Night Freight (22 page)

Why?
Sheffield thought. That was the big question. Why did he do it?

He said, "You want to tell us the reason, Mr. Franzen? Why you killed them?"

The small man moistened his lips. "I was very happy, you see. My life had some meaning, some challenge . . .I was fulfilled—but they were going to destroy everything." He stared at his hands. "One of them had found out the truth—I don't know how—and tracked down the other two. I had come to Janet this morning, and she told me that they were going to expose me, and I just lost my head and picked up the mallet and killed her. Then I went to the others and killed them. I couldn't stop myself; it was as if I were moving in a nightmare."

"What are you trying to say?" Sheffield asked. "What was your relationship with those three women?"

The tears in Andrew Franzen's eyes shone like tiny diamonds in the light from the overhead fluorescents.

"They were my wives," he said.

In the sixties and seventies I perpetrated a fair amount of fantasy and science fiction, much of it with Barry Malzberg and the majority of it eminently forgettable. Of all the s-f with my name on it, I like maybe six stories—four collaborations, including a 10,000-word satire on hack-writing called "Prose Bowl" that some critics consider a minor classic, and two solo efforts. "The Rec Field" is one of the solos, a blend of s-f and psychological suspense whose payoff line gave me a small chill when I wrote it in 1979. It surprised me with another when I reread it recently, hence its inclusion here.

W
e'd been on Repair Outpost 217-C for thirty-four months when Renzo got the idea to build a rec field.

One of us should have thought of it long before that. Except for compu-disks, the only recreation we had was cards and chess and backgammon—indoor games that neither of us cared for much. The thing was, we'd both been raised on outdoor sports. Soccer was Renzo's game and baseball was mine; we would talk soccer and baseball for hours, the classic professional contests, the matchups we'd been involved in ourselves when we were kids back home. Funny how the mind works. All those hours of sports talk and it still took thirty-four months for one of us to suggest a rec field of our own.

But then, I guess maybe we'd both blocked off the idea because of the conditions we were working under. Like 217-C itself. It was an uninhabited dwarf planet located just outside the Company's C-Sector shipping lanes, most of it igneous rock and volcanic ash, with here and there little clusters of trees and patches of bright green grass. Gravity was within 2.3 of Earth's, axis rotation was 21.40 Earth hours, but the atmosphere was low in oxygen; you could breathe it without a life-pac, only not if you were doing anything strenuous and not for more than a couple of hours at a time. And the weather was bad; hot and dank all the time, day and night, with a dense cloud cover always hanging low overhead that made even the daylight a dark gray. We never once saw the planet's sun nor either of its two tiny moons.

Another thing was that we didn't have any equipment—balls, bats, things like that—and no way of getting any sent in. The Company refused to stock the drone supply ship that came from Sector Base every six months with what they called "frivolous material"; the compu-disks were the only concession they made. And we couldn't leave the outpost ourselves, because if we did we would forfeit all of our accumulated wages. We were aware of that when we signed on, of course; it was in the Company contract. They paid enormous salaries, but the catch was that you had to sign on for a full six years and they withheld all your credits until those six years were up.

If any other human beings had come to 217-C we
could
have asked them to bring us the stuff we needed on a return trip. But in all our thirty-four months the only other man we'd laid eyes on was Dietrich, the Sector Chief, who came in every fifteen months or so on a routine inspection tour. Each of the freighters that were forced to veer in from the lanes for refueling or repairs was a drone, which were cheaper to operate than manned ships. If the Company could have figured a way to run outposts like this with Mechanicals instead of skilled mechanics, I suppose they would have done it. But they hadn't and so here we were — Renzo and me.

We got along pretty well from the first, Renzo and me, but even two people with common interests—and we had plenty of them besides sports; that was why we'd been selected to work together as a team—can get on each other's nerves after a while. Particularly in a place like this, where there was no sunlight or moonlight and everything was colorless except for the trees and those beautiful patches of bright green grass. We might even have turned against each other if it hadn't been for the mind-psychs the Company performed on all of its employees. They said the mind-psychs were to keep you from thinking about women and sex and family ties back home, but they were also to keep you from fighting with your partner; they didn't tell you that because they didn't want you worrying about it going in.

As it was, we'd stopped talking to each other for days at a time when Renzo came up with the idea for the rec field. Then all the friction disappeared and we were as close as we'd been in the early months.
It
was almost like being reborn.

We went to work right away. The first thing we did was to draw up plans and then keep on redrafting them
until we had the field laid out exactly the way we wanted it.
It
would be a hundred and fifty meters long and a hundred meters wide.
It
would be enclosed on three sides by a curving wooden fence three meters high; the fourth side would be four rows of spectators' seats, even though no spectators would ever sit in them, because we agreed the field should look as
authentic as possible.
It
would be floored in that bright green grass, except for base paths and a pitching
mound and home plate area for baseball, and it would have soccer goals and dugout benches and all the other necessary items.

It
would be the best damn rec field anybody ever built spaceward of Earth.

Once we were satisfied with the plans, we went looking for the best possible site. It took us two days to settle on one that pleased both of us. The spot we picked was behind and to the east of the bubble we lived in, at the edge of the compound and right up close to the biggest cluster of trees and patch of grass.

We started construction the next day. We measured
distances, staked them out, and cleared the area of ash and rock. With laser tools from the repair hangar, we cut down trees and shaped them into boards and posts of different sizes. We dug holes for fence posts and the soccer goals and home plate on the baseball diamond. We used a thermosetting resin to bind joints and lock the bleacher sections together.

At the end of eight months—forty-two months altogether on Outpost 217-C—we had the field roughed out; the fence and bleachers built. We considered painting everything, but the only duropaint we had was gray, the color of the Company freighters and the color of the surroundings, and we weren't about to use that. Besides, the natural wood color looked fine. And it would look even better once we got the grass put in.

That was our next project, the grass. We dug up blocks of sod a half meter square and carried them to the field and laid them down carefully to form the baseball diamond and the soccer rectangle. When that job was finished we set to work on the dugout benches and the goals. And when they were done we laser-carved a rock into a replica of home plate, put it down, manufactured three bases and two goal nets out of supply material, and put those in place.

By that time we had been working on the field a few days short of eleven months. We weren't quite finished yet—there were a few small things to be taken care of, and one major problem to be solved, before we could begin to use it—but in essence it was done. And done right, just as we had planned it.

Renzo and I stood admiring it after we'd tied the last goal net into place. "You ever see anything so goddamn fine in all your life?" he said.

"No," I said, "never."

"All the work was worth it, Alex. If it hadn't been for the field, the past eleven months would've been rough—a hell of a lot rougher than the first thirty-four."

"I know," I said. "But we've got it made now; once we start the games, the next twenty-seven will be even easier."

"We'll play soccer first, when everything's ready," he said. "That all right with you?"

"Sure. Soccer it is."

A little while later, when the heat got to be unbearable, we went back to the bubble to rest and take some nourishment. And while we were eating, a message came through from Sector Base, the first one we'd had since an outbound freighter was diverted in for airlock repairs three months ago: Sector Chief Dietrich was on his way to 217-C for another inspection and was scheduled to arrive in sixty-two hours. Renzo and I were to get everything ready for him, including the spare quarters; he was planning to stay at least overnight.

The news didn't interest either of us as much as it might have before we began building the rec field. It had been fifteen months since Dietrich's last visit—fifteen months since we had seen another human being—but we were still pretty excited about the way the field had turned out. And neither of us liked Dietrich much anyway. He was a strict Company man, the kind that let you know you were only a drone yourself, not
much different than the fleet of ships that were under his supervision. He didn't like sports, either. I'd tried
to talk to him about baseball the first time he'd come for inspection and he hadn't shown the slightest bit of interest.

But after we had acknowledged the message, Renzo said, "You know, the timing for Dietrich's visit isn't bad. Now we'll be able to show off the completed field to him."

"You think he'll approve of it?"

"Sure he will. Why wouldn't he approve of it?"

We spent most of the next three days getting the repair hangar and refueling station and rocket pit ready for Dietrich's inspection. Everything had to be clean, in its proper place, ready for any emergency; if he found anything at all out of line, which he wouldn't, the Company contract said we could get docked for it.

We did manage to do a little more work on the rec field, most of it cosmetic: trimming the grass, sanding rough edges off the fence and the bleacher seats, that sort of thing. Renzo and I had a lot of pride in that field and we wanted it to look as nice as possible for Dietrich.

As scheduled, the Sector Chief's small one-man shuttle vectored in at 0900 hours. When Dietrich had
shut off his engines and locked down on the pad, Renzo and I went out and stood waiting near the hatch for the forward airlock. It was another ten minutes before he came out, dressed in his silver-gray Company uniform.

It was good to see another human again, even Dietrich; and he was a pretty impressive figure, you had to admit that. Tall, ageless, big round head with a mat of hair the same silver-gray as his suit, face brown and so smooth it looked polished. Sharp green eyes, bright
and cold—the only color anywhere about him. Like the grass and the tree leaves were the only color on 217-C.

The first thing he said was, "Good to see you again, men." But he didn't sound as if he meant it. And he didn't smile or offer to shake hands with either of us. "Everything cope here?"

"Yes, sir," Renzo said. "Everything cope."

Dietrich gave both of us long penetrating looks, like he was trying to establish a telepathic link so he could
shuffle through our thoughts. Then he said, "Well, let's get moving," and we left the pad and went straight to the bubble.

But Dietrich didn't want to rest or eat or clean up in his quarters before beginning inspection; he never did. So right away it was through our living area, then into the supply section for an inventory check on the stores, then out to the hangar for another inventory check on the tool and supply bins there.

It was late afternoon before Dietrich finished with the hangar. He seemed satisfied that everything was in order—but not too happy about it, as if he'd wanted to find something out of line. He said, "We'll save the rest of the compound for tomorrow. Right now I could use some nourishment."

I said, "Whatever you say, Mr. Dietrich."

On the way back to the bubble Renzo caught my eye and grinned and nodded in the direction of the rec field. Then he said to the Chief, "If you don't mind, sir, there's something Alex and I'd like to show you before we go in."

"Show me?"

"Yes, sir. It won't take long."

"What is it?"

"Something we're kind of proud of."

I could see that Dietrich wasn't much interested in anything we would want to show him, but he shrugged and said, "All right, where is it?"

"Over behind the bubble," Renzo said, and we took him out there and right up near the fence beyond the bleachers, on the first base side of the baseball diamond. "Isn't that a fine-looking recreation field, Mr. Dietrich? Alex and me built it in our spare time over the last twelve months; we just finished it a few days ago."

Dietrich stood looking around at the field for a third of a minute. Then he turned and stared at us. There were wrinkles in his forehead and alongside his nose, and his cold eyes seemed even colder, like frozen green water. "Is this some kind of joke?" he said.