Buck Rogers 2 - That Man on Beta Read online

  Join the Greatest of

  All Space Warriors on the

  Most Incredible Quest of

  His Star-Crossed Career . . .

  —through the terrifying wilds of Anarchia, ruins of twenty-fifth-century Earth, on an impassioned search for his own descendants!

  —to the desolate remains of the Great Salt Lake, where ancient secrets are held . . . and the power-mad Kane crouches in ambush!

  —to the asteroid Beta—where Theo, Buck’s trusted compuvisor, is prisoner of the Draconians, who have hatched a scheme to conquer the Universe!

  —to the sin-filled supercity of Villus, where man’s every sensual wish is an android’s command . . . and the voluptuous Princess Ardala has big plans for Buck!

  —to the rescue-ship of Wilma Deering and a spectacular chase through star warp, on an escape mission like none Buck had ever seen . . . not, that is, until he became . . .

  THE CHASE!

  The Draconian fleet was on the run.

  “Okay, Colonel Deering, let’s all zero in on that Draconian D-III lead ship and blast it out of the universe.”

  Wilma checked her power sensor. “I’m not getting a power reading from that ship, Al. What’s going on?”

  “They’re playing possum. Let’s blast ’em.”

  “All right, Al. Let’s coordinate. All ships ready to fire . . .”

  Al’s voice returned, crackling over the headset. “All right, fire on three. One . . .”

  Suddenly, Wilma’s light-beam tracking signal came to life. The tiny yellow bulb started blinking on and off like a warning star.

  Al’s voice again: “Two . . .”

  “Stop,” Wilma commanded abruptly, the color draining from her face as the control slipped from her voice. “Al—don’t fire!”

  “Hold fire,” Al commanded the rest of the fleet. “What is it, Colonel? What’s wrong?”

  “Al, you won’t believe this.” Wilma swallowed hard. “But I think Buck Rogers is on that ship!”

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  BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25th CENTURY

  by Addison E. Steele

  Published by

  Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

  1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza

  New York, New York 10017

  This work is based on the teleplay by Bob Shane

  Copyright © 1979 by Robert C. Dille

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

  ISBN: 0-440-10948-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  First printing—January 1979

  B U C K R O G E R S 2

  THAT MAN ON BETA

  O N E

  The threat of invasion had been met. The Draconian fleet had been whipped, its storm-force destroyed by Earth’s defense squadron—a squadron fighting under the command of Colonel Wilma Deering, and using the aggressive, free-swinging tactics developed on the American frontier seven hundred years before and updated to the needs of the twenty-fifth century by Captain Buck Rogers.

  The storm-force destroyed, Earth’s defense perimeter secured, Draconia’s main force swung through a wide space-orbit and fled back to the boundaries of its home empire, fled like a whipped cur with its tail between its legs.

  The flagship—also known as the Draconia—had been blown to bits. The Princess Ardala and her would-be consort, Kane, had escaped with their lives—barely—in a tiny, sealed pod. Now they would face the wrath of the Emperor Draco.

  Not that the Draconian Empire would rest while the bitter gall of defeat still burned in the heart of its emperor. Draco had other wars to fight, other enemies to subdue. But Earth’s turn would come once again, of that there need be no doubt.

  And the Princess Ardala and her ruthless, oily, treacherous suitor would surely place themselves in the forefront of Draconia’s ceaseless war of conquest.

  Meanwhile, life on Earth returned to normal—or what passed for normal in these closing decades of the twenty-fifth century. The Inner City ruled Earth in splendor while much of the planet’s surface remained a seething, radioactive wasteland where savages and mutants prowled the ruins of a long-ago civilization whose politicians and militarists had led it to Armageddon.

  The defense squadron continued to train and maneuver under the guidance of its brilliant commander, Wilma Deering. And Colonel Deering continued to fret over the conduct of Captain William “Buck” Rogers, that strange revenant of the twentieth century whose return to Earth and enlistment in the space force had brought with it both the sharpest flying and fighting skills in the known universe—and the thorniest problems in personal relationships in Colonel Deering’s distinguished career.

  At the Inner City defense squadron spacefield, Buck Rogers’ sleek starflghter flashed in for a landing. Its powerful engines and advanced guidance systems were as far beyond the crude spacecraft of Buck’s youth as those spacecraft were beyond the motorized boxkites of the Wright Brothers.

  The starflghter rockets were fitted with computers of a complexity and speed that would have set a twentieth-century electronics engineer to gibbering with mystification and delight. And Buck Rogers was by no means averse to letting those computers handle all of the routine operation and checking procedures of his space fighter. But when it came to the crunch, Buck flew his own ship.

  He remembered the legend of the first moon-landing, back in the dusty days of his own twentieth century. The LEM had been fitted with the fastest and most complex computers available in those long-ago days—but when it came down to the ultimate, life-or-death seconds as the module skimmed over a rock-strewn plain, desperately seeking a smooth landing area in which to set down before its fast-dwindling fuel supply ran out, it was the astronauts, Buz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, who took command and brought the Eagle in for a safe landing.

  This was the lesson that Buck Rogers had carried from the twentieth century to the twenty-fifth: that all of mankind’s creations could amplify and assist him in his efforts. But no machine could take the place of a trained, intelligent, determined human being.

  Now Buck set his starflghter down on the tarmac and gave control of the rocket to its computers. They could monitor its condition, shut down its power systems, signal to maintenance crews for whatever parts needed servicing before the craft was next called upon to blast into the black void beyond Earth on a mission that would probably . . . most probably . . . involve only routine training and patrol responsibilities.

  As Buck strode away from the starflghter his crew chief trotted toward the rocket. “Captain Rogers,” the chief called. “Captain Rogers, I need your condition readouts, sir.”

  Concentrating on whatever thoughts occupied his mind, Buck hardly even heard the crew chiefs words.

  “Captain Rogers,” the chief called again. “I need your closing fuel reading, ammo report, computer readouts . . .”

  Buck half-heard the chief. Without breaking his stride he jerked one thumb back over his shoulder, indicating the starfighter with its built-in computer circuitry. The gesture said as plainly as words could have done, “Get that from the computers, chief. That’s what they’re for.”

  Grumbling, the chief gave up on trying to stop Buck and trotted off toward the starfighter itself. Captain Rogers was right, he knew—the information he needed was all available in the spacecraft’s data-banks and condition-circuits. He undogged the pilot’s hatch of the rocket and tapped the first of a series of
access codes into the ship’s master computer.

  Buck disappeared from the spacefield itself, striding purposefully into the monorail station that served the field. He sank into a round mass that instantly adjusted itself to fit Buck’s body shape and his body temperature, and gazed abstractedly from the window of the car as the monorail whizzed from the spacefield into the heart of the Inner City itself.

  The ultramodern buildings that flanked the monorail line had held Buck’s fascinated attention the first time he’d seen them after recovering from his five-hundred-years’ orbit in suspended animation. Their soaring towers, shimmering domes, gracefully swooping roadways, and splendid open plazas had dazzled eyes grown accustomed to the grime and pollution of twentieth-century Chicago, Buck Rogers’ home town.

  But by now the glories of the Inner City were as familiar to Buck as were the sun-baked buildings of Houston or the whispering palmettos of Cape Canaveral to the astronauts of an earlier age. When the monorail glided smoothly to a halt at his stop, Buck climbed from the sleek car, made his way through glowing white corridors, and took a final familiar turn; doors opened automatically, slid inconspicuously into the wall.

  He strode into a spotless, white-walled anteroom.

  In the center of the room stood a sleekly functional desk fabricated of the same glowing white material as the room itself. Behind the desk, seated on a white swivel chair, was a vaguely humanlike figure also of the same glowing white. It was as if the whole environment—room, furniture, figure—had been carved from a single shimmering block of perfect white marble. Buck was the only bit of color in the room.

  He stood in the center of the room, the door whispered shut behind him. The figure behind the desk turned its head toward him, spoke in a remarkably natural-sounding voice, for all that the sounds were generated electronically under the command of the figure’s own computer.

  “He’s busy,” the figure said.

  Buck turned aside and found a seat for himself. He returned his attention to the white figure. It was a secretarial robot. For all that its functions were impersonal and administrative, extensive psychological testing of Inner City executives had shown that they could work most effectively with robots cast into forms at least suggestive of human beings.

  The secretarial robot was a Lisa 5 model, and without being female in any biological sense, its fabrication was in lines whose grace was suggestive of a young woman and its programming gave it—or her—the mannerisms and voice of an intelligent, educated young woman of an earlier century.

  The robot looked expectantly at Buck Rogers.

  “I’ll wait,” Buck grated impatiently.

  “I don’t see you on his calendar,” the robot answered. Although she had the information in her data-banks, she politely went through the motions of examining a desk calendar, her gracefully formed mechanical fingers tracing the day’s schedule as her electronic visual scanners tracked across the orderly notations.

  “I don’t see you on his calendar,” the mechanical, yet pleasantly feminine, voice repeated.

  “I’m not on his calendar,” Buck grinned, “I’m on his bench.”

  The robot-receptionist sat for a moment in puzzled silence. If she had had the right relays and capacitors, she might have frowned in concentration. “I can’t quite compute that, Captain Rogers,” she said at last. “Perhaps there’s something wrong with my circuits.”

  “You’ve got a great set of circuits, kid,” Buck wisecracked.

  The robot scanned her anatomy uncertainly. “Thank you.”

  “Of course,” Buck said more to himself than the Lisa 5, “everything looks good to a guy after five hundred years, just about.”

  The Lisa 5 turned back to her work. She pulled a sheet of paper from a slot in her desk, slipped it into the futuristic equivalent of what Buck would have recognized, in his own era, as a super-typewriter with advanced data-storage and -retrieval circuits built into its chassis, and began to type. Her fingers moved faster than Buck’s eyes could follow; they appeared to turn into a translucent white blur. Almost before she had started typing, the Lisa 5 pulled the completed page from her typewriter and slipped it into another slot in her desk. With an almost inaudible whoosh the sheet of paper disappeared into the desk and was carried away to its destination.

  “Who taught you to type?” Buck asked the female robot. “Some kind of speed demon?”

  “Demons are an unscientific superstition unsubstantiated by any objectively verifiable evidence,” the robot answered coolly. “Typing programs are coded into the circuitry of all Lisa 5 secretarial robots. We come from the factory with the capability already present in us.”

  Buck crossed the room and leaned familiarly across the desk. In a low voice he suggested, “Maybe sometime after work we could go out for a can of 3-in-One oil.” While he held the robot’s attention by speaking, he surreptitiously flicked on the intercom button built into the control panel of her desk.

  Before the robot could respond to Buck’s invitation, a panel slid smoothly aside in the wall behind her. Beyond the reception room lay an elaborate office. In it stood the science wizard of the Inner City, the man who had first evaluated Buck on the spaceman’s return to the city from the Draconian space fleet that had found his ship in its five-hundred-year orbit. On that occasion Huer had sympathized with the astronaut, sided with him, and helped him through his trial with the Inner City computer council.

  Now the brilliant, ascetic Huer peered into the outer chamber from his office. “Lisa, what’s going on out there?” he addressed the secretarial robot.

  Before the robot could answer, Buck cut in. “Dr. Huer, it’s all my fault. Can I see you for a minute?”

  “Rogers. Of course. You know my door is always open to you.”

  “If I can find it,” Buck grinned.

  “Come in,” the aged scientist gestured, “come in.”

  As the young spaceman entered the inner office, the wall panel slid closed behind him, leaving the Lisa 5 alone once more at her desk. With soundless efficiency the robot slipped another blank sheet of paper into her typewriter and poised slim mechanical fingers above the keyboard. Before she began typing, however, she swiveled her head in the direction of the inner office, where Buck Rogers had disappeared. “Three and one oil?” the robot murmured to herself. “Why not say four oil instead?”

  T W O

  Inside the office of the science wizard, Buck Rogers and Dr. Huer settled into comfortable seats. “I hope you’re thriving on our hospitality, Captain Rogers,” the scientist said.

  “Hey, great,” Buck exclaimed. “It’s terrific, Doc. I like the twenty-fifth-century chow. The Vinol’s tops—better than the bubbly I could afford on air force pay back in the 1980s.”

  “But,” Dr. Huer peered seriously into the younger man’s face, “you have a complaint, eh?”

  “It’s . . . not quite a complaint,” Buck conceded. “More of a request, I guess. It’s that—well, Doc, there’s more to life than food and drink . . .”

  Dr. Huer smiled knowingly. “Oh, so that’s it. Well, that’s understandable. It’s been five hundred years. Just ask any of the men in the defense squadron for directions to the Palace of Pleasure.”

  “No, no, no,” Buck snorted. “I don’t mean that. You don’t have to worry about me in that department. I can take care of myself.”

  Dr. Huer raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure that’s such a good idea for a grown man, Buck?”

  Buck Rogers sat, puzzled for a moment. Then his breath exploded. “No, no, no!” he repeated. “That isn’t what I meant, either. Dr. Huer, what I mean is this—”

  The aged scientist leaned forward expectantly.

  “I need a leave of absence,” Buck went on. “Not just from flying duty—I’d talk to Wilma if that were the only thing. No, I have to leave the Inner City, at least for a while. I need to go out into Anarchia. I’ve got to—to find out what happened to my family. I’ve got to know if I have anyone left on Earth. Of cou
rse my immediate family were all gone centuries ago. But do I have descendants anywhere on Earth? Or off it, for that matter—anywhere in the galaxy?”

  The jocular atmosphere of a few minutes earlier had disappeared. Buck strode around Dr. Huer’s office like a restless lion patrolling the bars of its cage. “Do you know what isolation is, Doc? What we used to call alienation in my day? A sense of not belonging, of being cut off from all of humankind? I have to find out if I have a blood connection to any living, breathing human being.”

  Buck returned to his comfortable chair and slumped into it, his shoulders sagging and his head downcast. “I feel so . . . so . . . alone, Doc.”

  “I understand,” Huer nodded. “It must be very difficult coming from a different time and place. Suddenly finding yourself in a new world, half a millennium out of your own time.”

  “It’s funny,” Buck said, but not with any sign of amusement. “If this were some different planet and I couldn’t get home, somehow that wouldn’t be quite as frustrating. I’d know that my own people were still alive, might still be alive. Somehow, somewhere.

  “But this isn’t a different place. My home was only 30 or 40 miles from here. I mean, 50 or 60 kilometers. I’ve got to see it. What’s left of it. Or even what isn’t left of it.”

  “That could be very dangerous,” Dr. Huer put in. “It isn’t just kilometers—miles—that are at stake. Once you pass beyond the Inner City’s dome, we can’t offer you protection. Anything could happen out there, Buck.”

  “But I have to do it,” Buck dissented. “What I have to do is track down my—I don’t know. It’s not my roots I want to trace. It’s sort of . . . my sprouts.” As Buck’s irrepressible humor broke through his seriousness, he found himself unwillingly grinning again.

  “But the last time you went out there—when we mistakenly exiled you from the Inner City, Buck—you found your family’s graves. You wouldn’t leave Anarchia until you found them. Isn’t that so?”