This choice: Continue reading "Double Double" • Go Back...Chapter #44Double Double (19) by: Seuzz   Chapter 19
MICHELANGELO TILTED THE NOSE of his rocket sled downward and killed the thrusters. His timing was perfect. Balancing between the pull of the planet below, and the momentum still carrying his vehicle over its limb, he floated weightlessly in free fall.
He loved this rocket sled more than anything else, probably even more than the space jaunts he could take it on. For he had built it himself, which gave him a sense of mastery and accomplishment.
But taking it into space—an act forbidden by the colonial charter of Midos Five—was rewarding in its own right, as an act of independence and rebellion.
In the silence of weightless space he could feel himself float free of the anxieties of his life below. The dull education that had fitted him for nothing better than the life of a farmer, like his dead father, or a power engineer, like the man who had adopted him. The oppressive home life of watchfulness and suspicion. The hurried, furtive moments snatched with a girl in a meadow or behind a shed. When Michelangelo looked into the sky, and remembered how it was from there that his forebears had come, he wanted to rage at the small-minded timidity of the colony elders and the cowardice of the colonists they governed.
What profit it a man if he gains the world but loses his soul? The colonists of Midos Five, who had come there to recapitulate the primitive existence of their ancestors—ancestors who had struggled to escape their planet and transcend their narrow, hard-scrabble lives—could claim more than a world, they could claim the stars as well! But in throwing the stars away, Michelangelo felt they had thrown their own souls away too.
A soft whine told him that the rocket sled—which he had built in secret from bits and pieces stolen from his adoptive father's sheds—was losing altitude and beginning to slide back into the atmosphere. Michelangelo checked the gauges and saw that he had completed less than half an orbit, so he angled the nose up again, touched the thrusters, and lofted himself back into the purity of space.
Three orbits, he told himself, then he would come back down again. He was taking a respite only, after the hammer-and-anvil argument he'd had with Pater Jan about Karen. After being ordered to his quarters, Michelangelo had stormed off in the family flitter, racing through narrow mountain valleys only he knew and knew how to navigate, to the staging ground where he had assembled and built the rocket sled. There would be hell to pay when he got back to the settlement, but there would be less hell to pay if he was back by sunset. Michelangelo knew himself to be a hothead, but he was not stupid.
Some thirty minutes later, as he was guiding the sled in for a safe and leisurely descent, he felt a touch of vertigo, and to his astonishment watched as the cockpit of his sled dissolved away and was replaced by a grimy and underlit metallic chamber. He was standing on some kind of platform, and near at hand, on the other side of a console, stood a man with thinning blonde hair and a crop of livid acne crusting his brow.
The man's gaze as he stared back at Michelangelo was calm and measured. So was his voice after he tapped a button on the control board. "Captain," he said, "we have the pilot aboard now."
"Kirk is on his way," a voice replied, and the man closed the channel.
Michelangelo blinked. But after a pause, during which the other continued only to idly regard him, the youth flushed.
"Where the hell am I?" he demanded. "And who the hell are you?"
The man said nothing.
"Listen, I—!"
A door opened and another man entered. He was older than the first, but strong and vigorous in appearance. His gaze too was calm, but was much firmer. And though a light smile came onto his lips, Michelangelo recognized the expression behind it. It was the same expression that Pater Jan got when he was about to order his adopted son to do something both difficult and unpleasant.
"Welcome aboard the Rheingold," the man said. He paused, and his eyes flicked quickly over Michelangelo's length and breadth. "You're a young one."
"And you're a son of a bitch! Who are you?" Michelangelo was gratified to see the man's eyebrows rise fractionally at the outburst, though they only made him look even more amused.
"My name is James T. Kirk. And what's yours?"
"None of your business!" Michelangelo glanced around, and finally finished making some deductions about what had happened. "A transporter," he muttered. "You transported me out of my sled!"
"It was necessary."
"You bastard! My sled! It's gonna crash!"
"It will have made an unguided landing by now, yes."
In one step Michelangelo came off the platform and swung a brawny arm at the man. But the other caught it in a grip that was a strong as a digging crane, and he caught Michelangelo's other arm when he swung it around as well. He smiled into the young colonist's face.
"I asked you your name," he said, "but it doesn't matter if you don't tell me. We'll hold you on the Rheingold until it is time to return you to the colony."
"This is kidnapping! When my father finds out—!"
"Does he know about that spacecraft you were joyriding around in?" Kirk's smile plumped. "I was under the impression that space travel is forbidden on Midos Five. I think," he added after a fractional pause, "you will be happier on the Rheingold, until ... certain arrangements pertaining to your return ... can be completed."
Michelangelo was swung around, and with both hands pinned firmly behind his back he was frogmarched out of the transporter chamber and along a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor. A few moments later he was thrust into a dim room and the door closed behind him.
Angrily he nursed his wrists and glared. Then, calming himself, he glanced around. It was a small cabin, with a bunk built into the wall and a desk beside a narrow wardrobe. Everything except the sheets of the bed was made of machined metal.
Michelangelo tried to sort out his thoughts.
The man called Kirk was right: Space flight—indeed, any technology beyond that practiced in the more advanced regions of Earth in the middle of the twentieth century—was forbidden by the colonial charter. The only reason he had been able to build his rocket sled was because the colony still kept spare engines under lock and key in case an emergency space flight did have to be mounted. Midos Five, after all, couldn't count on off-worlders. Yes, they still maintained contact with the Federation, and ships did sometimes visit. Not often, though, for they had long since learned not to expect a warm welcome. The colonists resented the attentions of Starfleet, and were either forbidden from owning the kind of wares independent traders offered, or didn't need them, there being abundant natural resources on the planet.
So who were these people, and what kind of ship was this? Michelangelo doubted this was a Starfleet vessel, and traders wouldn't have seized him. The more he thought about it, the less he liked it, for in its self-imposed state of primitive development, Midos Five was easy pickings for pirates.
Not solely for his own sake, then, was he suddenly determined to escape. But how?
It was as he paced the room, wracking his brain, that he passed too near the cabin door, and found that not only was it unlocked, it was programmed to automatically open if the cabin's occupant approached it too closely.
After a moment of cautious surprise, Michelangelo peered out and found the dark corridor empty. He listened, but heard only the hum of machinery. He stepped out, but no alarm sounded. He sucked on his upper lip, and scampered back the way he'd been hustled.
The transporter room was only a few doors down, and he hopped in and over to the control board—now abandoned—to look with a sinking heart over the controls. They had nothing like transporters on Midos Five—he had only heard about them—and though he suspected the panel would be simple to operate if you only knew what you were doing, he couldn't even begin to understand what he was looking at.
There was a click from the door, and Michelangelo snapped his head up. He nearly came out of his skin when he saw Kirk standing in the doorway, smiling at him. Acting on a bull-like instinct, Michelangelo charged him, and bounced off the man as though he were part of the bulkhead itself.
"Thank you for confirming my deductions as to your character," Kirk said. "You are a bold and enterprising young man. Given a chance, you will take it."
Michelangelo was tempted to swing at him again, but only sullenly regarded him.
"Your door will be locked after I return you to your quarters this time, and you will be watched through the surveillance system, so I advise you against trying to escape again. But I do congratulate you on the attempt. I even want to convey my ... gratification ... on having made your acquaintance."
"Your gratification?" Michelangelo sneered.
"Yes. We have to begin with someone on Midos Five. And I doubt we could have lucked onto a better candidate than you."
* * * * *
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