I put down my nugget and said boldly, “How much for this?”
He scrutinized the nugget, put it in a balance and weighed it; then tested it on a jeweler’s stone, with several kinds of acid. “Voigin gold,” he said. “Where’d you get it?”
“A friend gave it to me.”
“I wish I had such friends.” He called, “Giving, come here a minute,” and a younger man came to his side. “What d’you make of this?”
Irving said, “It ain’t African gold. It ain’t Indian gold. It ain’t a California nugget. I say South America.”
“Good boy. Correct.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You loin,” he said. “How d’you tell the difference between salt and sugar? You loin. . . . The market value of this little bit voigin gold is about forty dollars. I got to make a buck—I’ll give you thoity-five.”
“Eh?”
“Thoity-six, and not a penny more,” he said, counting out the money. “And if your friend gives you any more, come to me with ‘em.”
I took the money, caught a taxi, and hurried back to MacAroon’s place. The bartender was gazing into space.
“That man I was sitting with,” I said, “where is he?”
The bartender, with a sardonic smile, said, “He put the bite on you, huh? I can smell a phony a mile off. I didn’t like the looks of him as soon as he set foot in my bar. If I was you—”
“Which way did he go?”
“I didn’t notice. Soon after you left he ordered a double, no ice and put down a ten-dollar bill—left me fifty cents, and went out.”
“Here’s my telephone number,” I said. “If he turns up again, call me any hour of the day or night, and hold him till I get here. Here’s five dollars on account; another five when you call.”
But Pilgrim never came to MacAroon’s again.
I inquired high and low-—mostly low—but found no trace of him. A British-sounding man with an insinuating air, a malarial complexion and a misleading eccentric manner, who talks about the River Amazon and its tributaries —I will pay a substantial reward for information leading to his rediscovery.
SATELLITE PASSAGE
by Theodore L. Thomas
Back to Cain and Abel, and ever since that time, there have been restless men, dissatisfied ones, the rovers, explorers, and adventurers. They are the men who traveled to India, discovered China, stumbled across America, pushed through the jungles of the Congo and the Amazon, charted the oceans, crested the mountains, and dog-sledded to the poles. To the stay-at-homes, these wanderers are sometimes heroes, sometimes worthless bums, depending as often as not on whether they do bring home nuggets of real gold (or silks, spices, slaves, oil leases). Now, very soon—as matters look, within our own lifetimes—the rovers will be going out to space. They will man our satellites and space stations, mine our moon, and colonize the other planets; eventually, it is they who will represent us to whatever alien life may have spawned from other stars.
Ted Thomas has a faculty for imagining life in space with such sharp realism that you can almost see and feel and taste it as you read. Here he tells the story of an embattled, proud and lonely man, a wanderer and a fighter, who must make a split-second decision for or against the community of mankind.
The three men bent over the chart and once again computed the orbit. It was quiet in the satellite, a busy quiet broken by the click of seeking microswitches and the gentle purr of smooth-running motors. The deep pulsing throb of the air conditioner had stopped; the satellite was in the Earth’s shadow and there was no need for cooling the interior.
“Well,” said Morgan, “it checks. We’ll pass within fifty feet of the other satellite. Too close. Think we ought to move?”
Kaufman looked at him and did not speak. McNary glanced up and snorted. Morgan nodded. He said, “That’s right. If there’s any moving to be done, let them do it.” He felt a curious nascent emotion, a blend of anger and exhilaration—very faint now, just strong enough to be recognizable. The pencil snapped in his fingers, and he stared at it, and smiled.
Kaufman said, “Any way we can reline this a little? Fifty feet cuts it kind of close.”
They were silent, and the murmuring of machinery filled the cramped room. “How’s this?” said McNary. “Wait till we see the other satellite, take a couple of readings on it, and compute the orbit again. We’d have about five minutes to make the calculations. Morgan here can do it in less than that. Then we’d know if we’re on a collision course.”
Morgan nodded. “We could do it that way.” He studied the chart in front of him. “The only thing, those boys on the other satellite will see what we’re doing. They’ll know we’re afraid of a collision. They’ll radio it down to Earth, and—you know the Russian mind—we’ll lose face.”
“That so bad?” asked Kaufman.
Morgan stared at the chart. He answered softly, “Yes, I think it is. The Russians will milk it dry if we make any move to get our satellite out of the way of theirs. We can’t do that to our people.”
McNary nodded. Kaufman said, “Agree. Just wanted to throw it out. We stay put. We hit, we hit.”
The other two looked at Kaufman. The abrupt dismissal of a serious problem was characteristic of the little astronomer; Kaufman wasted no time with second guesses. A decision made was a fact accomplished; it was over.
Morgan glanced at McNary to see how he was taking it. McNary, now, big as he was, was a worrier. He stood ready to change his mind at any time, whenever some new alternative looked better. Only the soundness of his judgment prevented his being putty in any strong hands. He was a meteorologist, and a good one.
“You know,” said McNary, “I still can’t quite believe it. Two satellites, one pole-to-pole, the other equatorial, both having apogees and perigees of different elevations—yet they wind up on what amounts to a collision course.”
Morgan said, ‘That’s what regression will do for you. But we haven’t got any time for that; we’ve got to think this out. Let’s see, they’ll be coming up from below us at passage. Can we make anything of that?”
There was silence while the three men considered it. Morgan’s mind was focused on the thing that was about to happen; but wisps of memory intruded. Faintly he could hear the waves, smell the bite in the salt sea air. A man who had sailed a thirty-two-foot ketch alone into every corner of the globe never thereafter quite lost the sound of the sea in his ear. And the struggle, the duel, the strain of outguessing the implacable elements, there was a test of a man.....
“Better be outside in any case,” said Kaufman. “Suited up and outside. They’ll see us, and know we intend to do nothing to avoid collision. Also, we’ll be in a better position to cope with anything that comes along, if we’re in the suits.”
Morgan and McNary nodded, and again there was talk. They discussed the desirability of radio communication with the other satellite, and decided against it. To keep their own conversations private, they agreed to use telephone communication instead of radio. When the discussion trailed off, Kaufman said, “Be some picture, if we have the course computed right. We stand there and wave at ‘em as they go by.”
Morgan tried to see it in his mind: three men standing on a long, slim tube, and waving at three men on another. The first rocket passage, and me waving. And then Morgan remembered something, and the image changed.
He saw the flimsy, awkward planes sputtering past each other on the morning’s mission. The pilots, detached observers, noncombatants really, waved at each other as the rickety planes passed. Kindred souls they were, high above the walks of normal men. So they waved ... for a while.