OLIVINE, RENEGADEHis Master's Vice
His ship roused Elmo Ixton out of deepsleep to the customary view of broad Kansas prairie, but he felt more uneasy than usual. Maybe the sleep hadn't been deep enough to keep his subconscious knocked out the entire two weeks.
The thing to do was not think about it.
With vigorous movements, and with cheerfulness intended to fool himself, he bounced out of the sleeptank and began exercising. "Schedule and coffee, Rollo," he said between bends.
"Yes, sir, Proxad Ixton," the ship responded snappily.
"Planetfall on Roseate in seventeen minutes. Coffee coming right up, sir." The prairie flickered and vanished from the holophane bulkheads, to be replaced by a view of nearby space with what was presumably the planet Roseate floating low to starboard.
"NO!" Ixton yelled frantically, clutching at the back of his control chair for support. "Put the prairieback!"
"Yes, sir," said the ship as Kansas reappeared. "Sorry, sir. Thought you would want to see the approach, sir." Ixton clung to the chair, stiffened his back to military erectness, and tried to push the terror from the spot where it nestled one inch behind his eyes. "Not this time, Rollo," he managed to say in a strangled voice. "Nothing I could see from out... from here... would be of concern to my duties on Roseate."
"Very well, sir. Here's your coffee, sir."
Ixton sank into the chair. With shaking hand he lifted the steaming cup from the serving pedestal that had risen out of the lounge deck. He sipped and said, "Excellent coffee, Rollo. Creamed and sugared just right." Rollo, after all, had feelings of sorts and didn't enjoy being yelled at. And of course the ship appreciated words of praise.
"Thank you, sir," the ship responded, the words sounding a little stiff to Ixton. As he drank the coffee Ixton made his eyes rest on the distant Kansas horizon, past the homesteads baking under an early autumn sun. But for some reason the view lacked its usual tranquilizing effect, although he sat as solidly in his chair as he could, and tried to imagine the mass of old Mother Earth beneath him. Whether his sleep had been too shallow, or whether the toughness of his assignment on Roseate was getting to him, he didn't know. One thing he did know: he wanted down as fast as possible.
"Are you getting landing instructions yet?" he asked.
"No, sir."
"Why not?" he demanded, trying to keep anxiety out of his voice.
"I was awaiting your command, sir."
Damn! Ixton fumed to himself. Now I've got Rollo too skittish to flip a relay on his own hook!
"O.K.," he said, "call Port Control for instructions. And let me talk to them, please."
"Roseate Control here!" barked a console speaker a few seconds later. "Receiving PSS Rollo. Go ahead."
"Hello, Port Control," replied Ixton. "This is Proxad Elmo Ixton, manning PSS Rollo, coming in for landing with a TUA of twelve minutes forty seconds. Request landing instructions to ship."
"You can come straight in, sir," responded Port Control. "We've been waiting for you! Instructions follow." As a series of blips and squawks began coming through, the speaker volume dropped to a whisper, since this was matter of no interest to Ixton. The man got up and paced the deck, feeling twitchy and wanting a cigarette, or something. Well, why not?
"Let me have a smoke, Rollo," he directed.
"Yes, sir." A thin white tube pushed out of the serving pedestal. Ixton grabbed the lighted cigarette and took a deep drag. This relaxed him slightly, but he resumed pacing as he smoked. At last he demanded, "Can't you shorten that TUA a couple of minutes, Rollo?"
"Yes, sir. I'll get us down as swiftly as possible, sir."
"Do that!" snapped Ixton.
He paced some more and tried to plan a course of action to follow once he landed. But all he could really do was try to imagine the various possibilities that might confront him. Omar Olivine was far from an ordinary fugitive from justice. Not many years back Olivine had been a proxad in the Space Patrol himselfa competent proxad, and highly resourceful.
Ixton hoped to simply sit on the situation until Patrol reinforcements arrivedif the planet's officials would stand for that. Technically and legally, Ixton's authority on Roseate would be supremea Space Patrolman's title of "proxad" stood for "proxy admiral," and it carried all the weight it implied. But law enforcement couldn't be divorced from politics and diplomacy, and part of Ixton's job was to avoid stirring anti-Patrol sentiment on Roseate, or any other world. And the planet had already been under total quarantine for two weeks, awaiting Ixton's arrival, and was doubtless indignant about it by now. Ixton pushed the butt of his cigarette into the wastecatcher and stared out over the prairie. There ought to be a way to make holophane scenes more realistic, he fretted. The focus was clear enough, the depth was convincing, and the colors far more accurate than they had been when he was a kid twenty years ago. But there was still a dead giveaway in the falsity of the viewer's relationship to the view: the deck of his control lounge did not actually attach itself to the prairie scene. It could be taken as a thin sheet of metal nearly flush with the ground of the prairie, or it could be the top of a tall tower, or the surface of a flying platform he was riding, or...
He grabbed the back of the chair, swaying and muttering angrily at himself.
"Pardon, sir?" asked Rollo.
"Nothing! Never mind! Just get us down from here!"
"Yes, sir. Only five more minutes, sir!"
"Cigarette!"
"Another, sir?"
"Yes, damn it, another! Quit dawdling."
The ship produced another cigarette for him and he sat down, glaring at the control console in front of the chair, not daring another look at the prairie scene.
The PSS Rollo dropped toward Roseate's port swiftly enough to produce a fairly spectacular meteor trail. If any fidgety planetary officials had been watching the approach on radar, they would have been most gratified by the haste with which the Patrol was coming to take the situation in hand. The ship braked at the last possible second and came down with engines roaring. The shocktubes squealed painfully when the tripads banged on the plastcrete hardtop and the ship shivered to a halt.
"Touchdown, sir," said the ship.
"Touch" hardly seemed the word for it to Ixton, who had felt the thuds despite the paragravity field. But he had asked for it. He took a deep, jerky breath and said, "Very good, Rollo. Exterior view, please." The prairie gave way to the unpretty sight of Roseate's spaceport, a wide expanse of empty and dirty plastcrete, marked here and there with crash-depressions and cargo-spillage stains. The Port Control building stood half a mile away, and beyond it he could see in the distance the outskirts of Roseate Citythe planet's principal town with some three hundred thousand souls.
Of course the lounge deck did not attach itself to this view any more definitely than it had to the prairie, but this was unimportant. Ixton knew this scene was for real, that Rollo was squatting firmly in the middle of that ugly plastcrete. The knowledge was vastly comforting.
"Link into local communications," he directed.
"Yes, sir," said Rollo, and a moment later the console screen lighted to show a young woman visiphone operator. "Yes, sir?" she echoed Rollo's words.
"I'm Proxad Elmo Ixton of the Space Patrol. Put me through to the Governor."
"Right away, Proxad Ixton, and welcome to Roseate," she said with businesslike coquetry. Ixton gazed sternly at her, and she got busy. "Here's Governor Drake, sir." Drake had the heavy face and alertness of eye that, Ixton supposed, had been displayed by the majority of politicians since ancient Babylon. He beamed, "Welcome to Roseate, Proxad"
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