His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

"Very interesting; very—this King Cole—I want to know more about him. I suppose you found his remains?"

"On Pluto? Don't be silly. When they crash there they stay crashed. This Ironface had had a better position than I did, naturally; I made it a point never to be unfair to the men I was assigned to, since my name alone struck terror—"

"Naturally, Major. How did King Cole work?"

"The usual way: ramming and boarding. Now Finkle had a tricky twist to his technique and had me baffled for a time—"

"That's too bad," said Jerry tiredly. "How old was Old King Cole when he—ah—crashed?"

"Rather young. In fact, he had just graduated from a tech school on Venus when he took up his career and ended it in about a year. But the Mercurian Menace was older and more experienced. He knew how to handle a ship. I was hard-pressed, but soon—"

Jerry hung up. It was fantastic! How many men had been to Pluto and returned? If his hunch was right—and it sometimes was—at least one more than the records showed. He phoned room service for the Marsport Herald.

"Yes, sir. Morning or afternoon edition?"

"Both. Oh, yes—I want them as of this date fifteen years ago. Better get me the year's file."

Room service turned to linen and said, "That man is mad as a hatter."

Then hastened to the Herald building for the files.

In due course the files reached Jerry, who had been calculating the location of the Bluebell.

He flipped the pages to January and read a report of the King's first appearance. He had struck like a demon at an excursion ship, gassing it and gutting it with thermite bombs, leaving a message pinned on the chest of the mutilated captain:

Old King Cole was a merry old soul,

And a pirate, too was he;

He wiggled his toes, and he thumbed his nose,

And said: 'You can't catch me!'

From that and subsequent clues his identity had been traced. He had been Chester Cole, honors student at Venusport Tech and had led his class at the Academy of Astronavigationbut was just a little cracked, it seemed. He had, as a student, fought a "duel" with another boy, crippling him. All that had saved him from prison then had been the loyal lies of his classmates. His crew, in the days of his career of crime, seemed also to have been made up of like contemporaries. It was a strange and striking picture, this mad boy roaming space in a ship of his own, striking out at will at women and children.

Now to the end of the files, to investigate his death 4 Pursuit Between the Planets

Approximately on the line which Jerry had calculated, a ship of strange design was speeding for Pluto. Like every spaceship, it was highly specialized. The super-powerful motors and grapples of the salvage scows were not hers, nor the size and luxury of the passenger liners.

This was no huge freighter, jammed to the blister and built for a maximum of space to store to a minimum of crew. Yet she had a purpose, and that purpose screamed from every line. This rocket was a killer, from bow to stern. Her prow was a great, solid mass of metal toughened and triply re-enforced for ramming; a terrible beak of death.

Above her rear rockets protruded a stern-chaser that scattered explosive pellets behind her in an open pattern of destruction.

But this very efficient machine was not entirely lacking in comfort, for Alice Adams rested easily in a chamber that might have graced—and once, perhaps did—the costliest luxury liner. She had awakened there after that peculiar odor through the Bluebell had laid her out and her crew. Then a courteous knock sounded on her door. "Come in," she said, baffled by the anomalous situation.

A man entered. "I welcome you," he said, "to my vessel. I trust that you will find—" Alice looked at his face, and screamed.

The man recoiled and muffled his features in a scarf. "I can hardly blame you," he said savagely. "It is the wind of Pluto. You will find that my entire crew is like that, I warn you. Skin grey and dead, the scars of the Plutonian sleet over all the face. For five years we lived unsheltered in that hell—five years that might have been a thousand. Can you know what that means?"

"But who are you?" asked the girl. "And I'm—I'm sorry about …"

"I was once known," said the man, "as King Cole. Bright boy of the space-lanes; pirate par excellence. The whimsical butcher—that was me. Fifteen years ago I died on Pluto, they think. Maybe I did; it's hard to say for sure these days. We lived in the broken open hull of our ship where it fell, breathing in helmets, feeding from crates and cans of food. One kid thought he could melt the snow outside and drink it. He was very thirsty, and he went mad when he saw the snow boil up into yellow-green gas. It was chlorine. It's cold out there where we're going.

"Many years it was, and then another ship crashed, and we took off our helmets and lived in that and sang songs with the men of it who survived. They were technicians, and tried to fix their rocket, but one of my boys killed them. He thought he liked it there; he must have been crazy.