Postmark Ganymede
Amazing Stories, September 1957
Consider the poor mailman of the
future. To ‘sleet and snow and dead of night’—things that must not keep him
from his appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and planets
that won’t stay put. Maybe he’ll decide that for six cents an ounce it just ain’t
worth it.
“I’m washed up,” Preston growled
bitterly. “They made a postman out of me. Me—a postman!”
He crumpled the assignment memo
into a small, hard ball and hurled it at the bristly image of himself in the
bar mirror. He hadn’t shaved in three days—which was how long it had been since
he had been notified of his removal from Space Patrol Service and his transfer
to Postal Delivery.
Suddenly, Preston felt a hand on
his shoulder. He looked up and saw a man in the trim gray of a Patrolman’s
uniform.
“What do you want, Dawes?”
“Chief’s been looking for you,
Preston. It’s time for you to get going on your run.”
Preston scowled. “Time to go
deliver the mail, eh?” He spat. “Don’t they have anything better to do with
good spacemen than make letter carriers out of them?”
***
The other man shook his head. “You
won’t get anywhere grousing about it, Preston. Your papers don’t specify which
branch you’re assigned to, and if they want to make you carry the mail—that’s
it.” His voice became suddenly gentle. “Come on, Pres. One last drink, and then
let’s go. You don’t want to spoil a good record, do you?”
“No,” Preston said reflectively.
He gulped his drink and stood up.
“Okay. I’m ready. Neither snow
nor rain, shall stay me from my appointed rounds, or however the damned thing
goes.”
“That’s a smart attitude,
Preston. Come on—I’ll walk you over to Administration.”
***
Savagely, Preston ripped away the
hand that the other had put around his shoulders. “I can get there myself. At
least give me credit for that!”
“Okay,” Dawes said, shrugging. “Well—good
luck, Preston.”
“Yeah. Thanks. Thanks real lots.”
He pushed his way past the man in
Space Grays and shouldered past a couple of barflies as he left. He pushed open
the door of the bar and stood outside for a moment.
It was near midnight, and the sky
over Nome Spaceport was bright with stars. Preston’s trained eye picked out
Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There they were—waiting. But he would spend the rest of
his days ferrying letters on the Ganymede run.
He sucked in the cold night air
of summertime Alaska and squared his shoulders.
***
Two hours later, Preston sat at
the controls of a one-man patrol ship just as he had in the old days. Only the
control panel was bare where the firing studs for the heavy guns was found in
regular patrol ships. And in the cargo hold instead of crates of spare ammo
there were three bulging sacks of mail destined for the colony on Ganymede.
Slight difference, Preston thought, as he set up his blasting pattern.
“Okay, Preston,” came the voice
from the tower. “You’ve got clearance.”
“Cheers,” Preston said, and
yanked the blast-lever. The ship jolted upward, and for a second he felt a
little of the old thrill—until he remembered.
He took the ship out in space,
saw the blackness in the view-plate. The radio crackled.
“Come in, Postal Ship. Come in,
Postal Ship.”
“I’m in. What do you want?”
“We’re your convoy,” a hard voice
said. “Patrol Ship 08756, Lieutenant Mellors, above you. Down at three o’clock,
Patrol Ship 10732, Lieutenant Gunderson. We’ll take you through the Pirate
Belt.”
Preston felt his face go hot with
shame. Mellors! Gunderson! They would stick two of his old sidekicks on the job
of guarding him.
“Please acknowledge,” Mellors
said.
Preston paused. Then: “Postal
Ship 1872, Lieutenant Preston aboard. I acknowledge message.”
There was a stunned silence. “Preston? Hal Preston?”
“The one and only,” Preston said.
“What are you doing on a Postal
ship?” Mellors asked.
“Why don’t you ask the Chief
that? He’s the one who yanked me out of the
Patrol and put me here.”
“Can you beat that?” Gunderson
asked incredulously. “Hal Preston, on a
Postal ship.”
“Yeah. Incredible, isn’t it?”
Preston asked bitterly. “You can’t believe your ears. Well, you better believe
it, because here I am.”
“Must be some clerical error,”
Gunderson said.
“Let’s change the subject,”
Preston snapped.
They were silent for a few
moments, as the three ships—two armed, one loaded with mail for Ganymede—streaked
outward away from Earth. Manipulating his controls with the ease of long
experience, Preston guided the ship smoothly toward the gleaming bulk of far-off
Jupiter. Even at this distance, he could see five or six bright pips
surrounding the huge planet. There was Callisto, and—ah—there was Ganymede. He
made computations, checked his controls, figured orbits. Anything to keep from
having to talk to his two ex-Patrol-mates or from having to think about the
humiliating job he was on. Anything to—
***
“Pirates! Moving up at two o’clock!”
Preston came awake. He picked off
the location of the pirate ships—there were two of them, coming up out of the
asteroid belt. Small, deadly, compact, they orbited toward him.
He pounded the instrument panel
in impotent rage, looking for the guns that weren’t there.
“Don’t worry, Pres,” came Mellors’
voice. “We’ll take care of them for you.”
“Thanks,” Preston said bitterly.
He watched as the pirate ships approached, longing to trade places with the men
in the Patrol ships above and below him.
Suddenly a bright spear of flame
lashed out across space and the hull of Gunderson’s ship glowed cherry red. “I’m
okay,” Gunderson reported immediately. “Screens took the charge.”
Preston gripped his controls and
threw the ship into a plunging dive that dropped it back behind the protection
of both Patrol ships. He saw Gunderson and Mellors converge on one of the
pirates. Two blue beams licked out, and the pirate ship exploded.
But then the second pirate
swooped down in an unexpected dive. “Look out!”
Preston yelled helplessly—but it
was too late. Beams ripped into the hull of Mellors’ ship, and a dark fissure
line opened down the side of the ship.
Preston smashed his hand against
the control panel. Better to die in an honest dogfight than to live this way!
It was one against one, now—Gunderson
against the pirate. Preston dropped back again to take advantage of the Patrol ship’s
protection.
“I’m going to try a diversionary
tactic,” Gunderson said on un-tappable tight-beam. “Get ready to cut under and
streak for Ganymede with all you got.”
“Check.”
Preston watched as the tactic got
under way. Gunderson’s ship traveled in a long, looping spiral that drew the
pirate into the upper quadrant of space.
His path free, Preston guided his
ship under the other two and toward unobstructed freedom. As he looked back, he
saw Gunderson steaming for the pirate on a sure collision orbit.
He turned away. The score was two
Patrolmen dead, two ships wrecked—but the mails would get through.
Shaking his head, Preston leaned
forward over his control board and headed on toward Ganymede.
***
The blue-white, frozen moon hung
beneath him. Preston snapped on the radio.
“Ganymede Colony? Come in,
please. This is your Postal Ship.” The words tasted sour in his mouth.
There was silence for a second. “Come
in, Ganymede,” Preston repeated impatiently—and then the sound of a distress
signal cut across his audio pickup.
It was coming on wide beam from
the satellite below—and they had cut out all receiving facilities in an attempt
to step up their transmitter. Preston reached for the wide-beam stud, pressed
it.
“Okay, I pick up your signal,
Ganymede. Come in, now!”
“This is Ganymede,” a tense voice
said. “We’ve got trouble down here. Who are you?”
“Mail ship,” Preston said. “From
Earth. What’s going on?”
There was the sound of voices
whispering somewhere near the microphone.
Finally: “Hello, Mail Ship?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re going to have to turn
back to Earth, fellow. You can’t land here. It’s rough on us, missing a mail
trip, but—”
Preston said impatiently, “Why
can’t I land? What the devil’s going on down there?”
“We’ve been invaded,” the tired voice
said. “The colony’s been completely surrounded by ice-worms.”
“Ice-worms?”
“The local native life,” the
colonist explained. “They’re about thirty feet long, a foot wide, and mostly
mouth. There’s a ring of them about a hundred yards wide surrounding the Dome.
They can’t get in and we can’t get out—and we can’t figure out any possible
approach for you.”
“Pretty,” Preston said. “But why
didn’t the things bother you while you were building your Dome?”
“Apparently they have a very long
hibernation-cycle. We’ve only been here two years, you know. The ice-worms must
all have been asleep when we came. But they came swarming out of the ice by the
hundreds last month.”
“How come Earth doesn’t know?”
“The antenna for our long-range
transmitter was outside the Dome. One of the worms came by and chewed the
antenna right off. All we’ve got left is this short-range thing we’re using and
it’s no good more than ten thousand miles from here. You’re the first one who’s
been this close since it happened.”
“I get it.” Preston closed his
eyes for a second, trying to think things out.
***
The Colony was under blockade by
hostile alien life, thereby making it impossible for him to deliver the mail.
Okay. If he’d been a regular member of the Postal Service, he’d have given it
up as a bad job and gone back to Earth to report the difficulty.
But I’m not going back. I’ll be the best damned mailman they’ve got.
“Give me a landing orbit anyway,
Ganymede.”
“But you can’t come down! How
will you leave your ship?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Preston
said calmly.
“We have to worry! We don’t dare
open the Dome, with those creatures outside. You can’t come down, Postal Ship.”
“You want your mail or don’t you?”
The colonist paused. “Well—”
“Okay, then,” Preston said. “Shut
up and give me landing coordinates!”
There was a pause, and then the
figures started coming over. Preston jotted them down on a scratch-pad.
“Okay, I’ve got them. Now sit
tight and wait.” He glanced contemptuously at the three mail-pouches behind
him, grinned, and started setting up the orbit.
Mailman, am I? I’ll show them!
***
He brought the Postal Ship down
with all the skill of his years in the Patrol, spiralling in around the big
satellite of Jupiter as cautiously and as precisely as if he were zeroing in on
a pirate lair in the asteroid belt. In its own way, this was as dangerous,
perhaps even more so.
Preston guided the ship into an
ever-narrowing orbit, which he stabilized about a hundred miles over the
surface of Ganymede. As his ship swung around the moon’s poles in its tight
orbit, he began to figure some fuel computations.
His scratch-pad began to fill
with notations.
Fuel storage—
Escape velocity—
Margin of error—
Safety factor—
Finally he looked up. He had
computed exactly how much spare fuel he had, how much he could afford to waste.
It was a small figure—too small, perhaps.
He turned to the radio. “Ganymede?”
“Where are you, Postal Ship?”
“I’m in a tight orbit about a
hundred miles up,” Preston said. “Give me the figures on the circumference of
your Dome, Ganymede?”
“Seven miles,” the colonist said.
“What are you planning to do?”
Preston didn’t answer. He broke
contact and scribbled some more figures.
Seven miles of ice-worms, eh?
That was too much to handle. He had planned on dropping flaming fuel on them
and burning them out, but he couldn’t do it that way.
He’d have to try a different
tactic.
Down below, he could see the
blue-white ammonia ice that was the frozen atmosphere of Ganymede. Shimmering
gently amid the whiteness was the transparent yellow of the Dome beneath whose
curved walls lived the Ganymede Colony. Even forewarned, Preston shuddered.
Surrounding the Dome was a living, writhing belt of giant worms.
“Lovely,” he said. “Just lovely.”
Getting up, he clambered over the
mail sacks and headed toward the rear of the ship, hunting for the auxiliary
fuel-tanks.
Working rapidly, he lugged one
out and strapped it into an empty gun turret, making sure he could get it loose
again when he’d need it.
He wiped away sweat and checked
the angle at which the fuel-tank would face the ground when he came down for a
landing. Satisfied, he knocked a hole in the side of the fuel-tank.
“Okay, Ganymede,” he radioed. “I’m
coming down.”
He blasted loose from the tight
orbit and rocked the ship down on manual. The forbidding surface of Ganymede
grew closer and closer. Now he could see the ice-worms plainly.
Hideous, thick creatures, lying
coiled in masses around the Dome.
Preston checked his spacesuit,
making sure it was sealed. The instruments told him he was a bare ten miles
above Ganymede now. One more swing around the poles would do it.
He peered out as the Dome came
below and once again snapped on the radio.
***
“I’m going to come down and burn
a path through those worms of yours. Watch me carefully, and jump to it when
you see me land. I want that airlock open, or else.”
“But—”
“No buts!”
He was right overhead now. Just
one ordinary-type gun would solve the whole problem, he thought. But Postal
Ships didn’t get guns. They weren’t supposed to need them.
He centered the ship as well as
he could on the Dome below and threw it into automatic pilot. Jumping from the
control panel, he ran back toward the gun turret and slammed shut the plexilite
screen. Its outer wall opened and the fuel-tank went tumbling outward and down.
He returned to his control-panel seat and looked at the view-screen. He smiled.
The fuel-tank was lying near the
Dome—right in the middle of the nest of ice-worms. The fuel was leaking from
the puncture.
The ice-worms writhed in from all
sides.
“Now!” Preston said grimly.
The ship roared down, jets
blasting. The fire licked out, heated the ground, melted snow—ignited the
fuel-tank! A gigantic flame blazed up, reflected harshly off the snows of Ganymede.
And the mindless ice-worms came,
marching toward the fire, being consumed, as still others devoured the bodies
of the dead and dying.
Preston looked away and
concentrated on the business of finding a place to land the ship.
***
The holocaust still raged as he
leaped down from the catwalk of the ship, clutching one of the heavy mail
sacks, and struggled through the melting snows to the airlock.
He grinned. The airlock was open.
Arms grabbed him, pulled him
through. Someone opened his helmet.
“Great job, Postman!”
“There are two more mail sacks,”
Preston said. “Get men out after them.”
The man in charge gestured to two
young colonists, who donned spacesuits and dashed through the airlock. Preston
watched as they raced to the ship, climbed in, and returned a few moments later
with the mail sacks.
“You’ve got it all,” Preston
said. “I’m checking out. I’ll get word to the Patrol to get here and clean up
that mess for you.”
“How can we thank you?” the
official-looking man asked.
“No need to,” Preston said
casually. “I had to get that mail down here some way, didn’t I?”
He turned away, smiling to
himself. Maybe the Chief had known
what he was doing when he took an experienced Patrol man and dumped him into Postal.
Delivering the mail to Ganymede had been more hazardous than fighting off half
a dozen space pirates. I guess I was
wrong, Preston thought. This is no
snap job for old men.
Preoccupied, he started out
through the airlock. The man in charge caught his arm. “Say, we don’t even know
your name! Here you are a hero, and—”
“Hero?” Preston shrugged. “All I
did was deliver the mail. It’s all in a day’s work, you know. The mail’s got to
get through!”
End
If Robert Silverberg were alive today,
he would be a very old man.
In the future, it’s difficult to
conceive of a situation where electronic communications (i.e. emails, texts,
video, audio, etc.) are not possible over great distances but physical Faster than Light (FTL) travel
is…
That’s not to say that physical
objects, small, high-value packages wouldn’t be a viable product or service for
a transportation company capable of such travel. I reckon it would, and better
minds than ours are already working on it.
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These free titles are copyright
Louis Shalako 2017. It is true that the occasional space pirate tries to profit
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(or universe) that we live in.
Anyways, thank you for reading.
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