been informed it was against the law for a student to give
anything to his driving instructor, but if I wanted to fly
his space yacht myself for a while he'd let me do it. And
he would let it go down on the books of the school as
instruction time, so I'd get paid for it. Well, you bet I
wanted to! He has some swell yacht. It's long and tapered,
sort of shark-shape, like the TU-Lockheed 4400 series,
with radar-glyph vision screens and a cruising range of
nearly 1,800 l.y. I don't know what its top speed is-
after all, we had to stay in our own system!
We were using his own ship, you see, and of course
it's Fomalhautian-made. Not easy for a human being to
fly! Even though I'm supposed to be the instructor and
Torklemiggen the student, I was baffled at first. I couldn't
even get it off the ground until he explained the controls
to me and showed me how to read the instruments. There's
still plenty I don't know, but after a few minutes I could
handle it well enough not to kill us out of hand. Torklemiggen
kept daring me to circle the black holes. I told
him we couldn't do that, and he got this kind of sneer on
one of his faces, and the two heads sort of whispered
together for a while. I knew he was thinking of something
cute, but I didn't know what at first.
Then I found out!
You know that CAS 43, our primary, is a red giant star
with an immense photosphere. Torklemiggen bragged that
we could fly right through the photosphere! Well, of course
I hardly believed him, but he was so insistent that I tried
it out. He was right! We just greased right through that
thirty-thousand-degree plasma like nothing at all! The hull
began to turn red, then yellow, then straw-colored-you
could see it on the edges of the radar-glyph screen-and
yet the inside temperature stayed right on the button of
40 degrees Celsius. That's 43-G normal, by the way. Hot, if you're
used to Chicago, but nothing like it was outside! And
when we burst out into vacuum again there was no thermal shock,
no power surge, no instrument fog. Just beautiful! It's hard to
believe that any individual can afford a
ship like this just for his private cruising. I guess
Fomalhaut must have some pretty rich planets!
Then when we landed, more than an hour late, there
was the Aguilar woman waiting for me. She had found
out that the school wouldn't let her change instructors
once assigned. I could have told her that; it's policy. So
she had to cool her heels until I got back. But I guess she
had a little Christmas spirit somewhere in her ornery frame,
because she was quite polite about it. As a matter of fact,
when we had her doing parking orbits, she was much
improved over the last time. Shows what a first-class
instructor can do for you!
Well, I see by the old chronometer on the wall that it's
the day after Christmas now, at least Universal-Greenwich
Time it is, though I guess you've still got a couple
of hours to go in Chicago. One thing, Mom. The Christmas
packages you sent didn't get here yet. I thought about
lying to you and saying they'd come and how much I liked
them, but you raised me always to tell the truth. (Besides,
I didn't know what to thank you for!) Anyway, merry
Christmas one more time from-
2213 12 30 O2001JGT
Dear Mom:
Another day, another kilobuck. My first student today
was a sixteen-year-old kid. One of those smart-alecky
ones, if you know what I mean. (But you probably don't,
because you certainly never had any kids like that!) His
father was a combat pilot in the Cassiopeian navy, and
the kid drove that way, too. That wasn't the worst of it.
He'd heard about Torklemiggen. When I tried to explain
to him that he had to learn how to go slow before he could
go fast, he really let me have it. Didn't I know his father
said the Fomalhautians were treacherous enemies of the
Cassiopeian way of life'? Didn't I know his father said
they were just waiting their chance to invade? Didn't I
know-
Well, I could take just so much of this fresh kid telling
me what I didn't know. So I told him he wasn't as lucky
as Torklemiggen. He only had one brain, and if he didn't
use all of it to fly this ship, I was going to wash him out.
That shut him up pretty quick, you bet!
But it didn't get much better, because later on I had
this fat lady student who just oughtn't to get a license for
anything above a skateboard. Forty-six years old, and
she's never driven before-but her husband's got a job
asteroid mining, and she wants to be able to bring him a
hot lunch every day. I hope she's a better cook than a
pilot! Anyway, I was trying to put her at ease, so she
wouldn't pile us up into a comet nucleus or something,
so I was telling her about the kid. She listened, all
sympathy-you know, how teenage kids were getting fresher
every year-until I mentioned that what we were arguing
about was my Fomalhautian student. Well, you should have
heard her then! I swear, Mom, I think these Cassiopeians
are psychotic on the subject. 1 wish Torklemiggen were here
so I could talk to him about it-somebody said the reason
CAS 43-G put the suppressor system in in the first place
was to keep them from invading, if you can imagine that!
But he had to go home for a few days. Business, he said.
Said he'd be back next week to finish his lessons.
Tonda Aguilar is almost finished, too. She'll solo in a
couple of days. She was my last student today-I mean
yesterday actually, because it's way after midnight now.
I had her practicing zero-G approaches to low-mass asteroids,
and I happened to mention that I was feeling a
little lonesome. It turned out she was, too, so I surprised
myself by asking her if she was doing anything tomorrow
night, and she surprised me by agreeing to a date. It's not
romance, Mom, so don't get your hopes up. It's just that
she and I seem to be the only beings in this whole system
who know that tomorrow is New Year's Eve!
Love,
Jim Paul
2214 01 02 2330UGT
Dear Mom:
I got your letter this morning, and I'm glad that your
leg is better. Maybe next time you'll listen to Dad and
me! Remember, we both begged you to go for a brand-
new factory job when you got it, but you kept insisting a
rebuilt would be just as good. Now you see. It never pays
to try to save money on your health!
I'm sorry if I told you about my clients without giving
you any idea of what they looked like. For Tonda, that's
easy enough to fix. I enclose a holo of the two of us which
we took this afternoon, celebrating the end of her lessons.
She solos tomorrow. As you can see, she is a really good-
looking woman, and I was wrong about her being spoiled.
She came out here on her own to make her career as a
dermatologist. She wouldn't take any of her old man Aguilar's
money, so all she had when she got here was her
speedster and her degree and the clothes on her back. I
really admire her. She connected right away with one of
the best body shops in town, and she's making more money
than I am.
As to Torklemiggen, that's harder. I tried to make a
holopic of him, but he got really upset, you might even
say nasty. He said inferior orders have no right to worship
a Fomalhautian's image, if you can believe it! I tried to
explain that we didn't have that in mind at all, but he just
laughed. He has a mean laugh. In fact, he's a lot different
since he came back from Fomalhaut on that business trip.
Meaner. I don't mean that he's different physically. Physically
he's about a head taller than I am, except that he
has two of them. Two heads, I mean. The head on his
left is for talking and breathing, the one on his right for
eating and showing expression. It's pretty weird to see
him telling a joke. His jokes are pretty weird all by themselves,
for that matter. I'll give you an example. This
afternoon he said, ~What's the difference between a mammal and a roasted hagensbiffik with murgry sauce? And
when I said I didn't even know what those things were,
much less what the difference was, he laughed himself
foolish and said, "No difference! What a spectacle. There
was his left-hand head talking and sort of yapping that
silly laugh of his, deadpan, while the right-hand head was
all creased up with giggle lines. Some sense of humor. I
should have told you that Torklemiggen's left-hand head
looks kind of like a chimpanzee's, and the right one is a
little bit like a fox's. Or maybe an alligator's, because of
the scales. Not pretty, you understand. But you can't say
that about his ship! It's as sweet ajob as I've ever driven.
I guess he had some extra accessories put on it while he
was home, because I noticed there were five or six new
readouts and some extra hand controls. When I asked
him what they were for, he said they had nothing to do
with piloting and I would find out what they were for soon
enough. I guess that's another Fomalhautian joke of some
kind?
Well, I'd write more, but I have to get up early in the
morning. I'm having breakfast with Tonda to give her
some last-minute run-throughs before she solos. I think
she'll pass all right. She surely has a lot of smarts for
somebody who was a former Miss Illinois!
Love,
Jim Paul
2214 01 03 LATE
Dear Mom:
Your Christmas package got here today, and it was
really nice. I loved the socks. They'll come in real handy
in case I come back to Chicago for a visit before it gets
warm. But the cookies were pretty crumbled, I'm afraid-
delicious, though! Tonda said she could tell that they were
better than anything she could bake, before they went
through the CAS 43-G customs, I mean.
Torklemiggen is just about ready to solo. To tell you
the truth. I'll be glad to see the last of him. The closer
he gets to his license, the harder he is to get along with.
This morning he began acting crazy as soon as we got
into high orbit. We were doing satellite-matching curves.
You know, when you come in on an asymptotic tractrix
curve, just whistling through the upper atmosphere of the
satellite and then back into space. Nobody ever does that
when they're actually driving, because what is there on
a satellite in this system that anybody would want to visit?
But they won't pass you for a license if you don't know
how.
The trouble was, Torklemiggen thought he already did
know how, better than I did. So I took the controls away
to show him how, and that really blew his cool. "I could
shoot better curves than you in my fourth instar, he
snarled out of his left head, while his right head was
looking at me like a rattlesnake getting ready to strike. I mean,
mean. Then, when I let him have the controls back, he
began shooting curves at one of the mini-black holes.
Well, that's about the biggest no-no there is. "Stop that
right now, I ordered. "We can't go within a hundred
thousand miles of one of those things! How'd you pass
your written test without knowing that?
"Do not exceed your life station, mammal, he snapped,
and dived in toward the hole again, his forehands on the
thrust and roll controls while his hindhands reached out
to fondle the buttons for the new equipment. And all the
time his left-hand head was chuckling and giggling like
some fiend out of a monster movie.
"If you don't obey instructions, I warned him, "I will
not approve you for your solo. Well, that fixed him. At
least he calmed down. But he sulked for the rest of the
lesson. Since I didn't like the way he was behaving, I
took the controls for the landing. Out of curiosity I reached
to see what the new buttons were. "Severely handicapped
mammalian species! his left head screeched, while his
right head was turning practically pale pink with terror,
"do you want to destroy this planet?
I was getting pretty suspicious by then, so I asked him
straight out: "What is this stuff, some kind of weapons?
That made him all quiet. His two heads whispered to
each other for a minute, then he said, very stiff and formal,
"Do you speak to me of weapons when you mammals
have these black holes in orbit? Have you considered their
potential for weaponry? Can you imagine what one of
them would do, directed toward an inhabited planet? He
paused for a minute, then he said something that really
started me thinking. "Why, he asked, "do you suppose
my people have any wish to bring culture to this system,
except to demonstrate the utility of these objects?
We didn't talk much after that, but it was really on my
mind.
After work, when Tonda and I were sitting in the park,
feeding the flying crabs and listening to the singing trees,
I told her all about it. She was silent for a moment. Then
she looked up at me and said seriously, "Jim Paul, it's a
rotten thing to say about any being, but it almost sounds
as though Torklemiggen has some idea about conquering
this system.
"Now, who would want to do something like that? I
asked.
She shrugged. "It was just a thought, she apologized.
But we both kept thinking about it all day long, in spite
of our being so busy getting our gene tests and all-but
i'll tell you about that later!
Love,
Jim Paul
2214 01 05 2200UGT
Dear Mom:
Take a good look at this date, the fifth of January,
because you're going to need to remember it for a while!
There's big news from CAS 43-G tonight. . . but first, as
they say on the tube, a few other news items.
Let me tell you about that bird Torklemiggen. He soloed this
morning. I went along as check pilot, in a school
ship, flying matching orbits with him while he went through
the whole test in his own yacht. I have to admit that he
was really nearly as good as he thought he was. He slid
in and out of hyperdrive without any power surge you
could detect. He kicked his ship into a corkscrew curve
and killed all the drives, so he was tumbling and rolling
and pitching all at once, and he got out of it into a clean
orbit using only the side thrusters He matched parking
orbits-he ran the whole course without a flaw. I was
still sore at him, but there just wasn't any doubt that he'd
shown all the skills he needed to get a license. So I called
him on the private TBS frequency and said, "You've
passed, Torklemiggen. Do you want a formal written report
when we land, or shall I call in to have your license
granted now?
"Now this instant, mammal! he yelled back, and added
something in his own language. I didn't understand it, of
course. Nobody else could hear it, either, because the
talk-between-ships circuits don't carry very far. So I guess
I'll never know just what it is he said, but honestly, Mom,
it surely didn't sound at all friendly. All the same, he'd
passed.
So I ordered him to null his controls, and then I called
in his test scores to the master computer on 43-G. About
two seconds later he started screeching over the TBS,
"Vile mammal! What have you done? My green light's
out, my controls won't respond, is this some treacherous
warm-blood trick?
He sure had a way of getting under your skin. "Take
it easy, Torklemiggen, I told him, not very friendlily-
he was beginning to hurt my feelings. "The computer is
readjusting your status. They've removed the temporary
license for your solo, so they can lift the suppressor field
permanently. As soon as the light goes on again you'll be
fully licensed, and able to fly anywhere in this system
without supervision.
"Hah, he grumbled, and then for a moment I could
hear his heads whispering together. Then-well, Mom, I
was going to say he laughed out loud over the TBS. But
it was more than a laugh. It was mean, and gloating.
"Depraved retarded mammal, he shouted, "my light is
on-and now all of Cassiopeia is mine!
I was really disgusted with him. You expect that kind
of thing, maybe, from some spacehappy sixteen-year-old
who's just got his first license. Not from an eighteen-
hundred-year-old alien who has flown all over the galaxy.
It sounded sick! And sort of worrisome, too. I wasn't sure
just how to take him. "Don't do anything silly, Torklemiggen,
I warned him over the TBS.
He shouted back: "Silly? I do nothing silly, mammal!
Observe how little silly I am! And the next thing you
know he was whirling and diving into hyperspace-no
signal, nothing! I had all I could do to follow him, six
alphas deep and going fast. For all I knew we could have
been on our way back to Fomalhaut. But he only stayed
there for a minute. He pulled out right in the middle of
one of the asteroid belts, and as I followed up from the
alphas I saw that lean, green yacht of his diving down on
a chunk of rock about the size of an office building.
I had noticed, when he came back from his trip, that
one of the new things about the yacht was a circle of ruby-
colored studs around the nose of the ship. Now they began
to glow, brighter and brighter. In a moment a dozen streams
of ruby light reached out from them, ahead toward the
asteroid-and there was a bright flare of light, and the
asteroid wasn't there anymore!
Naturally, that got me upset. I yelled at him over the
TBS: "Listen, Torklemiggen, you're about to get yourself
in real deep trouble! I don't know how they do things
back on Fomalhaut. but around here that's grounds for
an action to suspend your license! Not to mention they
could make you pay for that asteroid!
"Pay? he screeched. "It is not I who will pay,
functionally inadequate live-bearer, it is you and yours! You
will pay most dreadfully, for now we have the black holes!
And he was off again, back down into hyperspace, and
one more time it was about all I could do to try to keep
up with him.
There's no sense trying to transmit in hyperspace, of
course. I had to wait until we were up out of the alphas
to answer him, and by that time, I don't mind telling you,
I was peeved. I never would have found him on visual,
but the radar-glyph picked him up zeroing in on one of
the black holes. What a moron! "Listen, Torklemiggen,
I said, keeping my voice level and hard, "I'll give you
one piece of advice. Go back to base. Land your ship.
Tell the police you were just carried away, celebrating
passing your test. Maybe they won't be too hard on you.
Otherwise, I warn you, you're looking at a thirty-day
suspension, plus you could get a civil suit for damages
from the asteroid company. He just screeched that mean
laughter. I added. "And I told you, keep away from the
black holes!
He laughed some more and said, "Oh, lower than a
smiggstroffle, what delightfully impudent pets you mammals
will make now that we have these holes for weapons-and what
joy it will give me to train you! He was
sort of singing to himself more than to me, I guess. "First
reduce this planet! Then the suppressor field is gone, and
our forces come in to prepare the black holes! Then we
launch one on every inhabited planet until we have destroyed
your military power. And then-
He didn't finish that sentence, just more of that chuckling,
cackling, mean laugh.
I felt uneasy. It was beginning to look as though Torklemiggen
was up to something more than just high jinks
and deviltry. He was easing up on the black hole and kind
of crooning to himself, mostly in that foreign language of
his but now and then in English: "Oh, my darling little
assault vessel, what destruction you will wreak! Ah,
charming black hole, how catastrophic you will be! How
foolish these mammals who think they can forbid me to
come near you-
Then, as they say, light dawned. "Torklemiggen, I
shouted, "you've got the wrong idea. It's not just a traffic
regulation that we have to stay away from black holes.
It's a lot more serious than that!
But I was too late. He was inside the Roche limit before
I could finish.
I almost hate to tell you what happened next. It was
pretty gross. The tidal forces seized his ship, and they
stretched it.
I heard one caterwauling astonished yowl over the TBS.
Then his transmitter failed. The ship ripped apart, and
the pieces began to rain down into the Schwarzschild
boundary and plasmaed. There was a quick, blinding flash
of fall-in energy from the black hole, and that was all
Torklemiggen would ever say or do or know.
I got out of there as fast as I could. I wasn't really
feeling very sorry for him, either. The way he was talking
there toward the end, he sounded as though he had some
pretty dangerous ideas.
When I landed it was sundown at the field, and people
were staring and pointing toward the place in the sky
where Torklemiggen had smeared himself into the black
hole. All bright purplish and orangey plasma clouds-it
made a really beautiful sunset, I'll say that much for the
guy! I didn't have time to admire it, though, because
Tonda was waiting, and we just had minutes to get to the
Deputy Census Director, Division of Reclassification, before it closed.
But we made it.
Well, I said I had big news, didn't I? And that's it,
because now your loving son is
Yours truly,
James Paul Aguilar-Madigan,
the newlywed!
Fredrik Pohl Version 1.0
Of all the science-fiction writers who inspired and delighted my youth, the one who most completely saturated the pleasure centers of my brain was the late
Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D. I wasn't the only one who
felt that. Doc Smith invented the "space opera, the
high-tech deep-space adventuring that set the style for
everything from John Campbell's first stories to Star
Wars and beyond. It's a crying shame that Doc's The
Skylark of Space has never been made into a movie;
it's as thrilling and colorful as the best of them, and a
lot more intelligently imagined. One of the joys of growing up to be an editor was that I was able to get Doc
to write new stories for me ("Skylark DuQuesne was
the most important of them), so that I could carry on
into middle age the joys of my youth. When Doc died,
I mourned deeply. His daughter and son-in-law, Verna
and Albert Trestrail, are long-term and well-loved friends
and when, a summer or two ago, I stayed for a few
days at their comfortable home in central Indiana, I was
enchanted to find that Verna still owned Doc's own
personal typewriter, a four-square old Woodstock as
76
big as a breadbasket. Could I write a story on it? I
begged. Of course, Verna answered, and kindly kept
my coffee cup filled and fresh ashtrays within reach as,
over two long days, I wrote the first draft of "The High
Test. The former cabin boy had grown to command
the Q.E. 2! Of course, "The High Test is not exactly a
Doe Smith story. But it's not exactly a typical Fred Pohl
story, either, and I expect the reason is that I was
thinking of Doc all the time I was writing it.
2213 12 22 1900UGT
Dear Mom:
I know you'll say that's not much of a career for a
twenty-six-year-old man with a doctorate, but it pays the
rent. Also it's a lot better than I'd have if I'd stayed on
Earth. Is it true that the unemployment rate in Chicago
is up to eighty percent? Wow! As soon as I get a few
megabucks ahead I'm going to invite you all to come out
here and visit me in the sticks so you can see how we
live here-you may not want to go back!
Now, I don't want you to worry when I tell you that
I get hazardous duty pay. That's just a technicality. We
driving instructors have it in our contracts, but we don't
really earn it. At least, usually we don't-although there
are times like yesterday. The first student I had was this
young girl, right from Earth. Spoiled rotten! You know
the kind. rich, and I guess you'd say beautiful, and really
used to having her own way. Her name's Tonda Aguilar-
you've heard of the Evanston Aguilars? In the recombinant
foodstuff business? They're really rich, I guess. This
one had her own speedster, and she was really sulked
that she couldn't drive it on an Earth license. See, they
have this suppressor field; as soon as any vehicle comes
into the system, zap, it's off, and it just floats until some
licensed pilot comes out to fly it in. So I took her up, and
right away she started giving me ablation: "Not so much
takeoff boost! You'll burn out the tubes! and "Don't ride
the reverter in hyperdrive! and "Get out of low orbit-
you want to rack us up?
Well, I can take just so much of that. An instructor is
almost like the captain of a ship, you know. He's the
boss! So I explained to her that my name wasn't "Chowderhead
or "Dullwit! but James Paul Madigan, and it
was the instructors who were supposed to yell at the
students, not the other way around. Well, it was her own
speedster, and a really neat one at that. Maybe I couldn't
blame her for being nervous about somebody else driving
it. So I decided to give her a real easy lesson. Practicing
parking orbits-if you can't do that, you don't deserve
a license! And she was really rotten at it. It looks easy,
but there's an art to cutting the hyperdrive with just the
right residual velocity, so that you slide right into your
assigned coordinates. The more she tried, the farther off
she got. Finally she demanded that I take her back to the
spaceport. She said I was making her nervous. She said
she'd get a different instructor for tomorrow or she'd just
move on to some other system where they didn't have
benefacted chimpanzees giving driving lessons.
I just let her rave. Then the next student I had was a
Fomalhautian. You know that species, they've got two
heads and scales and forked tails, and they're always
making a nuisance of themselves in the United Systems?
If you believe what they say on the vidcom, they're bad
news-in fact, the reason Cassiopeia installed the
suppressor field was because they had a suspicion the
Fomalhautians were thinking about invading and taking over
43-G. But this one was nice as pie! Followed every
instruction. Never gave me any argument. Apologized when
he made a mistake and got us too close to one of the mini-
black holes near the primary. He said that was because
he was unfamiliar with the school ship, and said he'd
prefer to use his own space yacht for the next lesson. He
made the whole day better, after that silly, spoiled rich
brat!
I was glad to have a little cheering up, to tell you the
truth. I was feeling a little lonesome and depressed.
Probably it's because it's so close to the holidays. It's hard to
believe that back in Chicago it's only three days until
Christmas, and all the store windows will he full of
holodecorations and there'll be that big tree in Grant Park and
I bet it's snowing. . . and here on Cassiopeia 43-G it's sort
of like a steam bath with interludes of Niagara Falls.
I do wish you a merry Christmas, Mom! Hope my gifts
got there all right.
Love,
Jim Paul
2213 12 2~ LATE
Dear Mom:
Well, Christmas Day is just about over. Not that it's
any different from any other day here on 43-G, where the
human colonists were mostly Buddhist or Moslem and
the others were-well! You've seen the types that hang
around the United Systems building in Palatine-smelled
them, too, right? Especially those Arcturans. I don't know
whether those people have any religious holidays or not,
and I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.
Considering that I had to work all day, it hasn't been
such a bad Christmas at that. When I mentioned to
Torklemiggen-he's the Fomalhautian I told you about-that
today was a big holiday for us, he sort of laughed and
said that mammals had really quaint customs. And when
he found out that part of the custom was to exchange
gifts, he thought for a minute. (The way Fomalhautians
think to themselves is that their heads whisper in each
other's ear-really grotesque!) Then he said that he had
been informed it was against the law for a student to give
anything to his driving instructor, but if I wanted to fly
his space yacht myself for a while he'd let me do it. And
he would let it go down on the books of the school as
instruction time, so I'd get paid for it. Well, you bet I
wanted to! He has some swell yacht. It's long and tapered,
sort of shark-shape, like the TU-Lockheed 4400 series,
with radar-glyph vision screens and a cruising range of
nearly 1,800 l.y. I don't know what its top speed is-
after all, we had to stay in our own system!
We were using his own ship, you see, and of course
it's Fomalhautian-made. Not easy for a human being to
fly! Even though I'm supposed to be the instructor and
Torklemiggen the student, I was baffled at first. I couldn't
even get it off the ground until he explained the controls
to me and showed me how to read the instruments. There's
still plenty I don't know, but after a few minutes I could
handle it well enough not to kill us out of hand. Torklemiggen
kept daring me to circle the black holes. I told
him we couldn't do that, and he got this kind of sneer on
one of his faces, and the two heads sort of whispered
together for a while. I knew he was thinking of something
cute, but I didn't know what at first.
Then I found out!
You know that CAS 43, our primary, is a red giant star
with an immense photosphere. Torklemiggen bragged that
we could fly right through the photosphere! Well, of course
I hardly believed him, but he was so insistent that I tried
it out. He was right! We just greased right through that
thirty-thousand-degree plasma like nothing at all! The hull
began to turn red, then yellow, then straw-colored-you
could see it on the edges of the radar-glyph screen-and
yet the inside temperature stayed right on the button of
40 degrees Celsius. That's 43-G normal, by the way. Hot, if you're
used to Chicago, but nothing like it was outside! And
when we burst out into vacuum again there was no thermal shock,
no power surge, no instrument fog. Just beautiful! It's hard to
believe that any individual can afford a
ship like this just for his private cruising. I guess
Fomalhaut must have some pretty rich planets!
Then when we landed, more than an hour late, there
was the Aguilar woman waiting for me. She had found
out that the school wouldn't let her change instructors
once assigned. I could have told her that; it's policy. So
she had to cool her heels until I got back. But I guess she
had a little Christmas spirit somewhere in her ornery frame,
because she was quite polite about it. As a matter of fact,
when we had her doing parking orbits, she was much
improved over the last time. Shows what a first-class
instructor can do for you!
Well, I see by the old chronometer on the wall that it's
the day after Christmas now, at least Universal-Greenwich
Time it is, though I guess you've still got a couple
of hours to go in Chicago. One thing, Mom. The Christmas
packages you sent didn't get here yet. I thought about
lying to you and saying they'd come and how much I liked
them, but you raised me always to tell the truth. (Besides,
I didn't know what to thank you for!) Anyway, merry
Christmas one more time from-
2213 12 30 O2001JGT
Dear Mom:
Another day, another kilobuck. My first student today
was a sixteen-year-old kid. One of those smart-alecky
ones, if you know what I mean. (But you probably don't,
because you certainly never had any kids like that!) His
father was a combat pilot in the Cassiopeian navy, and
the kid drove that way, too. That wasn't the worst of it.
He'd heard about Torklemiggen. When I tried to explain
to him that he had to learn how to go slow before he could
go fast, he really let me have it. Didn't I know his father
said the Fomalhautians were treacherous enemies of the
Cassiopeian way of life'? Didn't I know his father said
they were just waiting their chance to invade? Didn't I
know-
Well, I could take just so much of this fresh kid telling
me what I didn't know. So I told him he wasn't as lucky
as Torklemiggen. He only had one brain, and if he didn't
use all of it to fly this ship, I was going to wash him out.
That shut him up pretty quick, you bet!
But it didn't get much better, because later on I had
this fat lady student who just oughtn't to get a license for
anything above a skateboard. Forty-six years old, and
she's never driven before-but her husband's got a job
asteroid mining, and she wants to be able to bring him a
hot lunch every day. I hope she's a better cook than a
pilot! Anyway, I was trying to put her at ease, so she
wouldn't pile us up into a comet nucleus or something,
so I was telling her about the kid. She listened, all
sympathy-you know, how teenage kids were getting fresher
every year-until I mentioned that what we were arguing
about was my Fomalhautian student. Well, you should have
heard her then! I swear, Mom, I think these Cassiopeians
are psychotic on the subject. 1 wish Torklemiggen were here
so I could talk to him about it-somebody said the reason
CAS 43-G put the suppressor system in in the first place
was to keep them from invading, if you can imagine that!
But he had to go home for a few days. Business, he said.
Said he'd be back next week to finish his lessons.
Tonda Aguilar is almost finished, too. She'll solo in a
couple of days. She was my last student today-I mean
yesterday actually, because it's way after midnight now.
I had her practicing zero-G approaches to low-mass asteroids,
and I happened to mention that I was feeling a
little lonesome. It turned out she was, too, so I surprised
myself by asking her if she was doing anything tomorrow
night, and she surprised me by agreeing to a date. It's not
romance, Mom, so don't get your hopes up. It's just that
she and I seem to be the only beings in this whole system
who know that tomorrow is New Year's Eve!
Love,
Jim Paul
2214 01 02 2330UGT
Dear Mom:
I got your letter this morning, and I'm glad that your
leg is better. Maybe next time you'll listen to Dad and
me! Remember, we both begged you to go for a brand-
new factory job when you got it, but you kept insisting a
rebuilt would be just as good. Now you see. It never pays
to try to save money on your health!
I'm sorry if I told you about my clients without giving
you any idea of what they looked like. For Tonda, that's
easy enough to fix. I enclose a holo of the two of us which
we took this afternoon, celebrating the end of her lessons.
She solos tomorrow. As you can see, she is a really good-
looking woman, and I was wrong about her being spoiled.
She came out here on her own to make her career as a
dermatologist. She wouldn't take any of her old man Aguilar's
money, so all she had when she got here was her
speedster and her degree and the clothes on her back. I
really admire her. She connected right away with one of
the best body shops in town, and she's making more money
than I am.
As to Torklemiggen, that's harder. I tried to make a
holopic of him, but he got really upset, you might even
say nasty. He said inferior orders have no right to worship
a Fomalhautian's image, if you can believe it! I tried to
explain that we didn't have that in mind at all, but he just
laughed. He has a mean laugh. In fact, he's a lot different
since he came back from Fomalhaut on that business trip.
Meaner. I don't mean that he's different physically. Physically
he's about a head taller than I am, except that he
has two of them. Two heads, I mean. The head on his
left is for talking and breathing, the one on his right for
eating and showing expression. It's pretty weird to see
him telling a joke. His jokes are pretty weird all by themselves,
for that matter. I'll give you an example. This
afternoon he said, ~What's the difference between a mammal and a roasted hagensbiffik with murgry sauce? And
when I said I didn't even know what those things were,
much less what the difference was, he laughed himself
foolish and said, "No difference! What a spectacle. There
was his left-hand head talking and sort of yapping that
silly laugh of his, deadpan, while the right-hand head was
all creased up with giggle lines. Some sense of humor. I
should have told you that Torklemiggen's left-hand head
looks kind of like a chimpanzee's, and the right one is a
little bit like a fox's. Or maybe an alligator's, because of
the scales. Not pretty, you understand. But you can't say
that about his ship! It's as sweet ajob as I've ever driven.
I guess he had some extra accessories put on it while he
was home, because I noticed there were five or six new
readouts and some extra hand controls. When I asked
him what they were for, he said they had nothing to do
with piloting and I would find out what they were for soon
enough. I guess that's another Fomalhautian joke of some
kind?
Well, I'd write more, but I have to get up early in the
morning. I'm having breakfast with Tonda to give her
some last-minute run-throughs before she solos. I think
she'll pass all right. She surely has a lot of smarts for
somebody who was a former Miss Illinois!
Love,
Jim Paul
2214 01 03 LATE
Dear Mom:
Your Christmas package got here today, and it was
really nice. I loved the socks. They'll come in real handy
in case I come back to Chicago for a visit before it gets
warm. But the cookies were pretty crumbled, I'm afraid-
delicious, though! Tonda said she could tell that they were
better than anything she could bake, before they went
through the CAS 43-G customs, I mean.
Torklemiggen is just about ready to solo. To tell you
the truth. I'll be glad to see the last of him. The closer
he gets to his license, the harder he is to get along with.
This morning he began acting crazy as soon as we got
into high orbit. We were doing satellite-matching curves.
You know, when you come in on an asymptotic tractrix
curve, just whistling through the upper atmosphere of the
satellite and then back into space. Nobody ever does that
when they're actually driving, because what is there on
a satellite in this system that anybody would want to visit?
But they won't pass you for a license if you don't know
how.
The trouble was, Torklemiggen thought he already did
know how, better than I did. So I took the controls away
to show him how, and that really blew his cool. "I could
shoot better curves than you in my fourth instar, he
snarled out of his left head, while his right head was
looking at me like a rattlesnake getting ready to strike. I mean,
mean. Then, when I let him have the controls back, he
began shooting curves at one of the mini-black holes.
Well, that's about the biggest no-no there is. "Stop that
right now, I ordered. "We can't go within a hundred
thousand miles of one of those things! How'd you pass
your written test without knowing that?
"Do not exceed your life station, mammal, he snapped,
and dived in toward the hole again, his forehands on the
thrust and roll controls while his hindhands reached out
to fondle the buttons for the new equipment. And all the
time his left-hand head was chuckling and giggling like
some fiend out of a monster movie.
"If you don't obey instructions, I warned him, "I will
not approve you for your solo. Well, that fixed him. At
least he calmed down. But he sulked for the rest of the
lesson. Since I didn't like the way he was behaving, I
took the controls for the landing. Out of curiosity I reached
to see what the new buttons were. "Severely handicapped
mammalian species! his left head screeched, while his
right head was turning practically pale pink with terror,
"do you want to destroy this planet?
I was getting pretty suspicious by then, so I asked him
straight out: "What is this stuff, some kind of weapons?
That made him all quiet. His two heads whispered to
each other for a minute, then he said, very stiff and formal,
"Do you speak to me of weapons when you mammals
have these black holes in orbit? Have you considered their
potential for weaponry? Can you imagine what one of
them would do, directed toward an inhabited planet? He
paused for a minute, then he said something that really
started me thinking. "Why, he asked, "do you suppose
my people have any wish to bring culture to this system,
except to demonstrate the utility of these objects?
We didn't talk much after that, but it was really on my
mind.
After work, when Tonda and I were sitting in the park,
feeding the flying crabs and listening to the singing trees,
I told her all about it. She was silent for a moment. Then
she looked up at me and said seriously, "Jim Paul, it's a
rotten thing to say about any being, but it almost sounds
as though Torklemiggen has some idea about conquering
this system.
"Now, who would want to do something like that? I
asked.
She shrugged. "It was just a thought, she apologized.
But we both kept thinking about it all day long, in spite
of our being so busy getting our gene tests and all-but
i'll tell you about that later!
Love,
Jim Paul
2214 01 05 2200UGT
Dear Mom:
Take a good look at this date, the fifth of January,
because you're going to need to remember it for a while!
There's big news from CAS 43-G tonight. . . but first, as
they say on the tube, a few other news items.
Let me tell you about that bird Torklemiggen. He soloed this
morning. I went along as check pilot, in a school
ship, flying matching orbits with him while he went through
the whole test in his own yacht. I have to admit that he
was really nearly as good as he thought he was. He slid
in and out of hyperdrive without any power surge you
could detect. He kicked his ship into a corkscrew curve
and killed all the drives, so he was tumbling and rolling
and pitching all at once, and he got out of it into a clean
orbit using only the side thrusters He matched parking
orbits-he ran the whole course without a flaw. I was
still sore at him, but there just wasn't any doubt that he'd
shown all the skills he needed to get a license. So I called
him on the private TBS frequency and said, "You've
passed, Torklemiggen. Do you want a formal written report
when we land, or shall I call in to have your license
granted now?
"Now this instant, mammal! he yelled back, and added
something in his own language. I didn't understand it, of
course. Nobody else could hear it, either, because the
talk-between-ships circuits don't carry very far. So I guess
I'll never know just what it is he said, but honestly, Mom,
it surely didn't sound at all friendly. All the same, he'd
passed.
So I ordered him to null his controls, and then I called
in his test scores to the master computer on 43-G. About
two seconds later he started screeching over the TBS,
"Vile mammal! What have you done? My green light's
out, my controls won't respond, is this some treacherous
warm-blood trick?
He sure had a way of getting under your skin. "Take
it easy, Torklemiggen, I told him, not very friendlily-
he was beginning to hurt my feelings. "The computer is
readjusting your status. They've removed the temporary
license for your solo, so they can lift the suppressor field
permanently. As soon as the light goes on again you'll be
fully licensed, and able to fly anywhere in this system
without supervision.
"Hah, he grumbled, and then for a moment I could
hear his heads whispering together. Then-well, Mom, I
was going to say he laughed out loud over the TBS. But
it was more than a laugh. It was mean, and gloating.
"Depraved retarded mammal, he shouted, "my light is
on-and now all of Cassiopeia is mine!
I was really disgusted with him. You expect that kind
of thing, maybe, from some spacehappy sixteen-year-old
who's just got his first license. Not from an eighteen-
hundred-year-old alien who has flown all over the galaxy.
It sounded sick! And sort of worrisome, too. I wasn't sure
just how to take him. "Don't do anything silly, Torklemiggen,
I warned him over the TBS.
He shouted back: "Silly? I do nothing silly, mammal!
Observe how little silly I am! And the next thing you
know he was whirling and diving into hyperspace-no
signal, nothing! I had all I could do to follow him, six
alphas deep and going fast. For all I knew we could have
been on our way back to Fomalhaut. But he only stayed
there for a minute. He pulled out right in the middle of
one of the asteroid belts, and as I followed up from the
alphas I saw that lean, green yacht of his diving down on
a chunk of rock about the size of an office building.
I had noticed, when he came back from his trip, that
one of the new things about the yacht was a circle of ruby-
colored studs around the nose of the ship. Now they began
to glow, brighter and brighter. In a moment a dozen streams
of ruby light reached out from them, ahead toward the
asteroid-and there was a bright flare of light, and the
asteroid wasn't there anymore!
Naturally, that got me upset. I yelled at him over the
TBS: "Listen, Torklemiggen, you're about to get yourself
in real deep trouble! I don't know how they do things
back on Fomalhaut. but around here that's grounds for
an action to suspend your license! Not to mention they
could make you pay for that asteroid!
"Pay? he screeched. "It is not I who will pay,
functionally inadequate live-bearer, it is you and yours! You
will pay most dreadfully, for now we have the black holes!
And he was off again, back down into hyperspace, and
one more time it was about all I could do to try to keep
up with him.
There's no sense trying to transmit in hyperspace, of
course. I had to wait until we were up out of the alphas
to answer him, and by that time, I don't mind telling you,
I was peeved. I never would have found him on visual,
but the radar-glyph picked him up zeroing in on one of
the black holes. What a moron! "Listen, Torklemiggen,
I said, keeping my voice level and hard, "I'll give you
one piece of advice. Go back to base. Land your ship.
Tell the police you were just carried away, celebrating
passing your test. Maybe they won't be too hard on you.
Otherwise, I warn you, you're looking at a thirty-day
suspension, plus you could get a civil suit for damages
from the asteroid company. He just screeched that mean
laughter. I added. "And I told you, keep away from the
black holes!
He laughed some more and said, "Oh, lower than a
smiggstroffle, what delightfully impudent pets you mammals
will make now that we have these holes for weapons-and what
joy it will give me to train you! He was
sort of singing to himself more than to me, I guess. "First
reduce this planet! Then the suppressor field is gone, and
our forces come in to prepare the black holes! Then we
launch one on every inhabited planet until we have destroyed
your military power. And then-
He didn't finish that sentence, just more of that chuckling,
cackling, mean laugh.
I felt uneasy. It was beginning to look as though Torklemiggen
was up to something more than just high jinks
and deviltry. He was easing up on the black hole and kind
of crooning to himself, mostly in that foreign language of
his but now and then in English: "Oh, my darling little
assault vessel, what destruction you will wreak! Ah,
charming black hole, how catastrophic you will be! How
foolish these mammals who think they can forbid me to
come near you-
Then, as they say, light dawned. "Torklemiggen, I
shouted, "you've got the wrong idea. It's not just a traffic
regulation that we have to stay away from black holes.
It's a lot more serious than that!
But I was too late. He was inside the Roche limit before
I could finish.
I almost hate to tell you what happened next. It was
pretty gross. The tidal forces seized his ship, and they
stretched it.
I heard one caterwauling astonished yowl over the TBS.
Then his transmitter failed. The ship ripped apart, and
the pieces began to rain down into the Schwarzschild
boundary and plasmaed. There was a quick, blinding flash
of fall-in energy from the black hole, and that was all
Torklemiggen would ever say or do or know.
I got out of there as fast as I could. I wasn't really
feeling very sorry for him, either. The way he was talking
there toward the end, he sounded as though he had some
pretty dangerous ideas.
When I landed it was sundown at the field, and people
were staring and pointing toward the place in the sky
where Torklemiggen had smeared himself into the black
hole. All bright purplish and orangey plasma clouds-it
made a really beautiful sunset, I'll say that much for the
guy! I didn't have time to admire it, though, because
Tonda was waiting, and we just had minutes to get to the
Deputy Census Director, Division of Reclassification, before it closed.
But we made it.
Well, I said I had big news, didn't I? And that's it,
because now your loving son is
Yours truly,
James Paul Aguilar-Madigan,
the newlywed!
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