Benedict's Planet

By James Corley

Few people on Mars wanted to help. Six men were already lost, one was dead and another insane.
Benedict’s newly discovered planet could make him a billionaire if he managed to get a sample of bohridium back to Earth. Bohridium which could increase the power of interstellar drives by orders of magnitude.
No one could explain events on the lost world that looked like a frozen earthquake. Were the nightmare Thight still in existence? Was Jonah Scull really the legendary saviour of the alien Youn?
And were the mathematicians right when they predicted ships travelling in these phantom dimensions could slip outside of reality altogether?

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Corley
• Release date: Feb 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311481306

James Corley

James Corley was first active on the British SF scene in the New Wave era of the late 60s, early 70s, his novel-length books tended to be rollicking space operas loaded with ironic humour. Later (under other names) he became more prominent as a writer of thrillers and detective stories.

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Benedict’s Planet

JAMES CORLEY

Galcom eBook edition

copyright © 2016

by the trustees of James Corley

All rights reserved

Introduction to the Galcom edition

Benedict’s Planet is a classic Space Opera first published in 1976 not long after NASA had conquered the Moon using computers less powerful than a modern mobile phone. Hence you’ll find in the following pages a celebration of stellar exploration with the occasional reference to tape cassettes and other technology unfamiliar to 21st century eyes. Still we think the adventure and irreverent in-jokes hold up well in the digital era.

James Corley, the author, was active on the British SF scene early in his career. Later (using other names) he became more prominent as a writer of thrillers and detective stories.

PROLOGUE

Extract from THE ANCHORAGE LECTURES,

courtesy Prof. M.V. Wilcox

and UBC Telecast:

‘In earlier days chemical rockets took man out as far as Pluto, and more often than not returned him to Earth again.

The first Moonbase had an atomic power plant, the second used fusion. But these ventures are rightly considered part of the pre-history of the True Space Age, bearing the same relationship to our present capabilities as Leif Eriksson’s voyage to America bore to that of the Mayflower.

‘In 2092 Samuel Moebright’s invention of his now universally familiar Converter laid the foundation for man’s explosion into space. No longer did humanity huddle under the domes of Mars. The Moebright Converter split the oxidized rocks of the Martian crust to give the planet a breathable atmosphere. Nevertheless, this task was the work of a generation.

‘While static Moebright plants gave the existing worlds of man abundant power, smaller versions - converting propulsion mass to raw energy - thrust his star ships out of the solar system.

They were overtaken while still on their journey by ships not only powered by Moebright units, but also fitted with the new Siemens-Elliott relativizer.

The Moebright, then and now, produces energy by the controlled degradation of matter. A small fusion reaction is necessary to prime the process, but anything from U235 to old rags can be used as fuel. Up to forty per cent of the rest energy of matter can be released.

‘Theoretical studies suggest an isotope of the transuranic element bohridium will have a catalytic effect on the process. True catalysis cannot, of course, occur in a nuclear reaction - in this putative system bohridium would continually be destroyed and re-created in an energizing cycle. Using this meta-catalyst it is thought the efficiency of the Moebright process could be increased to ninety per cent.

‘Now all we need is some bohridium. ’

CHAPTER 1

New Kennedy is no different to any other Martian mining town, it’s hard to get lost there and easy to find a bar. The streets are arranged in a neat grid pattern under the enormous dome. There’s at least one bar on every street, but the average is higher. If nothing else was going right for him, Wayne Benedict had achieved two things: he’d got lost, or at least he couldn’t remember exactly where he was; secondly he’d found the strangest bar on Mars - it was almost empty.

As in every other mining town on Mars, the male inhabitants of New Kennedy outnumbered the female ten to one. The holovision was no better than it was on Earth, most of it in fact was beamed up from there. So in the evenings the men went drinking.

By this time of night every other bar in the dome was packed to capacity. This one wasn’t. Wayne Benedict, a crumpled individual of advanced years, was alone in the place except for the bartender and a skinny, dark-complexioned figure who merged into the gloom at the rear of the narrow room, his presence marked only by the tragedy of his attempts to play muted jazz on a contraption that in better days had been a piano.

It wasn't hard to tell why the place was so deserted: it was at the wrong end of a dismal side street, the sign that should have said ‘DRINKS’ in faded red neon flickered listlessly offering ‘RINKS’. Inside, the lighting was bad but not bad enough to hide the seediness. It lacked real music and worst of all it lacked women. It suited Wayne Benedict, whose only conscious interest was in drinking himself rapidly into oblivion.

Benedict leant forward on his barstool and said to the almost comatose bartender, ‘Another of the same, comrade, whatever it was.’

The bartender stretched out a laconic arm and tipped a nearly empty bottle into Benedict’s glass. ‘Someone sell you shares in the distillery? You’re the thirstiest man I’ve seen since they humidified the atmosphere,’ he said in a bored manner.

Benedict stared at the glass of amber fluid. ‘This is the last one, friend. I’m down to my last credit. Can’t think of a better way to spend it.’

‘That idea lacks originality, but there’s something to be said for it,’ the bartender commented. He moved wearily away as the door was flung open and four, more gaudy, customers came in from the dark alleyway outside.

The newcomers lined up at the bar next to Benedict. ‘Four beers,’ the one who’d entered first demanded. When the bartender delivered the glasses the customer took a long pull at his drink and then jabbed Benedict’s shoulder with his elbow.

‘You’re sitting on my stool, Grand-dad,’ he said.

Benedict looked up and saw four young men standing in a semi-circle around him. He didn’t much like the look on their faces, expressions he interpreted as a desire to make life unpleasant for someone. The customer who seemed to be the leader put his glass back on the counter and deliberately tipped it over, sending the beer gushing over Benedict’s lap and on to the floor.

‘Leave the old guy alone. He’s not on your stool. You ain’t been in here before,’ the bartender ordered.

One of the young men laughed. A malevolent laugh that shook the oiled coiffure of his hair. The leader suddenly produced an old-fashioned cartridge pistol and pointed it at the bartender. ‘Keep out of this, you. This old fool’s spilt my drink. If he wants trouble we’ll give it him, right, boys?’

Paradigm Rag died away as the piano player gave up his attempt to resurrect the instrument. For a moment that hung suspended in time the situation looked ugly, but before anyone could react there was an interruption. A thin black hand that moved in the hypnotic motion of a snake folded over the hand that was holding the gun. The barrel turned up towards the ceiling then the young man screamed as the bones in his fingers cracked under the crushing pressure exerted on them.

To Benedict’s eyes the slow motion accelerated into a blur. The black hand carelessly slashed into the throat of one man, a dancer’s foot into the stomach of another. The third customer tried to push a broken glass towards the pianist’s face only to be flung bodily, flapping a broken arm, into the fourth who was attempting to escape through the door.

The pianist bent down and picked the gun up, he weighed it in his hand then shifted his indifferent gaze to the troublemakers groaning on the floor. Apparently deciding that they didn’t intend to pursue more trouble, he handed the pistol to the bartender and said ‘Sweep that mess up for me.’ The bartender nodded.

‘My name’s Scull,’ the dark man said to Benedict. He caught hold of Benedict’s elbow. ‘Let’s get out of here. The place looks untidy.’

Benedict followed numbly. Out in the street he got his voice back. ‘Shouldn’t we have reported that or something?’

‘It’s taken care of,’ the man who called himself Scull stated. ‘You a stranger on Mars?’ Benedict nodded. ‘The bartender’s a police deputy. All our bartenders are. It keeps the drunks well behaved.’

‘We didn’t leave our names with him,’ Benedict protested.

‘No need. He knows me. I own the bar. Come on.’

Benedict believed him. This man couldn’t have got a job as a pianist in anyone else’s establishment.

Walking awkwardly because of his beer-damp trousers, Benedict was led onto a main thoroughfare well illuminated by the lights of the dome. Although the planet now had a breathable atmosphere it still suffered from raging dust storms and a surface temperature that stayed below freezing point for most of the year. The domes were still a necessary part of survival, keeping in heat and keeping the dust out.

Eventually Benedict found himself inside another bar. The contrast with the previous one couldn’t have been greater. The place was large, bright, noisy and packed to capacity. A smiling hostess came up and took them through the crowd to a booth that was, considering the number of clients, magically empty. Not until Scull had semaphored for drinks and then drawn a transparent sound-curtain over the entrance could Benedict make his voice heard. ‘Look, it’s very good of you, friend, but I’m out of credits. The only reason I’m here at all is that you moved too fast for me to stop you.’

Scull grinned, showing large white teeth. ‘No sweat, I own this place too. I’d like you to have the evening on the house. I guess I owe you an apology for what happened back there. Since it was my place I feel kind of responsible.’

Benedict shook his head. ‘What did happen?’ he asked. ‘I've never seen those people before. I’ve only been on the planet a few weeks. Thanks for what you did, Mr. Scull, I don’t like to impose on your hospitality.’

‘Forget it. I don’t want my bars to get a bad reputation. It could be they were just a bunch of punks, crazed out of their heads. Maybe a mugging gang, it still happens, kids get bored here. Anyway they can tell their story to the magistrate tomorrow. Not that it'll do them much good.’ He shrugged dismissively, ‘The night’s young, let’s have a good time, eh? My first name’s Jonah, hell of a name, but no one ever forgets it.’

Benedict introduced himself and added, ‘I’m a mineral prospector, deep space.’

A half-naked waitress came through the sound curtain, bringing a babble of sound, two glasses and a bottle of imported liquor with her. She put the glasses and bottle on the table and waited until Scull sent her away with a wave of his hand.

‘Prospecting. Now that sounds an interesting occupation.’

‘Being a bar owner doesn’t seem too bad,’ Benedict commented as he sipped at the exotic liquor.

‘Not too bad,’ said Scull. ‘With me it’s more of a hobby than an occupation. You see, I’m interested in people, all sorts of people. So I run two bars. One attracts those who want a little fun, the other those who want to be down. You wanted to be down, Mr. Benedict.’

Benedict smiled faintly and without mirth. ‘I can’t deny that, Mr. Scull. Myself I’ve found no great reason for merriment on this planet.’ He sipped meditatively at the strong liquor that the black man had re-filled his glass with.

‘Then why are you here, Mr. Benedict? There’s no scope for prospecting on Mars. It’s an old world and much explored.’

Perhaps the liquor loosened Benedict’s tongue. He found a sudden compulsion to unload his troubles on to the odd stranger. ‘Many mines here though, friend. Owned by rich corporations. I needed the help of a rich mining corporation. I’ve been trying to get it for weeks. None of them would help me so I found myself in your bar.’

Jonah Scull silently poured more drink into the old prospector’s glass.

‘Have you ever heard of bohridium?’

Scull wrinkled his forehead. ‘A very rare artificial compound. Reputedly it has a catalytic effect on matter degradation in Moebright systems. Its properties have been widely publicized but they’re still largely theoretical. Only a few hundred micrograms at most have been produced by Linton Industries under a government contract. If they can produce it commercially it’ll be worth a thousand times its weight in uranium.’

Benedict was unimpressed by the surprising display of knowledge. He said, ‘I’ve got tons of it.’

Scull’s eyebrows twitched, ‘Perhaps I misheard. Did you say you had some bohridium?’

‘A whole mine of it.’

‘Uh huh. Right beside the fountain of eternal youth. Or is the location a secret? It’s an artificial element, Mr. Benedict.’

‘So is dry ice on Venus, Mr. Scull. The location is no secret. I’ve been trying to get one of the mining corporations out there. They won’t go. Look.’ He took a folded sheet of paper from inside his jacket and handed it to Scull, who spread the document on the table and studied it.

‘A provisional mining concession granting rights for extraction of native bohridium on the second planet of Almagest, star code Harvard 214734, dated 10 October 2182. It’s now 24 July 2183. If I understand this document, Mr. Benedict, you have three months in which to actually produce a sample of the bohridium at an Assay office. If you can’t your claim is void. So why haven’t you produced some and made yourself a very rich man?’

‘It’s a long story, said Benedict.

‘I’d like to hear it.’

Benedict shrugged his shoulders. ‘Almagest has five planets. It’s a long way out in Monocerous, about twenty seven parsecs across the galaxy from here. I had a Bern 300, a one-man ship. I was going through the planets looking for anything that might be worth extracting that far out. The system was unexplored, see. If you’re a prospector it’s no use treading on other people’s heels. So I guess I was the first human to set foot on the place. Maybe you know the way we go about prospecting, first of all there’s only a narrow range of planetary types that are worth looking at. The giants have got too high an escape velocity to make extraction economical, besides which they’re usually in distant orbits and so cold they’re covered in miles of liquid gas so you couldn’t get at any ore. Planets with a low density you don’t bother with either because any heavy metals will be too thin in the crust. Small to medium heavy planets are the ones to go after and the astronomical data on the Almagest system said all five planets fitted the criteria, so I decided to go out and take a look.’ Benedict paused for another drink, he wasn’t used to talking, it dried his throat. He stared at the table top for a while before continuing.

‘Four of the planets were bunched up on one side of the sun so I tried them first. Nothing very interesting, one of them supported life, but it didn’t seem to be very advanced, insects, that sort of thing. Almagest 2 was over on the other side, it looked almost as if it was hiding from me behind the sun. Hell, you get fanciful on your own out in the stars. I chased it anyway and when I got there I went into a polar orbit and started up the laser spectro-analyzer. It was a dead world, should have had an atmosphere according to the rules but it didn’t, desolate place, covered in mountain ranges, the plains were pockmarked with meteorite craters. The first twelve orbits found nothing interesting, there was a fairly high radiation count but no concentrations of uranium which was what I was hoping for. Then the computer printed out a highly localized field of bohridium. I’d never heard of the stuff, I had to get the computer to do a microfiche search to tell me what it was. By all rights it shouldn’t have been in the memory banks, the stuff wasn't supposed to occur naturally. I guess I’ve got some overenthusiastic fool of a programmer to thank for it. Or maybe I should damn him for it, all things considered. The microfiche told me I’d just become a billionaire many times over.

‘Naturally I went down to take a look. The Bern 300 control module has landing capabilities which is one of the things that makes it so useful. The trouble is the ship’s only got a 750,000 kg. cargo capacity. To register a full claim you have to lodge a sample of ten grams of pure material. The bohridium ore contained ten pure grams per 1.4 million kg.’

‘That’s thin,’ commented Scull. ‘Is that worthwhile considering the cost of refining?’

‘Thin?’ Benedict laughed sourly. ‘Not for bohridium, Mr. Scull. I’ve learnt a lot about the subject these past few months. Ten grams could catalyse every Moebright plant on Mars and increase the power output by over a hundred per cent. If I’d found one gram in a million kilos it