Buck Rogers 2 - That Man on Beta Page 2

  “Yes,” Buck conceded. “My parents were dead and buried in old Chicago, what you now call Anarchia. And so were my brother and my sister. But maybe someone survived. A cousin, a niece or nephew. And if someone survived the holocaust back in the twentieth century, they might have had children. And they might have had children. I’d have living relatives now. For all I know, you might be my great-great-great-whatever, my nephew, Doc. I need to know!”

  The old scientist smiled at the notion that the young man opposite him might be an ancestor of his. Then a more serious expression replaced the smile on his face. “Buck,” he said earnestly, “I can’t let you go out there. The odds are too slim. And you’re too valuable to the Inner City. If only for your knowledge of the Earth of the twentieth century. But beyond that, you’re such a natural starfighter pilot. We can’t afford to let you risk your life.”

  “You let me risk my life fighting the Draconians,” Buck snapped back angrily. “I’m not too valuable for that risk, am I!”

  “But that was for the common good of all,” Huer almost pleaded. “That was a risk taken for all of Earth—I might even say, for all of civilization.”

  “So what’s my family,” Buck asked with a combination of bitterness and wry humor, “chopped liver?”

  Huer’s response was a look of bafflement.

  Buck tried more directly: “Are you going to let me go or aren’t you?”

  Dr. Huer shook his head. “I can’t take the chance of having you killed or captured by a pack of savages or mutants, Buck. I don’t suppose it would help if I said that I have your own welfare at heart, as well as the needs of the community.”

  “No sir, it wouldn’t,” Buck conceded. He stood up and moved toward the exit. “Thank you, sir. Good-bye.”

  As the sliding panel that served for a doorway opened before Buck, Dr. Huer took note of the determined set of the younger man’s jaw. A seasoned judge of human behavior, a careful reader of expressions in people’s voices and in their body language, Huer could tell that Buck Rogers was not going to take no for an answer—that the closing of the office panel behind the spaceman was by no means the closing of the matter under discussion.

  As Buck strode angrily past the typing desk in the reception office, the Lisa 5 addressed him. “Buck, about that four oil, I’ve never heard of—”

  He was gone, totally ignoring the secretarial robot’s words.

  “Huh,” the Lisa 5 commented to herself, “five hundred years old, is he? Must be senile by this time!”

  Not long after, Buck was at the defense squadron spacefield at the edge of the Inner City dome. Despite his personal problems, while he remained the guest of the Inner City he would always carry out his duties as a rocket pilot bearing the rank of captain in the defense squadron.

  The other squadron pilots were gathered, along with Buck, for a technical briefing by their commander, in which she explained to them the features of a new energy-booster system that power engineers had finished installing, just an hour before, on their starfighters.

  The pilots included women and men, and members of all the races of Earth. In this regard, at least, the civilization of the twenty-fifth century had not merely recovered the ground lost in the ravaging Third World War half a millennium before, but had made reality of the idealistic goals of the old civilization.

  The defense squadron commander, Colonel Wilma Deering, was at the end of her briefing and about to open the floor for questions from her subordinates. “So the new energy pods,” Colonel Deering concluded, “will enable our fighters to go into star warp at least for limited periods.”

  Most of the pilots remained silent as they assimilated the new information, but Buck Rogers responded with a sharp question. “What are the outside limits on speed and duration?”

  “I think I already covered that point, Captain Rogers,” Wilma Deering replied. In her off-duty hours she was clearly one of the most beautiful, feminine, and desirable women in the Inner City—but on duty she was all crisp military efficiency. “The council has ordered us not to exceed 42,000 D.E.T. or to remain in star warp for longer than 140 S.S. seconds.”

  “That isn’t exactly what I asked, Colonel,” Buck shot back. “That’s a policy directive from the political leadership. I was asking the technical limitations of the new gear.”

  The eyes of commander and pilot locked in an angry, sparking duel of wills. The relationship between Colonel Deering, commander, and Captain Rogers, pilot, was difficult enough. Rogers was the most skilled and daring of the defense squadron’s spacemen, an incalculable asset to the protection of the Inner City. But he was headstrong, independent, and not amenable to discipline.

  If that dilemma wasn’t tough enough to deal with, there was the similarly difficult relationship between Wilma Deering and Buck Rogers.

  Well, there wasn’t time to deal with the complexities of such matters now. “The answer I gave you is the official position of the defense squadron,” she answered coldly.

  Captain Rogers clearly remained unplacated, but before he could speak again the briefing room was jolted by the strident sounds of a siren’s wail. After a few seconds of ear-splitting wailing, the siren dropped away and a voice spoke through the loudspeaker. “Code A,” the voice announced urgently, “Code A. Radar reports unidentified blip. Fighter squadron will scramble at once. Scramble at once. Repeat—Code A, Code A.”

  Colonel Deering pressed a control stud, answered the intercom voice. “Squadron commander speaking. Code A received and acknowledged. We’re on our way.”

  Within seconds the constant training of almost-daily drill scrambles of the defense squadron came to the fore. Pilots sprinted across the spacefield tarmac and vaulted into fighter rockets already warming up under the quick response of razor-sharp ground crews.

  With a massive roar as rocket engines blasted the fighters off their launching pads and into the sky above the Inner City, the starfighter squadron zoomed away from the spaceport.

  Colonel Deering radioed back to base. “Squadron approaching C Sector. No other spacecraft in range of visual sighting or instrument detection. What are our instructions?”

  “Suggest you scan coordinates 14-40, C Sector,” the crackling voice of ground control responded. “We request you attempt visual sighting of unidentified blip and report findings at once.”

  “14-40,” Colonel Deering responded, “C Sector. Check, ground control. Here we go.”

  Wilma Deering adjusted the controls on a glowing, flickering panel of electronic scanners and computer readouts that all but filled the compact cockpit of her powerful starfighter. On an eerily glowing telescreen she adjusted the coordinates to match those radioed from ground control and punched a read-in button to send the information to the starfighter’s master astrogation computer.

  “Defense squadron,” she radioed all her pilots, “set astrogation computers to coordinates 14-40, C Sector. Execute 18 degree turn. Ready—mark!”

  In a display of precision team flying that would have set the navy’s Blue Devils of Buck Rogers’ time agape with envy, the starfighter squadron swooped through a graceful maneuver, zeroing in on the space coordinates dictated by their commander. At the identical instant there appeared a faint dot dead in the center of the glowing telescreen in the cockpit of every fighter.

  “Colonel Deering,” a pilot’s voice came over the intership radio, “I have visual contact with target at screen center.”

  Wilma Deering nodded. “Good. I scan also. Any idea what it is?”

  “Negative,” the pilot replied.

  Another pilot’s voice crackled across the ether. “Can’t tell from here either.”

  “I’ll go for a closer look,” Buck Rogers radioed. As usual, instead of waiting for orders he was taking the initiative in responding to a challenge from the deeps of space.

  The pilots of the squadron cut their engines to half-idle as they awaited further instructions. Colonel Deering radioed to Buck Rogers and the rest of her command:
“Negative, Rogers. Cut to half power. All ships stabilize in orbit on my command. Ready—mark!”

  The squadron moved in on the unfamiliar object, carried through the virtual vacuum of space by the momentum of their velocity. As they approached the object it became obvious that it was what they had all suspected: an alien spacecraft.

  Again the ether snapped with the exchange of messages between Colonel Deering and the pilots in her squadron:

  “I’ve never seen a ship like that!”

  “It’s not Draconian!”

  “Nor Gregorian!”

  “Doesn’t look like a pirate ship, either!”

  Suddenly the slowly drifting ship flashed into lightninglike movement. Almost before any of the Inner City’s pilots could react, the alien craft was disappearing into the blackness, the glow of its power-pods the only means left by which to follow its course.

  “Look,” Wilma gasped, “it’s going into—”

  “Star warp!” Buck Rogers completed for her. “I’ll follow!”

  “Captain Rogers, wait!” Wilma commanded.

  “If I wait we’ll never know what that thing was!” Buck slapped at the controls of his starfighter with the studied confidence of a spaceman who has spent so many hours at the controls of his ship that he could execute any maneuver blindfolded, standing on his head and with one hand tied behind his back.

  Her voice rising to an angry pitch, Colonel Deering almost shouted into her radio: “Captain Rogers, I’ll give the orders here! Now—”

  But even as Wilma tried to call him back, Buck Rogers’ ship flashed away from the rest of the defense squadron, accelerating wildly along the trail of the almost invisible alien craft. Within seconds Buck’s starflghter accelerated to the maximum speed of normal matter moving within normal space. Buck’s mass, like that of his ship, increased hugely. Strange distortions of both space and time swept over pilot and craft.

  Then Buck threw in the switch that activated his starfighter’s new booster pods, and his ship crashed the invisible barrier that separates normal three-dimensional space from the bizarre realm of the hyperuniverse where light-speed barriers are unknown and stranger phenomena occur than we can even imagine.

  Buck radioed back a message, hoping that he might still get word to Wilma before his starfighter had penetrated too far into the hyperspace realm. “I see him now, Colonel. Closing in. I’m at 42,000 D.E.T. If I shove this crate up to 43 I think I can catch him. Just how safe is it to exceed 42, Colonel? No politics!”

  “Captain Rogers,” Wilma Deering almost screamed into her microphone, “I order you to cease star warp and return to fleet at once!”

  “Just one more minute,” Buck grated.

  “I’ll have you court-martialed! Rejoin fleet now!”

  Buck glared at his communicator, reached his right hand as if to set a switch, then simply shrugged and stretched out his left hand instead for the booster-pod-deactivator switch.

  Inside the alien ship, a pilot sat at the control panel in a large, well-lighted area. Unlike the starfighters of Earth’s defense squadron, this alien ship was huge. Instead of a cramped cockpit built to hold a single pilot, it had a bridge large enough to accommodate a full complement of specialists.

  And unlike its enigmatically designed exterior, the alien ship’s interior showed a style of fittings and equipment that Colonel Deering and her starfighter pilots would have recognized instantly, had they seen it.

  It was Draconian.

  “We’ve lost the Earth ship,” the Draconian pilot grunted into a microphone. “He pursued us into warp space, but then for some reason he seemed to drop back into ordinary, sir.”

  The voice coming back through the radio seethed with fury. “You were not supposed to lose it, you idiot! Ach, that’s just what I’d expect of you fools! Can’t I get anyone competent to do what I tell them?”

  The pilot’s face grew pale with fear. “I’m sorry, Lord Kane. I thought you wanted me to get away from pursuit.”

  Although the pilot couldn’t see the face of the other man, he could imagine the rage contorting the already unpleasantly beefy features of Kane.

  T H R E E

  At the defense squadron spaceport of the Inner City a sharply ordered formation of space pilots stood before their pacing commander. Their starfighters had been wheeled off the tarmac by ground crewmen who were even now busily refueling and servicing the rockets so they would be ready to blast off on a moment’s notice when the word next came for a scramble.

  Where the space pilots stood in orderly formation, Colonel Wilma Deering stopped her pacing before Captain Buck Rogers. As he stood at his full height the colonel had to peer upward into his face, but she did so not with the wilting helplessness of a soft woman. She did so with the angry expression of a military commander prepared to dress down a defiant subordinate.

  “Your conduct was just what I would expect of you, Rogers! You’re impetuous, insubordinate, and uncivilized!”

  For long seconds she glared angrily into his square-jawed face, then she spun on her heel and strode away.

  Under his breath, Buck Rogers murmured, “But I’m cute.”

  Half-hearing the words, Colonel Deering whirled back to face Buck again. “Did you say something, Rogers?”

  “No, sir,” the captain replied.

  “And I don’t find that amusing either,” Colonel Deering snapped. “You’re all dismissed.” She stood with her fists on her hips for a few seconds as the pilots broke formation, then stalked angrily from the field.

  One of the other pilots approached Buck Rogers. “Dr. Huer put out a message, Buck. He wants to see you, pronto.”

  “Check,” Buck nodded.

  “I wonder why she was so hard on you,” another pilot commented to Buck.

  The captain grinned. “Probably because she was right.” He slapped his colleague on the arm and strode away toward the monorail station. In a short time he was closeted with the science wizard of Inner City once more.

  “Buck Rogers,” the wizened savant spoke without preliminary, “I may be able to help you after all.”

  Buck’s reply was sarcastic. “Terrific, Doc. How?”

  “I’ve programmed the master computer bank, requesting a complete genealogical readout on you and your family. Would you like to hear it?”

  Interest kindled in Buck’s eyes. “Yeah, I sure would.”

  “Okay,” Huer told him. “Just have a seat and I’ll summon up the data.” He turned toward a computer terminal outfitted with a microphone and a loudspeaker. “Proceed with data readout,” the scientist instructed the computer.

  Lights blinked across the surface of the control panel, and servomechanisms whirred as data records were spun into position. “Family of Rogers, William, a.k.a. Buck,” the computer’s mechanical voice sounded. “Father James Rogers. Mother Edna Rogers. Brother Frank Rogers. Sister Marilyn Rogers. All died April, 1988. Cause: holocaust. Sister-in-law Ellen Rogers, wife of Frank. Died May, 1988. Cause: holocaust. No record of other relations or descendants.”

  The voice lapsed into silence and the whir of moving records murmured softly in the background.

  “I’m sorry, Buck,” the aged Dr. Huer spoke softly.

  Before Buck could answer, the whirring of records gave way to another statement by the computer’s electronic voice. “Further information retrieved from data-banks. Jackie Rogers, daughter of Ellen and Frank. Disappeared as of May, 1988. Last recorded address, Chicago, Illinois. Presumed dead in holocaust, but death not confirmed and may have survived in Anarchia or made way off-planet. No further data on Jackie Rogers. No record of descendants. No other known relatives of subject William ‘Buck’ Rogers.”

  “Then there’s hope!” Buck’s countenance lit up.

  Huer shook his head. “Buck, forget it. After five hundred years, what chance is there?”

  “I can’t forget it, Doc. As long as there’s any chance at all—” He saw the solemn look on Dr. Huer’s face, thought for a while, the
n spoke again, bitterly. “Yes, you’re right, Doc. I know that you’re right. Thanks for trying.”

  He headed for the door of the office, ignored the trim Lisa 5 robot in Huer’s outer office, stumbled down the corridor despondently, and almost collided with Wilma Deering as she emerged from the door of another facility.

  The two pilots dodged, backed, and tried to give way to each other. The performance was almost a dance, and Buck’s gloom lightened somewhat with the humor of the moment. They started walking side by side, then repeated their encounter by beginning simultaneously to apologize.

  “I know I shouldn’t have done those . . .”

  “I shouldn’t have been so rough on . . .”

  Again they both stopped and laughed at themselves.

  Wilma said, “You’re not mad?”

  Buck shook his head. “I deserved the chewing out. You’re not mad either?”

  “No,” Wilma shook her head. “Buck, I’m making a very special dinner tonight. Euranian Clipsop and all the trimmings.” She stopped walking, faced Buck as he also halted and turned toward her. “Can you come, Buck? My place for an intimate meal and . . .”

  “No,” Buck responded after a fraction of a second, “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “You are mad,” Wilma exclaimed.

  “No, honestly, I’m not mad at all. But I just can’t make it.” He shrugged helplessly. “Besides, I don’t have the faintest idea what a Clipsop is.”

  Wilma leaned closer so that her breath was warm on the side of Buck’s face. “Then I’ll have to teach you,” she whispered.

  Buck laughed. “I’ll really look forward to it. But not tonight, Wilma. Really.” He leaned down and kissed her lightly—on the forehead. “Sometime, though,” he said. “In fact, let’s make it real soon now.”

  He strode away, down the brightly lit corridor.

  Behind him Wilma Deering stood gazing with a mixture of annoyance, disappointment, and suspicion.

  Back in his quarters, Buck at last had a chance to switch from his flying suit—a combination of smart military styling and purely functional life-support systems that would have been the envy of any twentieth-century astronaut. He stood in the center of his room, clad only in skimpy shorts.