Destination: Saturn

I

The moose stood atop a low hill and stared ruminatingly through a row of evergreens at the long, low-slung house beside the shores of Great Slave Lake. And you couldn’t blame this fine specimen of Alces americanus for staring, for this particular structure was an eye-stunner even by the sophisticated standards of 2080.

After all, you expect the home of one of Earth’s youngest and most adventurous multibillionaires to be a bit on the palatial side. And so it was: almost an acre of glistening plastic, elaborately sculptured and friezed in a flamboyant, Imperial style of architecture that might be best described as Neo-Napoleonic Baroque with a few touches of Ivan-the Terrible Pseudo-Gothic added for extra impressiveness. As a modest little lakeside cottage, it had everything, including an artfully camouflaged private airport, a lake-front harbor filled with new-model racing craft of the air-cushion type currently popular, and a complete staff of robot servants. And there it was, right smack in the center of the chill Canadian wilderness, kept comfortably warm by concealed electronic mirrors placed amid the exotic flowering shrubbery.

Yes, even a simple moose might be expected to goggle at the home of Ajax Calkins, sole heir to the incredible Calkans industrial complex upon which the space age was built. This particular moose, raised to roam the near-Arctic tundras of northern Canada, had probably never been exposed to the luxurious splendors of modern living, and he seemed fascinated—especially by the living room, which was clearly visible through the wide floor-to-ceiling windows.

It may have been that the moose had never seen a quarrel between two humans before. For that was what was taking place at this moment within that luxurious living room.

Ajax Calkins, a slim, fairly good-looking but not overly impressive young man of twenty-five or -six was engaged in heated argument with a young girl (with whom, in fact, he was also engaged to be married). Ajax was personable enough to the casual eye, but he would himself be the first to agree with the statement that his appearance gave no suggestion of a fantastically wealthy Captain of Industry, and even less of the Leader of Men he so earnestly wished to be. His eyes were blue, but pale and dreamy rather than keen or intense. His straight hair was brownish, and a mediocre shade of brown at that. His mustache was slight and (to be frank) hardly visible, unless you stood very close to him. The crowning disappointment, from Ajax’s point of view—was his height, something short of the six full feet for which he longed. It wasn’t any comfort to remember that he was taller than Julius Caesar or Napoleon. Ajax’s appearance belied his dreams. In an age of over-security and hyper-civilization, with no more frontiers to cross or kingdoms to conquer, he dreamed of carving empires of his own from virgin wilderness… of emulating the heroic kingdom-builders of the past, like Pizarro, the bold conquistador who pulled down the Incas and won a continent for Spain, or Cecil Rhodes, who hacked a mighty nation out of trackless jungle and named it after himself, or that great explorer, Captain Cook, who found and claimed virgin Australia for his Queen. Ajax had a mental picture of himself that was part Clive of India and part Lawrence of Arabia, with a little “stout Cortez” and even a pinch of the White Rajah of Sarawak for seasoning.

Alas, he was none of these… only the richest young man on Earth, or anywhere else for that matter. But filthy lucre (even when you have it by the trainload) cannot assuage the pangs that afflict one born to a high, heroic destiny yet lacking the means wherewith to implement it.

Abandoning all sense of pride, Ajax had even sunk so low as to advertise for a kingdom. Much to his delighted surprise, just as he was about to give up all hope, one of his “Kingdom Wanted, Price No Object” ads in the Syrtis Major Sentinel actually brought in a customer! One Anton Smallways, on behalf of a group of miners and space-prospectors, invited him to come out to the Zone and be king of their tiny world. You can imagine the alacrity with which Ajax Calkins sped to the Asteroid Zone in his private spaceyacht, the Destiny … Clive of India—hah! He was going to be Ajax of the Asteroids!

Sadly, though, his glorious dreams fell through. His private world, the Imperial Kingdom of Ajaxia, proved to be no natural planetoid at all, but a stupendous prehistoric spaceship left over from some lost, primordial Asteroidal civilization. And on top of that, Anton Smallways and the other miners, his royal subjects, proved to be phonies. They were revealed as agents of the clever, ambitious Saturnians, and not human beings at all.

Out of this disillusionment, however, Ajax had salvaged a little something. Due to its strategic position at the edge of EMSA—in a sort of “no-man’s space” between the territory controlled by the Earth-Mars Space Administration and the hostile and cunning Interplanetary Empire of Saturn—and due to the enormous potential value of the mysterious machines and instruments with which the planetoid-spaceship was crammed, King Ajax the First had been able to bulldoze EMSA into officially recognizing him as an independent monarch, in exchange for all scientific rights to the Asteroidal machines. This concession, while it rescued his prestige, still left him in a sorry position… a King without subjects, a ruler without a realm over which to reign.

It was over details of the terms of the EMSA/Ajaxian Treaty that King Ajax the First was quarreling on the afternoon in question. From his hilltop observation post, the inquisitive moose could see quite clearly both the angry young monarch and his equally vehement opponent, Miss Emily Hackenschmidt, former Field Investigator for the North American Sector of EMSA, now Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the Royal Court of Ajaxia, and fiancee of Ajax Calkins.

Like Calkins Hall, she was also an eye-popper, and although she did not occupy a fraction of the house’s acreage, her architecture was equally admirable and even more symmetrical. She had deep-blue eyes (glaring, at the moment, in a determined frown); warm pink lips, obviously designed with osculation in mind, and an appealing tousled mop of short black curls arranged in poodlelike bangs. Her slim figure, with its superb collection of breath-taking curves arranged in just the right places, was at a disadvantage in the severe and workmanlike maroon service uniform of EMSA’s women’s division, although the knee-length culottes did succeed in displaying tantalizing glimpses of her long, graceful legs which were clad in lacy satinelle pettipants and calf-high boots. All-in-all, as the curiosity-smitten moose might have observed, Emily was a fitting future consort for this 21st Century Alexander of Macedon.

At the moment, however, her views of Ajax Calkins were anything but consort-like.

“You fumble-headed, slack-jawed idiot!” she hissed between tightly clenched teeth. “Of course EMSA’ll have to break up your precious planetoid in order to take apart the Asteroidal drive-engines and weaponry—and why shouldn’t they, you dense-witted cretin?”

“Why shouldn’t they, you ask? I’ll tell you why!”

“Tell me then, Ajax, you idiot.”

“King Ajax!” he snapped.

“King Ajax, you idiot,” she complied.

Ajax drew himself up and fixed the angry girl with an Imperial eye. “I say, Miss Hackenschmidt, you do leave something to be desired, as an Ambassador Plenipotentiary, in the tact-and-diplomacy department.”

“Oh, flack tact and diplomacy! Ajax, you make me so mad! And stop calling me ‘Miss Hackenschmidt’ as if I were your high-school cybernetics teacher or something!”

Ajax looked pained. “Please watch your language before royalty. Shall I call you ‘Miss Hackenwhacken’?—No, but,” he overrode her reply and continued serenely: “really, though, my objection to this item in the treaty should be blatantly obvious. I yielded exploitation rights to EMSA in return for EMSA’s recognition of my sovereign state. But if EMSA dismembers and carts off the planetoid-ship, there goes my sovereign state.”

“Your so-called ‘sovereign state’ “—she pronounced the words with scathing emphasis—“is going to have to go, anyway, Ajax, dismembered or not. EMSA can’t leave that flying treasure trove of scientific secrets within grabbing range of the Saturnian border. Which reminds me. I should never have let you persuade me to join you here on Earth… it’s pretty dumb for both of us to be here, leaving the planetoid-ship unattended. What if the Saturnians make a grab while we’re sitting here yelling at each other? Where’s your ‘sovereign state’ then?”

Ajax smiled his infuriatingly superior smile, plucked a stimulette from the rosewood box on the nearest end table and drew on it until the self-igniting tip caught. He did this with the practiced smoothness of a stereovision actor performing a bit of “business” designed to communicate something to the effect that “cooler heads than thine, my saucy miss, are at work and have already anticipated the eventuality.”

“You forget the Wuj,” he said calmly.

As ever, the thought of the diminutive Martian spider-being made him smile with quiet pride. Out of all the recent mishmash of phony planetoids and amoebic pseudo-subjects and interplanetary war, the one good thing that had happened to him in his quixotic quest for a private planetary empire was—the Wuj. Alexander had his Hephaestion, Dr. Johnson his Boswell… and Ajax the First, the Third Least Wuj of the Northern Panel Spinnery and the Eggery of the Silvery Downs!

Emily looked dubious.

“I don’t know… the Wuf is certainly loyal, but… well, he’s not human and doesn’t think like a human, and who can predict what hell do in an unexpected situation? Besides, those Saturnians are tricky, unscrupulous, and about as trustworthy as a homicidal maniac with a blowtorch.”

He smiled smugly. “I know… and they learned it all from your precious EMSA, didn’t they?”

Emily glared, but bit her lip in silence; it was uncomfortably true. When the first manned expedition from EMSA had reached Saturn some thirty years past, they discovered that the surface of the Ringed Planet supported life despite all scientific predictions to the contrary. The gravity was considerable, but not as bad as had been anticipated, since the actual planet proved very small. What had showed up on Earthside telescopes as a vast orb, only a trifle smaller than giant Jupiter, proved mostly atmosphere. The native dominant lifeform was a bit odd, however: a race of plastic, large amoebas whose bodily configuration was under conscious control and who could extrude rubbery pseudopods at will. They had a childlike, malleable mentality to match their outward form, and soon hero-worshipped the Earthmen from EMSA, copied their ways and imitated their institutions—a situation which led to rapid industrialization, to the growth of imperialistic dreams of conquest, and to the present impending interplanetary war whose first major engagement the Earthmen had won, with the aid of the age-old Asteroidal arsenal on Ajaxia.

“Well,” she said at last, “wherever they learned it from, they have mastered their lessons. And unless you agree to our terms and let EMSA break up the planetoid-ship and carry it into an in-world orbit somewhere safe, the very next move the Saturnians make will be to seize ‘Your Majesty’s sovereign state.’ Wuj or no Wuj!”