Pluto (Dwarf planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space flight -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; Spouses -- Fiction
Home! That was funny, to consider home, a place in space where gravity
was furnished by an mechanogravitic warp, and where there were no
windows to open, and where you lived in a cube of steel three thousand
feet on a side, mostly filled with the items required for living plus
the maze of equipment required to maintain the great lens that gave
Pluto its sun.
Home! It was a far cry from his boyhood home on Venus, where the
greenery of the forest fought with the very walls. But home is where
you like it, and McBride liked it.
He wished that he were there, for he felt that Enid needed him.
Then with that perversity of nature that people call fate, a bellhop
approached him and handed him a spacegram. McBride tipped the boy and
opened the envelope easily. He'd been getting 'grams by round numbers
for several years, and this was no novelty. He was not aware of its
importance until he opened the folded page and read:
JOHN MC BRIDE
SATAN'S HOTEL
HELL, PLUTO
HIT SKY FOR HOME. ENID IN NO GREAT DANGER FROM FALL, BUT HER
RECOVERY WILL BE ASSISTED BY YOUR PRESENCE.
CALDWELL.
McBride read the words twice, and then looked around himself, wildly.
_Hit Sky_ was easy to say--but at 6-G it would take just over one
hundred hours to make the passage. Four days minimum!
McBride raced to the elevator, chewed his fingernails while the car
rode him down the hundred and seven floors with that snail's pace
caused by many stops. He shot out of the elevator door, caromed off the
opposite wall into an ash tray which he upset and sent a small cascade
of sand across the floor. McBride coasted to a stop before the hotel
manager's desk and tossed the 'gram in front of him. The manager read
and looked up in sympathy.
McBride said: "Get me a reservation on the next sunward-bound ship.
Emergency stop; they'll make the stopoff with an emergency."
"Right." The manager spoke into the phone and then said: "And you'll be
checking out?"
"Yes. Have one of the boys collect my stuff and ship it out to Station
1."
"O.K., McBride, we'll see that your stuff is taken care of. Ben!" he
called out through the door, "hurry up on that reservation, and see
that a car is ready to take Mr. McBride to Hellsport."
"T'won't be necessary," said Ben with a glum face. "The _Uranium
Lady_ just took off fifteen minutes ago, and there isn't another ship
scheduled out of Hellsport for five days."
"Five days!" groaned McBride. "Anything flyable on this planet?"
"Nothing that would take a run to the Lens," said Ben.
"Sure?"
"Almost positive. However, I'll put a request on the radio that may
smoke out an unknown."
"I'll buy the thing if they won't let me go any other way," said
McBride.
"We understand," said the hotel manager.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account