Fiction: Space Guys adventure demo!

 

I'm woefully behind my usual obsessive schedule, and in the meantime, I've been starting into something new that could waste vast amounts of time. Here's a link for the start of this in Chelsea the social worker, and one of my posts on the Marx 4-inch space guys and my newly acquired space girl. Also included, a preview pic of a Marx spaceship I just got!

 

The ship, from a distance, looked like an arrow, complete with the three-finned tail and a triangular head. For that matter, the resemblance did not diminish at closer examination, except for a flared waist amidships where a number of lesser objects were clustered. If viewed from the front or especially the rear, however, there was a certain resemblance to the symbol of peace, thanks to a ring supported by the three pylons of the tail. The designers would certainly have dismissed it as a coincidence brought on by a purely functional design. Yet, the fact remained that it was both a symbol and a product of peace. And the voyage ahead might well determine whether that peace would last or end in disaster.

At the moment, the ship circled a planet colored a deep but vivid red. Ahead was something like a five-spoked wheel, spinning gently. Several small craft were moored at regular intervals along its edge. Any other craft would have docked in one of the berths, but the incoming ship was almost half as long as its width. Instead, the ship launched one of its own lesser craft. Soon enough, the shuttle joined with the space station. An airlock opened, and a pilot emerged into the station corridor.

The pilot was a handsome man, no longer quite young. He was clean-shaven with an orderly haircut. He wore a jumpsuit of a material that looked vaguely like leather, with a harness that strapped across his chest and abdomen and a collar obviously intended to support a helmet. He gave what could almost have been a smile at the approach of two young men and a woman with reddish-gold hair who clearly made them nervous. “Hi, I’m Jason Freeman,” said one of the young men, somewhat more confident than the other. “I’m from the New Dakota settlement. On Mars, of course. This is my friend Jackson, and I guess this is Dr. Cahill.”

The lady stepped forward. It was evident that she was over 30, though certainly under 50. “That’s Lana Cahill, Doctor of Botany,” she said. “My specialty is astro-horticulture, which is the fancy name for studying how plants grow off Earth. I came here from England to help the colonies become self-sufficient. I understand these nice boys are pilots.”

Jackson ventured to speak up. “We’re all pilots out here in the Colonies,” he said. “Jason and me are the best, and we have the scores and the record to prove it.”

“I don’t doubt it,” the newcomer said with a chuckle. “I’m Lieutenant Harrison. I’m here to take you aboard the exploration vessel Janus.”

They followed the pilot through the hatch in what became a descent into the shuttle below. The shuttle pod proved to be a titanium alloy tube with a bullet-shaped cockpit on one end and a communications console at the other. The interior was almost but not quite tall enough to stand upright in. The lieutenant clambered straight for the door to the cockpit at the front. The men took two seats that faced each other in the middle. The lady took a seat at the rear, turned sideways to face the console. “Say, one of us should take that seat,” Jason said.

“I know what I’m doing,” Dr. Cahill said. “In fact, I have equipment in my office that’s more advanced than this. In fact, it must be newer than this.”

The airlock shut. There was a jolt as the shuttle cut loose. “It probably is,” Harrison said. “It’s 6 months each way from Earth to Mars, plus it takes at least 4 months to prep any equipment for Mars conditions. All our equipment needed two years of prep time minimum, and that was the stuff they didn’t have to build from scratch.”

Jason turned his head for a better look at the pilot. “Have you done this before?” he said. “A Mars run, I mean…”

“I did it once,” Harrison said. “That was enough, for a while. I’ve done most of my time on low-orbit runs, a Moon trip now and then.”

 Jason nodded before venturing the real question. “What’s it really like, on Earth?” he said.

There was a moment of silence. Then the pilot laughed again, quite kindly. “Anybody else but me prob’ly would ask you what it’s like out here,” he said. “You might as well get used to it. I don’t really get around much myself. Most of what I see is from orbit. From there, there’s no place that looks much different from another. Most of it’s big, blue ocean. On the land, you’re got lots of green, a few big splotches of desert, mountains and rivers like long snakes. Then you have the cities… They really don’t take up that much space, but they glow like suns. The biggest I ever went to was Hong Kong, I had to put on sunglasses to see. That was after flying in the dark, of course.”

Jackson spoke up. “You could be a poet, mister,” he said.

“Oh, who says I haven’t tried it?” Harrison said with another chuckle. “I’ve been around long enough to try a lot of things, once. I still only found one or two things I’m good at…”

They had pulled alongside the craft called Janus, visible through a porthole on the right. It seemed like a slow approach, but the Martians both knew that the larger ship was racing at many thousands of miles per hour, and they were going the other way. They first passed a roughly triangular section at the front, really a shuttlecraft big enough to carry two pods like their own in its underbelly. “That’s the Pegasus,” Harrison said. “It’s an Orion-class payloader. There are only four of them so far. I’ve flown one. They say it’s set to take over the low-orbit trade…”

“I know,” Jackson said, somewhat impatiently. “We’re rated to fly them, as soon as we get any.”

That drew another chuckle from Harrison. “I suppose spaceships are all you talk about out here,” he said. “Or all you hear about, anyway.”

By then, they were past the payloader to the long, thin fuselage, which on close examination was a connecting corridor lined with fuel tanks and cargo pods. A module at right angles to the main corridor sported a secondary docking bay and a 10-meter sensor dish. “It’s what the out-of-towners always talk about,” Jason said. “We usually have to ask to find out about anything else. When it’s not spaceships, it’s sports we can’t even play.”

He saw the pilot nod. “So what do you like to talk about?” he asked.

“Music,” Jason answered. “Movies. Cartoons. We like the ones about animals. Out here, we don’t have anything but lab animals in cages. Even those are mostly just insects in little glass boxes. You might see cats and dogs in the films that go back to Earth, but we usually don’t even see mice outside the big settlements. Port Eris got a couple goats once. We rode the monorail 300 kliks to see them. By the time we got there, they had both died. There were people paying to look at the bodies.”

“I heard about that,” Harrison said. “Too bad. I had an uncle who raised goats. They’re smart. Kind, too, in their own way.” Jason nodded, but his attention was diverted. They were passing the main shuttle bay at the midsection. It looked like the cylinder of a six-gun from one of the westerns, except with the bullets on the outside. The wheel was rotating to receive a larger shuttle. He was sure he glimpsed a face through the porthole of the craft. He could have sworn it was a woman, more beautiful than he had ever seen, indeed more beautiful than he could have imagined outside of the movies on record, with deep black hair.

“Now this is going to be the tricky bit,” Harrison said, with a hint of a nervous edge to his voice. They were approaching the rear of the Janus, and Jason was beginning to feel something between awe and outright unease at its vast size. He looked to Jackson, who was if possible more uneasy. Suddenly, the other Martian spoke up.

“Remember the old movie about the big gorilla and the really tall building?” Jackson said. “I read the Janus is longer than the real building was tall.”

“Mm, not exactly,” the pilot said. “The Janus proper is 360 meters, including the payloader. The Empire State Building topped out at 380 meters. I went there once, before… Well. Before. Say, you fellows have any girls back home?”

As he spoke, the pod twisted sharply. The porthole showed empty space. “Uh, actually,” Jason said, “Jacks is already, ah- married!” There was a sudden jolt as the pod docked with the spinning tail.

The Martians sat gasping. Jason took some reassurance from the sight of the woman smoothing her garments and rubbing her head. “There!” the pilot said cheerfully. “That was hardly any trouble at all!”

Jason scrambled through the hatch unapologetically. His first thought was to get out of the rattletrap tin can of the pod. His second was to find the dark-haired goddess he had glimpsed during the trip. He had pulled himself through the hatch into welcome gravity when he froze. He was in a corridor that was unaccountably dark. There were cargo containers and instruments all around, with little rhyme or reason. Then, from the shadows, a figure seemed to materialize rather than emerge. He saw little but a silhouette and one side of a face. A half-smile curled the visage as the head turned, revealing a hideous scar.

“Welcome aboard,” said the stranger. As he spoke, he raised a pistol.