A Complete Novelet By
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Startling Stories, March 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CHAPTER I
Graveyard of Old Ships
You've seen them—the old ships, the battered and ruined ships, theships that have made one voyage too many, and are so ancient you can'tremember their names or the reputations they've earned for themselvesin deep space! Sure you've seen them! Black hulls stretching away formiles into the red sunset—ships that can be bought for a song ifyou've a song left in you and still want to go adventuring on the rimof the System.
Do you know how it feels not to have a song left in you? Do you knowhow it feels to be a legend without substance—the lad who broke thebank at Callisto City and walked out two days later without a penny tohis 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 atthe ships, and I could guess what he was thinking. Good old Pete! Whenhe shut his eyes I was still wearing a golden halo.
Lucky Jim Sanders, strong as an ox and coming along fine—born luckyand loving life too much to worry his head about the future. But whenlife rises up and wallops you and lays you out flat you forget thegood times and your own recklessness, and the inner strength and thelaughing 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 toget up either. He wanted to croak.
A wiry little cuss with blue eyes and a fringe of beard on his chinthat had just grown there and stayed. Clothes that made him look likehe was trying to spin a cocoon about himself.
You bet he had a story! A hard luck story that would have made Sinbadlook like a quiet family man. But when I like someone straight off, hispast 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 twentyyears, but you slept a thousand, Pete! You crawled out of an old shipand went to sleep in the desert.
"Did you get tired, Pete? Of the roar and the dust and the night—thecrocus-flower faces of Venusians, the gopher-girls of Mars and thepinwheeling stars—of the night and the dust and the roar? Couldn'tyou take it in the old days, Pete, when ships kept bursting apart atthe seams and there was an ant hill on Callisto called a colony, withtwenty 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 ofold ships, feeling sorry for myself, envying Pete because he didn'tseem 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 couldsmell the green earth again, after it's been rainin'! If we could justget a whiff o' the sea!"
I swung on him. "What chance have we? You don't value dough so muchwhen you've got it to toss around. But when you're stony broke you getto feeling like a stone. Weighed down, petrified! You can't do anythingwithout dough!"
Pete made a clucking sound. "All right! You got trimmed, Jim—and bad!But last night you had another streak of