A Matter of Matter (Stories from the Golden Age) Read online

  The contract was found, the payments were checked, the clerk was finally satisfied—if somewhat surprised, for the number of such that were finally paid out were quite few—and called a man named Joe to tell him that a Star-Jumper IV was to be placed at the disposal of one Chuck Lambert.

  Chuck took his deed, checked the notary’s commission, checked the description, checked the location and, in short, wore the clerk’s patience entirely out. Finally Chuck took it and went to the registry office, which was closed.

  The janitor, however, proved of aid and informed him that he could send it in by registered mail, retaining a photostat. Chuck thanked him and was not further balked, for a lithographer was near at hand and eager for business.

  At the port, Chuck landed with his light luggage, left it under cover from the light drizzle which had begun, and went to find Joe. It took six searched hangars and a coffee shop to locate the greaseball and then it seemed that Joe had thought the ship was to be ready for Tuesday. However, much pressing got consent for today.

  The next six hours were worse than the past eleven years. Chuck was here, so very near his goal, that seconds stretched out into light-years for him. What constituted his grand gesture was all muddled up and tangled with a number of details like Joe needing another cup of coffee and the starboard magnetrons being worn out on the Star-Jumper and having to be replaced and the hydraulic jack which wouldn’t function and after an hour’s repair had to be abandoned for another one which had stood right there all the time.

  If Chuck had not got out of that port that afternoon he would have died of apoplexy, youth or no youth.

  He was almost ready, the ship was finished, the port clearance secured and Joe given a final cup of coffee, when he found out that the food supplies he had had shipped to the port could not be found.

  It was dark, a rainy, wet dark, when he finally rose from the port, entered the acceleration height, put down his throttle and was gone. Chuck Lambert had never tasted such sweetness. The 4G sag was nothing to him. The age and obsolescence of the ship was nothing to him; his empty stomach was entirely forgotten. Here was sweetness. After eleven years he was on his way.

  Now, inasmuch as the Sunday feature sections you see do such a fine job of telling how space travel looks and feels and as you may have done some of it yourself and so don’t need to be told, a light-year-by-light-year description of Chuck Lambert’s voyage to Planet 19453X is not necessary.

  He saw the strange phenomena of light changes, size changes, star displacements and elongations and he felt all the bodily discomforts and euphorias and he saw the dark stars and luminous masses and, in short, he gloried in it. He wrote a log which sounded like a piece of poetry done by at least Julius Caesar. Space and the Universe were his onion. He ran out of dimensions like a spilled wineglass.

  If he left anything out and if he missed anything, it was because after three or four days of it he had to get a little sleep.

  He spent the following month filling his log, checking his course and building up a paper empire which stopped only because most of his supplies were not paper-wrapped and he ran out of writing materials.

  Probably few men have ever owned as much conquered Universe and purchased earth as Chuck Lambert in those long weeks of his voyage. But all things must come to an end and all dreams must break. Chuck Lambert landed at last on Planet 19453X.

  Now it happened that he had paid very little attention to his ship. The Star-Jumper was old and cranky and full of missing rivets. Her type had been developed for courier service in the first Colonial Revolt and about fifty thousand like her had been sold at a hundred dollars apiece to a man named Fleigal in Brooklyn. Her sole virtue was her near approach to perpetual motion, but of her drawbacks there is not enough paper here to adequately condemn them. Like any military job she had neither grace nor charm, safety nor comfort. And she managed this landing in a way calculated to drive any veteran of the spaceways entirely off his usual imbalance. She would not sit down.

  Had Chuck been a more experienced navigator he still would not have understood why. And he was very far from that. When he reached the star, he had to brake to a full stop in the middle of the system and take five hours’ worth of painful navigation to make sure the star was the right one. Then he used up two days examining orbits and the planets which ran in them to find 19453X, a thing which any professional would have finished up before he had the star itself within a light-year.

  But the hunt-and-poke system at last gave results and Chuck, without observing at least one very strange fact about this area, tried to get down.

  19453X had an atmosphere and a great many clouds. It was about seven times the size of Earth. It had no seas but seemed to possess a remarkable number of marshy areas which left the dry land at about one-fifth. It had numerous ranges of mountains and great, stretching plains. Chuck had all this down and noted with some enthusiasm, for it was his world, all his.

  And then the Star-Jumper drifted somewhere between ground and sky, no power, no lifts, nothing.

  Chuck became aware of this situation after a moment or two. The leaded ports were not such to permit a very good view below. He put a trifle of power to the magnetrons because he was anxious to get there.

  He had his kingdom all organized and his palace half built when he touched and his head was full of such a confusion of thoughts that he was not instantly aware of anything wrong.

  Then he unbuckled himself from the pilot’s seat and started to get up. Two things happened. He hit his head on the overhead and the ship came off the ground.

  He was not aware of the second fact until he opened the door to the rear compartment. He thought he must have left a throttle open and hastened back to the seat. His feet got no traction. No throttle was open. The Star-Jumper was going skyward at an amazing rate.

  Chuck buckled himself in again and, with patience, put the ship down once more. He stayed there at the controls and watched, just in case. He was in a grottolike valley, honeycombed, colorful hills before him and beside him. These promptly began to recede once he shut the power off. He was rising!

  Chuck was no electronic genius. He had read the books. And they didn’t have any answers for this. He assumed a high wind and poured on power. Back went the ship, bump, bump against the ground.

  He didn’t want to bother about this anymore. He was too anxious to see his planet, stand on it, feel it and taste it. If his ship wouldn’t stay landed, then there were ways to do it.

  He coaxed the controls until the Star-Jumper skittered over the ground. A big cave opened up in the hill ahead and he resolutely put his ship’s bulk into it. It was a tight squeeze and it didn’t help the paint, but the Star-Jumper’s eccentricity was foiled. Whether it would or no, now, it had to stay down.

  Chuck got up. He put on his helmet, took down some extra oxygen cartridges, buckled on his flying belt and was prepared to explore. That he was having difficulty in here getting traction and bumping into things, he did not heed. He was space-dizzy already. He had been knocking around in this interior for so many weeks he couldn’t register any difficulty. He didn’t.

  He opened his air lock, closed it behind him with commendable caution, opened the outer port and started to jump down.

  But he didn’t jump down. He went up and hit the cave roof with a clang, to cling there like a bat upside down and completely bewildered. He was walking wrong end to and getting traction like a fly and, personally, it didn’t feel good.

  He stood there, head down, thinking about it. Nothing in the numerous books Isabel had dug out for him had contained any such data as this. Carefully he walked toward the light and came close to the opening. There he slipped and “fell” straight up over the lip and would have kept on going to the absolute zero of space if his flying belt hadn’t been in working order. It was. About a thousand feet up, Chuck got it going and, with considerable gratification, power-dived back to his planet and by dint of some adjusting, made a soft landing in a clay bank, straight
up.

  The clay was very sticky and mired his boots considerably and, belt still going, he managed to clamber out of this strange bog to dry land. He tried here to turn his jets off and, much to his surprise, when he turned them off, he stayed right side up just as he thought he should.

  Chuck heaved a very deep sigh of relief in that moment. For a while there he thought he had run into something which was way beyond his engineering depths; with some confidence now he struck out afoot for the first ridge which would let him over and into the broad valley he had spotted coming in.

  Spaceports, being insulated the way they are, have a nasty knack of obscuring the view and he did not realize until he reached the crest that he had, indeed, a lovely, lovely planet.

  It was green and purple and gold and the docks and rivers shined below him. Trees waved in a gentle wind, grass rippled, brooks laughed. It was charming.

  It was green and purple and gold and the docks and rivers shined below him. Trees waved in a gentle wind, grass rippled, brooks laughed. It was charming.

  He went down the slope, careful because he didn’t seem to be able to restrain a bounding tendency he had never before noticed in his walk, and knelt reverently beside the first brook. It was his, all his.

  Incautiously he started to remove his helmet, being all unguarded before this greenery, and promptly began to suffocate. It was not the pressure. As far as pressure went, that was about equal. It was the quality of the air. As soon as he started to breathe it he started to suffocate. He had enough promptitude to clamp his helmet back on and give himself oxygen and only that saved his life.

  Was it because the air was poison? But no, he didn’t seem to be poisoned, only unsatisfied. He stood there and blinked in the bright daylight at the lovely trees.

  He looked at the brook. The water was laughing, but was it laughing at him? He scooped some up in his fingers, half expecting it to turn into vitriol, but it was cool and moist and pleasant. He opened his helmet air lock and inserted a cup of it, and when he got it through and got the swallow down he was instantly sorry. It came right back up.

  It wasn’t that it tasted bad; that would be a relief. It just wasn’t the sort of thing his stomach wanted and his stomach didn’t know why.

  This made Chuck a trifle bitter.

  A pretty brook, lovely clouds, obvious air. He made a hurried recheck of his oxygen supply and decided he had enough for a couple of months if he was careful of it. But what of his lovely kingdom?

  He did not see that he had real live subjects until he had gone nearly a kilometer and then he saw the cluster of huts, neatly blended into a river bend’s trees.

  The village probably contained a couple of hundred people or things and Chuck instantly loosened up his gun in its holster and went forward quietly. But if he had just now seen them, they had long since seen him and there wasn’t so much as a pet in that village.

  He looked it over. Comical huts, fitted with round thatch roofs, floored with river reeds. There were metal cooking pots and metal weapons. And a real, live fire smoldered in the middle of the main hut. It was common. It was almost uninteresting except that these beings were sentient and skilled in a certain culture.

  Perhaps he would not have had any intercourse with them at all if he had not, just as he was leaving, found the old woman.

  She was too old to be spry and she was too scared to hide all of her in the hay pile and so Chuck tapped her gently and coaxed her out.

  “Oof! Oof!” she screamed, meaning “Don’t kill me!”

  Chuck looked her over. The features were not quite right but this creature was a biped, looked remarkably like Earth women and certainly didn’t offer him any menace.

  Chuck made her understand, amid many “oofs,” that nothing untoward was intended. His efforts to communicate the facts by signs, that he was the owner of this planet and that these people were his subjects were received round-eyed and interpreted in some outlandish fashion he was never to know.

  After a while she finally took him to the village center where a bucket of water stood beside a big stone square and Chuck sat down. He knew he couldn’t drink the water but he wanted to appear mild and tractable, the way a true planet owner should.

  She went off and yelled around in the reeds and after some time a number of men, hairy fellows, mostly forehead and biceps, came back, carefully extending their spears to be ready to repel boarders, and finally saw that Chuck sat there mildly enough.

  This was all very satisfying to Chuck. This was the way it should be. They considered him a superior being and he began with many “oofs” to convince them how very safe and mild he was and how they would benefit from his rule. They got rather near and finally relaxed enough to ground their spear butts. Chuck grew expansive. He was talking through his electronic speaker, which was turned up rather high, and his voice must have reached a good long ways, for more and more people came curiously to see what was happening.

  Finally a young maiden whom Chuck found not at all ugly crept forward and touched his foot. This excited some wonder. She looked bravely up at him and he felt elevated. She took a stick and began to clean the clay off his boots with short pries and Chuck, in middle sentence, found himself getting lighter and lighter. He was a foot off the ground before the end of his uncomprehended paragraph and was beginning to accelerate when his audience took off with one long scream of alarm.

  The girl crouched where she had been, looking up. Chuck rose to a hundred feet, going faster, got his jets going at last and came down.

  The girl crouched where she had been, looking up. Chuck rose to a hundred feet, going faster, got his jets going at last and came down.

  The girl cringed, head bowed, shivering. Chuck touched her hair and then a jet spluttered and he went up once more. Altogether he considered the interview at an entire end. Humiliated, he navigated himself over the center of the village, looked sadly down at the frightened eyes peering from the reeds and then changed his course back to the ship. Enough was enough for one day.

  He sat for a long time on his cabin ceiling, thinking about fate that night. He wrote a letter to Isabel in which he confessed himself entirely confounded and disheartened. Before he finished it he was beginning to get mad at Madman Murphy.

  Eleven years. Eleven hard, toilsome years for a planet he couldn’t even walk upon!

  He crept out about midnight and looked at the stars, holding on hard to the cave lip to keep from flying away into space, and then it occurred to him that he had a legal course.

  He went back to it and worked it out. It was true. He was on the extreme perimeter of the galaxy. The star in whose system his planet lay was not, contrary to ordinary behavior, traveling outwards from the hub but was traveling inwards at a fast rate. Elementary calculation showed that it was making some thousand miles a second into the galaxy. If he could claim that this was not, as the contract stated, a system belonging to the Earth Galaxy, then he could have Madman up before the courts and have his money back. With that he could buy another place, a few thousand acres on some proven colonial orb, and he and Isabel could settle down and raise kids. And then he got to thinking about the vagaries of law and the money lawyers cost and realized that Madman Murphy would never have to refund a penny.

  This almost crushed him.

  He had a planet on which he could not possibly live, whose air he could not breathe, whose water he could not drink, and the owning of it had taken the best of his life. He was almost ready to end it all when he heard a rustling outside.

  There was a clink-clink.

  Visions of a combat, blaster against spears, drove all thought of suicide away and he helmeted himself promptly and passed through his air lock to find, not warriors, but the girl who had cleaned his boots.

  It was hard standing on the ceiling shining a light down upon her. She was very humble. She had a bowl of white liquid which was probably milk and a little piece of bread and she made shivery motions at them.

  Instantly Chuck knew
he was a god.

  Now there have been many men in the human race who have found themselves gods and never once has it failed to bolster their drooping spirits nor spur their lagging wits. She had come like a brave little thing to leave food for the goblin and if she died in the consequence, she had done it all for her village. It was plain.

  Chuck hand-holded down his ship side and came near her. He knew better than to try to eat that food and it wasn’t food he was interested in. It was the fact that she walked on the ground and he couldn’t. She had some beads around her neck, metal spheres of some brilliance. He held his hand for them and she took them off and gave them to him. He gave her a fountain pen which had ceased to work and when she accidentally let it go, he brought it down from the ceiling and returned it to her. She tied it with a dress string and there it bobbed, trying to rise.

  “Oof, oof,” she said, meaning “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” Chuck said, meaning “Oof, oof.”

  He remembered, as he looked at these beads, the clay on his boots and he swiftly put several handfuls of rocks in his pockets. They kept him down. This was nerving. He went for a walk with her in the starlight.

  It is certain they did not talk about much. It is also certain that Chuck did a terrible lot of thinking. He did a lot of calculating in an elementary way and then, suddenly, things came right to him.

  Madman Murphy had skunked him. There was no recourse. But it had been an adventure.

  He was taking her back to the ridge so that she could descend to her valley and tell people it wasn’t so tough talking with gods after all and that they did not always go spinning off into space on you. But just before they reached the place he would leave her she stopped and pointed into a hole in the hill.

  There were lots of holes in the hill but she was insistent about this one as one of the local sights and he obliged her and startled her into a screech by turning on a flashlight and shining it down.