“Ole Lenny has been out there doin’ repair work on one of the big antennas, out by the relay station. He’s a systems engineer with ST T, and he’s been on that job nearly twenty-five years. He’s sittin’ there at the base of the antenna array when his suit tells him there’s this big ole rock floatin’ up towards him. It’s movin’ so slow and so near that he gets a real strong signal from the rangefinder. He says it’s up there near close enough to spit on, but the detection radars don’t flag it so he knows there’s no chance of it hittin’ anythin’. So he’s not worried any, and not much interested. You seen one rock, you seen `em all.
So ole Lenny he sits up there, and he thinks a’ this rock. Don’t often see `em that close, he thinks. After a while he says to himself, if it’s all that close, I ought to be able to see it with my eyes, not just my rangefinder. So he looks round, and sure enough, he can really see that rock. Only it isn’t a rock. It’s a sealed space pod, with a Mischener Drive stuck on one end of it. Reminds me of the time that I saw one of them pods myself.”
Anson paused. “I’m going to skip a bit here, Rob. There were about three minutes of broadcast where Tinman Petey — that’s the name of the half-witted fistula who was doing the broadcast — tells his audience all about the way that he met his third wife. I don’t know what they thought of it, but it was too much for me. I’ll skip to the point where he gets back to talking about Lenny Pascal.
“So Lenny claps on the old suit jets, and he hustles on over for a closer look. The rock’s goin’ on by at maybe ten meters a second, so he won’t be able to take too long lookin’ before he has to turn on around and get on back to the antennas. He’s in front of that pod now, and what do you think he’s seein’? Lindy Lamarr, maybe, naked as an overspun Kerr-Newman? Nope. Bet he wishes it was, eh?
“It’s two little men, floatin’ inside the pod, and they’re bare as a baby, except for a sort of collar. They don’t move none, so Lenny he figures he ought to take a closer look. Ain’t no law ’gainst naked little men, he figures, providin’ they’re after their own business, but he can’t help bein’ a wee bit curious. So he bangs on the outside of the pod.
“They don’t move a bit. So Lenny figures that’s near as good as an invite to go in, and in he goes through the lock. Full-size lock, he says, nothing midget about that. Now he sees why they’re not after tellin’ him to come in. Seems they’re dead, both of ’em. Two little men, beards on their faces and ugly as sin, half a meter long and dead as Marley. Spooky, eh?
“Ole Lenny takes a look around inside there, but he sees nothin’ as would have killed ’em, like wounds ’n burns. He takes a closer look at ’em, and he finds they’ve got a whole lot of broken bones, under the skin, just like somebody took and squeezed ’em flat. That’s scary, so Lenny calls out the computer log, but he can’t make no sense of that. Pod come on out of the Belt, thirty days back, now it’s a-floatin’ on past the Moon goin’ to god-knows-where. No power left on it.
“By now Lenny’s beginnin’ to feel spooked, and he’s gettin’ a long way from home, and he’s itchy about leavin’ his job on the antenna for so long. So he calls on over to Medaris Base and asks ’em to come on out where he is and look at the Little People.
“Would you believe it, over there on Medaris they don’t seem to want to listen to him at all?
“Seems like Lenny’s had a problem with the Base one time before, when he saw a space-dog out on the antenna after he’d been a while in Gippo’s Bar. This time, nobody will give him half an ear. He has to head back to work, and by the time he hits Tycho again he don’t have any idea where that pod’s heading to. Maybe down to Earth, maybe off into the Sun.
“So there you got it, friends. What do you think? Do we have the Little People, moved out here mebbe now Earth’s not so friendly as it used to be? Or do you think there might be an engineer who’s firin’ skew on one or two jets? One thing’s for sure. We won’t know which, ’less one of you can take off after ole Lenny’s rock and check it for yourself.”
Anson leaned across and flipped a switch. “There you have it, Rob. That’s the whole thing, except for Tinman Petey’s sign-off. And that’s the same every time.”
“You talked to Pascal?”
“Sure. Tinman Petey too. I couldn’t get much more than what you heard from either of them. Lenny Pascal’s physical description was a little more complete, but he couldn’t tell me any more about how the pod first appeared or where it was heading.” Anson picked up a sheet from the desk in front of him. “You ought to photo-record this, but I can give you the main points in a couple of sentences. Body mass for the Goblins, as near as Pascal could judge, would be about five kilos. He thought their bone structure was pretty normal, though it was hard to tell because they were so broken up. The air in the pod was breathable, so they didn’t die of asphyxiation like the other Goblins we’ve encountered. Pascal says that their skin color was odd, but it was more like bruises, not cyanosis.”
“Too much acceleration?” Rob interrupted. “That’s what it sounds like. Did Pascal check the drive log?”
“That’s the odd part. He had the same thought as you did, and he felt they must have been exposed to more than thirty gees. He looked at the drive log in the pod and all it had been used for was small control maneuvers. Nothing big. In fact, Pascal said that he didn’t think a Mischener can give much thrust, even at top power.”
“He’s quite right.” Rob rubbed thoughtfully at his forehead. “I’d forgotten that it was a Mischener Drive. They’re controlled to half a gee or less. You could never modify one to get more than a couple of gees out of it — the whole thing would blow up.”
“I couldn’t modify any drive to do anything, but I know what you mean. I checked out that information on the Mischener Drive myself. I’ll get to that in a minute. Here’s something else for you. Atlantis is just about out in the Belt now, but I’ve been tracking its position as it moved. Take a look at this.”
Howard Anson held another sheet up to the camera. “Forty-five days old. A tracking station near the inner edge of the Belt recorded an unauthorized launch of a life-support pod from a point very close to Atlantis. Nobody sent out a Mayday, so the pod didn’t get tracked by Search and Rescue. All that happened was a violations report to Central Records. See how that would fit with what Pascal said about the pod’s log? The pod computer shared reference readings that say it started out in the Belt, thirty days before it drifted past the antenna farm. The time would fit perfectly. If the Goblins had started out from Atlantis in that pod, thirty days before Pascal sighted it, they’d have been just right to match that unauthorized launch. It would all be consistent, except” — he shrugged, a bewildered expression on his tanned face — “I don’t see how the Mischener Drive could do it.”
“It couldn’t.” Rob was shaking his head firmly. “Your argument won’t fly, Howard. I’ll do the detailed calculations for you if you like, but I already know the answer. There is no way you could fly from out near the Belt, where Atlantis was a month and a half ago, and get to the Moon on a Mischener Drive in thirty days. The orbit geometry is wrong. Anyway, the Mischeners don’t have the capacity for a continuous impulse trajectory, even at a fraction of a gee. They were designed for free-flight Hohmann transfer orbits, with a little bit of thrust at the beginning and a little bit more at the end.”