Short Fiction

Rawley. And if you wish, I’ll show you how to convert sunlight into useful energy. You won’t need so many cyclotrons then. Before I’d monkey with anything as unpredictable as a skinless atom I’d go jump in a lake.”

I was no longer listening. There was something I had left unfinished and it suddenly seemed more important to me than anything a frog could say or do.

Going down in the jacket-lift to Sylvia I kept trying to recall just how I felt when it had cheated me out of something I was entitled to.

It didn’t seem right to leave a kiss dangling in midair, and I was sure that Sylvia was feeling frustrated, too.

She was. She came into my arms in utter silence, and we did the kiss up brown, and stored it away in our memories for when we were eighty-eight.

“Darling,” she said. “I’m glad we thought of that.”

I felt better almost at once. They had sent me out from Earth with a pat on the back and a commission, and I was returning with the commander’s niece in my arms and a story in my brain which the news syndicates would certainly want.

I’d ask a good price for it. Lunar honeymoons were expensive, and although Sylvia wasn’t extravagant she liked orchids as well as the next girl and was just the right height to wear sables with grace.

And We Sailed the Mighty Dark

I

Graveyard of Old Ships

You’ve seen them⁠—the old ships, the battered and ruined ships, the ships that have made one voyage too many, and are so ancient you can’t remember their names or the reputations they’ve earned for themselves in deep space! Sure you’ve seen them! Black hulls stretching away for miles into the red sunset⁠—ships that can be bought for a song if you’ve a song left in you and still want to go adventuring on the rim of the System.

Do you know how it feels not to have a song left in you? Do you know how it feels to be a legend without substance⁠—the lad who broke the bank at Callisto City and walked out two days later without a penny to his name?

Pete knew and he kept harping on it. “If you’d quit that first night, Jim, instead of pushin’ it all back across the board!”

There was awe in his eyes when he looked at me, and then he’d look at the ships, and I could guess what he was thinking. Good old Pete! When he shut his eyes I was still wearing a golden halo.

Lucky Jim Sanders, strong as an ox and coming along fine⁠—born lucky and loving life too much to worry his head about the future. But when life rises up and wallops you and lays you out flat you forget the good times and your own recklessness, and the inner strength and the laughing girls, and you just want to sit down and never get up!

I’d met Pete down in the valley, sitting on a rock. He didn’t want to get up either. He wanted to croak.

A wiry little cuss with blue eyes and a fringe of beard on his chin that had just grown there and stayed. Clothes that made him look like he was trying to spin a cocoon about himself.

You bet he had a story! A hard luck story that would have made Sinbad look like a quiet family man. But when I like someone straight off, his past is just so much water over the dam if he wants it that way.

I never did find out the truth about Pete⁠—right up until we parted. I had a lot of fun kidding him about it. “Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years, but you slept a thousand, Pete! You crawled out of an old ship and went to sleep in the desert.

“Did you get tired, Pete? Of the roar and the dust and the night⁠—the crocus-flower faces of Venusians, the gopher-girls of Mars and the pinwheeling stars⁠—of the night and the dust and the roar? Couldn’t you take it in the old days, Pete, when ships kept bursting apart at the seams and there was an ant hill on Callisto called a colony, with twenty living dead men in it?

“The ant hill’s a city now, Pete. And you’re still Pete, still around, and I’m just cutting my wisdom teeth on my first streak of hard luck! Hard like a biscuit, Pete! A dog biscuit flung to a dog!”

---

I was raving even more wildly as I stared out over that graveyard of old ships, feeling sorry for myself, envying Pete because he didn’t seem to care much whether he lived or died.

But I was wrong. Pete did care.

“If we could just get back to Earth, Jim!” he pleaded. “If we could smell the green earth again, after it’s been rainin’! If we could just get a whiff o’ the sea!”

I swung on him. “What chance have we? You don’t value dough so much when you’ve got it to toss around. But when you’re stony broke you get to feeling like a stone. Weighed down, petrified! You can’t do anything without dough!”

Pete made a clucking sound. “All right! You got trimmed, Jim⁠—and bad! But last night you had another streak of luck!”

I stared at him, hard.

He gestured toward the old ships. “There’s a yardmaster down there with a list of ships a yard long. If you want to buy a ship you just stand around twiddling your thumbs until he notices you. If he sizes you up right⁠—you get a bargain!”

“You mean if he thinks you’ve got some dough, but not much?”

“Uh huh!” Pete winked. “But if he thinks you’ve got a lot of dough you could get a bargain too. Without shelling out a cent!”

It didn’t take me long to get what Pete was driving at. I’d taken a beating, and everyone knew it. But everyone knew my face too! I was still Lucky Jim Sanders, wearing a golden