Nine Rarities Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes. Cap said: "It's been good. I won't deny it. I had a fine crew and a sweet ship. We worked hard, we did what we had to do. And now it's all over and we have peace. Peace."
     
    The way he said that word it meant something.
     
    "Know what that means?" said Lamb. "It means getting drunk again, as often as you like; it means living on earth again, forgetting how religious you ever were out in space, how you were converted the first trip out. It means forgetting how non-gravity feels on your guts. It means a lot. It means losing friends, and the hard good times brawling at Phobos-Deimos Base.
     
    "It means leaving this rocket." The men were silent.
     
    "I want to thank you. You, Hillary. And you, Slop. And you, Ayres, for signing on after your brother died. And you, Thompson, and McDonald and Priory. And that's about all. Stand by to land!"
     
     
     
    WE LANDED without fanfare.
     
    The crew packed their duffles and left ship. Cap lingered behind awhile, walking through me with his short, brisk strides. He swore under his breath, twisted his small brown face. After awhile he walked away, too.
     
    I wasn't a war-rocket anymore. They crammed me with cargo and shipped me back and forth to Mars and Venus for the next five years. Five long years of nothing but spider-silk, hemp and mineral-ore, a skeleton crew and a quiet voyage with nothing happening. Five years.
     
    I had a new captain, a new, strange crew, and a strange peaceful routine going and coming across the stars.
     
    Nothing important happened until July 17th, 2243.
     
    That was the day I cracked up on this wild pebbled little planetoid where the wind whined and the rain poured and the silence was too damned silent.
     
    The crew was crushed to death inside me, and I just lay here in the hot sun and the cold night wind, waiting for rescue that never seemed to come.
     
    My life blood was gone, dead, crushed, killed. A rocket thinks in itself, but it lives through its crew and its captain. I had been living on borrowed time since Captain Lamb went away and never came back.
     
    I lay here, thinking about it all. Glorious months of war, savage force and power of it. The wild insanity of it. I waited. I realized how out of place I was here, how helpless, like a gigantic metal child, an idiot who needs control, who needs pulsing human life blood.
     
    Until very early one morning after the rain I saw a silver speck on the sky. It came down fast—a one-man Patrol inspector, used for darting about in the asteroid belt.
     
    The ship came down, landing about one hundred yards away from my silent hulk. A small man climbed out of it.
     
    He came walking up the pebbled hill very slowly, almost like a blind man.
     
    He stood at my air-lock door. I heard him say, "Hello—"
     
     
     
    AND I knew who it was. Standing there, not looking much older than when first he had clipped aboard me, little and lean and made of copper wire and brown leather.
     
    Captain Lamb.
     
    After all these years. Dressed in a black patrol uniform. An inspector of asteroids. No cargo job for him. A dangerous one instead. Inspector.
     
    His lips moved.
     
    "I heard you were lost four months ago," he said to me, quiet-like. "I asked for an appointment to Inspector. I thought—I thought I'd like to hunt for you myself. Just—just for old time's sake." His wiry neck muscles stood out, and tightened. He made his little hands into fists.
     
    He opened my air-lock, laughing quietly, and walked inside me with his quick, short strides. It felt good to have him touch me again, to hear his clipped voice ring against my hull again. He climbed the rungs to my control room and stood there, swaying, remembering all the old times we had fought together.
     
    "Ayres!"
     
    "Aye, sir!"
     
    "Hillary!"
     
    "Aye, sir! "
     
    "Slop!"
     
    "Aye, sir!"
     
    "Conrad!"
     
    "Aye, sir!'
     
    "Where in hell is everybody? Where in hell is everybody?" raged Lamb, staring about the control room. "Where in the