Planet Stories March 1953 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pulp, SF
Publisher: Fiction House
Published: 1952-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

HAPPY RAIN NIGHT

By DEAN EVANS

If was the Big Sleep for those at Residential Number 327 this night… this very dark Martian night… this very good night for the Synthi-Rain.

I

T WAS the eve of the annual synthi-rain and all Mars was settling down for the big sleep that always went with it. Everything was ready, reso-skins had been peeled off the pumps a week before.

Uh huh, thought the lone attendant at the fuel port outside the city. You could tell everything was ready, even the traffic was thinning. Hadn’t been a ’copter or anything in for fuel in the last ten minutes.

He eyed the wall clock inside his cubicle. Almost eleven. Might as well close up and go on home, there wouldn’t be any more customers in tonight.

He suddenly decided to modify that thought as an old hull-weary job came banging clumsily down into cradle number one and slumped, little vibration tentacles rippling here and there over its surface. He sighed, went out the lock, went over to the cradle.

There was a woman in the ship. Not much of a woman, but you never knew what the big gambling city of Fraon would draw next in the line of tourists. All kinds.

Like this one. This one could be called typical. Wild black hair on the dame. Not long, but wild. A little sloppy, like the last-season’s modo-strap she wore on the white skin between her breasts. The strap looked fringy.

“Fuel, Miss?” he asked.

But the woman didn’t seem to hear. She was studying a small scanning disc, turning it this way and that like somebody pruning herself. Only not. She was giving the place the once over.

“Yeah,” she said finally. “Yeah, but not the kind you think…” she stopped. She glared suddenly across the ramps at another jet—a Security Ship—that was coming in fast, settling for the cradle next to hers.

“No,” she said. “No. Changed my mind. How far’s Fraon from here?”

“You’re on the edges now. Follow the bottom lane and drop when you see the lights. That be all?”

But the woman didn’t answer. She yanked at controls inside the cabin and the old beat up jet rose with a tired, grumbling roar like the sigh of a very old man contemplating the long long years that have gone.

Ten minutes later she looked down, yanked once more on the controls. She’d almost overshot. The ship shuddered violently fore to aft and then jammed down inside the Administration Port.

She hunched her shoulders inside the plastiskin, let her eyes go up to a sucker sign off in the distance. She read:

CITY OF FRAON,

GAMBLER’S PARADISE

And in smaller letters beneath:

COME CLEAN—GO AWAY THE SAME

She curled her lip. Between Fraon and the city of Jao to the south, the planet had quite a bit of “Paradise.” Of the two cities, though, Fraon was the larger; Fraon would be the logical one. That’s why she’d chose to try it first. That’s where he would come.

She left the ship and made her way over to the Guide, a small niche of a place set into the corner of the now darkened Administration building.

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