Sectret of The Marauder Satellite (v1.0) Read online

  THE MARAUDER

  Was it my imagination, or was I getting colder?

  A shadow seemed to be blocking out a disc of stars; it was getting larger, closer...

  Then I saw it.

  Rather, I saw its silhouette. It had moved over the horizon line and was gliding across the brilliant blue-green of the planet below.

  It reflected no light; it was as black as the deepest space between the stars. Yet its outline revealed that it was no stray asteroid. Its contours were irregular, and yet created.

  That’s what made my scalp tingle: the strange object below, still on a collision course with my tug, was a made object—but not man-made. I knew it with an instinct far deeper than science or learning, the way a dog will recognize another dog as one of its own kind, but not a cat...

  It was alien.

  TED WHITE

  SECRET OF THE MARAUDER

  SATELITE

  A BERKLEY BOOK published by

  BERKLEY PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  Copyright © 1968, 1978, by Ted White

  All rights reserved

  Published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved which includes the right

  to reproduce this book or portions thereof in

  any form whatsoever. For information address

  Berkley Publishing Corporation

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10016

  SBN 425-03888-2

  BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by

  Berkley Publishing Corporation

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10016

  BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOK® TM 757,375

  Printed in the United States of America

  Berkley Edition, NOVEMBER, 1978

  For Mary, for having inspired the book...

  For Dr. John Boardman, for his scientific assistance...

  And for Robin, for being my wife

  Introduction to This Edition

  I WROTE THIS BOOK IN 1965. For a book of this nature— “hard science” fiction, set in the near future (1984)— that’s a risky procedure.

  Time has tripped me up on a few details'. The protagonist says in the first chapter, “I was born in 1966...... 1966 is the year we lost our first space team.” I was off by only a month or two there. Fire at the launching site took our first space team early in 1967. And,4 ‘We put our first men on the moon in 1972. ” I was too conservative: Apollo 11 put our first men on the moon in the summer of 1969.

  But in the latter half of the 1970’s these are minor points indeed—and it’s disturbing to realize that many people might read this book without realizing that either date was incorrect. What has happened to our space program?

  A fan of science fiction since I was eight years old, I was seduced into this life-long relationship by Robert A. Heinlein’s “juvenile” sf novels, starting with the first, Rocketship Galileo, which I encountered in the local library shortly after its publication in 1947. I became a science fiction fan—someone who writes for and publishes “fanzines” and attends sf conventions—in my early teens and by 19621 was writing and selling the stuff professionally. The next year I became an editor (at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for which I read unsolicited manuscripts by the trunkload), and the year after that my first sf novel was published.

  One day in early 1965 I had a phone call from Henry Morrison. I’d known Henry for many years. We’d both contributed to the same fanzine in the early 1950’s, and in 1963 I’d worked briefly for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency (an agency through which a surprisingly large number of sf writers have passed as employees—a sort of Rite of Passage) of which Henry was then vice president. Now Henry was setting up his own agency and he’d seen one of my first paperback novels. He called me up with two proposals. One was that I consider him as my agent (I had no agent then). The other was that I consider writing a “juvenile”—a sf novel written for the teenage market, like those Heinlein novels I’d enjoyed so .much.

  I had not up to then considered the idea. I’d been writing action-adventure sf—fast-paced stuff with a minimum of dialogue and characterization. But Henry said he thought I could do it, and he pointed out that such books tended to stay in print a long time, earning continuing royalties in the process. v(The paperbacks I’d been writing paid a small advance and royalties were a joke.)

  After due consideration I took him up on both proposals—and have never regretted it.

  The “juvenile” novel is a bastard sort of thing. It is a marketing category more than anything else. It is published for and sold to librarians. The intended readers are teenagers. I have never met a teenaged sf reader who wasn’t reading fully " adult” science fiction by that point. The only discernible difference between a “juvenile” sf novel and an “adult” sf novel seems to be the absence of explicit sex and related themes from the “juvenile.” A number of Heinlein’s “juvenile” sf novels—Star Beast; Have Spacesuit, Must Travel; Starship Troopers—were serialized in adult sf magazines and were well received by that audience. At best, then, “juvenile” sf novels were as good as “adult” sf novels, but somewhat restricted in nature.

  I knew this, of course, in 1965. I saw the project of writing my own “juvenile” sf novel as an interesting challenge.

  I used Heinlein as my model. I analyzed his “juvenile" novels for the elements which had appealed to me and which had made them successful. It seemed to me that Heinlein had adroitly balanced a “hard-science” approach—at times quite didactic—with a mystical appreciation for the wonders of the universe in its vastness. In most of his “juveniles” the immediate plot problems are counterbalanced by a touch of unexplainable alien mystery. I liked that.

  The “space station” novel was also an old standby in the field. Heinlein had only touched on what a space station would be and how people would live on one, but del Rey, Leinster and others had devoted whole books to the subject in the early 1950’s. Times had changed, and I was aware that many problems had not been foreseen or dealt with. I wanted to do a “space station” book, then. I did some reading on the subject and discovered that there existed a rare breed of radio “ham” who monitored broadcasts from space—from the trial shots going up from both our country and Russia. And these hams were reasonably certain that they’d monitored distress calls from Russian orbital missions. It was fairly likely that some of the Russian Cosmonauts had perished in orbit and remained there, entombed in their capsules.

  The assumption was that the Russians had suffered technical failures (they didn’t wear space suits), but I considered the possibility that other—alien—causes had been at work. And that gave me my basic plot for the book: the marauder satellite.

  The rest of the book came to me almost effortlessly, as I wrote it. And it took me only about three weeks to write the complete novel. The character of the protagonist, Paul Williams—whose name I borrowed from my friend, Paul Williams, the founder of Crawdaddy and rock journalism, and then still a sf fan—took shape as I began to write the first chapter and grew steadily until Paul and his problems began to overwhelm the original plot of the book. (In this respect I’m a little unhappy with the way I ended the book—I should have resolved Paul’s problems a little more in step with the resolution of the basic plot. However ...)

  The book was published by a Philadelphia firm, Westminster Press, in 1967. It was an immediate success. Virginia Kirkus and The Library Journal loved it. The New York Public Library made it one of their books of the year. It was glowingly reviewed in Analog and Fantasy & Science Fiction (the reviewer for Galaxy managed to “lose” two copies rather than read it and discover
his preconceptions about me as a writer might be wrong). Subsequently the book went into five printings in hardcover.

  And it has had a surprisingly wide influence. In 19721 met a science fiction fan, then a college student, who told me he’d read the book at fourteen and it had impressed him more strongly than anything else he’d read. Science fiction writer Gregory Benford wrote a “juvenile” novel, Jupiter Project, which was based on my book for its inspiration and “feel.” I appeared on a New York City radio program where I met a group of high school students who had read the book and had perceptive comments to make on it.

  I think the success of the novel hinged on two aspects: the nature of the protagonist and his problems, which I think any modem sf reader can identify with; and the “hard-science” approach to the space station and actual work in space, which was perhaps better thought out and detailed in Marauder Satellite than in any previous and comparable book. I had a lot of fresh material to work with, the product of our space program’s achievements at that point. I also had handy a friend, John Boardman, who taught physics at Brooklyn College and who supplied me with the necessary math. But, basically, I think the sue-cess of the book was due to my own approach to it.

  It was easy for me to remember how I felt as a teenager, easy to approach the protagonist without condescension. I did not “write down” to my audience. I wanted a book which could be read by anyone, of any age, with pleasure—not a book indefinably stamped ‘‘kids only.”

  I wish I could say that the publication of Marauder Satellite launched me on a successful new career as a writer, but it did not. I continued to write paperback originals (of, I like to think, increasing quality). In 19681 became the editor of Amazing Stories and its sister publication, Fantastic Stories, which I continue to edit today. I wrote two more ‘‘juvenile” sf novels. No Time Like Tomorrow was published by Crown and was a modest success—not on the same level asMarauder Satellite, but the royalty checks have continued to come in steadily over the years. Trouble on Project Ceres, for Westminster, was an indirect sequel to this book—set in the same ‘‘universe” a few years later, but sharing none of the characters—but suffered at the hands of a new editor who summarily (and oyer my strongest protests) cut the first two chapters of the book. It got lukewarm reviews in the publications aimed at librarians and sold very poorly. I remain convinced that the loss of those first two chapters was the cause of its lack of commercial success, and the editor remains convinced that she was right and the poor sales were sheer coincidence.

  Whichever of us was right, I was so disheartened by my treatment at Westminster that I shelved my plans for future books in the ‘‘series”—a very loosely conceived series of books which would form a ‘‘future history” of sorts, all growing out of the impact of the alien ‘‘marauder satellite”—and I’ve not attempted a ‘‘juvenile” sf novel since then.

  It’s a little hard for me to realize, when I reread it, that this book is almost twelve years old. It feels as fresh and as alive as it was when I wrote it. It takes me back to a time when space and our space program was still in the daily news and we’d yet to set foot on the moon, but the prospect was enormously exciting—the vindication of all of those of us who believed in science fiction.

  —Ted White, 1977

  SECRET OF THE MARAUDER

  SATELITE

  Chapter 1

  I MET Mary the first time when we were on a TV show together. I was seventeen then, and still half a year from graduation. Td been down to the Cape, but all of my space time was simulated. People say it makes no real difference, the simulators are so advanced these days, but there is a difference. You know you’re participating in an exercise. Bix, my roommate, tells me that they’re thinking of using drugs to complete the illusion and make you think you’re really out there, but he’s full of wild stories, ideas, and schemes, and I discount them all heavily.

  But this TV thing—it’s one of those scholastic shows where they parade us, America’s Youth, out for a trained-seal act. We compete in teams while they throw questions at us, ranging from "What peninsula is bounded on the west and south by the Atlantic Ocean and on the east by the Mediterranean?” to "What Indianapolis racing driver introduced the first commercially produced front wheel drive to automobiles?” with a wide variety of literature and quantum mechanics thrown in to keep us on our toes.

  I was in my first show when I was eleven, and I was proud and scared. We came in second out of three teams, so I felt sort of cheated—neither winner nor loser. But I wanted nothing more to do with the things. They sat you there and threw questions at you, and you felt the whole weight of your teammates, friends, school, parents, everybody—while you struggled against the sinking feeling that you’d lose your mind and your memory and, in one second, against every would-be manly instinct, were going to start crying.

  It’s worse than Little League Baseball.

  I’m a test-wise guy. They’ve been giving me tests since I learned to read and write, age four. Throughout the first half of grade school, I rebelled. I was what is euphemistically called an “underachiever,” meaning that I refused to do better than make passing grades. But by the time I was in fifth grade and things were getting interesting, I was getting interested. Then there was no stopping me.

  Tests, TV shows, more tests, and then NASA.

  The NASA program is a godsend; I don’t think I could have taken normal high school. NASA pulled me out of junior high and threw me into five years of the devil’s personal torments, designed to crash-program me with high school, college, and grad school training, plus military training, and most important to me and the sole justification for the whole thing, space flight training.

  I was a space cadet.

  It’s something we laughed over, the first year. Shades of old TV reruns—Junior Spacemen of the Space Academy and all that. And, in a very real sense, that’s what we were. We were being trained to be the spacemen of tomorrow.

  But back to Mary. We’d been tapped to go on the TV show, and despite my bold resolutions of the years past, I went on. We were one of three teams, the other two from the new junior colleges that seem to be catching on these days for the bright kids who want to skip high school.

  This is going to sound silly, but I’m scared of those younger kids. I’m nineteen now, and I’ve had over a year in space, and it’s been all I’d bargained for and more. But I’m scared of those supersmart kids who, without the pressure schooling I’ve had, are just as smart and probably can outthink me at every turn.

  While we train for the glory of country and the future of space, those kids are lining up plush corporate futures of their own, and someday, when I’m retired and an old man in my thirties, one of those bright-types is going to be looking at me from across a desk and saying, “O.K., so you know space. But what can you do, Mr. Williams? Where can we fit you into our picture?" And I’m not sure I’ll have the answer.

  I was the oldest on the show; my teammates were both sixteen. And the other teams averaged sixteen in age. Mary was fifteen.

  There was nothing special about her that I remember. She wore glasses, and had long hair done up in a bun. I remember noticing during the preshow warm-up that she was rather tall for a girl, but I was tense—we were all tense—and I wasn’t noticing much about the competition. I was spending my time preparing myself for the ordeal by blanking out my surroundings and telling myself, “This is just another test, kid. You’ve been taking tests—written tests, oral tests, all kinds—for years. Don’t sweat it.” It was like the one play I was in. All the other kids backstage the first night were joking and jittering. I was convinced it was just another dress rehearsal, and utterly cool about the whole bit. It wasn’t until the second night that I had my stage fright.

  We came in second again, a very close second. Mary’s team beat us by ten points, which is the closest margin possible. The third team was eighty points behind, and I remember a rather pinch-faced girl on that team stamping angrily on the fl
oor, her face screwed up as if she was going to throw a tantrum any moment. That’s what I hate about these shows. I’d noticed her before the show, and she was one of these compulsively lively types, very outgoing, very cheerful. Now she was totally shot down. People have no right to do that to us.

  Mary, on the other hand, was radiant, in a quiet sort of way. There was a party afterward, awkwardly informal, where we sipped Pepsis and watched the adults with their cigarettes and cocktails and wondered where the dividing line was. The moderator of the show had a fine speaking voice and an I.Q. of not over 120.

  I congratulated Mary on her team’s win, and said, “Mary Cramer—your father isn’t Maxfield Cramer, is he?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, he is.”

  “How about that,” I said. “We had him for a seminar last year. He’s up there now, isn’t he?” Maxfield Cramer is a space scientist. That’s an inexact label, but the labeling process in the scientific fields has been breaking down now for years. Cramer had been an astronomer and a biologist. He’d gone up to the Station to do research on space-traveling spores, and to establish the first space-mounted observatory. He’d ended up with a finger in every pie he could find. For him it was a lifetime’s dream come true.

  I can’t kid myself I’ll ever be a science man. I’ll go into space, and I’ll make a good spaceman—I may even become an astronaut—but I’m practically oriented. I’m a doer, not a thinker, when it comes right down to it.

  So we said a few more polite things to each other, Mary agreeing that her father was now back up at the Station, and mentioning what a tense grind the show was, and like that. I thought she was rather pretty, rather a nice girl, but in the NASA academy you don’t have enough free time to get seriously concerned about girls, and somehow I never missed it. But it did strike me at the time that she was, in addition to being an attractive kid, one smart one as well. And I’ve always laid my plans for marriage upon the solid foundation of intelligence plus beauty. As I’ve said to Bix, “What’s a pretty object, if you can’t talk to it now and then?” to which he has nodded sagely and added, “I trust you want more than just to talk to an attractive slide rule,” and then we have started discussing emotional maturity index factors, and that is a long digression. At any rate, I filed Mary Cramer away in my mind to be considered as possible wife material, come marrying time. And since that looked to be some distance away yet,