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  Table of Contents

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  For the Best in Science Fiction

  Half Title

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 The Last Spaceship

  Chapter 2 The Edict

  Chapter 3 Secret Spacemen

  Chapter 4 Captain Ballinger

  Chapter 5 Escape!

  Chapter 6 The Trail of a Spaceman

  Chapter 7 Freya

  Chapter 8 Land of the Midnight Sun

  Chapter 9 Peace Plans

  Chapter 10 War Plans

  Chapter 11 Treachery!

  Chapter 12 Mexico Again

  Chapter 13 Return to Space

  Chapter 14 Battle in Space

  Chapter 15 Prisoners

  Chapter 16 Mutiny!

  Chapter 17 Canopus

  Chapter 18 The Star Brain

  Chapter 19 Home is the Spaceman

  About the Author

  For the Best in Science Fiction

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  Spacemen, go Home

  By the Same Author

  Earthbound

  The Star Seekers

  Stadium Beyond the Stars

  Spacemen, go Home

  Milton Lesser

  HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON

  New York

  Copyright © 1961 by Milton Lesser

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Limited.

  First Edition

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-9046

  95212-0111

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book is for

  Clara and Sam Lang

  Spacemen, Go Home

  Chapter 1 The Last Spaceship

  WHILE the moonship “Tycho III” was settling slowly toward the landing pit swallowing the fiery exhaust of its braking rockets, Andy Marlow had his first look in more than a year at the planet Earth.

  What he saw was a spaceport, the New Mexico Spaceport to be exact. Andy felt a lump in his throat. He couldn’t talk, even though he knew his friend Turk stood by the viewport at his side. It should have been different, Andy thought. It should have been so different.

  He could almost conjure in his mind an image of what it might have been like—the proud launching gantries gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight, the doors of a dozen firing pits rolled back to reveal the sleek noses of as many space-bound ships, and far below at the edge of the tarmac a band playing the “Interstellar March” in salute to the space cadets returning from their training at Luna Academy.

  Instead, Andy saw the rusting skeletons of the big gantries that hadn’t been used in a year, the tightly shut doors of the firing pits, the broken hulks of a few old spacetubs littering the tarmac like the bones of prehistoric monsters, and a crowd of Earth citizens milling about where the band should have been.

  Turk punched his shoulder. “Well, come on,” he said, “snap out of it. At least we’re home. Aren’t you glad to see Earth again?”

  “Are you?” Andy asked.

  Turk scowled. Like Andy Marlow, he was eighteen years old. He had been born Backy Ayoub in Istanbul, Turkey, and the nickname Turk had stuck with him during the first—and only—year at Luna Academy. Turk was short, dark, stocky, and very wide across the shoulders. His heavy body always seemed on the verge of bursting out of the gray jumper that was the Academy uniform. His dark eyes were intense.

  “I guess I’m not so glad to see Earth again,” he said finally. “Not like this.”

  By contrast, Andy Marlow was tall, fair-haired, and lean. He had pale, gray-blue eyes which, even now at the age of eighteen, had laugh-wrinkles radiating from their corners. But, as “Tycho III” settled with hardly a bump in the landing pit, Andy wasn’t laughing. He tried to think of the future, but it was a blank; he found himself wondering if he would ever even smile again.

 
“Anybody waiting for you?” he asked Turk.

  “There’s no one who’d care whether I came back to Earth or shipped out to the Milky Way.”

  Andy didn’t answer. No one would ship out again, ever.

  “Tycho Ill” was the last Earth ship to return home. By interstellar edict, space was now forever closed to Earthmen.

  “Say,” Turk said, trying to break the gloom of their thoughts, “don’t you have a brother who’s a spaceman waiting for you?”

  “He was a spaceman,” Andy corrected. There were no spacemen now, just earthbound exiles. “I don’t know where he is.”

  “Maybe they can tell you at the Placement Center in White Sands.”

  “Maybe.”

  Andy continued to stare out the viewport. He could see nothing but the sheer walls of the landing pit now.

  “You like the view or something?” Turk said.

  “What? Oh, don’t mind me.”

  Andy was delaying until the last possible instant the moment when he would step out of “Tycho III” ’s airlock. Probably, he would never set foot inside a spaceship again; no Earthman would, Earth’s brief two hundred years in space were now history, ancient history.

  “Attention!” an amplified voice blared. “Attention! All Cadets assemble at the aft airlock for debarkation! All Cadets to the aft airlock!”

  Andy heard the sound of magnet-sheathed boots clomping through “Tycho III” ’s narrow companion-ways. Like all the rest, it would be a sound he would try to remember. Or, he wondered, would he be better off forgetting it, forgetting all of it?

  He knew he never could do that.

  With Turk alongside, he went to the airlock.

  Most of the other Cadets already had gathered there. The executive officer, an ensign named Mac-Ready, made a brief speech:

  “Men, I don’t have to tell you we’re returning to Earth for good. I don’t have to tell you that though you’ve all been trained as spacemen, that’s something you’ll never be. But all your ex-officers at the Academy, from Superintendent Archer on down, expect you to behave like spacemen. You’ll see a lot of unpleasantness and ugliness; people will blame you for what happened. Though most of them never would have gone to space anyway, there isn’t a man on Earth who wanted the space lanes closed to us. And they’ll hold you responsible.” MacReady’s eyes shifted from one Cadet face to another. “That’s all. Good luck to all of you.”

  MacReady’s voice broke. Andy wondered how many times the exec had had to make that same speech to returning Cadets.

  With Turk, Andy followed the other Cadets through the airlock and up the pit stairs to ground level. The first thing he saw at the top, at the edge of the tarmac, was a cordon of police. Their faces were set grimly. They stood in close ranks, shoulder to shoulder. They looked as if they expected trouble.

  A crowd of civilians pressed them from behind.

  Andy saw heads bobbing, faces appearing over the police cordon.

  “Go back to the moon!” a man shouted. “We don’t want you here.”

  “Traitors!” someone else cried.

  “Cadets they call themselves. Troublemakers… Someone threw a stone. A Cadet in front of Andy cried out and stumbled. The police formed two lines at the edge of the tarmac, and the Cadets ran for it.

  Andy felt too numb to be dismayed by their homecoming.

  Chapter 2 The Edict

  “NAME?” asked the machine.

  “Ayoub, Backy.”

  “Age?” asked the machine.

  “Eighteen … and a half,” Turk replied.

  “Year at the Academy?”

  “First year,” Turk said, a little truculently.

  “You wish to remain in the United States of North America?”

  Turk looked at Andy, who shrugged.

  “I don’t know yet,” Turk said.

  “Any family?”

  “No.”

  “Place of birth?”

  Turk told the machine, “Istanbul, Turkey.”

  Andy hardly heard the questions as the reception-mech rattled them off from its voice box. His turn would come next, he knew, and he was impatient to get the formalities over with here at the Placement Center.

  He felt, suddenly, better than he had at any time since leaving the moon. He didn’t know why, but somewhere between the spaceport and White Sands City itself the mood of hopelessness which he had carried like a heavy weight on his shoulders had left him. For the first time he felt curiosity about the future. There was a future for him somewhere on Earth, there had to be. And his brother Frank, whose recommendation had sent Andy to Luna Academy and who had returned home a few months ago with the other Space Captains from one of Earth’s far-flung interstellar bases, his brother Frank would help him find it.

  Wouldn’t they know, here at the Placement Center, where Frank was?

  Andy became aware that the reception-mech was questioning him. He answered the name-rank-and-serial-number questions automatically. Then the machine asked:

  “Do you want work or further schooling?”

  “Schooling?” Andy echoed the word. “In space-manship?”

  “Not in spacemanship. At one of Earth’s universities”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t given it much thought,” Andy admitted. ‘I’d like to contact my brother. He was a spaceman. Would you have his records here somewhere ?”

  “Name?”

  “Frank Marlow”

  “Marlow, Frank,” the machine said, and then there was silence. Andy stared at the faceless box of the machine, at the grid from which its mechanical voice issued. He could almost picture the electronic tape inside the box that filed data for the machine.

  Finally words came from the voice box:“Cadet Marlow, Captain Strayer will see you personally.”

  Andy was surprised. Captain Strayer, he knew, was in charge of the Placement Center. “I just wanted to find out where my brother was,” he said.

  “Captain Strayer will see you.”

  Turk, who had seemed on the verge of inheriting the bad mood Andy had abandoned, brightened. “Hey now,” he said. “We get to see the big boss himself. How about that?”

  The machine said, “Captain Strayer will see Cadet Marlow only.”

  “We’re together,” Andy said simply.

  Another pause. Then, “Very well. Both of you.”

  Moments later the two Cadets were walking down a wide hall where other new arrivals were entering the little cubbies of the placement specialists.

  “Do you know who Captain Strayer is?” Turk asked.

  “Sure. He opened up the star trail to Fomalhaut. He’s one of the most famous spacemen around.”

  “Ex-spacemen,” Turk said glumly, and Andy had the feeling that somehow they had switched attitudes.

  They reached the end of the hall.

  Turk was staring down at his boots. Andy took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. He could still act like a Cadet, he decided.

  “Here it is,” Andy said, and he knocked on the door that bore Captain Lambert Strayer’s name.

  “Come in!”

  In a bare, functional office, Lambert Strayer sat behind a large plastic desk. He looked younger than Andy had expected. He was tall and ramrod straight, with a shock of white hair and piercing china-blue eyes. His skin was darkly bronzed by long years of exposure to the radiation that had seeped through the hulls of ships under his command. His smile was warm.

  “Did they give you a rough time at the ’port?”

  “Not too bad, sir,” Andy said. “Our exec told us to expect it. The police herded us on a bus and … here we are.”

  Strayer stood up and shook hands with both of them. “You’ll be Marlow,” he told Andy. It wasn’t a question. “You look like your brother, son. We shipped out together to … let me see … Deneb and Arcturus. Frank was my exec on the Arcturan expedition. I never served with a better man.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Well, sit down, boys. Tell me, what
are your plans?”

  “We don’t exactly have any, sir,” Turk admitted.

  Captain Strayer shook his head philosophically. “It’s usually that way,” he said. “You boys have been trained for space. All your lives you’ve been, well, pointing in one direction … outbound. And then along came the Edict.”

  “Isn’t there a chance, any kind of chance at all,” Andy asked, “that Earth will be allowed into space again?”

  Captain Strayer shook his head, this time not philosophically but decisively. “Not after the Edict. Not in our lifetime. Not if the Star Brain has its way.” He shrugged. “And of course it will. It always has. Who are we to complain? We’re just men of flesh and blood. We’re not infallible and sacrosanct, like the Star Brain.”

  Andy wondered if he detected any sarcasm in Captain Strayer’s tone. He couldn’t be sure.

  Turk protested, “Captain Reed Ballinger didn’t take the Star Brain’s decision lying down. He complained.”

  Captain Strayer scowled. When the expression of warm welcome on his face changed so suddenly, something of the man’s power was revealed to Andy. Captain Strayer would make you proud if you were his friend, he decided, but he’d make you quake if you were his enemy.

  “Don’t tell me you expect me to defend Ballinger?” Strayer said tonelessly.

  “Well,” Turk said, shuffling his feet, “the way we heard it on Luna… .”

  Strayer leaned forward. His intense eyes shifted from Andy’s face to Turk’s and back again. “If it wasn’t for Reed Ballinger, we’d still be in space. Make no mistake about that.”

  “But he… .” Turk protested.

  “As you know, Earth and Capella were contesting for the mineral rights to an uninhabited planet in the Cygni System. The dispute was brought before the Star Brain, and it decided in favor of Capella. Make no mistakes about that, either. The Star Brain’s decision is objective. It has to be.”

  “A machine … telling men what to do,” Turk said.

  “A machine,” Strayer shot back at him, “developed with all the scientific skills of humanity and the other intelligent races in the Galaxy. A machine developed for one purpose only: to keep the peace in the Galaxy.”