His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

Jerry took his crew of two to the steering blister that bulged from the top of the ship, picking his way between damaged bodies. In the blister he found the captain, staring permanently at a hole in the observation plate where a meteorite—one of many—had pierced the armor of his vessel. With a crowbar Jerry pried off the top of the recorder and photographed the tracing needles on the graph that charted the course of the ship with all its crazy tacks and swerves through space.

"Dehring," he ordered, "take up that corpse. We're going to stack them and see that they get decent burial when we reach a planet." And with the callousness of years of space travel and the coldness that the hard life of the salvager instills, the man obeyed.

Jerry wandered at random through the ship. It had carried some passengers. One of the cabin doors was open, and the figure of an old woman, face mercifully down, was sprawled over the threshold. She had heard the alarm in her little room as the air drained out of the ship; unthinkingly she had flung open her door—gasped for breath when there was nothing to breathe—and fallen as she was.

He picked up her tiny frame, and carried it to the stern of the ship. He wondered who she was why she was returning to Earth from Venus at her age. Perhaps she had wanted to pass her last years among the green and brown fields and again see a mountain. Perhaps—he thought he knew how she felt, for he, too, had once been homesick.

Mars—red hell of sand and cloudless sky. Home of "wanted" men and women, where the uncautious were burned in the flaming bonfires of the Martian underworld. Haven of every swindler and cutthroat in the system, it was but a dull gem in Sol's diadem. Some day they would clean it up—raid the sickening warrens that snaked through and under its cities; fill them in with dynamite. That day would be a good one …

Gently he deposited the body among others; brushed away his random thoughts and called, "Macy! Grapples fixed?" Macy's thin voice trickled through his earphones, "Yes, sir. I gave them twelve hundred meters."

"OK" he snapped. "Return to the ship, all except Wylie. You'll stay aboard, Kurt, to stow displaced cargo."

"Yes, sir," said Wylie, in a growl. "And shall I comb the corpses' hair, sir?"

Jerry grinned. "Why not? And see that it's done or I'll fire you and bust your rating on every scow out of Mars." Discipline, after all, was the thing.

Jerry resumed his place at the firing board. "Stations all," he called sharply over the annunciator. "Brace for seven Mars gravities in seventeen seconds. One—"

His hands flew over the board, setting up the combinations of rocket discharges that would be able to stir the huge Argol out of its inertia and snap it after the scow of Leigh Salvage, Incorporated, like a stone on a string, at the end of a ponderous osmiridium cable.

"Nine!" The men were strapping themselves into hammocks.

"Eleven …

"Fourteen!" He tensed himself, sucking in his stomach muscles against the terrible drag. "Sixteen!

"Fire!"

And the ship roared sharply up and out of the asteroid belt, its powerful rocket engines—designed to move twenty times the weight of the scow alone—straining to drag the ponderous cargo hulk behind it. Soon the initial speed lessened, and they were roaring along at an easy thousand K.P.S. The captain rose and set the automatics; tried to shake some of the blood from his legs into his head. He could rest now.

Assembled, Jerry and the men drank a toast to the trade in ethyl alcohol—"To salvaging: the greatest game of all!" They drained their cups. The big Sven rose, some of his Norse reticence vanished in the universal solvent. "My brothers in labor," he began. "We have gone far on this trip, and there is no one here who will not agree with me when I say that we could not have done it without Captain Jerry. I give you our boss and the best of them all, Jerry Leigh, of Leigh Salvage, Incorporated!"

The flask went the rounds, and when it was emptied there was another and yet another. In just a few hours Jerry was standing alone in the middle of the room, looking owlishly about him at the collapsed forms of the crew. There was a cup in his hands—a full cup. He spurned a nearby body with his foot.

"S-s-sissies!" he said derisively, and drained his drink. Slowly he deflated onto the floor.

An alarm bell smashed the silence into bits; men dragged themselves to their feet. "Mars," said one, absently.

"Don't land easy, Captain," another urged Jerry. "Smear us all over the field. It's about the only thing that'll do this head of mine any good."

Jerry winced. "That's the way I feel, but I'd like to get that hulk in before I die. Landing stations, all men."

Their ship and its huge running mate hovered over the red planet.

Irritably Jerry dove it near the atmosphere and blearily searched its surface for the landing field. "Damn!" he muttered. "I'm in the wrong hemisphere."