The Makeshift Rocket

CHAPTER THREE

The sun was low when Knud Axel Syrup pedaled a slightly erratic course over the spaceport concrete. He had given the Alt Heidelberg several hours' worth of his business: partly because there was nothing else to do but work his way down the beer list, and partly because Miss Emily Croft—once her tears were dried—was pleasant company, even for a staid old married man from Simmerboelle. Not that he cared to listen to her exposition of Duncanite principles, but he had prevailed on her to demonstrate some classical dances. And she had been a sight worth watching, once he overcame his natural disappointment at learning that classical dance included neither bumps nor grinds, and found how to ignore Sarmishkidu's lyre and syrinx accompaniment.

"Du skal faa min sofacykel naar jeg doer —" sang Herr Syrup mournfully.

"An' what might that mean?" asked the green-clad guard posted beneath the Mercury Girl. "You shall have my old bicycle ven I die," translated Herr Syrup, always willing to oblige.

"You shall have my old bicycle ven I die, For de final kilometer Goes on tandem vif St. Peter.

You shall have my old bicycle ven I die.

"Oh, said the guard, rather coldly.

Herr Syrup leaned his vehicle against the berth. "Dat is a more modern verse," he explained. "De orig'inal song goes back to de T'irty Years' Var."

"Oh."

"Gustavus Adolphus' troops ban singing it as—" Something told Herr Syrup that his little venture into historical scholarship was not finding a very appreciative authence. He focused, with some slight difficulty, on the battered hull looming above him. "Vy is dere no lights?" he asked. "Is all de crew in town?"

"I don't know what," confessed the guard. His manner thawed; he brought up his rifle and began picking his teeth with the bayonet."'Twas a quare thing, begorra. Your skipper, the small wan in the dishcloth hat, was argyfyin' half the day wi' General O'Toole. At last he was all but thrown out of headquarters an' came back here. He found our boys just at the point of removin' the ship's radio. Well, now, sir, ye can see how we could not let ye live aboard your ship an' not see-questrate the apparatus by which ye might call New Winchester an' bring the King's bloody solthers down on our heads. But no,

that poor little dark sad man could not be reas'nable, he began whoopin' and screamin' for all his crew, an' off he rushed at the head of 'em. Now I ask ye, sir, is that any way to—"

Knud Axel Syrup scowled, fished out his pipe, and tamped it full with a calloused thumb. One could not deny, he thought, Captain Radhakrishnan was normally the mildest of human creatures; but he had his moments. He superheated, yes, that was what he did, he superheated without showing a sign, and then all at once some crucial thing hap pened and he flashed off in live steam and what resulted thereafter, that was only known to God and also the Lord.

"Heigh-ho," sighed the engineer. "Maybe someone like me vat is not so excited should go see if dere is any trouble."

He lit his pipe, stuck it under his mustache, and climbed back onto his bicycle. Four roads led out of the spaceport, but one was toward town—so, which of three?—wait a minute. The crew would presumably not have stampeded quite at random. They would have intended to do something. What? Well, what would send the whole Shamrock League adventure downward and home? Sabotage of their new drive unit. And the asteroid's geegee installations lay down that road.

Herr Syrup pedaled quickly off. Twilight fell as he crossed the Cotswold Mountains, all of 500 meters high, and the gloom in Sherwood Forest was lightened only by his front-wheel lamp. But beyond lay open fields where a smoky blue dusk lingered, enough light to show him farmers' cottages and hayricks and—and—He put on a burst of speed.

The Girl's crew were on the road, brandishing as wild an assortment of wrenches, mauls, and crowbars as Herr Syrup had ever seen. Half a dozen young Grendelian rustics milled about among them, armed with scythes and pitchforks. The whole band had stopped while Captain Radhakrishnan exhorted a pair of yeoman who had been hoeing a wayside cabbage patch and now leaned stolidly on their tools. As he panted closer, Herr Syrup heard one of them:

"Nay, lad, tha'll no get me to coom."

"But, that is to say, but!" squeaked Captain Radhakrishnan. He jumped up and down, windmilling his arms. The last dayglow flashed off his monocle; it fell from his eye and he popped it back and cried: "Well, but haven't you any courage? All we need to do, don't y' know, is destroy their geegee and they'll jolly well have to go home. I mean to say, we can do it ten minutes, once we've overcome whatever guards they have posted."

"Posted wi' machine guns," said the farmer.

"Aye," nodded his mate. "An' brass knuckles, Ah'll be bound."

"But where's your patriotism?" shouted Captain Radha-krishnan. "Imitate the action of the tiger! Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage, and all diat sort of thing."

At this point Herr Syrup joined them. "You ban crazy?" he demanded.

"Ah." Captain Radhakrishnan turned to him and beamed. "The very man. Come, let's leave these bally caitiffs and proceed."

"But!" wailed Herr Syrup.

His assistant, Mr. Shubbish, nudged him with a tentacle and leered: "I fixed up a Molotov cocktail, chief. Don't worry. We got it made."

There was something in the air, a smell which—Herr Syrup's bulbous nose drank deep. Yes. Irish whisky. The crew must have spent a convivial afternoon with the spaceport sentries. So diat explained why they were so eager!

"Miss Croft is right," he muttered, "About whisky, anyhow. It calcifies the liver."

He pushed his bicycle along the road, beside Radhakrishnan's babbling commando, and tried to think of somediing which would turn them back. Eloquence was never his strong point. Could he borrow some telling phrase from the great poets of the past, to recall them to reason? But all diat rose into his churning brain was the Deadi Song of Ragnar Lodhbrok, which consists of phrases like "Where the swords were whining while they sundered helmets"—and did not seem to fit his present needs.

Vaguely dirough dusk and a grove of trees, he saw the terraforming plant. And then the air whirred and a small flyer slipped above him. It hung for an instant, then pounced low and fired a machine-gun burst. The racket was unholily loud, and the tracer stream burned like meteorites.

"Oh, my goodness!" exclaimed Captain Radhakrishnan.

"Wait there!" bawled an amplified voice. "Wait there an" we'll see what tricks ye're up to, ye Sassenach omadhauns!"

"Eek," said Mr. Shubbish.

Herr Syrup ascertained that no one had been hit. As the flyer landed and disgorged more large Celts than he had thought even a spaceship could hold, he switched off his bicycle lamp and wheeled softly back out of the suddenly quiet and huddled rebel band. Crouched beneath a hedgerow, he heard a lusty bellow:

"An' what wad ye be a-doin' here, where 'tis forbidden to venture by order of the General?" "We were just out for a walk," said Captain Radhakrishnan, much subdued.

"Sure, sure. With weapons to catch the fresh air, no doubt."

Herr Syrup stole from the shadows and began to pedal back the way he came. Words drifted after him. "We'll jist see what himself has to say about this donnybrookin', me lads. Throw down your gear!

'Bout face! March!"

Herr Syrup pedaled a little faster. He would do no one any good languishing in the Grendel calaboose and living off mulligan stew.

Not, he thought gloomily, that he was accomplishing much so far.

The asteroid night deepened around him. In this shallow atmosphere the stars burned with wintry brilliance. Jupiter was not many millions of kilometers away, so whitely bright that Grendel's trees cast shadows; you could see the Galilean satellites with the naked eye. A quick green moon strode up over the topplingly close horizon and swung toward Aries -one of the other Anglian asteroids—spinning with

its cluster mates around a common center of gravity, along a common resultant orbit. Probably New Winchester itself, maddeningly near. When you looked carefully at the sky, you could identify other little worlds among the constellations. The Erse Republic was still too remote to see without a telescope, but it was steadily sweeping closer; conjunction, two months hence, would bring it within a million kilometers of Anglia.

Herr Syrup, who was a bit of a bookworm, wondered in a wry way what Clausewitz or Halford Mackinder would think of modern astropolitics. Solemn covenants were all very well for countries which stayed put; but if you made a treaty with someone who would be on the other side of the sun next year, you must allow for the fact. There were alliances contingent on the phase of a moon and customs unions which existed only on alternate Augusts and—

And none of this was solving a problem which, if unsolved, risked a small but vicious interplanetary war and would most certainly put the Mercury Girl and the Alt Heideblerg Rathskeller out of business.

When he re-entered the spaceport, Herr Syrup met a blaze of lights and a bustle of men. Trucks rumbled back and forth, loaded with castings and fittings, sacks of cement and gangs of laborers. The Erse were working around the clock to make Grendel mobile. He dismounted and walked past a sentry, who gave him a suspicious glare, to the berth ladder, and so up to the air lock. He whistled a little tune as he climbed, trying to assure himself that no one could prove he had not merely been out on a spin for his health.

The ship was depressingly large and empty. His footsteps clanged so loud that he jumped, which only made matters worse, and peered nervously into shadowed corners. There was no good reason to stay aboard, he thought; an inn would be more cheerful and he could doubtless get off-season rates; but no, he had been a spaceman too long, one did not leave a ship completely unwatched. He contented himself with appropriating a case of Nashornbrau from the cargo—since the consignee had, after all, refused acceptance—and carried it back to his personal cubbyhole off the engine room.

Claus the crow blinked wicked black eyes at him from the bunk. "Goddag," he said.

"Goddag," said Herr Syrup, startled. To be courteously greeted by Claus was so rare that it was downright ominous.

"Fanden hade dig!" yelled the bird. "Chameau! Go stuff yourself, you scut! Vaya al Diablo!"

"Ah," said Herr Syrup, relieved. "Dat's more like it."

He sat down on the bunk and pried the cap off a bottle and tilted it to his mouth. Claus hopped down and poked a beak in his coat pocket, looking for pretzels. Herr Syrup stroked the crow in an absent-minded way.

He wondered if Claus really was a mutant. Quite possibly. All ships carried a pet or two, cat or parrot or lizard or uglopender, to deal with insects and other small vermin, to test dubious air, and to keep the men company. Claus was the fourth of his spacefaring line; there had been radiation, both cosmic and atomic, in his ancestral history. To be sure, Earthside crows had always had a certain ability to talk, but Claus' vocabulary was fantastic and he was constantly adding to it. Also, could chance account for the selectivity which made most of his phrases pure billingsgate?

Well—there was a more urgent question. How to get a message to New Winchester? The Girl's radio was carefully gutted. How about making a substitute on the sly, out of spare parts? No, O'Toole was not that kind of a dolt, he would have confiscated the spare parts as well, including even the radar.

But let's see. New Winchester was only some thousands of kilometers off. A spark-gap oscillator, powered by the ship's plant, could send an S.O.S. that far, even allowing for the inverse-square enfeeblement of an unbeamed broadcast. It would not be too hard to construct such an oscillator out of ordinary electrical stuff lying around the engine room. But it would take a while. Would O'Toole let Knud

Axel Syrup tinker freely, day after day, in the captive ship? He would not.

Unless, of course, there was a legitimate reason to tinker. If there was some other job to be done, which Knud Axel Syrup could pretend to be doing while actually making a Marconi broadcaster. Only, there were competent engineers among the Erse. It would be strange if one of them, at least, did not inspect the work aboard the Girl from time to time. And such a man could not be told that an oscillator was a dreelsprail for the hypewangle camit.

So. Herr Syrup opened another bottle and recharged his pipe. One thing you must say for the Erse, given a trail of logic to follow, they follow it till the sun freezes over. Having mulled the question in his mind for an hour or two, Herr Syrup concluded that he could only get away with building an oscillator if he was in some place where no Erse engineer would come poking an unwelcome nose. So what was needed was an excuse to—

Along about midnight, Herr Syrup left his cabin and went into the engine room. Happily humming, he opened up the internal-field compensator which had so badly misbehaved on the trip down. Hm, hm, hm,

let us see … yes, the trouble was there, a burned-out field coil, easily replaced … tum-te-tum-te-tum. Herr Syrup installed a coil of impedance calculated to unbalance the circuits. He shorted out two more coils, sprayed a variable condenser lightly with clear plastic, removed a handful of wiring and flushed it down the toilet, and spent an hour opening two big gas-filled rectifier tubes, injecting them with tobacco-juice vapor and resealing them. Having done which, he returned to his bunk, changed into night clothes, and took a copy of Kant's Critique off the shelf to read himself to sleep.

"Kraa, kraa, kraa," grumbled Claus. "Bloody foolishness, damme. Potfarl Ungah, ungah!"