Checkpoint Lambda

Checkpoint Lambda Murray Leinster

COPYRIGHT© 1966, BY MURRAY LEINSTER

Published by arrangement with the author BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, JULY, 1966

BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by

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CHAPTER 1

Scott ran into the situation on a supposedly almost-routine tour of duty on Checkpoint Lambda. It was to be his first actual independent command as a Space Patrol commissioned officer. Otherwise the affairs of the galaxy seemed to be proceeding in a completely ordinary fashion. On a large scale, suns burned in emptiness, novas flamed, and comets went bumbling around their highly elliptical orbits just as usual. On a lesser scale, where the affairs of men were concerned, there seemed to be no deviation from the customary. The Golconda Ship had vanished, to be sure, but it was the habit of that fabulous vessel to disappear once in every four years, while half the galaxy tried to guess where it had gone, and the rest tried to think of ways to intercept it when it came back.

Other human activities were commonplace. Huge bulk-cargo carriers lifted off from spaceports and moved slowly out to emptiness. At appropriate distances the landing grids which had lifted them let go, and the ungainly objects flickered and abruptly disappeared. Actually, they were on their way to destinations light-centuries distant, wrapped in cocoons of overdrive-field which carried them many times faster than light. Sleek, bright metal ships, graceful in outline, shot into being from nothingness and then swam slowly to the point where the same landing grids’ force-fields could lock on and let them down to worlds totally new. Mile-long ships with swimming pools and hundreds of deck-levels carried cargo and passengers between star clusters, and small, grubby cargo craft ferried minerals from airless satellites to the planets they circled. Space-yachts cruised leisurely, while battered tramp ships doggedly nosed into queer corners of space upon their sometimes legitimate business.

The galaxy was a very busy place. There was most activity, perhaps, near the yellow sun on whose third planet humanity had begun and from which it had spread to distances incomprehensibly immense. But it was busy everywhere.

A space lane stretched from Rigel to Taret, two thousand light-years from one end to the other, colonized worlds clustered upon it like beads upon a string. Space lanes led to the Coalsack and from the Rim to Betelgeuse. Other surveyed lanes forked, then joined, ended, and began once more. Sometimes they crossed each other. At intervals there were spaceports for the exchange of passengers and freight between ship lanes. Men displayed great ingenuity in arranging such things.

There was the sun Canis Lambda, for example. Scott was on his way to take command of the checkpoint that floated in orbit around it. Canis Lambda was a yellow type G sun which should have had as many planets as ancient Sol. At some unimaginably remote period it had possessed them. But like Sol, which possessed an unnamed world that blew itself to bits—bits now floating aimlessly between Mars and Jupiter—Canis Lambda had four now-detonated children, reduced these days from mountains and islands to particles of celestial sand. None was large enough to be called a planet and all seemed useless. Yet the sun Canis Lambda burned brightly in emptiness where no less than six man-marked space lanes crossed each other. And men needed a course-marker, a buoy, a transfer-point there. So they built one.

The first two attempts were failures, because they were only buoys. They vanished, and the Five Comets of Canis Lambda were blamed for their disappearance. The current checkpoint was more ambitious.

Men took an ancient ship that was unsuited for any other use. They drove it to Canis Lambda, took out the overdrive engine and put it in orbit near a mile-thick fragment of an exploded world. They installed radars and telemeters and space-radio equipment. Three decks were filled with growing things to provide food and purify the air. Finished, the former liner was not only a buoy and a checkpoint for space traffic, but it was a hotel and a warehouse and other things besides.

Scott hadn’t seen it when he heard about what he was running into, but he’d studied its plans. It had freight doors in its hull. It had lifeboats in their blisters. It had air-locks and any number of conveniences—cabins, a tiny theatre, a restaurant, even a small hospital far down in its stern-most section. Passengers could board it from a liner following one space lane and wait in it for a liner following a different lane to take them to another world. Freight could be transferred to it also. The buoy—the check-point—was a necessary facility for interstellar traffic.

But one day, while Scott was on his way to take it over as his first independent command, several passengers were there, awaiting a ship for Dettra. They were supposed to transfer. But they didn’t.

This started everything, so far as Scott was concerned.

He heard about it in the control room of the liner taking him to the space buoy. The skipper had checked for passengers to be landed and found that Scott was not only routed for Lambda, but was a lieutenant in the Space Patrol and headed for duty there. He was traveling as a paying passenger and in civilian clothes, as Patrol men always did when off duty. The skipper had assumed he was only another passenger. But when he realized who Scott was, he urgently invited him into the control room.

“I’d no idea you were Patrol,” he told Scott apologetically, “or I’d have invited you here before.”

“I’ve spent enough time in control rooms,” said Scott, “not to mind being just a passenger.”

“We don’t often see a Patrol man,” explained the skipper, “and I didn’t think—.”

“I’m obliged to you,” Scott told him. “I haven’t worried about a thing since we left Dettra.”

It wasn’t quite the truth. Checkpoint Lambda was his first independent command, and he’d been assigned to it for a very special reason. The whole project would work out best, and he’d seem better fitted for other commands later, if absolutely nothing unusual happened on Lambda before he got there, while he was there, and after he left. He’d been uneasy on that account alone but so far everything seemed normal.

“I may have a problem at Lambda,” said the skipper after a pause. “I’m glad you’re aboard to take over if it turns up.”

Scott waited. The Patrol was the only interstellar service with authority to order anybody around, but it leaned over backward to avoid any such behavior.

“Just before we left Dettra,” the skipper explained, “a ship came in to the space port. She was minus some passengers and some freight she should have picked up at Lambda. But at Lambda they insisted there were no such passengers nor any freight for that ship. They said for her to go on her way. There was no point in making contact.”

Scott frowned. At this particular time it wasn’t likely there’d be any confusion about passengers or freight at Lambda. It was exceedingly important that everything be right. Within the past months one change in the landing arrangements at Lambda had become necessary. Among Scott’s special orders were directions for him to take care of that change. But this was way out of line.

“One of the passengers was a girl,” said the skipper.

“She was bound for Dettra. The liner skipper knew her family. She had to be on Lambda! She had to! He put up an argument. So the Lambda Patrol officer came on the vision-screen. He swore at the liner and ordered it on its way. There was some freight to be put off there, too. The Patrol officer refused to take it. He swore again. He was adamant. So the liner had to go on to Dettra. Her skipper told me about it an hour before we lifted off.”