Read Ebook: The jet jockeys by Stockheker R W Kiemle H W Henry William Illustrator

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Ebook has 1200 lines and 27271 words, and 24 pages

"What I mean," I went on, "is that if I decided to have this face of mine fixed up, we'd have to find a new source of income to pay for it, wouldn't we?"

The idea seemed to stagger him. "Get your face fixed up!" he yelped. "Are you crazy, Pete? Why those scars are worth good hard cash to you. They're all that keeps you racing the big cylinders today. You know that, Pete."

I guess I did. You see, I ride for the Galaxy circuit under a queer set-up. What I mean is that the circuit pays me a straight salary just to put a little more color into a race.

Instead of setting out to win, I'm hired to ride the magnet bends, making hair-brained skids and turns, the kind of trick stuff that looks good to the stands, but kills real speed. And the only reason I get by with most of the stuff I pull is because I've built up a reputation on this tough mug of mine.

I'm considered to be the sort of guy who would rather wreck his rocket than give an inch to another rider.

"I know, Skid," I said. "But I don't figure to go on racing rockets forever. Someday I'm bound to meet up with a nice girl, and--well, what is she going to think of this face of mine?"

Skid's finger traced a pattern along the sleek side of his rocket.

"Look, Pete," he said. "In the first place, there's nothing really wrong with your face. Believe me, those scars give you the kind of tough charm most women go for. And in the second place, it wouldn't do you any good to have your face fixed, Pete, because you're just the sort of guy who would get it banged up all over again, if just from falling over the nearest baby carriage."

Maybe I would have gone for that kind of talk if it hadn't been for that little plate-eyed space kid. But now I had my mind made up.

"I'm serious about this, Skid," I insisted. "I'm going to have this pan fixed up, if it's the last thing I ever do. And it looks like the only way I can get the cash is to go out there and place in the Double Century this afternoon."

Skid's teeth made a little clicking sound.

"Now I know you are crazy, Pete," he said. "I'll admit you're one of the greatest trick riders who ever put a rocket around a tube. But the moment you set out to race, you go completely haywire. You know that too."

I did know it. It's a funny thing. Just riding around the tube to put on a show, the way I'm paid to do, I'm like a robot. Up in my head there's a little timing device that tells me just how fast, down to the last split second, a rocket can take a magnet bend.

I can work out to the last fraction of an ounce the carom I can afford to take off the force fence or another rocket without wrecking. But the moment I go out to win, the tube guards start hanging out the crash warning again.

Still, there was the look in that little space dancer's eyes.

"This time it's going to be different, Skid," I said. "That last crash at Xovia was a lesson to me."

Skid gave up. He knew, as well as I, that the only thing I learned from the Xovia smash-up was that the nurses on Venus are tough kids to work into a clinch. But he didn't try to argue any longer. All he did was give me a shove toward my heavy, scarlet-finned cylinder.

"If that's the way it is, Pete," he said, "I'm for you to the limit."

Up in the stands I caught the usual half-hysterical burst of applause that always signals the finish of Suvia's act. With a sigh of relief I eased myself down into the cockpit of my rocket. A moment later the metallic, robot-toned voice of the tube starter crackled from the loudspeaker, announcing the line-up for the Double Century.

At the finish of this announcement, the boom swung down to lift the first of the big racing rockets into the starting racks. Its appearance brought an instant responsive roar from the stands. That sound beat down into the pits with all the solidness of a slab from Sirius.

A quarter million voices, hiked to scream-pitch by excitement, is impressive beyond description, and Astrola, with its vast network of vacuum tube trains, often draws crowds of that size.

Four years ago, when Maza Boruu first introduced this brand new sport of rocket racing on Mars, nobody would have dreamed he was turning loose a sensation that would sweep the planetary system like a Jupiterian fire storm. But a year after the first rocket took the magnet bends at Zonuu, you couldn't have counted the tracks on a family of centipedes.

On Earth, especially, the response was tremendous. With the perfection of the Celetron robot, and its introduction into industry, time was beginning to become an item of increasingly boring magnitude to the majority of the populace. The result was that this new and exceedingly dangerous sport was pounced on by the people of Earth with all the gusto of a hungry carnivore on a juicy side of caveman.

Even so, jaded nerves or not, there's nothing else this side of the fourth dimension that for sheer thrill can touch rocket racing. The spectacle of twenty big torpedoes thundering along before the ground-quivering blast impact of their jets, unleashing power better suited to the vastness of space than to a race track, is soul shaking. That riotous kaleidoscope of shifting, glow-colored cylinders would move a Cela pulp man.

Even after years of racing, the mere anticipation of the coming ride was enough to start my pulse to pounding. In an effort to counteract this stirring excitement, I tried to concentrate on the track.

Since the last time Skid and I had jammed around the big elliptic here at Astrola, the place had undergone a thorough remodelling. The old stands had been dismantled and replaced with new ones fabricated of jadette, that dark green bubble plastic recently developed in the Fabraglas Laboratories. The design of these stands followed closely the weird atomic style of the architecture of Mars.

The infield of the track, except for the video screen that brought the fifty-mile track within constant view of the stands and the huge Zoduu nuclear pile out in the center, was laid out in geometrically patterned beds of Vassong's vibrating orchid mutations.

Now, disturbed by the crowd noise, these orchids kept up a constant quivering, forming swiftly changing color combinations. A heavy perfume, as titillating as wine, rose from these blooms.

The track itself was the usual elliptical super-panta magnet, with arches of tennilite spaced around it at quarter-mile intervals. These tennilite arches, when under full charge from the Zoduu nuclear pile, builds up the tubular force fence which guards the stands, and the force field which holds the terrific speed of the rockets under control.

This set-up of magnet and arches was the same combination as that first used by Boruu on Mars.

The voice of the announcer, calling Sirius 50 into position, jerked my attention back from the field equipment. Sirius 50 belongs to little Agu Ziggy, one of the original Martian riders from that first race at Zonuu, and I knew I was starting in the tube next to Ziggy.

With Sirius 50 on the move, I stooped down to get my polarized Beta-X visor out of its compartment. My helmet, when I straightened out, missed Suvia's blond head by inches. She had reached over the cockpit rim and was pulling back one of my hinged earphone flaps.

"Pete," she yelped in my ear, "what happened down in the rocket pits between Skid and Steve?"

The bad side of my face was covered by the crash helmet, so I felt pretty good.

"Nothing important, baby," I told her. "I doubt if it disturbs the Andromeda Nebula a bit."

She gave me a look you could have fried an atom with, and climbed up a step higher.

"Those little fire dancers Mil Gaines brought over from the Paris races are down in the dressing rooms, squeaking like a caveful of bats about a fight, Pete."

"Pay them no attention, baby," I told her. "Those dizzy little space dames are always squeaking like a caveful of bats. I remember getting drunk in a joint up on Venus where--"

She reached down and rattled my earphone jack, nearly blasting my eardrums loose.

"This is serious, Pete," she wailed. "Answer me."

"I am answering you," I said. "I'm telling you there wasn't any fight. Jet Markham cooled them off."

"But how worked up did Steve get? Would he try to do anything desperate in the race--like trying to wreck Skid's rocket?"

"Hold it, kid," I said. "Just what did those little spacies say?"

Before she could answer, one of the little Celetron robots came clicking up and tried to push the sliding cockpit cover shut under Suvia's nose. She brushed it off with a sweep of her arm, causing it to whir plaintively. That's one thing about women, even Suvia, they've no respect for machinery. Those robots are precision instruments, too.

"It was that little dancer Azi Maruu runs around with," she said then, "who was doing most of the talking. I gathered Maruu has been needling Steve all week until he's reached a stage where he'll just about go out there and try to wreck Skid's rocket if it kills them both. The little dancer was spilling all this dope because she wanted the troupe to bet everything on Maruu to cop the 'Double.'"

That made sense in pieces big enough to start a meteor. Shades of little galaxies, I thought bitterly, the one day I decide to go out and drive a race, a thing like this has to happen.

"Guys have tried to wreck Skid before, baby," I said, trying to keep the trouble out of my voice. "I wouldn't give it another thought. Now you'd better let Percy here get those boom magnets fixed before he blows a tube."

My big, scarlet-finned Comet slid into the starting tube with hardly a jolt. From the corner of my eye I could see the familiar golden bulk of Sirius 50, its outlines somewhat blurred by the semi-transparent walls of the starting tube. On the other side, in the pole position, a gleaming white Tri Planet-built Star Car was being swung into place. The driver of the Star Car was a new-comer to the circuit--a nice looking blond-headed kid who brought his rocket up from Antarctica for this race.

The white Star Car was the last rocket to go into the tubes and it filled out the top tier. There are four of these tiers with five tubes to the tier here at Astrola, as at most of the newer tracks. The favorites usually draw the lower tier, where the pull of the force field is tougher and the going slower. This makes for closer and more exciting races since the rockets scramble for the better positions on the upper levels.

Outside my rocket I noticed the guide-line color bands on the force fence deepen suddenly, almost obscuring the stands. Although these bands were invisible to the crowd, they stood out sharply in my specially ground lenses, tracing the dome-shaped path of the force fence. This force fence, despite its apparent fragility, can stop a churning rocket on a pinpoint. And it has stopped plenty of them, too. Not even radar controlled cushioning jets and the strong repellent force the fence exerted can keep a rocket from going into it.

When the color bands steadied to racing ready, I felt for the accelerator paddles, jabbing them all the way home. With the paddles completely depressed, the forward propulsion jets were all set to fire simultaneously when the starter threw the radio-controlled master switch in the judges' stand.

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